Road Of Bones. Don Pendleton

with concrete underfoot and metal walls on either side. The hallway ran for twenty feet and then turned left at a dead-end partition, granting Bolan access to the warehouse proper.

       The building was dark, except at the far end, where two banks of overhead lights blazed his trail. Between Bolan and what he took to be his destination, ranks of agricultural machinery stood silent in the murk. He picked out tractors, cultivators, backhoes, combine harvesters. Moving between them, the soldier homed in on sounds of moaning and a male voice asking questions that he couldn’t translate.

       They were still at work, then, but he still might be too late. Beyond a certain point there was no rescue, and the only mercy came with death’s release from hopeless agony. If it came down to that, Bolan was equal to the task.

       When he was halfway to the lights, a voice addressed him from a pool of shadows to his left, between a thresher and a skid loader. The lookout spoke in Russian. “Who the hell are you?”

       Bolan let his AK answer back, one Russian to another. Three rounds at a range of six or seven feet, two punching through a plastic cooler that the stranger carried, loosing plumes of smoke. His muzzle-flashes lit a startled face before it toppled over backward, out of frame.

       So much for stealth.

       He dodged between a swather and a mower, reached a different aisle and pounded toward the bright oasis where the action was. Bolan could hear people scrambling, as a voice called out, “Mikhail? Mikhail!”

       Presumably the dead guy.

       Bolan let the others wonder as he moved in for the kill.

      * * *

      TATYANA ANUCHIN hoped she was dying. She’d heard the pale interrogator asking for dry ice and tried not to imagine how or where he’d use it. After the electric shocks, it hardly seemed to matter, but she understood that pain was both his passion and profession. Since she had resisted his best efforts to the moment, he could only plan on doing something worse.

       She hoped to die before she cracked and told her captors everything. Exactly what she knew and how she had acquired that knowledge, naming sources both unwitting and deliberate. Sergey had been the lucky one, compelling them to kill him outright at the airport terminal. In retrospect, Anuchin wished that she possessed the same presence of mind.

       Next time, she thought, and almost found it humorous.

       That would confuse them, if she burst out laughing. If nothing else, it would insult the ghoul they’d summoned to abuse her. Anuchin wondered if he was a colleague from the Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii, the FSB, someone whom she might have seen at headquarters and overlooked in passing.

       Someone from the Lubyanka’s basement? Or an operator from the private sector, peddling his skills and predilection to the highest bidder in a cutthroat marketplace?

       It hardly mattered now, when she was duct-taped naked to a wooden chair, her flesh a crazy quilt of superficial burns and bite marks from the alligator clips. The jolting pain still resonated in her muscles, in her teeth and jaws. A migraine headache pulsed behind her eyes.

       Was it a sin to pray for death? If so, she didn’t care.

       Could hell be any worse than this?

       Against her will, Anuchin began to imagine the next phase of her live dissection. Dry ice, she knew, was the solid form of carbon dioxide. Its normal temperature hovered around -109 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to cause frostbite on contact. Above -70 degrees, it sublimated into frosty-looking gas, the “fog” so often used on movie sets for old-time horror films.

       And as a tool of torture, she recognized that it could prove effective. As to whether it was worse than electricity…well, she’d simply have to wait and see.

       If she withstood the ghoul’s next round of questions, how would he proceed? With scalpels or a blowtorch? Acid? Could she hope for shock to spare her from the worst of it, or was he skilled enough to revive her with drugs?

       Holding her breath accomplished nothing, as she’d quickly learned. Innate survival mechanisms wouldn’t let her suffocate herself. If her hands were free—

       The gunshots startled Anuchin from her fantasy of suicide. Her eyes snapped open, saw her captors facing toward the darkness of the cavernous warehouse. The ghoul was shifting nervously from foot to foot, as one of those who’d snatched her from the airport shouted to the long rows of machinery.

       “Mikhail? Mikhail!”

       No answer from the shadows.

       The thought of rescue never entered her mind. Who was there left to help her? No one from the Ministry of Justice that she served. They wished her dead, silenced forever, buried with the secrets she’d uncovered.

       As for private parties, Anuchin couldn’t think of one who had the means to find her coupled with an interest in helping her survive. Certainly, she had no friends within the Russian Mafia, denizens of the thieves world that infested every level of Russian society from top to bottom.

       With Sergey dead, she had no one.

       A quarrel between murderers, then, with Anuchin caught in the middle. Better that than more torture. She could always hope for a stray bullet to release her from her world of pain.

       Was that so much to ask?

       Helpless and totally exposed, she closed her eyes again and mouthed another silent prayer.

      * * *

      WHILE ONE OF BOLAN’S targets shouted for Mikhail, others were fanning out to sweep the warehouse, homing in on the echoes of his first gunshots. He saw one man breaking to his left, another to his right, their mouthpiece fading back to crouch behind a bulky gravity wagon.

       That left two figures visible beneath the warehouse lights. A naked woman was fastened to a chair with duct tape at her wrists and ankles, plus a loop around her ribs, slumped with her chin on her chest. Beside her, to her left, a tall man in a raincoat stood and goggled at the shadows with protruding eyes. A glint of stainless steel told Bolan that he held a knife.

       Completely useless in a gunfight.

       From the tall man’s look and his reaction to the shots, Bolan knew he was the inquisitor. Without a second thought, he raised the AKS and stitched the gawker with a rising burst from clavicle to forehead, shattering his face. The guy went down as if someone had cut his strings, and Bolan saw the woman in the chair turn toward him, blink, then look around to find out where the shots had come from.

       Wondering if she was next?

       The shooter behind the gravity wagon was playing it safe. His cohorts, flanking Bolan, did their best to keep it stealthy, but their style was obviously more attuned to smash-and-grab than creep-and-sneak. They telegraphed their moves with scuffling feet, letting their target track them in the dark.

       Bolan fell back from the bright lights and climbed aboard a midsize Caterpillar tractor, crouching with his back against its open cab. He’d let the hunters come to him—the first of them, at least—and see what happened next.

       The gunman coming from his left was faster, shuffling toward Bolan from behind a bale wrapper. He didn’t check the high ground, though, intent on peering under things, where shadows pooled. When he had closed the gap to twenty feet, a burst from Bolan’s SMG ripped into him and dropped him, twitching, on his back.

       The dead guy’s backup took advantage of the muzzle-flash and banged away at Bolan with a pistol, but the Executioner was already in motion, airborne, dropping to a crouch behind the tractor as incoming rounds cracked through its cab.

       The soldier broke to his left, keeping the bulk of the machine and its big engine block between his adversary and himself. When he was near the tractor’s nose, he knelt, then stretched prone and crawled around beneath the radiator grille, careful to keep his weapon’s magazine from scraping concrete as he went.

       He caught the second shooter scrambling toward the tractor, pistol out in front of him