Interception

The man turned toward her, and she could see smoke curling out the end of the weapon in dark gray ribbons. The stench of cordite cut through her nostrils, burning like smelling salts, and snapping her back into the sharp reality of the moment.

“There’s more downstairs,” Bolan said. “I’ve got to take them out if we’re going to get out of here. Hurry! Cut yourself free and get a weapon.” He indicated the black metal machine pistols scattered around the floor at his feet. Rasmussen looked down. It seemed like the weapons were floating in a lake of blood.

“Get under the table and watch the door,” Bolan continued. “Do not shoot me when I come back in. Hurry!”

Then he turned and made for the door to the triad snuff film studio. Karen Rasmussen began to free herself.

CHIN HO MEDINA stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up, a Kalashnikov assault in his sweating hands. He called again, confused by the commotion and then the lack of commotion as the first team of bodyguards had rushed up the stairs that ran like scaffolding to the second-story office space. How much trouble could a teenage girl be? Then a black apparition appeared quickly in the doorway and he barked out a single word before opening fire.

He saw a black-clad, balaclava-wearing man and screamed, “BSD!” referring to the Croatian commando group, part hostage rescue team, part death squad that served as a special operations force.

The triad gunmen’s assault rifle blazed in his hands as behind him the rest of the criminal cell, already poised and on edge, exploded into action. Bolan pulled back from the edge of the doorway as he saw him level his weapon and the child pornographer began to blast away, the muzzle-flash obscuring the gunmen’s own vision as he poured lead into the shadows above him.

He didn’t see the deadly black sphere as it dropped toward him.

It arched in a gentle lob over his head and struck the hard, oil-stained concrete floor. The impact detonation grenade immediately exploded. Shrapnel fanned out, riding the edge of the concussive blast, and tore into Chin’s flesh seconds before the explosion sent him spinning like a rag doll over the safety railing of the stairs, his weapon spinning away.

Behind the mutilated corpse, razor-sharp shards of metal buzzed into unprotected flesh and a ball of billowing fire mushroomed out behind it. Men were screaming as they were thrown or swept aside. Clothes burst into flame and blood ran in rivers across the filthy floor.

Bolan stepped out of the doorway and rushed down the stairs, his pistol up and ready. He caught a flash of motion and pivoted smoothly at the waist, putting a 3-round burst into one stumbling kidnapper, then a second into another man fighting to stand.

A screaming man staggered about, clutching at a torn and bleeding stump where his arm had been: no threat. Bolan turned away, racing down four more steps, and saw a child-rapist crawling along the ground, his guts strung out behind him, and screaming in agonizing pain. The man was reaching for the blood-smeared grip of a machine pistol: threat. The Executioner used a Parabellum burst to hollow the man’s skull.

He thundered down another half flight of stairs and saw movement beyond the edge of the blast radius. He vaulted the smoking railing as heavy-caliber slugs chewed into the wood steps where he’d been standing. He landed in the middle of his grenade kills. He tried to spin and drop but his foot came down in a puddled smear of intestines and he slipped.

The gunner who had fired on him rushed out from behind a stack of fifty-five-gallon industrial barrels, weapon blazing. Bolan shot him with a burst low in the stomach and the man doubled over, firing a second burst into the ground, causing ricochets to whistle and whine madly around the room.

Riding out the recoil of the last burst, Bolan pushed himself up. His blacksuit was soaked with blood along the right side and his ribs felt bruised from the tumble but his adrenaline was running through him in currents of electricity.

He sensed movement and turned his head, the muzzle of his pistol shifting in tandem and steel-steady in his grip. His finger lay welded on the smooth metal curve of the trigger taking up the slack. He saw a shape crouched under an old metal office desk and his arm straightened, his finger tightening on the trigger.

The girl’s lips quivered with fear, and her thin cheeks were smeared with dirt. Her lower lip was split and swollen so that a trickle of blood had run down her chin and dried like a string of chocolate syrup.

Narrowing his eyes, Bolan lowered the pistol. He got to his feet and looked around. Off to his left on the edge of a pile of corpses strung out like toys by the grenade blast, a triad hardman climbed to his feet and staggered away. Bolan shifted, seeing only the motion at first. Then his eyes went to the hands. In hostage rescue situations the shoot teams always looked to the hands in their split-second decisions. Empty hands: no shoot. Full hands: shoot.

The shuffling figure grasped one of the utilitarian machine pistols. The handgun in Bolan’s fist spit a triburst, the soft-nosed bullets burrowing into the gunman, cracking his wing-shaped shoulder blade like hammers on a plate.

The man spasmed, his back arching and the machine pistol clattered and bounced off the concrete. The gunner staggered toward a line of fifty-five-gallon oil barrels. He screamed once in pain and staggered, close to going down. His arm came out, and Bolan figured it was a last desperate attempt to stop his fall before he died. The hand came down. Too late Bolan saw the apparatus attached to the industrial barrels by twisted lines of thick coaxial cable.

There was a sharp, dry metallic click and suddenly glowing red LED numerals blinked on in the swatch of gloom as Bolan put a second burst into the man and dropped him dead. The numbers glowed dark red and stood out starkly against the gloom: 00:00:30.

