Season of Slaughter Read online

  “Pathetic,” Kowalski continued. He stuffed the .45 back into his waistband. Reclining, he let his eyes close. “Let me know when we get where we’re going, or someone wants to explain something to me, whichever comes first.”

  Watson began to reach for the weapon under his jacket. A rustle of motion, then pain exploded. His lips were smashed and shredded across broken teeth by the impact of stainless-steel pistol across flesh. He screamed, hands clutching the torrent of blood pouring down his chin.

  “From now on, if you dream about pulling a gun on me, you better wake up and apologize to me,” Kowalski told him, eyes still closed, his body, save for his gun hand, relaxed and slouched.

  The rest of the SUV ride went quietly for Kowalski.

  AFTER JACK GRIMALDI BROUGHT Mack Bolan and Sable Burton into Sparta Municipal Airport, the soldier wasted no time getting him and his companion a rental car.

  Burton looked at the vehicle, a Chevy Impala, her face covered in doubt.

  “What’s wrong?” Bolan asked.

  “Another rental car?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “I can’t carry one in my pockets, at least not big enough to drive around with.”

  “I do have a question about the people you work for. Nothing that could threaten national security, but something that’s been eating at me,” she said, getting into the passenger seat.

  “What’s that?” Bolan asked from behind the wheel as they pulled out to the airport’s exit.

  “You get shot at a lot, right?” Burton asked.

  Bolan nodded.

  “And your rental cars, they really take a beating, don’t they?”

  “More than I’d like to admit,” Bolan answered.

  “How can you keep renting cars? I mean, the insurance alone on wrecked cars must run into thousands,” Sable continued.

  Bolan turned onto the road, looking at the map. His cheek tugged involuntarily into a smile. “It’s pretty high. I don’t keep track.”

  “Millions?”

  Bolan wiped his mouth. “Maybe.”

  “And the insurance companies don’t think anything of all these wrecked cars charged to Colonel Brandon Stone?” Sable asked.

  “My people are good at erasing computer records.”

  “There’s still people at the counter,” Sable returned.

  Bolan sighed. “So some information gets around. I handle everything through some very special authority, and I have some good people to clean up my messes.”

  “Like witnesses?” Sable asked.

  Bolan shook his head. “I would have never started an operation like that.”

  Burton watched as Bolan opened his windbreaker, the extended magazine of his pistol poking out like an ugly metallic tumor under his armpit. She noticed his eyes glancing between the driver’s-side mirror and the rearview mirror.

  “Is there trouble?” she asked, not bothering to turn.

  “We’re being followed,” Bolan explained.

  Burton slouched deeper in her seat, unsettled. “What are we going to do?”

  “Continue to drive. Can you take the wheel?” Bolan asked.

  The woman nodded. “What will you be doing?”

  “I might end up going EVA.”

  “EVA?”

  “Extra Vehicular Activity.”

  “There’s going to be more shooting,” Burton stated numbly. “Any idea who they are?”

  Bolan was to the point. “Army of the Hand of Christ. Fist of God. Possibly a combined group.”

  “Fist of God. I remember a security alert at Terintec. They’re a Middle Eastern terror group,” Burton said. “Let’s switch. I’ll climb into your lap, then you slide to the shotgun seat.”

  “You can handle it?” Bolan asked.

  “I’m not the rail I was when I was a teenager, but we can do the switch,” she told him, crawling across the parking brake. Bolan scooted out from under her, keeping his foot on the accelerator while she steered until she situated herself.

  Burton hit the steering tilt on the go, setting it up so she could handle the car better, then yanked the driver’s seat forward so she didn’t have to manipulate the clutch, brake and gas by tiptoe. She gave Bolan a nod and he looked back over her shoulder.

  “I could pick up some speed and get us to the quarry. I know a way around the old lumber mill,” she said.

  “They’d probably have fewer people at the quarry than at the mill, if any,” Bolan agreed.

  “Want me to take it easy, or do you want me to give them a show?” Burton asked.

  Bolan looked back. “Give them a show.”

