Rebel Force. Don Pendleton

craned his neck, looking upward. Nothing moved on the stairs or crouched in the gloomy landings. He tracked his scanning vision with the poised muzzle of the Glock 17. The hair on the back of Bolan’s neck stood raised like the hackles of a dog.

      The stale smell of dust and disuse was hanging heavy in the air. Faintly beneath that was the slight odor of machine oil coming up from the factory floor. Bolan’s straining ears detected nothing. He placed the reinforced soles of his boots carefully on the first metal rung of the building’s skeletal framed staircase and began to climb.

      He edged around the curve of the stair. The raised grip of the pistol’s butt snuggled tightly into his palms. He kept his Weaver stance tight, keyed-up to react to the slightest motion. Garabend was an established veteran of life as a hunted man. Security so apparently lax was unexplainable in such a man.

      Reaching the second-floor landing, Bolan snuggled up tight against the fire door. He pressed his back against the wall beside the door handle. The seal of the landing door was too tight for him to use a fiber optics surveillance cable borescope. The heavy steel door effectively muted any potential sound coming from the second-floor hallway.

      Gritting his teeth, Bolan pulled the door open and darted his head around the edge. He was met with silence and darkness. The hallway ran for several yards, office doors on one side, dark windows facing the parking lot on the other. The hall turned in a L-break at the far end toward the front of the building.

      Bolan moved down the center of the hallway, ready to drop prone or respond with deadly fire at the slightest threat. He moved as silently as his considerable skills allowed, but to his own adrenaline-enhanced hearing, his footfalls echoed loudly. Reaching the bend in the hallway, Bolan took a rapid look around the corner. Along this stretch, doorways marked both sides of the hall at intermittent lengths.

      Halfway down he picked out a crumpled form. From the green smear under the still shape, Bolan could tell the figure had lost a lot of blood, and recently, as the signature still held a good amount of heat. Instinctively Bolan snapped his line of sight up, scanning the corridor for any sign of movement. Seeing none, Bolan slid around the corner and into the passage.

      The heat register meant the downed figure was either still alive, or had been struck down just minutes before. Keeping low, Bolan moved forward. His nostrils flared under the saddle of the night-vision goggles. The reek of cordite was heavy on the stale air of the abandoned factory.

      Going up to the body, Bolan looked it over quickly. The figure remained still. Reaching his free hand out, Bolan felt for a pulse on the figure’s neck, found none. He peered down, straining to make out facial features in the ambivalent light of the NVGs. The figure was male. A thick beard fell across a broad swell of chest. He was dressed in a Russian army pattern camouflage parka. There was a folding stock, paratrooper model AKS-74 under the man’s body.

      Bolan touched the barrel. The metal was cool. The weapon had not been fired. Scanning the hallway, Bolan used his fingers to probe the corpse, trying to ascertain the source of his injuries. The face was intact, the torso clear of wounds. Frowning, Bolan felt the back of the man’s head.

      His fingers came away wet.

      The location on the back of the head where the spinal cord merged with the back of skull was the medulla oblongata, Latin for “stem of the rose.” Bolan knew it was the collective location for all of the nerves of the central nervous system. The hypothalamus hung there like a grape cluster, regulating breath and the beating of the heart. In the special operations community, a shot to the medulla oblongata was known as “popping the grape” and was a preferred method of neutralizing subjects from behind.

      This hadn’t been a sloppy assassination. The dead man—Chechen, Bolan guessed, given the beard and Russian army jacket—had been coolly dispatched from up close and personal by someone with the nerves of a professional killer.

      Bolan rose and stepped over the corpse. The man had been killed directly in front of a door on the outer side of the hallway. His intelligence information hadn’t been specific as to where on the second floor Garabend was supposed to be having his meeting.

      “This mission is going to be very ad hoc, Striker,” Brognola had warned.

      Bolan knew ad hoc was government speak for “half-assed.”

      Bolan also knew that, in his War Everlasting, “half-assed” got you killed. But he felt, just as Brognola did, that the information on Garabend’s laptop was worth the risk. Worth his life even, if every drop of his blood was counted against the blood of innocents. Innocents Bolan had sworn his life to defend and avenge.

      Bolan put his hand on the office door.

      It swung open easily under his touch.

      2

      The Executioner glided into the room, pistol tracking ahead of him. The room was a reception area leading, presumably, to a private office farther back. The space had been stripped of furniture when the last owners of the building had pulled out ahead of the increasing violence and the brutal Russian air force. There were no pictures on the walls, no furniture or filing cabinets set up. Overhead, exposed wiring hung down like snakes from a ceiling stripped bare of light fixtures.

      Bodies lay scattered around the room. In the heat sensitive night-vision goggles, the walls looked as if they had been splattered with florescent paint from the spilled blood. The reek of cordite was overwhelming in the tightly confined space. Spent shell casings pressed up against Bolan’s feet as he moved through the room. Four corpses were tossed with careless abandon around the enclosure.

      More of the folding stock AKS-74s lay in hands quickly cooling in death. The office was a stinking abattoir filled with the stench of torn flesh and the copper tang of pooling blood. Bolan kept his eyes trained on the doorway leading into the inner recesses of the suite. His recon had revealed a surprising turn of events. It was time to adapt, to improvise, to overcome. Carefully, Bolan crouched. He secured an assault rifle by its pistol grip, tugging it free from its owner’s dead fingers.

      Tucking the skeletal buttstock into his hip, Bolan ensured the safety was disengaged. Once outfitted, he holstered his Glock 17. Safely putting his pistol away freed his hands, and Bolan snapped down the folding stock of the paratrooper carbine to make it more manageable in the enclosed environment. Things were ugly now. The Executioner had been thrown a bloody curve ball, and he was determined to take it in stride.

      There was an infrared penlight built into the goggles. When activated, it was like a flashlight in the lenses of the night-vision device, visible only in the infrared spectrum. Using it, Bolan quickly determined that Garabend was not one of the dead.

      The soldier stood, slowly unfolding from the crouch he had used to navigate the room. The soles of his boots were tacky with blood. Keeping the AKS tight against his torso, he padded toward the door to the inner office.

      Behind the office door came the end of the line. Secrecy and stealth became superfluous the instant he crossed through that final door. Bolan had every reason to suspect that he would find the corpse of Enzik Garabend inside. What he was less certain of, given the freshness of the kills, was whether or not he would find Garabend’s murderer in there as well.

      Standing at an angle by the office door, Bolan surveyed it as carefully as he could through his NVGs. The door was closed. That seemed wrong. Once the target had been taken out, and considering the mess in the outer chamber, why go to the trouble of carefully closing a door behind you as you left?

      The Executioner made his decision. Stepping forward, he raised up high on the ball of one foot and brought his right knee up to his chest where he held the AKS at port arms. Exhaling sharply through his nose, Bolan snapped his curled leg out with explosive power. He thrust through on the breaching kick, his big foot slamming into the door just inside of the handle, even to where the bolt ran in the lock housing.

      The door popped open under the sharp force and swung wildly back. Bolan recoiled to one side in an attempt to avoid any returning fire from inside the room. After a heartbeat he tucked in behind the muzzle of