Ninja Assault. Don Pendleton

stand over the air-conditioning unit, opened it and slit the silver wrapping on a large duct set into the roof. When that was open, Bolan took his smoke grenades in turn, removed their pins and dropped each of the four smoke bombs into the vent he had created with his blade. The unit wasn’t running to propel the smoke through lower ducts and vents, but each grenade contained enough HC to spread fumes through the topmost floor, at least.

      And that was all that Bolan needed.

      He approached the rooftop access door—no padlock on the outside there—and tried it. Locked, of course. With numbers running in his head, he stepped back from the door and raised his stubby SMG, firing a muffled 3-round burst into the steel door’s dead-bolt lock. Another moment and he was inside, descending steep stairs dimly illuminated by pale ceiling-mounted emergency lights.

      Halfway there, Bolan removed a lightweight balaclava from his pocket, pulled it on and made a quick adjustment to permit clear, unobstructed vision. He had borrowed the idea from Tommy Wolff’s assassins, caught on video, and saw no reason why it shouldn’t work for him, if he was seen by anyone he wasn’t forced to kill.

      Just plant the bug, he thought, but knew it might not be that simple. Nothing ever was, once battle had been joined.

      Voices below made Bolan hesitate, but they were all retreating from the service stairs. No one would think of heading for the roof when they lost power. Down and out would be the drill, assisted by floor plans posted in offices and corridors, reminding people where to go in the event of an emergency.

      He reached the bottom, peered around the corner and immediately saw the fire alarm wall unit to his left, within arm’s reach. Unseen, he grasped the unit’s pull-down handle, yanked it sharply, and was instantly rewarded with a clamor echoing throughout the building.

      Sixty seconds, give or take, cleared out the fourth-floor hallway, even as the smoke from his grenades began to filter down through ceiling vents. Downrange, the last two visible employees reached a stairwell leading to the street below, pushed through its heavy door and disappeared.

      Noboru Machii had a corner office at the far end of the hall, to Bolan’s right. Turning in that direction, Bolan double-timed to reach his destination, submachine gun gripped in one hand, while the other delved in a pocket and extracted the infinity device.

      The clock was running now. Bolan could hear it in his head, louder than the insistent fire alarm.

      The kyodai’s office, reeking of smoke, was vacant when Bolan got there, and a white haze was seeping from the ceiling vents. He left the door to the reception area wide open, as he’d found it, and moved on to penetrate Machii’s private sanctuary.

      Empty.

      Bolan went directly to the spacious desk, set down the bug he’d taken from his pocket and retrieved a small screwdriver. Within ten long seconds he’d removed the base plate from the telephone, surveyed the wiring and began the installation.

      When he’d cut the trunk line on the building’s roof, it had no impact on phone service to the floors below. Landlines were powered by another system altogether, usable in blackouts, and he hadn’t touched their power conduit when he was turning off the lights at Sunrise Enterprises. He scanned the phone’s guts, finally wedging the infinity transmitter in beside the set’s digital answering machine. A simple clip job finished it, with no need to strip any wires and risk short-circuits sometime in the future. A few keystrokes on Bolan’s cell phone, and the bug went live, the arming signal cut before the desk set had a chance to ring.

      He was finished, except for putting back the base plate. He had three screws set, was working on the fourth, when he heard voices coming down the corridor in his direction, speaking Japanese.

      Unhappy voices, which was natural enough, and now he had to scoot.

      Bolan tightened the fourth screw down as far as it would go and pocketed his screwdriver. He replaced the phone as he had found it, nothing out of place as he surveyed the desktop, making sure no traces of himself remained.

      Now, out.

      Machii’s office had a private washroom, and the washroom had its own connecting door to yet another room beyond, labeled as Storage on the floor plan he had memorized. That room, in turn, had its own exit to the corridor from which he’d entered the office. If his luck held, he could slip around behind whomever was approaching in a heated rush, and slip back to the roof while they were fuming in the office.

      And if not, at least he might come out behind them. Give them a surprise.

      Meeting opposition was a risk on any soft probe, always kept in mind, no matter how much preparation went into avoiding contact. With his work done, the transmitter live and waiting to broadcast whatever words were spoken in Machii’s office from now on, it wasn’t absolutely critical for Bolan to escape unseen.

      But it was vital for him to escape alive.

      The washroom door was shut when Bolan reached it, and he closed it tight behind him once he was inside. No dawdling in the john to eavesdrop on the Yakuza returning to the office. He was out the other door in seconds flat, and found that Storage meant a bedroom where Machii could sleep or party privately, with someone who had caught his fancy. There was no one in the boudoir, smoky now and ripe with HC’s tangy odor, and he crossed directly to the other door. Bolan paused there, ear pressed against the panel, listening.

      And heard nothing.

      Behind him, in the Machii’s private office, two men conversed, their words incomprehensible to Bolan. Taking full advantage of their evident preoccupation, he stepped out into the corridor—and found two young men gaping at him in surprise.

      “Hakujin!” one declared.

      “Supai!” the other snapped, as both reached for their holstered pistols.

      Bolan didn’t need to speak the language to know that they had pegged him as an intruder. He had them beaten, going in. The MP-5 K sneezed two muted 3-round bursts from less than twenty feet, stitching the young men’s chests with 9 mm Parabellum hollow-point rounds, mangling their hearts and lungs, stopping those hearts before the guards knew they were dead. They fell together, but he didn’t stick around to see it, sprinting for the service staircase that would take him to the roof.

      It was a judgment call. To reach the street without retracing his original approach meant running back the full length of the corridor and rushing down eight flights of stairs—two zigzag flights per floor—among Sunrise employees exiting in answer to the fire alarm. If he got past them all, that route would put him on Atlantic Avenue, busy with traffic and pedestrians. If someone brought him under fire out there, it could become a massacre.

      Better to do the unexpected thing, descend via the fire escape and exit through the alley. Cornered there, if he ran out of luck, at least Bolan could fight without much fear of injuring civilians.

      He was on the roof and sprinting for the fire escape when someone shouted from behind him. Next, a pistol cracked, and Bolan heard the whisper of the bullet as it flew past his cheek.

      One shooter was behind him when he turned, and Bolan saw another peeking from the rooftop access doorway, clearly not as bold as the front-runner. Bolan sent the shooter spinning with a 3-round Parabellum burst, his white shirt spouting scarlet, then sent three more rounds to make the doorway peeper duck back out of sight.

      Eighteen rounds remained in the MP-5 K’s magazine, and Bolan didn’t plan on using any more of them topside than he could help.

      He still had no idea what might be waiting for him in the alley below.

      He glanced over the parapet, saw no shooters prepared to pick him off as he descended, and swung out onto the fire escape. Taking the metal ladder rung by rung was slow. Instead, he gripped the side rails with his hands and braced the insteps of his shoes against them, sliding down until he struck the asphalt fifty feet below and landed in a crouch.

      Above him, gunshots echoed. One round struck a commercial garbage bin to his right and spanged into the heaped-up garbage it contained.