  The woman grinned, popped the clutch and threw the gearshift into fourth, the Impala’s engine snarling to livid fury.

  HARPY WIPED her sweaty brow on her bare forearm, looking back at the others as they spent time dragging the chassis of the SmarTruck onto a rolling pallet. The truck was far too tangled into the trees to get out easily, so Adonis laid some charges. The tires and axles were wrecked, but the trees were cleared. It hardly looked like anything worth stealing anymore, but the Kevlar shell and the wheels, even the engine, were all superfluous to the electronics built into the vehicle.

  She returned her attention to the helicopter. Dents from gunfire covered it and she could see where the strain of evasive action made a hydraulic line loose, but nothing a little bit of work couldn’t fix. It was flyable; they wouldn’t have been able to dash up to the Spartan Lumber Company Mill otherwise. The windshield was starred with 9 mm bullet impacts, and the machine-gun pintle was as useless as an erection on a castrated bull after Adonis threw his fit.

  The machine-gun mount wasn’t as important as the hydraulic line, though, and she and her crew were busy working on it and replacing the starred and pocked windshields. It was all she could do to take her mind off the loss of one of her best pilots.

  “Harpy,” someone said.

  She turned away from her work on the Black Hawk, seething indignance at the interruption. “What?”

  “We got news from Sparta Municipal. Two passengers and a pilot came in with a Learjet about twenty minutes ago and rented an Impala,” the man said.

  Harpy regarded him, her full lips disappearing into a thin line. “Two people? A man and a woman, by any chance?”

  “The man was tall. Over six feet. Dark hair and complexion, and wore black clothing. The woman was about a foot shorter, long dark hair.”

  Harpy’s eyes glinted as she stared at him. “Are they headed here?”

  “No. They spotted their tail and took off down a side road, driving like a bat out of hell. They’re heading toward the quarry.”

  Harpy looked over her shoulder at Dark and Adonis, then back to him. “How many people do we have up there?”

  “Five on guard duty,” he told her. “And another two carloads on their tail.”

  “How many?”

  “Six men total.”

  Harpy nodded. “Get me a couple more guys and pull some serious hardware from the lockers. We’re heading out to the quarry to break big Stones into little stones.”

  SABLE BURTON THROTTLED DOWN through the turn, taking it tight and on the inside. It was risky pulling this kind of speed at night, but the back roads were notorious for being empty and she’d learned as a teenager how to gauge oncoming traffic. In the passenger seat beside her, her companion was relaxed as far as the reliability of his driver allowed him to be. He was concerned that a second car had joined pursuit of them, and that could only mean one thing.

  Their tail had cell phones and weren’t shy about calling in for help. That didn’t bode well for the Executioner and his companion considering that they were heading toward a rock quarry that could be a nest full of enemies. Bolan was only anticipating a soft probe this night, so only the Beretta 93-R and the Desert Eagle, along with various knives and other close-quarters implements of death were with him. Anything heavier was back at the plane with Grimaldi.

  No matter. The Executioner was a man of improvisation.<
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  “If I can get some distance,” Burton said, “I think I know a turnoff where we can lose these guys.”

  “A little distraction?” Bolan asked.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Bolan leaned out the window, unleathering his .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. The massive hand cannon would do some damage to one of the pursuing cars, but the Executioner’s main goal was to give Burton her moment’s lead. Triggering the Magnum pistol, he laid a fusillade of fire across the two cars trying to keep pace with her.

  Brakes squealed behind them and Burton hit the gas, the engine’s growl starting the moment the cars behind them swerved and fought to slow down. The woman hit the next curve and cut their speed, swerving along the shoulder. Bolan glanced forward, seeing that they were aiming down a bike trail.

  She killed the headlights, stamped the brakes, then let the car drift as soon as the Impala got to a manageable speed. She was busy negotiating subtle curves along the course of the ribbon of asphalt they were on when they finally came to a speed where she could put on the emergency brake without gouging the mechanism to ruins. Bolan, watching behind, saw the two pursuit cars thunder past.

