Killing Game

Bolan rose to his knees. Thrusting the knife tip through the curtain material directly in front of him, he sliced down as far as he could. Then, still holding the knife and the big .44 Magnum pistol, he reached forward and grabbed the sides of the opening, clutching them between his fingers and the two weapons.

Ripping both hands apart, Bolan caught his first glimpse of light since diving through the window. A man wearing a blue beret and brown slacks was bringing a British Sten submachine gun to bear.

Pulling the Desert Eagle’s trigger, the Executioner caught the terrorist in the chest, driving him back.

Another mammoth blast came from across the street, covering fire from Platinov, but another enemy gunner fired on Bolan, rounds tearing through the curtain missing his left ear by a millimeter.

He had to get out of these curtains of death, and he had to do it now. Bolan rose from his knees to his feet as first his head, then his shoulders, and finally his legs came up and out of the curtains. Then he stepped away from the tangled material as the real battle began.

The Executioner took in his environment in a heartbeat. Just as he’d guessed, he was in the safe house’s living room. He could hear a television almost directly behind him. Against the other three walls were sofas and chairs, and the time it had taken him to untangle himself from the curtains had given the terrorists time to push away from the walls and take cover behind the furniture.

Bolan knew it hadn’t been him who had prompted such actions. Had he dived through the window and into the curtains alone, the hardmen inside the living room would have had only to draw their weapons and send a massive hailstorm of gunfire into the disarrayed clump of curtains. It had been Platinov’s fire from the roof across the street that had saved his life. The terrorists now taking cover were doing so to avoid the thunderous assault that was coming from somewhere outside of their house.

But now that they could see Bolan, and the giant pistol in his hand, they turned their attention his way.

The Executioner fired another round directly into a stuffed armchair behind which he had seen the top of a balding head. The 240-grain Magnum round easily penetrated the leather cover material and stuffing, then hit the man behind the chair somewhere critical enough to send him sprawling out to the side in instant death.

Return fire suddenly poured from the other men around the room as they recovered from their initial shock. Covered on three sides in the living room, Bolan knew it could only be a matter of seconds before he’d be nailed.

To his side, an archway led from the living room into a dining area. Firing two more quick rounds from the Desert Eagle, Bolan heard the springs inside one of the sofas sing out as the bullets shredded through them and took out another terrorist hiding behind them. The man had just enough life left in him to stand up, but not enough to lift the heavy Thompson submachine gun in his hands before he fell forward over the back of the couch.

As soon as he’d pulled the trigger the second time, Bolan dived toward the archway. He had not yet had time to sheath his knife, so he tucked both the blade and the Desert Eagle flat against his chest. The shoulder roll took him out of the living room into the entryway behind the front door, and he rolled back to his feet at the foot of a staircase that led to the second floor of the house.

The Executioner ducked and pivoted back around as gunfire sailed over his shoulder. The men in the living room had now been forced out from behind the couches and chairs in order to get into a position from which they could attack. And as yet another sonic boom sounded from across the street, Bolan watched one of the men’s heads totally disintegrate atop his neck.

Bolan leaped to the third step of the staircase. He had seen no one at the first landing of the split-level home, and could see no one at the top, either. This unconventional tactic provided him with no cover or concealment, but it made the men trying to kill him pause for a few tenths of a second.

Which was more than enough of an edge for the Executioner.

Bolan had finally sheathed his knife, and now he drew the Beretta 93-R. Thumbing the selector switch to 3-round-burst mode, he cut loose with a trio of 9 mm rounds that stitched another CLODO terrorist from navel to neck. The man’s eyes widened in disbelief, then he fell forward onto his face, dropping the .357 Magnum Taurus 8-shot revolver he had been about to bring into play.

The Executioner’s unorthodox movement had worked once. So he reversed it, jumping downward, landing on his rubber-soled hiking shoes with the grace of a cat. But the roar that came out of the Desert Eagle was that of a lion as he pressed the big pistol’s barrel directly into the chest of a young terrorist, pulverizing his heart.

Bolan ducked back from the archway, climbing up one step again to avoid the torrent of lead that zipped his way. When he leaned back around with the Desert Eagle, he spotted another younger terrorist sprinting toward the window.

The Executioner raised the Beretta to fire, but another loud blast kept him from wasting his ammunition as Platinov sent yet another 325-grain semijacketed hollowpoint into the man’s chest.

Bolan watched him hit the floor on his back like a sack of potatoes falling off the back of a truck. The young man had just enough strength left to crane his neck up and look at his ruined chest.

Then he closed his eyes forever.

According to Bolan’s count, Platinov had fired all five of the rounds in her weapon. Now, she would have to reload the big X-frame wheel gun and, even with the full moon clips, that would take time.

Time during which he couldn’t count on getting any cover fire from her.

Only two CLODO men remained in the living room, and the dining room across the entryway appeared empty. The Executioner pulled the triggers of both pistols at the same time. A .44 Magnum round ended the life of a French terrorist when it drilled through his black T-shirt and into his even blacker heart. At the same time, a left-handed 3-round burst of 9 mm slugs cut through the ragged tweed sport coat of another hardman.

Bolan dropped the nearly spent magazine from the Desert Eagle as he transferred the Beretta from his free hand to his armpit. Jerking another box mag of .44 Magnum rounds from his belt, he jammed it into the butt of the huge Israeli-made pistol.

He had seen the glitter of brass at the top of the ejected magazine as it fell from the Desert Eagle’s grips before hitting the floor. He had not been able to keep count during this battle, but the mere fact that at least one round was left in the discarded magazine assured him that another was already chambered in the .44.

