Collision Course. Don Pendleton

the nose. The big man crumpled at the knees and went down. A gash opened up across the bridge of his nose and spilled blood across his face.

      Stunned, the biker rolled his eyes up and looked at the nightmare figure looming over him. Bolan slapped the muzzle of the pistol across the man’s jaw, snapping his head to the side. With his face turned up like an offering, Bolan quickly snapped the Croatian handgun back then drove it forward, slamming the butt into the man’s temple and putting his lights out.

      Without uttering a word, the unconscious biker bounced off the fridge door and fell face-first onto the dirty kitchen floor. Bolan produced a pair of hinge-style handcuffs from his back pocket and quickly secured the man’s hands behind his broad back. He could hear heavy footfalls approaching the kitchen from the front of the house, so he quickly moved beside the doorjamb.

      Sideways stopped cold, incredulous shock stamped on his face, when he almost tripped over the unconscious and handcuffed body of his buddy lying on the floor.

      Bolan stepped out and drove the muzzle of the HS 2000 Croatian pistol into the big man’s solar plexus. Sideways grunted and folded like a cheap card table. As he went down, Bolan’s knee came up and clipped him hard on the point of his chin.

      Stunned by the second blow, Sideways flopped over on his back, hitting the dirty linoleum hard as he went down. In an instant Bolan was on him, shoving the gun into his face and pinning him to the floor with his other hand wrapped around the man’s neck. Sideways’s eyelids fluttered as he fought to regain his composure after the brutal ambush.

      The Executioner’s voice was like a cold wind through a high mountain pass as he spoke.

      “I’m going to ask you some questions about where you got this pistol,” Bolan said. “And you’re going to tell me everything I want to know.”

      2

      The squalid little Boston bar sat quiet and dark, caught between rundown residential neighborhoods on one side and the sprawling industrial wasteland surrounding a factory park on the other side.

      The business was the kind of place that accepted food stamps and cashed welfare checks. On the first and fifteenth of every month it was a pretty lively place. It was early in the morning now, and the last of the homeless had been chased from the alleyway behind the one-story building. The tired old neon beer signs in the grimy front windows were turned off.

      The only lights inside the tavern emanated from the crack beneath the door to the combination office and storage room in the back, just across from the entrance to the walk-in cooler. Muffled voices and sounds seeped out through the cheap wood along with the bar of pale yellow light.

      Inside the room, against the far wall, crates of liquor devoid of tax stamps and cases of hijacked beer were stacked toward where Frankie Bonanno kept his desk, which was piled high with invoices, shipping recipes and defunct tax forms. A cheap accountant’s calculator sat on the desktop next to an overflowing ashtray where a cigar smoldered.

      Next to the ashtray was a lady’s compact mirror with coke residue smeared across the glass and a sticky razor blade. Beside the mirror was a HS 2000 Compact Croatian handgun.

      Just like Robert Scone, Frankie Bonanno was a big man. His forearms and shoulders were huge and hard from his time working the docks and cracking skulls. He was equally comfortable behind the controls of a forklift or swinging a sawed-off Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The knuckles on his hands had been broken so many times they were huge and misshapen.

      His thin, greasy hair was swept back and plastered into place with the liberal use of gel in a vain attempt to cover an emerging bald spot the size of a tea saucer. His ruddy, acne-scarred complexion matched his alcoholic’s broken-veined nose. His pig eyes were scrunched tightly in pleasure as the skinny blond woman’s head bobbed up and down in his lap.

      Suddenly the door to the office swung open in a swift arc and a living shadow rushed into the room. There was a whirl of dark fabric as a black overcoat came open and the masked specter’s arms snaked out. The gloved hands were filled with deadly technology.

      One hand swept downward and leveled a sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R on the huddled form of the cowering blonde. The left hand swung out from the intruder’s coat and tracked straight onto the fat jowls and flabby chest of Frankie Bonanno.

      Behind his mask Mack Bolan smiled.

      There was a small mechanical click as Bolan’s finger depressed the trigger on the stun gun and twin electrode darts fired out and hammered into Frankie Bonanno. There was a crackle as 2,000,000 volts sizzled into the big mobster. Immediately the sickly sweet stench of charred flesh filled the cramped little room.

      Bonanno’s shriek of pain morphed into a choking gurgle as he began to spasm and jerk in his seat, pants still down around his thick, hairy ankles. Blue bolts of electricity arced from the fillings in his teeth in an uncanny effect that produced a mouthful of fire.

      Bolan hit the juice again and pushed another charge into the mobster.

      The fat man looked up and saliva dribbled from his gaping mouth. Then there was a pause, two heartbeats long, as Bonanno slumped helpless in his chair.

      Bolan turned his balaclava-covered face toward the cowering woman. “Get out,” he ordered.

      The woman looked up at the Executioner in stunned disbelief. Mob hitters were not known for compassion, and she clearly suspected some trick.

      “I said get out!” Bolan snapped.

      This time she did not hesitate. The woman scrambled to her feet and scurried to the door.

      From the chair Frankie Bonanno lifted his head, still confused by the events unfolding around him.

      “Who are—?” he began.

      “Shut up,” Bolan snapped. He pressed the cold muzzle of his Beretta against the oiled expanse of Bonanno’s forehead. “If you so much as twitch I’ll splatter your brains across the wall.”

      Frankie Bonanno froze. The mobster was deeply afraid. When the masked gunman had burst through the door, his first thought had been the Feds. But one man did not make up a SWAT team, federal or otherwise. A lone man meant a freelancer, and if that was true then Frankie wondered why he was still alive.

      Bonanno watched as the figure in black pulled a pistol from behind his back. The handgun was identical to the weapon already sitting on the desk, a factory-new Croatian HS 2000 pistol. The man dropped it with a clatter that shattered the overflowing ashtray and spilled cigarette butts across the desk and onto the floor.

      The man dropped something smaller onto the desk between the two HS 2000 pistols. It was the size of a quarter and when Bonanno saw it lying there, an involuntary groan escaped him. His eyes showed sullen fear as they moved from the microprocessor chip on the desk back up to the intruder looming above him.

      “Three months.” Bolan said, voice harsh. “Three months ago a six-man team took down the supply dock of Las-Tech in Jersey. They got away with a shipment of chips just like that one. Chips that can run the supercomputers needed to control the centrifuges used to enrich uranium to weapons grade, say in Iran. Microprocessors sophisticated enough to turn scud missiles into guided munitions.”

      “I—I—” Bonanno’s mouth worked uselessly as he tried to force his brain to come up with some lie that might save his life.

      “Then suddenly a capo in Palermo has those same microchips on the open market and they go to an arms dealer in Bosnia, then multiple loads of Croatian pistols start flowing back through Palermo out of Sarajevo and into Jersey. And look, you happen to have one.”

      “Sarajevo is in Bosnia, not Croatia,” Bonanno muttered.

      Bolan stepped forward and cracked the butt of his Beretta across the mobster’s face. His nose exploded and sprayed blood. His hand flew out and struck the open bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey sitting on the desk and knocked it over. Amber fluid gurgled out of the bottle and began to spread across the desk.

      “You