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  The shooting stopped and the upstairs was relatively quiet. Then a few moments later, it started up again. This time it lasted only a few seconds, and when it was done, Atay heard no more shots. He left his safe booth and went to the door to the stairway. He heard nothing. He looked inside the stairway and saw a body sprawled out on the steps. It was Frankie, one of the newest members of the BNG. At the top of the steps he saw another body. He couldn't make out whose body it was, but he could tell it wasn't the graying cop he'd seen go up the steps.

  He slowly climbed the steps, holding the revolver ahead of him with both hands, ready to fire if necessary. Just as he reached the top of the stairway, two men came through the door. Before his aging reflexes could react, the men had drawn their own weapons and ordered him to drop his. From where he stood near the top of the staircase, he could see multiple bodies piled on the floor in the clubhouse and decided to comply, but he didn't want to drop the gun. It was one of his prized possessions. He slowly lowered the gun to the ground, his finger off the trigger.

  "Please," he said. "Let me set it down gently. It is very valuable."'

  * * *

  Bolan and Osborne checked the pulses of the two bangers they'd been questioning before their panicked comrade shot them down. Both men were dead, as was everyone else in the room except for the two blacksuits. "What are we going to do now?" Osborne asked.

  "Let's go down to the store," Bolan said. "Did you see the owner down there on your way up here?"

  "He was hunkered down behind the counter."

  "He's tight with the BNG. Maybe he knows something. Let's go down and talk to him."

  Bolan knew the old man was a long shot, but at that moment he might be all that stood between the people of San Francisco and nuclear annihilation.

  The men raced for the stairs, but stopped at the top of the steps when they saw the old man who owned the store coming up, a blued-steel revolver in his hands.

  "Drop it!" both men shouted in unison.

  The man slowly lowered the gun to the ground, apparently unfazed by the multiple gun barrels pointed at his face.

  "Please," he said. "Let me set it down gently. It is very valuable." When he had placed the gun on the steps, he raised his hands, interlocking his fingers on the top of his head. He knew the drill.

  Bolan picked up the revolver. It really was valuable, a pristine Smith & Wesson Registered model, the very first issue of the original .357 Magnum made between 1935 and 1939, back when that was the most powerful handgun caliber. The craftsmanship of the gun, with its hand checkering on the back strap and hammer, was like nothing seen on a mass-produced handgun in decades. The guns were so exclusive back in the 1930s that each one came with a certificate of registration, which is why they were called "Registered" models. Bolan knew prices for those revolvers easily ran into the five-figure range. He took extra care when he placed the old man's prized possession in his waistband. The Filipino seemed to appreciate the Executioner's gentle treatment of the antique weapon.

  Bolan motioned for the man to come upstairs. When he saw the carnage around the room, his eyes went wide. "I should have told Gulay to go fuck himself," the man said, mostly to himself.

  Bolan made a mental note to have Kurtzman check out this Gulay character, provided he survived long enough to talk to do so. Time was running out.

  The soldier had only hours to find the bomb and disarm it, and that would only happen if the old man knew where it was located.

  "Listen to me, old man," Bolan said. "If you think what you see here is bad, you haven't seen anything yet. If you don't give me some answers, you, your store, your home, your family and everyone you know are going to be dead before the evening news comes on tonight."

  "So," the old man said, "it really is a nuclear weapon."

  "You know about the bomb?" Bolan asked.

  "I suspected, from what the boys were saying after they came back yesterday. That son of a bitch Gulay."

  "Came back from where?" Bolan asked.

  The old man looked distracted. "Where is Gulay? He's in the Philippines, of course."

  "No," the Executioner said. "You said 'when the boys came back.' Came back from where?"

  "Oh...the CSAA Building."

  Bolan looked at Osborne. "He means the old California State Automobile Association building. It's been empty for years. If they aren't able to sell it soon, they're going to demolish it."

  "Is that where bin Osman placed the bomb?" Bolan asked the old man.

