Cold War Reprise. Don Pendleton

TWO

      Alexandronin’s first burst of Uzi fire kept the assassins’ heads down as the Executioner charged around their flank, Beretta Storm leading the way. Bolan held his fire, his Russian ally leaning on the trigger to keep the enemy focused away from him.

      “Which of those two idiots lost control of his Uzi?” one killer snarled in Russian.

      “Probably both,” another answered his comrade. “They were both human shields, remember?”

      “Longbow to Tomahawk, be alert! One operator moved around to your side of the street,” another, presumably a sniper, informed the hit crew. Bolan was glad that he’d taken the time to relieve his former prisoner of his comm link. Aware that the enemy was on to him, Bolan sidestepped into the open and fired four quick shots at the squad in front of the bar. Two of his shots struck one gunman center mass, but the impacts had no affect on the would-be murderer.

      Bolan snaked back behind cover as the Russians’ Uzis crackled, ripping the air he’d stood in moments before. The assassins were wearing body armor, good stuff, too, as Bolan had Dutch-loaded his Beretta with high-velocity hollowpoints and full-power NATO ball ammunition. The high-pressure ball rounds were effective against a good deal of ballistic vests, meaning that the killers had expected heavy opposition. The corner that Bolan had ducked behind was chewed up as a trio of submachine guns tracked to keep the big American pinned.

      Bolan ran a mental countdown to the moment when a “Flying Squad”—Scotland Yard’s version of SWAT—showed up to the scene of a raging gun battle on the bank of the Thames. The Executioner knew that he had minutes, but with the skill and professionalism of the assassination cadre, he’d need every second of that Doomsday countdown to put the killers away. Now, Bolan not only had Alexandronin’s life to worry about, but also the British policemen who would be caught in the cross fire.

      Three weapons in the front meant that the rest of the team was swinging around the back to strike at the Executioner from behind. Bolan charged to the back alley, Beretta leading the way. His suspicions were confirmed when he heard the whispered announcement of “in position” from a new speaker on the communications hookup.

      Bolan whipped around the corner, his Beretta’s muzzle jammed into an assassin’s face, breaking his nose. The soldier’s off hand slapped the gunner’s Uzi against the wall and though the hitter triggered his subgun, the rounds spit through empty air. Bolan triggered his Storm, the solitary 9 mm round blowing off the back of the killer’s skull, disgorging a cone of spongy brain matter and blood into the face of the second man with them. The remains of the dead man’s skull contents turned the assassin’s shooting glasses into a blood-sprayed mess he couldn’t see through.

      The Executioner tossed the corpse of the point man aside and pivoted the gun in his hand to strike the surviving killer in the head. The Slavic gunman stepped back, tearing his glasses off, the motion helping him to avoid the weight of the handgun as Bolan’s swing jammed it up against the wall. Now able to see, the Russian killer lunged forward, forearm trapping Bolan’s gun hand against the wall.

      The close-quarters gunfight suddenly turned into a brawl as the assassin chopped at Bolan’s neck, but the soldier deflected most of the lethal precision with his shoulder. The neck-breaking blow degraded to a clumsy slap that cuffed Bolan’s head above his ear. The gunman tried to bring his Uzi to bear, but the Executioner had trapped the subgun between his hip and the wall. The frustrated hitter tried to nail his opponent between the eyes with a backhand stroke, but Bolan took the blow on the crown of his head. The curved surface of his skull denied the murderer a solid hit, sparing Bolan anything worse than scalp abrasions.

      The soldier snaked his foot behind his enemy’s ankle and with a surge of strength, barreled the gunman backward and off balance. The assassin stumbled onto his buttocks, the Uzi wrenched out of his grasp. No longer restrained, Bolan had both arms free to tackle the killer prisoner. He dropped on the gunman, knees slamming into the hardman’s shoulders with jarring force, pinning the man to the ground under his 200-plus-pound frame. Bolan fired off a hard punch to the prone assassin’s jaw, a knockout blow that jammed the mandible into a heavy juncture of nerves at the side of his neck. The Slav wasn’t rendered unconscious, but neural overload left his eyes glazed over, staring glassily into the murky, starless night sky.

      “Kroz! Report!” a voice over Bolan’s radio demanded. The stunned Russian groaned incoherently as if to answer the broadcast order. Bolan took a moment to pull his Combat PDA, activating its 8 megapixel digital camera to record the gunman’s face, just in case this particular prisoner had as short a shelf life as his last one. Bolan punched the assassin once more, and the stunned, glassy eyes closed with unconsciousness.

      Bolan brought the microphone to his lips. “Kroz can’t come to the phone right now. However if you leave a message at the beep…”

      “Shit! Shit!” the Russian on the other end swore. “Switch frequencies! Channel B!”

      The alternate frequency plan might have worked, had not Bolan captured not one but two different radios. Bolan checked Kroz’s unit for indications of the secondary communications frequency and found that Kroz had scratched his dial to mark the next channel. The soldier plugged his earphone into Kroz’s unit and clicked over to the frequency.

      “…fucking guy?” one of the conversants complained in Russian.

      “Maintain radio discipline,” the leader of the death squad ordered.

      Sowing panic among his enemies was a good weapon for evening the odds against superior numbers and firepower. As it was, the assassination team was down four shooters in the space of a few minutes. With two sharpshooters and three gunmen on hand, that was nearly half of the Russian force.

      “Central says to abort!” another voice cut in. “The mission has been compromised.”

      So, the assassins have a coordination and operations center, Bolan thought. If they’re going to cut and run, there’s a chance that they could give me a better look at who ran this op.

      Bolan scurried back to the front of the bar, listening to the Russians as he did so.

      “Principal target still breathing. Cannot disengage anyhow,” the hit team’s commander returned.

      “Scorch the earth,” the coordinator snapped. “Principal is no longer an issue. Avoiding his partner is!”

      “Confirm command scorch,” the leader said.

      “Burn it all down!” the commander bellowed.

      Bolan snapped open the stock of his Uzi. He wasn’t certain of the extent of the firepower the death force had on hand, but the people in the dive were at risk. He used the Uzi’s butt to punch out a window into the bar.

      Inside, patrons huddled close to the floor, terrified of the rattle of full-auto weaponry ripping and roaring outside. Though there was a likelihood of the presence of murderers and other scum being among this crowd, Bolan had little proof of their collective guilt, let alone knowledge of actions warranting death by high explosives. He fired a burst into the ceiling and the crowd rose as one, a human tide breaking for the back door, shoving out into the alley. No one wanted to go out the front, which would take them right into the middle of the current firefight. It was better than giving away that Bolan was listening in on the Russians’ party line by shouting a warning to the bar bums.

      The first thunderbolt impact blew the doors off the dive, tearing them off of their hinges. Splinters and shrapnel forced the Executioner to duck out the window to avoid being sliced by the rocketing wave of debris. He popped back up and saw that the panicked patrons had managed to evacuate long before the interior of the bar was turned into a blast crater. The force of the explosion informed Bolan that the enemy had resorted to RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades that could be reloaded quickly and were devastating to a range of 300 yards.

      Bolan snaked through the broken window with whiplash speed, dropping to the shattered floor as the next 77 mm warhead impacted at the corner he had been hiding behind earlier. The concussive fury of the thermobaric warhead was so violent, Bolan could