Fire Zone. Don Pendleton

out and landed in a patch of weeds beside the road. Bolan saw that the receiver was partially open. The rifle had fired once and then jammed.

      “I’m coming out. Please don’t kill me.”

      Bolan fired the instant he had a decent shot. The man fell from the cab and landed facedown on the ground. He pushed up and turned to face Bolan. The expression on his face was not one of betrayal at the violation of a surrender but one of utter hatred because he had been outwitted. Then the hand grenade he had intended for Bolan exploded beneath him and lifted his body three feet straight up in the air. The lifeless body crashed to the ground.

      Swinging around, Bolan trained his Desert Eagle on the first man out of the truck. He cursed. The man had sneaked off. Bolan needed information, and only one of the mercenaries was left alive to tell him what he needed to know.

      He ducked low and looked under the bed of the truck. Nothing. Advancing in a crouch, he went to the rear of the truck and chanced a quick look inside. All he saw was a stack of suitcase-sized wooden boxes partially covered with a tarp. No one could hide under that. Wherever the passenger had gone, it wasn’t to get into the truck to die. Bolan ejected the magazine in his pistol and reloaded. He wanted a full clip when he found his man.

      A quick glance showed how his target had rolled into a shallow ditch alongside the road and then crawled away fast. The Executioner’s quarry had reached a small stand of junipers. Knowing he faced a wounded man who was carrying at least a sidearm and maybe grenades like the driver, Bolan used a large tree as cover. He listened hard but heard nothing moving. The animals in the woods had fallen silent, telling him a human had disturbed them. He listened but heard nothing until a deep inhalation told him where to look. Then he caught the scent of sweat, blood and something unpleasant—cooked flesh.

      He slipped around the tree and looked up. Partially hidden ten feet up among the foliage of an oak tree limb lay his camo-dressed prey. Bolan fired three times. The heavy .50-caliber slugs ripped enough wood away from the limb to bring it down. Amid the foliage the stunned man stirred and tried to get away. Bolan fired again but just missed and then had to dodge behind the juniper as the merc fired wildly in his direction.

      Bolan took no pleasure at being right about how the man was armed. He had a job to do and was taking too long. All the gunfire would attract the rest of the gang. Judging from the ease with which they had moved through the Lucky Nugget Mine complex, he estimated at least ten had taken part in the operation. Added to the ones in the field setting the fires, he might face twice that if he let them home in on him.

      “Who are you working for?” Bolan called out, not expecting an answer.

      To his surprise, he garnered a heartfelt “Go to hell.”

      The accent was faintly European, but Bolan doubted the man had learned English as his second or even third language.

      “Africa? South Africa? Afrikaans?”

      Bolan wanted to fix his location in the man’s thoughts by calling out all the inane questions. He scaled the tree and kept climbing until he came to a limb strong enough to support him. Bolan slithered out on it like a snake and then trained his weapon on the man below where he struggled to get away from the bullet-riddled tree limb.

      His finger drew back smoothly as he squeezed off the shot. The heavy slug tore through the mercenary’s right shoulder, driving him flat onto the ground. His right arm twitched as he tried to lift his pistol. As he reached over with his left hand, he froze. His head came up and he looked down the barrel of Bolan’s Desert Eagle.

      “Don’t,” was all Bolan had to say. The man collapsed and lay on the ground, seemingly beaten. Remembering how the driver had been so contrary, Bolan kicked the pistol away from the man’s hand, patted him down and then grabbed his broad belt and heaved. He tossed the man a few feet away, waiting for a hand-grenade detonation.

      Nothing.

      “Who do you work for?”

      “The highest bidder,” the mercenary said. He struggled to raise his body off the ground. His left hand pressed into his belly as if he needed the support to hold in his guts, then he painfully sat up. “Just like you,” he grated out.

      “Who do you think I work for?”

      The mercenary tried to shrug, but the bullet he had taken to his right shoulder caused him to blanch in pain instead.

      “Same as me. Highest bidder.”

      “Where’s the gold?”

      The man laughed harshly and turned his head. Bolan read more into the man’s quick glance to the right than he did in the words. The mercenary rubbed his left hand along his belly.

      “Where were you going in the truck?”

      “Going to blow it up. No evidence.” The man lifted his left hand. Bolan fired a round through the man’s head but not before a weak, determined finger pressed the button on a small radio detonator he had retrieved from some hidden pouch. The ground shook so hard it made Bolan think he’d gotten caught in an earthquake. Then the door opened on the blast furnace, and fire raced toward him from the direction of the truck. It had been wired as a gigantic firebomb intended to cover the mercenaries’ tracks.

      Instead, it had given birth to a new forest fire that threatened to devour the Executioner.

      3

      The heat threatened to boil the flesh from Bolan’s face. Throwing his arm up to protect his eyes, he saw the worst had happened. The mercenaries had been driving back to the junction of the main road to blow up the truck. The resulting fire would cover their tracks completely.

      He had to admit their scheme had almost worked—and it had almost killed him. If he had not pursued the mercenary he had blown out of the tree so aggressively, he might have been near their truck when it blew. As it was, though, he couldn’t get to his car to escape. Through the wall of scorching-hot flame, he saw the paint on the car he had stolen begin to blister. Then the entire car erupted in a secondary explosion as the flames reached the gas tank.

      Bolan headed deeper into the forest. His flesh tingled from the heat. If he didn’t put some miles between himself and the fire, he would be charbroiled in only a few minutes. He fell into a distance-devouring jog that carried him along the dirt road toward wherever the mercenaries had come from. As fast as he was, as determined to escape the fire as he could be, the conflagration crept closer and began to warm his back. He put his head down and put on a little more speed, shifting his gait from a jog to a run.

      It did no good. The inferno behind him filled the sky with burning sparks that cascaded over the landscape for hundreds of yards. Even sucking smoky air into his burning lungs, Bolan covered a mile in a little over five minutes. And he still wasn’t far enough away to feel safe. It was as if the fire toyed with him, letting him get a little farther toward safety before roaring to catch up and spit burning embers onto his clothing. Thinking to veer away from the fire at an angle, he turned off the road and found the dry undergrowth ablaze. He cut back to the road, hoping to go in the other direction, but found it similarly blocked.

      He realized these excursions to either side of the road only wasted time and let the fire surge closer, so he continued along the road, eyes watering and lungs screaming from the acrid smoke. Bolan hoped to find out why the mercenaries had come this way but saw no trace of them or what they had been up to.

      Running through the smoke-filled air was making it difficult to breathe. The atmosphere looked like L.A. on a smog-alert day and tasted like the inside of a barbecue pit. Over the loud crackling of fire dogging his every step, he heard the whup-whup of a chopper overhead. Bursting into a small clearing, he saw the small helicopter and waved.

      The pilot saw him and came lower, buffeted by strong ground winds kicked up by the fire. Landing was out of the question because takeoff would be impossible. The pilot gestured frantically, pointing to a spot away from the road, then he gunned the engine, rose vertically and beat a hasty retreat.

      Bolan wished the pilot had tried for the pickup.