  "I don't know," the old man said.

  "Why were gang members returning from there?" Bolan asked.

  "I arranged for them to get jobs as security guards in the old building. I did this under orders from the Malaysian."

  "Was bin Osman there yesterday?"

  "Yes, he arrived with a fat American. My boys said the American seemed to be in the middle of some sort of mental breakdown. He wept the entire time he was there."

  "What did bin Osman do in the building," the soldier asked.

  "My men weren't supposed to be in the area where they were working, but I had a couple of them keeping an eye on the Malaysian while he was there. I don't trust the man."

  "What did they see?"

  "The Malaysian had the American construct some sort of device. Both of them were wearing protective suits, the kind you see people wearing in nuclear power plants. They left some strange things behind, like a container that looks like it was designed to transport some sort of nuclear waste."

  "That building must be thirty stories tall," Osborne said. "Where did they assemble the device?"

  "There is a loading dock just below the main floor, accessible through the alley in the rear of the building," the old man said. "They assembled the device in the storage area behind the loading dock."

  "Is it still there?" Bolan asked.

  "Yes. If bin Osman had had it moved, my men would have reported it to me. You say it's a bomb?"

  "It's a nuclear device with enough power to kill everyone in San Francisco and the surrounding area," Bolan said.

  "That's what I feared. Can you stop it?"

  "I'm going to try. Can you call your men and tell them I'm coming?"

  "I can try, but cell phone reception is bad in the old building, especially down in the loading dock area."

  "How many men are in the building?"

  "At least three," the old man said. "But if you leave now and drive like demons, you will get there just as the day shift comes on. Then there will be six men."

  "Call them and tell them we're coming," Bolan ordered. "Tell them not to try to stop us."

  The man called several numbers, but got nothing but voice mail messages. Then he tried several more with similar luck. The old man left a message after each call, telling the men to work with the big soldier. "I can't get through to any of them. My guess is that the day shift is already at the site."

  Bolan and Osborne holstered their weapons and started to trot toward the door, but the old man's voice stopped them.

  "Gentlemen," he said. "If my boys put up a fight, you have no choice but to take them out, just as you did the boys upstairs." The Executioner nodded in agreement with the man. "If it comes to that, please, don't let them suffer."

  "I won't," the Executioner promised.

  "One last thing," the old man said. "Could you please leave my gun on the newspaper stand inside the door when you leave? And please, be careful. I've had it a very long time." Bolan set the gun down just before he ran out the door. "Good luck, gentlemen," the old man said as they left.

  He knew he was sending the two men to destroy the last remnants of the gang that had been the most important part of his life up until this point, but now he was too tired to continue his involvement with such nonsense. The knowledge that his cousin and mentor back in the Philippines had casually condemned the entire San Francisco gang to death, along with everyone else in the city, angered him.

  He felt sad thinking about all the boys who had died d
uring the past several days, and sadder still thinking about what was soon to happen to the remaining boys. But that was nothing compared to the thought of what might happen if these men failed. The old man knew that the two men racing from his store were the only chance he and hundreds of thousands of other people had of surviving the rest of this day.

  If I live until tomorrow, the old man thought, looking at the faded blue question mark tattooed on his forearm, I'm going to see a doctor about having this removed.

  18

  Bolan and Osborne ran out to where Bolan had parked his bike. Osborne's car was parked several blocks away.

  "Bring your car over here," Bolan ordered Osborne. "We won't need to worry about over-penetration at the CSAA Building. I have a couple of rifles in my top box that we'll want to use."

  Bolan grabbed one of the two P90s from his top box and slung it over his shoulder, then covered it up with his riding jacket. By the time Osborne pulled up, he'd already put on his helmet and gloves and had the bike idling by the curb. "Take this," he told Osborne, handing him the second P90. "You know the way, so I'll follow you. Drive fast, but try not to get stopped. We don't have time to get pulled over for speeding."