No sooner had he reloaded the Desert Eagle than the Executioner’s fine-tuned ears heard movement above him, at the top of the staircase to his side. His head jerked that way and he saw yet another terrorist in a blue beret. The man wore the same brown slacks as many of the others. But it looked as if a tie-dyed T-shirt covered his chest—at least at first glance. As he turned toward the threat and got a closer look, the Executioner realized that the man was actually shirtless. His chest and belly had been completely covered with tattoos.

And he was aiming a Mossberg JIC—Just in Case—12-gauge shotgun down the steps.

The Mossberg—with a stubby eighteen-inch barrel, pistol grip and no stock—came as close to being the perfect close-quarters-combat firearm as any one gun could. But it was as useless as a stalk of dry spaghetti if a bullet took the shotgun’s wielder before he could pull the trigger.

Twisting at the waist, Bolan let the Desert Eagle rise, as if on its own accord, to shoulder level. He stopped as soon as the heavy barrel pointed at the nose of the man atop the steps.

The terrorist had obviously trained in the “competition style” of shooting, in which the shooter always tried to superimpose the front sight over the target before squeezing the trigger. There were several drawbacks to that style of shooting when it came to a real gunfight rather than a pistol match at a gun range. First of all, it went completely against human nature, during times of life or death, to focus on anything but the threat itself. The rear, ancient, primordial part of the brain literally screamed at the defender to look at the threat rather than the front sight or anything else.

Trying to find the front sight under such emotional strain was further complicated by the fact that the eyes got the message from the brain as well, and fought against focusing on the end of the gun when it was the target that was about to kill him.

And last, but hardly least, was the theory that the trigger should be gently squeezed rather than pulled. Under such tension, the human body’s small motor functions shut down and sent blood and adrenaline flowing to the larger muscle groups to increase strength. A death grip was automatically taken on the gun, and the trigger was pulled, not squeezed, regardless of what the shooter had been capable of doing during practice.

A true life-or-death gun battle was as different from a practice session at a gun range as a karate tournament was from a street fight. And, as he pulled the trigger of the big .44 Magnum pistol, Bolan thought of the moronic firearms instructors he had heard say that the stress of losing a pistol match duplicated the stress of a true fight to the death.

Such range “masters” had obviously never been in a real gunfight themselves. They might have trophies filling their living rooms and dens which they could show off to their friends, but they had never shot at anything that was shooting back at them.

The Executioner’s 240-grain, point-aimed, RBCD total fragmentation round drilled through the tattooed man’s nose and angled up into his brain before exploding. The now familiar pink mists shot out of the terrorist’s head from the front, back and both sides, hanging in the air for a moment like a quartet of crimson clouds. The terrorist dropped the shotgun, which bumped down the stairs, coming to a halt directly in front of the Executioner as if to say, “Use me.”

Bolan holstered both the Desert Eagle and Beretta, then reached down and lifted the shotgun in both hands. Racking the slide back far enough to see that a shell had already been chambered, he flipped off the safety with his thumb and stepped to the side to allow the near-headless body of the Mossberg’s former bearer to tumble down past him.

Behind him, the Executioner heard the explosion of Platinov’s 500 S&W Magnum revolver from across the street again. Good. The Russian woman had successfully reloaded the mammoth handgun and begun sniping again. But all of the men on the ground floor had been eliminated by now, so he had to guess she was taking potshots through the curtained windows of the floors above him. His suspicion was confirmed a second later when he heard the tinkling sound of broken glass above him.

Bolan raised the Mossberg’s stumpy barrel up the steps just as another pair of hardmen appeared on the landing, both armed with AK-47s. The man on Bolan’s right was right-handed and prepared to shoot that way. The terrorist to the Executioner’s left was a southpaw.

Standing side-by-side as they were, they looked almost like mirror images of each other.

Raising the shotgun to shoulder level, Bolan sent a load of double-aught buckshot into the throat of the man on his right. Rivers of crimson shot from the arteries in the man’s neck, and his head fell to his right shoulder, still attached to his body but only by the few tendons and ligaments.

The man to the Executioner’s left screamed out loud as his partner’s blood sprayed his face. Panicking, he pulled the trigger of his Soviet-made assault rifle and sent a fully automatic burst of 7.62 mm rounds flying high over Bolan’s head.

The big American took his time, steadying the shotgun, his eyes planted firmly on the blood-covered terrorist’s chest—just an inch to the right of center. A second later, he pulled the trigger and the 12-gauge buckshot spread into a tight, inch-and-a-half grouping as the lead balls struck home.

Both corpses fell headfirst down the steps past the Executioner to join their fellow terrorist at the foot of the steps.

Bolan racked the slide of the Mossberg to chamber another round. So far, he had fired two of the double-aught shells. The magazine held only five, so he had either three or four rounds left in the weapon, depending on whether the man who had introduced the shotgun into the fight had topped off the magazine after chambering the first round.

At this point, the Executioner had no way of knowing. What he did know was that he’d have to be ready to drop the scattergun and draw one or both of his pistols at a second’s notice.

The firing from across the street had ceased, which meant Platinov had come down off her perch to join him in the ongoing battle. Between the roars of the firearms, Bolan had heard enough noise above him to know there were more terrorists upstairs, on the second level and maybe even the third.

One thing was for certain. The fight wasn’t over yet.

Not by a long shot.

CHAPTER THREE