  “I know this bike path,” Burton explained. “I used to ride down it when I started feeling claustrophobic at the mill.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Now we chase them?” Burton asked.

  “They’re heading full-tilt toward the quarry,” Bolan said. “Does this path come close to the quarry?”

  “In fact, it does. About two miles up, you’ll be able to climb a fence and be on the quarry grounds. The cars have about eight miles of road to loop around to the main entrance,” she said.

  “Drive.”

  Burton put the Impala in gear.

  THE EXECUTIONER STRIPPED out of his windbreaker and his jeans. Underneath was a blacksuit. It took only a few moments for him to insure everything was well situated, even in the dark and by touch.

  Burton looked at him, her big green eyes wide, reflecting the distant lamps of the quarry. Awe covered her face as he underwent his transformation to battle mode, streaks of black greasepaint covering his hands, cheeks and forehead to help him blend into the shadows.

  “Stay here,” the Executioner whispered. “Keep with the car and if there’s shooting, get down. If I’m not back fifteen minutes after you hear the first gunshot, hit reverse, get down the road and get back to Sparta and my pilot.”

  “You’ll be dead, is what you’re saying.”

  “Dead, or in no condition to continue the fight. Maybe Jack can call in someone who can finish it. Or I’ll be on the run and going back to Sparta under my own power. It’s a backup plan. I don’t want you getting shot.”

  “But don’t you have a cell phone?”

  Bolan paused. “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, put mine on your speed-dial,” Burton told him. She produced her own little pocket phone.

  Bolan shook his head. The damn thing was small enough to have fit in the professor’s pocket, and yet he barely noticed the bulge, not connecting it with a piece of vital communications technology.

  “You ring me, but don’t say anything, that means I hot-tail it out of here. All you have to do is just push the Send button. If you have something to say, I’ll hear it anyway,” Burton told him.

  “I might not be able to reach the cell. Good plan, though. But still—”

  “I know. Stay the hell out of the way.”

  With that, Bolan threw his windbreaker over the coil of barbed wire atop the fence and vaulted over it. He came down on a five-foot ledge overlooking a deep precipice. Despite the lights across the quarry, on the landing, shadows still wrapped around him, and taking long, loping strides, he made his way toward the collection of trailers and sheds that made up an improvised work area. The trailers were still on wheels, and orange plastic fencing surrounded small, one-man Bobcat bulldozers in a temporary corral. The whole setup looked flexible enough to crawl up, down or laterally along the quarry, keeping up with the milling and blasting of stone. There was just one thing that disturbed the soldier’s senses.

  He’d been to enough mobbed-up construction areas and quarries to realize that shotgun-toting guards didn’t stroll around well-lit quarries in the middle of the night if it was a legitimate business. It was a little something that struck the Executioner as highly suspicious.

  The two cars rolled in quick and Bolan sprinted the last fifty feet to take cover against a bank of portable toilets. He looked for the next closest cover and saw that there was a trailer, seven yards away, behind piles of cast-off sandstone and other unusable rock. Shuffling noiselessly on hands and feet, he got closer to the trailer, and darted under the bottom of the trailer before anyone could notice his blacksuited form flickering in the shadows just outside the spill of the lamps.

  He eased his Beretta 93-R from its place in his shoulder holster, the sound-suppressed weapon probing the darkness ahead of him as he continued along in the deep shadow of the trailer. Men were getting out of the two pursuit cars, and someone was heading up to greet them.

  “What the hell’s going on?” one of the chasers asked.

  The quarry crewman shrugged. “Harpy just called us and told us to expect her. Where did those two go?”

  “They must have pulled off, but I can’t tell you where,” the driver said. “How long until she gets here?”

  “She said to give it ten minutes. She’s driving. But that was five minutes ago,” the quarry man said.

  That was about all the Executioner needed to hear. Harpy was on her way, and there was a chance that she could be bringing a full-size army. The soldier had to start evening the odds now.

