Ninja Assault. Don Pendleton

leave the scene when he was done, Bolan was satisfied.

      If not? Plan B, whatever that was.

      First, he had to move, close with his enemies and take them down before the racket they were making drew police to swarm the block.

      Bolan had only two rules in the field. He would not harm or threaten innocents, and he would not use deadly force against police—even though some of them were far from innocent themselves. It was a short list of restrictions, but he rarely deviated from those basic principles.

      And he was not about to do so this day.

      He made his move while they were trying to get organized, recovering from having seen their driver killed before their eyes. One of the three surviving Yakuzas saw Bolan moving, shouted something to his comrades and squeezed off an autorifle burst that missed its moving target by at least ten feet.

      Bolan returned fire, did a better job of it and saw the shooter drop his rifle as three Parabellum shockers ripped into his gun arm, taking out the shoulder. In the movies, shoulder wounds were treated lightly, on par with paper cuts, but in the real world they were serious, often disabling, sometimes fatal if projectiles nipped the brachial or subclavian arteries.

      Whatever, Bolan pegged the odds at two-to-one against him now, and focused on reducing those.

      Bolan reached the nearest sidewalk, ducked behind a bulky standing mailbox, then proceeded with his charge. Another Yakuza shooter was firing at him—and he had been right, that was an Arsenal AR-SF—until the next burst out of Bolan’s SMG nearly beheaded him.

      Three down, and now the last Yakuza on his feet sprang out from cover, brandishing a stubby shotgun with a pistol grip. He pumped the slide, ejecting brass and plastic, screaming something Bolan couldn’t understand without his smartphone translator. Before the screamer had a chance to loose another buckshot cloud, Bolan zipped him across the chest and slammed him back against the crumpled wreckage of his car’s front end.

      One left, and he was still alive, sitting in blood, his eyes half-closed, lips moving silently, when Bolan walked around the car. Bolan considered him, knew they were running out of time to talk, even if they possessed a common language, and he fired a single mercy round into the man’s forehead.

      All done.

      He got the Honda started and was rolling out of there, already thinking downrange toward the best and quickest place to find another car.

       CHAPTER FOUR

       Sunrise Enterprises

      “No, Detective. I have no idea who might desire to vandalize our offices. Do you?”

      The bald, fat officer stared at Noboru Machii, his suspicion thinly veiled, and said, “No, sir. But I’ll be looking into it.”

      “Perhaps you’ll trace the smoke grenades,” Machii said. A firefighter had found them in the air-conditioning duct, while seeking a source for the smoke that still hung around them in the lobby.

      “I couldn’t rule it out,” the detective said. Was his name Davis? Dawkins? No matter. All Machii wanted was for him to leave the premises. “These things are mass-produced, you understand.”

      “Of course.”

      “Your ordinary public’s not supposed to have them, but does that mean anything these days? Between the internet and dealers on the street, forget about it.”

      “So, it’s hopeless then?” Machii asked.

      “Oh, nothing’s hopeless,” the detective answered. “But I wouldn’t get my hopes up, if you follow me.”

      “I understand. Now, if there’s nothing else…”

      The plainclothes officer was rummaging inside his rumpled jacket, pulling out a dog-eared business card and offering it to Machii, who accepted it and held it gingerly, between his thumb and index finger, checking it for sweat stains.

      “Call me if you think of anything that might be helpful, eh? You got my office number on there, and my cell. Work cell, that is. Nobody gets the home number, know what I mean?”

      “Indeed,” Machii said.

      “Okay, then. If I find out anything, I’ll be in touch. You’ll still be doing business here?”

      “I will. Power should be restored within the hour, once your people clear the scene.”

      The fat detective nodded, turned and waddled toward the exit, glancing at the team of electricians as he passed them, no doubt wondering how much a rush job after hours would be costing.

      And the answer, as Americans would say, was plenty: triple time for labor, plus materials. Restoring power to the building was about to cost Machii three grand, with another thousand minimum on top of that, to fix and flush the air-conditioning. He had that much and more in petty cash, but he was seething over the audacity of the assault.

      And he was worried that no suspects sprang to mind.

      Of course, Machii had his share of enemies, but most of those were in Japan. The few he’d made so far, around Atlantic City, had been dealt with swiftly and decisively. Unless he started to believe in zombies, they no longer posed a threat.

      But someone clearly did.

      He nodded curtly to the electricians and the air-conditioning technicians standing with them. “It is clear now,” he informed them. “Get to work.”

      A couple of them didn’t seem to like his tone, but that meant nothing to Machii. When they were as rich as he was, when they’d killed as many men and when they had a family of twenty thousand oath-bound brothers standing at their back, supporting them, he would consider their opinion.

      In the meantime, they were nothing more than servants.

      Machii climbed the stairs, hating the smoke taint in the air be breathed, and found his office as he’d left it. As expected, the police had asked about the bloodstain on the hallway carpet, and he’d trotted out his underling to lisp the fable of his accident. The fat detective had refrained from asking any questions on that score, being more interested in the smoke bombs from the AC duct.

      Thank heaven for small minds.

      Back in his office now, Machii started a more thorough search than he’d had time for while he’d waited for emergency responders to arrive. First thing, he checked his desk, found nothing out of place, and then repeated the inspection with his files. Needless to say, he kept nothing at the office that might incriminate him, guarding against situations such as this, but if he found some normal business papers disarranged or missing, it might point him toward enemies behind the raid.

      When Machii found nothing to direct him in the filing cabinets, he stood back and surveyed the room, inhaling its polluted scent as if the latent fumes might hold a clue. If not to steal from him or kill him, why would anyone attack Sunrise? No other possibility immediately came to mind, and since the power blackout had deactivated all of the building’s security cameras, no answers awaited him on videotape.

      What next?

      He had two calls to make. The first, to Jiro Shinoda in Las Vegas, would be a deliberately vague inquiry, trying to determine whether he had experienced any disturbances of late, without alerting him to what had happened in Atlantic City. After that—and there was no escaping it—Machii had to report the raid to Tokyo. His oyabun had to be informed within the hour, or suspicion might begin to ripen in his mind. And that, above all things, was something that Machii wanted to avoid.

      His hand was on the telephone when Tetsuya Watanabe knocked, then entered without waiting for a summons. “Excuse me, sir,” he said.

      “You are excused. What is it?”

      “Endo and his team…”

      “They’ve captured