Blood Rites. Don Pendleton

kept moving, damn the pain. He hadn’t heard the shot, although his window was open, and had seen no muzzle-flash. Same story when the second chase car took a hit, but this one evidently missed the driver, since he charged on toward a parking lot some fifty yards ahead of them, and then squealed to a halt.

      The plug car, coming at them from the north, took the next hit. Crawford was up and running when it swerved and stalled. He still had no sight of the enemy, but knew the white man wasn’t firing from the car he’d abandoned in the parking lot.

      Two targets, neither of them visible as yet, and Crawford couldn’t go back to his boss if either one eluded him. Channer was hurt and raging, gone to ground by now, away from what was left of Kingston House before the pigs from Babylon rolled in.

      Crawford clutched an M4 carbine loaded with a SureFire 60-round magazine, two more stuffed into pockets in his floppy shapeless jacket, worn with sleeves rolled back over his tattooed forearms. In his belt was wedged a Beretta 92G-SD pistol, and he worried that it might pop loose while he was running.

      Crawford dropped behind a tree whose trunk was stout enough to cover him from any shooters working near the building. One armed man should be his only adversary, but he couldn’t sell the woman short, either. She had an instinct for survival, and you never knew who might be handy with a weapon, if one fell into their hands.

      Armed or not, she had to die.

      The notion of a white man bursting in to save her boggled Crawford’s mind, but he couldn’t afford to focus on that now. Survival was his one priority—which meant getting through the firefight with his skin intact and finishing the job he’d been sent to do. If he fell short, the death awaiting him at Winston Channer’s hands would make a gunshot seem like Heaven’s blessing.

      He looked around and found the other two survivors from his car still crouching near it, angling weapons toward the visitor’s center, waiting for a target to reveal itself. Beyond them, four men from the second car were circling through the shadows cast by the building, seeking the man who’d brought them under fire.

      Crawford hissed at his two lazy soldiers, then took a chance and raised his voice when they ignored him. “Move your ass!” he commanded, punctuating the order with an emphatic motion from his rifle.

      Glowering, the two of them broke cover—and a bullet instantly found Byron Taylor, spinning him around with blood spraying as he hit the road facedown. Ini Munroe, beside him, gave a yelp and sprinted toward the building where the other soldiers were engaged in tracking down the sniper.

      “You bring his head to me!” Crawford shouted after them. “And find the woman!”

      Munroe offered no acknowledgment, but kept on running with his head tucked low, ready to open fire with his Kalashnikov if threatened. Trouble was, the threat might not be recognized until another bullet struck and laid him out.

      Crawford knew he’d have to move soon. Hiding while his soldiers did the dirty work might be the normal mode of operation in some syndicates, but in the Viper Posse, leadership was understood to mean precisely that. Word got around if someone in the upper ranks was slacking.

      Which was the first step toward a bloody end.

      Cursing, he edged around the tree, taking a precious moment to prepare himself, then burst from cover, shouting, “Burn in hell!”

      Whatever waited on the Other Side, two of his men had solved the mystery already, and instinct told him they would soon have company.

      * * *

      BOLAN SAW THE second runner drop, then swung back toward the quartet from the second chase car. They were fanning out along the east wall of the visitor’s center, crouching as they scuttled through the shadows, searching for the shooter who had slain their comrades. So far, none of them had spotted Bolan, but his good luck couldn’t last much longer as they closed the gap, advancing steadily.

      One way to keep from showing muzzle-flashes was to lob a frag grenade.

      He palmed one of the M68s, pulled its pin and pitched the grenade overhand. The bomb had a three-second fuse plus an impact fuse for backup, which would blow the charge three to seven seconds after it hit the ground or some solid object. No backup was needed this time, though, as the timer worked efficiently to fill the night with smoke, fire, shrapnel and screams.

      It wasn’t a clean sweep, of course. The shooters had been smart enough to spread out while they hunted, so that one burst from an automatic weapon couldn’t drop them all at once. Two took the brunt of it, riddled with jagged shards of steel, and one shooter’s arm separated from his trunk and went airborne, hand still clutching his machine pistol. The little stutter gun erupted when it hit the pavement, emptying its magazine with one long burst.

      The two remaining soldiers from the second car were stunned, one of them limping as he tried to turn and flee, but neither one of them was going anywhere. Bolan had spotted them while the shrapnel flew, and clipped the limper with a single round between the shoulder blades that punched out through his chest and sprayed the nearby stucco wall with blood. It took a moment for the dead man’s injured legs to get the message, then they folded, dropping him facedown onto the sidewalk.

      That left one, and he was running for his life, firing backward, blindly, with some kind of stubby Kalashnikov carbine. Bolan recognized the Russian weapon’s sound and ducked a stream of slugs that fanned the air above his head, finding his spot by pure dumb luck.

      The Executioner framed the shooter with the Steyr’s sight and hit him with a double-tap that ripped into his left side, low, an inch or two above his waistline. Nearly lifted off his feet, the soldier spun, dreadlocks fanned out around his screaming face like serpents on Medusa’s scalp, and went down firing, landing heavily, his back against the wall.

      It shouldn’t take him long to bleed out, but he was a danger in the meantime, his Kalashnikov still spitting death in Bolan’s general direction. One more shot from twenty yards drilled through his forehead, bounced his head against the stucco as it emptied through a fist-size exit wound, then let him slump, slack-limbed, into the awkward sprawl of death.

      How many left?

      He made it one man from the first car, at least three from the third, if he’d taken out its driver. Bolan still had work to do, and he was running out of time before some passing driver heard the sounds of battle coming from the park and called the cops.

      The one thing Bolan would not do, regardless of the circumstances, was initiate a firefight with Miami-Dade Police. He’d made a vow, at the beginning of his lonely war, that he would never drop the hammer on a cop. Law enforcement officers, in Bolan’s mind, were “soldiers of the same side.” He’d evade them by whatever means he could, but always stopping short of lethal force.

      Which meant he had to mop up his remaining enemies and haul ass out of there before the police arrived.

      Tick-tock.

      He was about to go after the shooters from the third car when a flash of light from Bolan’s right alerted him to trouble. It was the Marauder’s dome light, coming on because one of its doors had opened. The woman bolting out of panic at the gunfire? Or had someone found her?

      Either way, he had to check it out, but he couldn’t leave enemies behind while his back was turned.

      Mouthing a curse, the Executioner moved out.

      * * *

      GARCELLE BROUARD HAD heard enough, huddled against the floorboards of the white man’s car, to know that he was never coming back. She should have bolted instantly, the moment she was left alone, but something—maybe confidence in how he’d handled Channer and his soldiers at the Kingston House—had made her play along.

      And now, was it too late?

      She had to find out for herself.

      She fumbled blindly for the door latch, reaching up, behind her head, afraid to show herself with bullets flying all