  Bolan followed Osborne's Audi down Grant Avenue to Broadway Street, where he made a sharp left. The torque-laden V-8 engine roared as Osborne took the corner, but the car's advanced all-wheel-drive system bit into the tarmac and the car shot around the corner without any drama. To keep up, Bolan had to turn the corner with considerably more effort, breaking the rear tire loose and sliding like a dirt-track racer.

  The Audi flew down Broadway until it reached the Broadway tunnel. Traffic was light, even for a Sunday morning, and once the Audi hit the tunnel, Osborne put his foot into the accelerator and was soon hitting triple-digit speeds. To keep up, Bolan had to keep the throttle pinned to its stop and tuck in behind the small windscreen. When they neared the mouth of the tunnel, Osborne slowed down to a still socially reprehensible seventy miles per hour. Even though that was nearly double the speed limit, it felt slow after the high-speed run through the tunnel.

  Osborne didn't slow the Audi to anywhere near the speed limit until he neared Van Ness Boulevard. When he turned left onto Van Ness, he once again went so fast that he forced the Executioner to slide around the corner to keep up. Van Ness was wider than Broadway and even less crowded, and the pair set a street-racing record for covering the nearly thirty blocks between Broadway and the CSAA Building.

  When they got to the CSAA building, Osborne slammed the Audi around the corner of Fell Street and drove down into the entrance to the loading dock, Bolan's BMW in tow. The soldier dismounted the bike and met Osborne as he emerged from the Audi's diver's seat.

  "How are we supposed to get in?" Bolan asked.

  "I suppose knocking at the front door would be too easy," Osborne offered.

  "I think that submachine gun hanging around your neck might be a little off-putting."

  Bolan surveyed the situation. The entrance to the loading dock was in the southeast corner of the building, fairly well hidden from traffic on Fell Street.

  "I don't think we have time to be subtle," the soldier said, producing several chunks of C-4 from a kit in the left saddlebag of his motorcycle.

  There were two large overhead doors in the bay, along with a pair of hinged steel doors that swung outward into the loading-dock area. Bolan molded one piece of the explosive around each of the four large hinges that held the steel doors in place and placed a blasting cap in each chunk. He motioned for Osborne to follow him to a nearby Dumpster. Once they were both crouched behind the Dumpster and holding their ears, Bolan hit the red button on a remote device that looked like a typical key fob for a car. The C-4 detonated. When the smoke cleared, the two doors had fallen from their hinges and lay across the loading dock.

  * * *

  The young Filipino-American man curled the cigarette paper into a trough and crumbled some of the sticky marijuana bud into the paper. With one practiced motion he rolled the paper into a perfectly cylindrical cigarette. He carefully licked the tip of his tongue across the glue strip on the top of the paper and finished rolling the cigarette. When he was finished, he placed the pointier end of the cigarette between his lips, took out a disposable lighter, and fired up the opposite end. When the paper caught fire he pulled as much smoke as possible into his lungs and held it while he passed the cigarette to his left.

  The six BNG members, three of whom were getting off of their shifts guarding the CSAA building and three of whom were about to start their shifts, had developed a shift-changing ritual that involved passing around a joint or two along with several bottles of malt liquor. Normally it was the most pleasant part of their day, but the events of the last few days had them all terrified. Rather than simple diversion, they now used the alcohol and drugs to provide the courage they found they lacked when confronting this faceless monster who had decimated their ranks.

  "Man, I need to chill out," the man who'd just rolled the joint said. "All the shit that's been happening, that big motherfucker who's been capping everyone's ass, I'm about to lose my fucking mind."

  "Get the fuck out of here," another said. "That's bullshit. Ain't no motherfucker like that. They've just bugged out somewhere for the weekend. They're just too goddamned lazy to work."

  "No man," said a third. "They're dead. I saw Jake and them in Jake's Hummer, an' they're dead. Jake's mamma's already planned the funeral. They was supposed to bust a cap up some biker's ass and he busted caps up their asses instead."

