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  The sight of Duane appearing over him, grinning, disabused him of that notion. This was no hallucination; the last man standing had returned, and he was pointing an Uzi right at Bolan’s head.

  Duane sneered at him.

  “Do it, then,” Bolan said coldly, his voice cracked and harsh. “Or do you only have the guts if it’s an old man, or if it’s a dozen of you against two?”

  Risky. He could be riling Duane to action. On the other hand, taunting him could buy a precious second or two.

  “You ain’t gonna get me that way,” the cultist said in a singsong tone as snide as his expression. “I’m gonna enjoy this. And when you’re ground meat, then I just take the girl and buy my ticket out of here....”

  He laughed. He should have spared the soldier the lecture and just pulled the trigger. That was the difference between professionals and amateurs. Duane was no professional.

  “Duane, you don’t have the guts,” Elena yelled, her voice trembling from tears of pain. It wasn’t much, but it took his attention away from Bolan for a moment.

  Bolan was a professional. While he’d been talking to Duane, he had pulled the TEKNA from its sheath and shifted his weight. His eyes might be clouded by pain and poison, but he had instincts and will that had been honed over years of combat. As Duane looked away for that crucial second, Bolan put everything he had into one last effort. He pulled his arm free and threw the knife at Duane’s throat.

  The knife missed the jugular, but caught Duane in the socket of his left eye. He screamed in pain, stumbling back and dropping the Uzi as he clawed at his face.

  Bolan grabbed for his dropped SMG and tried to lever himself upright to fire....

  A volley of shots rang out, jerking Duane as they caught him from behind and from the side. He fell, lifeless. Bolan had no idea what was going on, but this was sure as hell no hallucination. He could see men running toward them, and he steadied the SMG.

  “Cooper...no!” yelled the man in the lead. Bolan’s eyes narrowed. There was something familiar about him.

  The man came over to him, dropping to his knee. As he did, he indicated two of his men to attend to Elena. There were others milling around behind them.

  Bolan squinted at him. The security officer from the base in Miami?

  “We’ve come to get you out. Not that you seemed to need too much help, there,” the security man added with some good humor.

  “You reckon?” Bolan asked.

  * * *

  “...AND YOU SHOULD see Griffintown right now. National Guard on every street corner. There’s a lot of gossip, but no one really wants to say too much. The Midnight Examiner had such a hold on the town, and there are too many people scared of any secrets. But if no one takes over the paper, then the town will probably die. Maybe that’s just as well....”

  Martha finally stopped to draw breath. She and Bolan were in a visitors’ lounge at the military base in Miami, where he and Elena Anders had been taken by the marine task force. Antibiotics and sterile dressings had stabilized his wounds and the effects of the toxin and infection. His leg injury was healing nicely.

  “So, you planning to do some hotshot journalism?” he asked, taking advantage of her silence. “This could be worth a Pulitzer.”

  She laughed. “Cooper, not only am I not cut out for this kind of thing, but if I dared to write about it I’d have every security man in Florida coming through my door. It’s one hell of a story, but it’s not mine.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Head back up north, maybe. Go back to shopping papers. I don’t know. Maybe a novel? I could write this as a novel. They couldn’t burst through my door then, could they? I mean, who’d believe it?”

  Bolan couldn’t help but smile.

  A few hours later, he visited Elena’s room in the hospital block. She started to well up as she tried to thank Bolan for what he had done. It was all the soldier could do to stop her. It was just another day’s work.

  “So how’re you holding up?” he asked Elena, hoping to change the subject, and pointing to the cast that extended from wrist to neck and across her chest and the bandages covering her hands.

  “I’m okay.” She shrugged, and then winced as she regretted the movement. “If this is the worst I came out of this with, then it’s not so bad, I guess. I should get something for being so stupid in the first place,” she added bitterly.

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” Bolan’s tone was mild, but then it grew serious. “But there were some serious things at stake here. Ricke had connections that went deeper than a crackpot philosophy and a need to gather cash. This situation nearly cost you your life, certainly your sanity, and maybe it could have cost a whole lot for the country, as well.”

  “All I can say is that grief does funny things to people,” Elena said sadly.

  Bolan smiled. “I realize that, Elena. More than you can ever know. What’s important now is how you can move on from here.”

  They said their goodbyes and Bolan strode out to the tarmac, breathing in the humid, sea-salty air.

  An exploitative cult had been disbanded and a young woman had her life back—along with anyone else who might have fallen prey to Ricke’s twisted evangelism. A power-hungry man was dead, and the nation’s secrets were safe once again. At least for now.

  The Executioner had been in this game long enough to know that there would always be greedy, unscrupulous people willing to take advantage of the vulnerable for their own gains. And there would always be those who sought to undermine America’s security and prosperity.

  Bolan’s job was to keep fighting.

  * * * * *

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  ISBN-13: 9781460342107

  Slayground

  Copyright © 2014 by Worldwide Library.

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Andy Boot for his contribution to this work.

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