Bolan leaped forward. The demolitions a group like this seemed capable of couldn’t be that complex. He wasn’t a Gary Manning or a Hermann Schwarz, but he could defuse most simple trigger explosives.

He had almost reached the charges—the number display read, 00:00:28. His eyes fairly danced across the apparatus, taking in the details of the construction, hunting for connection points, trailing wires.

Then the girl shot him in the back.

He grunted hard at the impact and spun even as the echo of the shot was still bouncing through the cavernous warehouse. He felt a sting like a razor slice along his left arm, and the middle of his back felt as if he’d been blindsided by a sledgehammer.

He didn’t have time to question why it had happened. He was a man with a gun and men with guns didn’t often solve problems in Croatia. The only men with guns the girl had seen, he understood intuitively, had been the ones intent on using her up and throwing her away.

He spun and dropped and fired quickly. His bullets found the floor in front of her and there was a risk of ricochets but he was an expert with his weapons and had no choice but to take the risk. Concrete chips sprang up and slapped the girl with granite shards. She screamed but stubbornly held on to the machine pistol.

Bolan shifted the muzzle and punched a burst through the frame of the desk beside her head, already starting to surge forward. The rounds flattened as they punched through the cheap metal, and the girl screamed again.

From the top of the stairs Karen Rasmussen answered that scream with one of her own.

Bolan felt relief like a punch in the gut when the girl finally panicked enough to drop the machine pistol. He leaped forward and kicked the weapon across the room and snatched her up by the arm.

“American!” he growled.

The girl looked at him and more tears came, but he could feel her tense in his grip as her fear and confusion overtook her. Then she clung to him for a moment and he felt hope. She let out a sudden, sharp piercing scream and her fists began to windmill as she fought him with desperate energy. He looked to the digital timer.

00:00:22.

He wanted to yank the girl free as the clock slid to 00:00:21, but she was glued to him like a wildcat, scratching and clawing and trying to bite. He forced himself to hold on despite the hurt in his back where the Second Chance ballistic vest had stopped the slug. He yelled for Karen Rasmussen to run, and turned away, scanning the big room for the way out he had seen on his initial reconnaissance.

He saw the door and the padlock hanging off the chain from the inside in the same instant. He’d shot the man charged with manning the entry post on his own way down the stairs and saw that body sprawled on the floor, outflung hand inches from an assault rifle.

00:00:21.

“Karen!” Bolan barked for a second time.

“I’m coming!” The teenager answered, and he could hear her running down the stairs.

He tucked the wildly flailing girl under his arm and moved toward the door. He brought up his handgun as he did so, approaching the lock at an angle. He was stunned by the ferocity with which the triad clique had been prepared to defend its base of operations. With the death penalty so frequently employed, maybe they felt they had nothing left to lose.

He saw more clusters of fifty-five-gallon drums connected by television cables designed to carry electronic impulses and digital signals. The triad team had cobbled together a devastating mixture of low-and high-tech. What it lacked in complexity Bolan felt sure it would make up for in raw, explosive power.

00:00:20.

Squeezing the girl tightly, Bolan lifted the pistol and fired into the big padlock holding the thick links of chain together. The metal padlock jumped at the impact like a fish on the end of a line and split apart. Bolan stepped forward and struck out with the tread of his boot, catching the mechanism and ripping it down.

Karen Rasmussen joined him as the thick chain dropped to the floor. The girl was almost epileptic in her spasm now as she kept shrieking a word over and over again, the same liquid syllables in screaming repetition, but Bolan didn’t know the word, didn’t think he even recognized the language. He stuffed his pistol into its shoulder holster to better control the twisting girl and reached out to pull the warehouse door open.

00:00:19.

Karen Rasmussen threw herself against the handle and heaved her weight against the sliding structure. It came open easily and she stumbled through, Bolan rushed out after, running hard. The little girl bucked in his arms.

He heard a car door open and saw the flash of a dome light out of his left eye even as he was turning. He saw an Asian man in a leather coat with a long ponytail hopping out of a sleek black Lexus, one of the team’s ubiquitous machine pistols filling his hands.

Bolan dropped the twisting girl as he brought up his handgun. Rasmussen was screaming, her voice raw now, hands up around her face and standing directly in his way. He struck her with a heel-of-the-palm blow to her shoulder blade as the gunman lifted his machine pistol, and she spun away from him.

The Executioner leveled his silenced weapon, just catching a sense of the girl darting away from him. His finger found the trigger a split second before the other man’s and a 3-round burst struck the Asian in the chest. The man staggered under the triple impact and came up against the edge of the car. Bolan pulled down and stroked his trigger again. The man’s face was ripped off his skull, and he hit the broken pavement of the parking lot.

Bolan turned, reaching out for the girl, but he just missed her as she darted back into the building. His fingertips grazed her, coming close enough to feel the feather brush of her hair as he grasped nothing and she slipped past him.

“Sister!” Rasmussen suddenly shouted. “I just remembered the word, I was too scared to translate before!” the daughter of the American diplomat said. “Her sister’s in there.”