  He burst from his hiding space, Beretta spitting 3-round bursts.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Executioner’s first target was the driver of the lead car, who was still busy trying to figure out what was going on with the guy in charge of the quarry. From his vantage point in the space between the trailer and the sharp slope that formed a wall of mossy soil around the edge of the quarry, he was all but invisible until he moved. He looked right at Bolan rising from the shadows, and his eyes bugged out like hard-boiled eggs. The militiaman’s mouth started to work as his hands clawed desperately at the pistol in his waistband. For all his speed, he wasn’t quick enough as the 3-round burst from the Beretta caught him high in the chest, subsonic slugs chewing up through his breastbone until the last shot smashed through his windpipe.

  The quarry boss jerked backward, shouting in surprise as the man in front of him detonated in a spray of crimson. He was still stepping back when Bolan’s second burst smashed into the base of his skull. Black hair flew as the rounds slammed in. The impact of the trio of bullets spun him around, and Bolan watched the quarry boss’s forehead flap like a flag where his burst blew an exit cavity through his brainpan.

  Two down, too many to go, the Executioner reminded himself as he switched the Beretta to single shot and took the driver’s shotgun rider through the heart with a single round. The man staggered, staying on his feet as his brain didn’t quite process his cardiac pump being torn in two, so the Executioner punched another shot through the man’s open mouth. Doubly dead, the AHC fighter tumbled backward to learn the final fate of his soul.

  Even with a silenced weapon, the sudden dropping of three men in midconversation caught the attention of the two shotgunners at the front gate. At the boss’s final shout, they suddenly burst into Bolan’s line of sight from the mouth of the quarry, shotguns still aimed at the ground as they raced to investigate.

  “Good God!” one of them cried out as he saw the gory head wounds on all three of Bolan’s first targets.

  That was the last prayer the gunner for the AHC ever spoke as Bolan stepped to within two yards of his head. From only a few feet away, the Executioner punched a single 9 mm hollowpoint right through the guy’s temple, brains erupting in a volcano of gore on the other side. He gripped the dead man by the collar with his oth
er hand, yanking him in tight as the second shotgunner screamed in shock from being sprayed with brains and blood.

  He brought up his pumpgun, firing blindly and hammering out three rounds of buckshot. If it hadn’t been for his human shield, Bolan would have been the final recipient of twenty-seven .36-caliber pellets. Instead, the buck lodged in dead flesh, only one pellet passing through soft viscera to clip Bolan just under his ribs, slicing skin before dancing off into the night. The Executioner pushed his Beretta through under the corpse’s arm and ripped a 3-round burst into the blood-spattered gunner.

  The shotgun-toting killer was struck just above his navel, bullets plowing through his intestines, one 9 mm slug crushing its way through a vertebra. He jerked and spun spastically to the ground, his legs suddenly deprived of signals from the brain. Bolan flicked the selector to single shot once more and pumped a solitary mercy round between the AHC gunner’s eyes, ending his suffering and any threat he might pose.

  The Executioner shoved aside the corpse he was using as a shield. He traded his Beretta for the Desert Eagle now that the silence had been broken by the thunder of shotguns. Men were racing from a trailer, including the pair who had been in the second car. They had congregated with the gunners at the far trailer, presumably to chew the fat while the men who were in charge held their last-minute powwow closer to Bolan.

  Right now, they were busy scrambling for their own weaponry, caught flat-footed by the gun battle between Bolan and the shotgunner. None of them was even considering taking cover, or even bothering to aim. They stabbed the air ahead of them with pistols and shotguns and opened fire. The Executioner dived to the ground, his body slicing the night with panther-like grace. Landing in the gravel, he brought up the Desert Eagle.

  The first 240-grain boattail hollowpoint collided with the driver of the second chase car, a man with his gut hanging out over his waistband and squeezing the trigger on a .45 as fast as he could. The .44 Magnum slug met him right above the bulbous belly, tearing up and through his heart and smashing out his spine. Heart torn in two, spine snipped like twine, the driver somersaulted face-first into the gravel and shuddered like a mountain of jelly before he was stilled forever.