Blood Rites. Don Pendleton

and missed by yards. Bolan stood his ground and let the woman scramble toward him, fresh blood weeping from her nose and from a cut beneath her jaw.

      “Please, get me out of here!” she begged him. “I can pay you!”

      “That way,” Bolan said, nodding toward the hallway leading to the back door, “while I cover you.”

      She ran, seeming no worse for having fallen down the stairs. If she was hurt, she managed to disguise it well. Bolan retreated from the staircase, walking backward as he followed her, still covering the Viper Posse shooters on the second floor. Each time one showed his head, Bolan squeezed off a round or two and sent them ducking out of sight.

      He heard the back door open as the lady shoved against it, bursting out into the night. She might run off without him, and if so, he wished her well. The last thing Bolan needed was a sidekick looking for sanctuary.

      But she didn’t run. He found her waiting in the alley, looking frantic. “Don’t tell me you walked here,” she implored, her accent something from the French Caribbean. Haitian, maybe, though there were other possibilities.

      If she was Haitian, it put her presence at the Kingston House into a new perspective. Not merely a captive, but perhaps a prisoner of war.

      “The car’s down that way,” Bolan told her, pointing. “Half a block.”

      “You’ll take me out of here?”

      “I didn’t plan to hang around.”

      “Please hurry, then, before they catch us!”

      She was off and running after that, with no idea what Bolan’s ride might look like. To delay pursuit, he fired another short burst through the open door, no targets yet in sight, then followed her at double time.

      “The Mercury,” he told her as he caught up.

      “This? It’s old.”

      “It’s vintage,” he corrected, and unlocked the doors remotely, sliding in behind the wheel while she sat next to him.

      Downrange, he saw armed men erupting from the back door of their social club, scanning the alley and the street beyond for targets. Bolan left his headlights off as he revved the Marauder’s engine, cranking through a tight U-turn, but they were sure to spot him anyway. Less than a minute later, he had two cars in pursuit and gave up the deception, switching on his lights.

      “They’ll catch us,” she worried aloud. “We can’t outrun them in this…this….”

      “Don’t underestimate three hundred ninety cubic inches,” Bolan said, still not entirely sure he wanted to escape from Channer’s men. More damage could be done by getting rid of them for good, but he required an open killing ground for that, without civilians in his line of fire.

      Someplace like the nearby park, perhaps, where he could find some combat stretch, with all the kiddies safely home for dinner, schoolwork and TV time with families.

      “They’re coming!” his passenger warned.

      “Stay down after we stop,” he told her.

      “Stop! What do—”

      “Hang on! We’re almost there.”

       2

      The winding road led Bolan through Snapper Creek Park to a deserted visitor’s center. A couple of dim lights still burned inside for security’s sake. The extra cover wouldn’t hurt when he went EVA, and he was hoping the trees around the building would conceal muzzle-flashes from drivers passing by. As for the racket, he could muffle only his own guns. The rest were out of his control until he silenced them by force.

      He reached the smallish parking lot and put the Mercury Marauder through a tight bootlegger’s turn. Bolan switched off the headlights as he killed the rumbling engine, grabbed the Steyr and was out of there in seconds flat.

      “What about me?” his passenger called after him.

      “Stay there!” he snapped, and left her, merging with the night.

      It wasn’t dark for long. Two chase cars were approaching on the same road he had followed. They claimed both lanes, so no one could slip past them, high beams swallowing the darkness, but they weren’t in any hurry now. Still making decent time, but nothing risky as they came on, sniffing for an ambush.

      To the north, where Bolan could have fled the park along another looping road, a third car was approaching, headlights off, a subtle touch defeated by the widely spaced floodlights. It had been a smart move, sending in another team to cut off his retreat, but Bolan wasn’t worried yet.

      Three cars, say four men to a ride unless they packed them in like cocktail sausages. A dozen wasn’t all that many if he handled it correctly. If he blew it, on the other hand, one man was all it took to bring him down.

      Bolan tracked the two cars on his right through the Steyr’s integral telescopic sight. He put his first round through the tinted windshield of the chase car rolling down the left-hand lane, approximately where the driver’s face should be. The car lurched, started drifting toward a grassy verge, then straightened out and stopped as someone got the steering wheel under control.

      By then, Bolan had shifted to the second car and fired another muffled shot, hoping the silencer that doubled as a flash-hider would cover his position. Round two pierced the second windshield with a plink, but this car didn’t swerve or stall. Instead, it suddenly accelerated toward the parking lot where Bolan’s Mercury sat waiting. The chase car’s headlights were switching off, three doors already opening before it came to rest.

      Call that a miss, on driver number two.

      Three men had tumbled from the first car he’d fired on, and he saw four scrambling from the second now. He had a choice to make, and he made it swiftly, spinning toward the third car, still approaching with its lights turned off. He used the glint of floodlights on the windshield as his guide, firing another single shot intended for the driver.

      And scored this time, if the reaction of the vehicle was any indication. It stopped short, as if a dead weight had slipped down and landed on the brake pedal, the engine muttering to be unleashed, but for the moment stuck exactly where it sat.

      Call that two out of three.

      As men erupted from the third car, Bolan swung back toward the other two. He couldn’t trust the night to cover him forever, even with the AUG’s suppressor masking his location, but he still had time to do some damage now, before he had to move.

      The soldiers sent to kill him were the same sort he’d encountered back at Kingston House, with dreads and baggy shirts intended to evoke an Afro-Caribbean vibe. Their scruffy clothing was in sharp contrast to the bright, shiny weapons they carried, all ready to rip at the first glimpse of a target.

      Coming at them any second now.

      * * *

      THE FIRST SHOT SEEMED to come from nowhere. It cracked the windshield and ripped open Lenny Garvey’s face. The driver gave a little grunt, as if surprised, then slumped over the steering wheel, taking the vehicle off course till Gordon Crawford reached across and disentangled Lenny, gave the wheel a twist and thrust a leg between the driver’s dead ones, stamping on the brake.

      “Get out of the car!” he shouted at the backseat soldiers, leading by example as he bailed out and hit the pavement on one shoulder, gasping at the sudden pain. “Damn it!”

      Crawford kept moving, damn the pain. He hadn’t heard the shot, although his window was open, and had seen