  "Get the fuck out of here," the other man repeated. "Ain't no man who can do all the shit they say this big guy is supposed to have done."

  "I'm not shitting you, man. T.J. was there in Santa Cruz the night the big motherfucker killed just about everyone in a warehouse," another man said after he'd exhaled the marijuana smoke he'd been holding in his lungs while the other men conversed. "Motherfucker came out of nowhere and blew the place to shit. Killed everyone but T.J."

  "What he's saying is true," another gangbanger said. "He's the same motherfucker who killed every one of our boys down in Davenport. Ain't none of us left but maybe fifteen, twenty boys."

  "T.J. says the man's seven feet tall," one BNG banger said. "Motherfucker got guns coming out of his arms like Edward Scissorhands. Ain't no one can stop him because the motherfucker's dead already. He's one of them walking dead."

  "I don't know about that zombie shit," yet another of the group said. "But I hear he likes to cut people, slice their throats ear to ear. He's carving guts out while they're still alive."

  "Shit," said the skeptic. "You all been to too many movies. Ain't no man can do any of that. You're all afraid of the boogeyman." Before he finished his thought a loud roar came from the loading dock area.

  "What the fuck?" he asked.

  "Man, someone's trying to get in through the loading docks," another said. "Where're your guns? Grab them motherfuckers and get out there!"

  * * *

  Bolan and Osborne were in the building and had taken defensive positions behind two garbage Dumpsters when the gang members came bursting into the storage area through a basement door. Each man carried an SAR-21. As the store owner had predicted, there were six of them. When they saw the blown door, they spread out, keeping behind cover as best they could. One chose a spot that protected him from Osborne's position, but left him wide open to Bolan. The soldier took the opportunity to open up on him with the P90, stitching him from the thigh up to his armpit. The man dropped the SAR-21 and fell to the ground, clutching his side.

  At the same time, Osborne got off a shot at another of the attackers, punching a 5.7 mm round clean through his torso, right below his neck. Bolan could see that the shot had hit the man in his spine, and he watched the unfortunate gangbanger drop instantly.

  So far none of the BNG members had even fired a shot. The remaining four men cowered together behind a forklift. Each held an assault rifle, but none of the men showed inte
rest in firing their weapons. Bolan decided to try to get them to surrender.

  "Drop your weapons!" the Executioner shouted. "Give yourself up and you won't die."

  Bolan could hear the men talking among themselves.

  "How do we know we can believe you?" one shouted. "You killed all of our brothers, man. Why wouldn't you kill us?"

  "You have my word," the Executioner said. "You surrender, I promise we won't kill you. You don't surrender, I promise we kill you. That shouldn't be a tough decision."

  "You won't kill us," the man said, "but you'll send us to jail for the rest of our lives. No thanks, man. I rather be dead."

  "We won't even send you to jail if you help us find the bomb," Bolan said.

  "What bomb?" another man asked.

  "The one that the Malaysian set up in this building yesterday," the Executioner replied.

  "What kind of bomb?" the man asked.

  "The nuclear kind. It's set to go off this evening and when it does, it'll take all of San Francisco and most of Oakland with it. That includes you."

  "Is that why the fat man wore the big rubber suit when he worked here yesterday?" the man asked.

  Bolan thought he must be referring to an NBC suit. "That's why. Your boss bin Osman was trying to kill you guys along with everyone else."

  "I'll kill that motherfucker," the man said.

  "Too late," the Executioner said. "He's dead. What do you say? You help us and live or fight us and die?"

  The gangbangers talked among themselves for a few moments before one said, "We're throwing down. Don't shoot, man."

  One by one the Filipinos tossed their SAR-21s to the floor and came out with their hands up, their fingers interlocked over their heads.

  "Check them for other weapons," Bolan told Osborne.

  The blacksuit found at least one knife on each of them and one of them had a handgun stuck in the waistband of his pants. When they were clean of weapons, the Executioner said, "Okay, now show us the bomb."