Road Of Bones. Don Pendleton

He drove past, boxed the block and rolled back toward the water with the makings of a plan in mind. He’d keep it simple: hit and git, if that was possible.

       If not…well, Bolan played the cards that he was dealt.

       And on occasion, he’d been known to throw away the deck.

       He parked within a half block of his target, killed the Volga’s engine and turned to his tools. First up was an AKS-74U submachine gun, nineteen inches long with its wire stock folded, weighing five and a half pounds unloaded. Size aside, it had the same firepower as its parent weapon, the venerable AK-74 assault rifle in 5.45 mm, with a cyclic rate of 650 rounds per minute. On paper, the little gun’s effective range was listed as 350 yards, but with an eight-inch barrel it was used primarily for work up close and personal.

       For backup, Bolan wore an MR-444 Baghira semiauto pistol in a fast-draw shoulder rig. The Russian-made sidearm was chambered for 9 mm Parabellum rounds, carrying fifteen in a double-column box magazine.

       His less-lethal option consisted of four GSZ-33 stun grenades, a flash-bang model equivalent to the U.S.-made M-84 that generated one million candela to blind a target on detonation, while shocking him deaf and nearly unconscious with 180 decibels of concussive sound inside a five-foot radius. When they were clipped to Bolan’s belt and the pockets of his long coat filled with extra magazines, he left the sedan and locked it, moving toward the warehouse with the address offered by his contact.

       Despite the vote of confidence from Langley, filtered back to Bolan through his friends at Stony Man, there was a chance that his informant could turn out to be a rat. In which case, it was fifty-fifty that Bolan would never have a chance for payback.

       Not in this life, anyway.

       But there was one thing you could say about the odds on any battlefield.

       They shifted when the Executioner arrived.

      * * *

      WHEN THE INTERROGATOR took a break, Valentin Grushin braced him, getting in his face to ask him, “Are you making any progress?”

       The pale man regarded Grushin as he might a laboratory specimen, perhaps a frog or piglet offered for dissection. Grushin thought, again, how much the creepy bastard looked like Dracula. Not old Lugosi, long before his time, but Christopher Lee in the great Hammer films from the sixties and seventies.

       “She’s tough,” the pale man said. “I give her that.”

       His name was Ivan Shukov, but inevitably he was known within the dark world he inhabited as Ivan the Terrible. No surprise there, from what Grushin had heard—and now seen—of his work.

       “I would have said you’re getting nowhere,” Grushin said, emboldened by his guns and three companions. “All this time, and nothing.”

       All that screaming, and the generator humming, Shukov murmuring his questions as he placed the alligator clips for maximum effect. How many volts? Enough to singe the flesh without inflicting death or permanent disfigurement.

       So far.

       Grushin wasn’t unsettled by the screaming. He had made some women scream himself—a few from pleasure, others not so much. Insensitivity to suffering was part of what equipped him for his work, a subset of his general indifference to the fate of other human beings.

       No. What made his skin crawl in the presence of a man like Ivan Shukov—and there seemed to be a surfeit of them in the world these days—was the disturbing sense that he, Grushin, might fall into the hands of such a man someday.

       And then what would become of him?

       It would be easy to transgress and fall from grace. A simple comment in the wrong place, at the wrong time, might betray him. Passed along maliciously, amended and redacted, any casual remark could turn into a death sentence. And while he didn’t relish death, Grushin had long since come to terms with personal mortality, accepting that the chances of a long and happy life were slim indeed.

       It wasn’t dying that he feared, so much as screaming out his final breath while everything that made him human was extracted, sliced and diced or seared with flame, by someone like Ivan the Terrible.

       Had he already gone too far in goading the interrogator? Would his criticism get back to the man in charge, be filed away for future reference and used against him somewhere down the line? Perhaps, but now it was too late to take it back.

       “I’m thinking of a new approach,” Shukov said.

       “Oh?” Grushin strived for a noncommittal tone.

       “Selective applications, heat and cold,” Shukov explained. “You have dry ice?”

       “Dry ice? No,” Grushin replied.

       “But you can find some, yes?”

       Grushin considered it. Where would he locate dry ice?

       As if reading his mind, Shukov said, “I suggest the ice plant. Kulakovsky Street. You know it?”

       “I can find it,” Grushin said, determined not to ask Shukov for the address.

       “A pound or so should be sufficient,” Shukov said. “I have a pair of gloves. And tongs.”

       Of course he would.

       “I’ll send Mikhail,” Grushin said, wishing he could go himself and get away from Shukov for a while. Ivan the Terrible depressed him, set his teeth on edge and made him feel the need to shower under scalding water.

       Too late, Grushin thought. He was already soiled beyond redemption, not that he placed any faith in superstition or the church. Forgiveness, if it mattered, always called for a confession and repentance, whereas Grushin had been raised to keep his mouth shut in the presence of authority.

       And truth be told, he wasn’t sorry for the things that he had done. Well, maybe one or two of them, but just a little.

       Dry ice coming up, he thought, and bustled off to find Mikhail.

      * * *

      BOLAN COULDN’T READ the sign, in Cyrillic, outside the warehouse, but he didn’t need to. The address was painted in Arabic numerals, and the numbers didn’t lie.

       Unless his contact had.

       No way to second-guess it now as he approached in darkness. Seven hours had passed since the package had been lifted, and he understood the kind of damage that could be inflicted in that span of time.

       A gunshot to the head took, what, a fraction of a second? But the men he had to deal with would be after information, likely skilled in methods of extracting it. How long that took depended on their subject’s pain threshold and powers of endurance.

       No one was immune to torture. Everybody broke, sooner or later, if they didn’t die from shock or blood loss. But would a subject give up what his or her tormentors required, or misdirect them? Would the innocent confess to heinous crimes, while the guilty targeted a fictional accomplice?

       Bolan reckoned he had seen the worst of it on more than one occasion. If he’d come too late this time, at least he could avenge the victim and make sure that her interrogators felt a measure of the pain they had dispensed. Or maybe they’d be lucky, and he’d simply kill them where they stood.

       But first, he had to get inside.

       The large doors on the warehouse loading dock were padlocked, and their rumbling would have been too noisy even if they weren’t secured. He sought another way inside and found it at the southeast corner of the big, old building. An employees’ entrance, he supposed, although its faded sign was gibberish.

       He tried the knob and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. No sign of an alarm from where he stood, fishing inside a pocket for a set of picks. Bolan spent sixty seconds on the lock—no dead bolt on the door to make it complicated—and he pocketed the picks again before he crossed the threshold.

       The soldier was cautious now, letting