Killpath. Don Pendleton

landing, then hopped back on to the staircase below the pile of thugs.

      “Es peligroso aquí!” Bolan shouted loud enough for the woman in the closet to hear. “No se mueva!”

      “Si!” she responded.

      She’d survived in her hideout, and she’d stay put long enough. Satisfied, Bolan continued through the house. If Agent Blanca wasn’t on the first or second floors, then she’d be in the basement.

      He reloaded as he walked, discarding the spent magazine in the AK, but he returned it to its sling over his shoulder. If he cut loose with the automatic rifle in the close quarters of a basement, he’d end up deafening himself. He switched to the suppressed Beretta instead.

      He found the entry to the basement and descended the stairs quickly, but with caution. He didn’t want to get caught by a spray of bullets from below, but he wasn’t about to wait around for the next wave of guards to show.

      The basement was well-lit, but the uneasy silence of the subterranean layout set his instincts on edge. If there was a prisoner, there would be guards. And if there were guards, then his appearance should have elicited a response.

      Maybe they were part of the crew that he’d just taken out, but something told him that any hope of rescuing Teresa Blanca was gone. He spotted a hanging sheet of translucent plastic and moved toward it.

      No, Blanca no longer required gunmen at the doorway to keep her prisoner. He pushed aside the rubbery drape and stepped into the slaughterhouse.

      Blanca’s forehead sported a still-smoking bullet hole, and the rest of her body showed signs of recent and brutal torture.

      There was a muffled sound in the corner of the room. Bolan turned and saw a couple of disposal bins. As he walked closer, a muzzle rose shakily from behind one of them. The barrel of a pistol came into view, but Bolan had sidestepped from in front of the gun. He reached over the top of the gun’s slide and clamped down, twisting the weapon loose from the hand holding it with the snap of finger bones. A man cried out, recoiling and kicking one of the canisters aside.

      A man in a white coat held his hand gingerly, his trigger finger broken by the Executioner’s disarm.

      “Was that Teresa Blanca?” Bolan asked.

      The man was in his late forties, his wet hair matted across a receding hairline near the top of his skull. He was drenched with sweat. His big, trembling lips sputtered for a few moments. “Yes. It was her.”

      “And you shot her?” Bolan asked.

      The man gave a jerky nod. “Yes. I heard the gunfire upstairs…”

      “What about the torture?” Bolan pressed. “Were you part of that, too?”

      “Please. I stopped her suffering. Don’t hurt me.” He swallowed hard. “I was just following orders.”

      Bolan pressed a small handgun, a .22 auto-back, into the man’s hand, squeezing his fingers around the weapon. “I won’t hurt you.”

      The torturer blinked.

      “Take off the lab coat,” Bolan barked.

      “W-why…”

      “Because you’ll be too easy to spot,” Bolan said. “You don’t want to get shot, do you?”

      The man quickly began peeling off his coat. “You think there will still be shooting?”

      Bolan heard footsteps on the stairs he’d just come down. The second wave was here, and part of the group had been dispatched to the basement.

      “Over there!” Bolan shouted. He brought up his big Desert Eagle from its hip holster. As if spurred on, the torturer raised his own tiny pistol, shooting through the plastic tarp hanging in the doorway before the Executioner could even pull the trigger.

      Bolan cut loose with the .44 Magnum to make certain that the Zetas gunmen had something to focus on. The room filled with flying lead, bullets cutting through the walls and plastic alike. Bolan threw himself to the ground. The lab coat guy, however, was not so fast to react.

      Rifle slugs chopped into his chest, throwing him back over the bins he’d been hiding behind earlier. He reached toward Bolan, fingers stretching and clawing for mercy.

      “Physician, heal thyself,” the Executioner said.

      He brought up the Beretta 93R and cut loose, the silencer smothering any telltale flicker from the sleek machine pistol. He focused on one of the enemy muzzle flashes, and suppressed slugs hit one of the gunmen in the head. The other opponent continued blasting away, but he was on the move, trying not to make himself an easy target.

      Bolan blew out the guy’s knee with another tri-burst, and he fell to the ground. The rifle clattered across the floor. The man scrambled to remove his sidearm from its holster, but Bolan stopped him in the act, sending a trio of bullets into the sentry’s skull.

      The gunfire had drawn more guards to the basement, and they sent two grenades down the steps ahead of them. Bolan supported Teresa Blanca’s body with one arm and flipped the steel table with the other. He crouched behind the shrapnel-proof barrier as sheets of shell fragments and notched wire clanged off its surface.

      Bolan lowered Blanca to the floor gently. He sent a quiet prayer to the universe to watch over her spirit, and reloaded the Beretta.

      Bolan kept the machine pistol handy as he grabbed his last banger from his harness and pulled the pin, counting down as the fuse burned. When the time was right, he dropped the grenade into the middle of the group of guards who’d followed their own bombs down the stairs. Bolan released a loud bellow, equalizing the internal and external pressure on his ears to protect himself from the sound of the explosion.

      Bolan rose from behind the steel table and stepped through the shredded plastic sheet. Blinded and deafened foes staggered helplessly around the room. The Executioner lived up to his name, putting bullets into the brains of the trio of Zetas guards directly in front of him. He holstered the machine pistol and pulled out the AK.

      A sentry to the right of him was leaning against a wall, pressing his forearm against his eyes in an effort to restore his burned-out vision. Bolan sliced him in half with a burst from the AK, then turned and spotted another man, blinking and raising his rifle one-handed to gun him down. Bolan sidestepped, aimed the AK with both hands, and tore open the gunman from crotch to throat.

      Bolan headed toward the staircase, doing the math on the diminished guard force. There would be two men left at most, plus the guy he’d left unconscious in the hall closet.

      His AK was low on ammo, so he drew his Desert Eagle from his hip holster. The door at the top of the stairs was closed—the perfect spot for a gunman to wait him out. Bolan dumped the current magazine in the .44 Magnum and slid in a stick of copper-solid hunting bullets. Pure homogenous copper from nose to tail, these slugs were meant to penetrate the heaviest hides in nature. For the Executioner’s purpose, they would tear through walls easily, while causing massive destruction to human flesh.

      He loaded the magazine, racked the slide and put the first heavyweight round into the barrel. He paused to scoop up the conventional hollow point and pocket it, not wanting to waste his ammunition. Then he fired two shots through the drywall on either side of the door. The high speed slugs struck and plowed through the plaster, their mass and velocity preventing any deflection. Bolan heard a scream as a man on the other side was hit.

      A second guy kicked the door open, and Bolan put a round right into his opponent’s rifle. The gun shattered in the man’s grasp, saving his life, for the moment. Bolan continued up the stairs as another figure staggered into view. It was the man he’d clobbered before, and he’d rearmed himself.

      Another stroke of the Desert Eagle’s trigger, and the Executioner all but beheaded him, the copper slug destroying the man’s jaw and blasting out the bottom of his skull. By the time the soldier reached the top of the steps,