Season of Slaughter Read online

  Bolan stepped back, barely dodging the followup kick that brought Dark’s boot heel within inches of smashing his jaw. The breeze lifted Bolan’s short hair, but he reached up, forearm blocking the forward momentum of the shin. He snapped his fist into the back of Dark’s knee and thrust down hard, unbalancing the mass murderer and twisting him to the floor.

  Dark’s hands hit the floor, preventing him from smashing face-first into the ground, and Bolan felt the tall man’s leg rip from between the trap of the soldier’s forearm and fist. The Executioner took a quick half step back, his momentum increased as the mercenary’s boot struck him just above his navel.

  The blow, had Bolan stood fast, would have folded him over in crippling pain, maybe even damaged an internal organ. Again, the soldier reacted to an attack with an attack on the limb striking at him. He grabbed the booted foot and brought a knife-hand chop on the attacker’s knee.

  Flame stung the Executioner’s hand as it struck a knee guard hidden under the BDU pant leg, and he recoiled from the stroke. Dark somersaulted away from Bolan, and the pair faced off, both breathing deep and fast as they locked furious, hate-filled gazes.

  The two men lunged at the same time, fists flashing against ribs and abdominal muscles and backs as they hammered, armored chest to armored chest. The impact stopped them both, punches to kidneys and backs blunted by ammo pouches and Kevlar and trauma plate wrapping vulnerable torsos. Both warriors growled, bouncing a step back. It was Dark who acted first, forehead lashing toward Bolan’s nose, but the Executioner braced his neck and turned his head, catching skullbone on his cheek. Had the original Stony Man not been spiking into adrenaline levels he’d rarely reached before, he’d have felt the skin under his right eye swell to three times its normal thickness, thousands of capillaries ruptured by the savage head butt.

  Instead, with a snarl, the Executioner sliced both hands up into Dark’s armpits, thumbs driving into the soft tissue. The RING killer gagged at the hit right beneath the major arteries that fed his arms. Despite the pain that washed across his face like a storm front, he clamped down tight on Bolan’s hands. Before the soldier could pop his hands free, Dark grabbed his adversary’s upper arms, fingers digging in like claws. The Executioner glanced down to see the trench-coat-wearing murderer’s foot snake between his own, looking to hook an ankle for leverage.

  Bolan denied Dark the advantage of his leverage, dropping to his knees and yanking the man off balance. After hitting the floor, he sprung up again, head and shoulders stabbing under the terrorist’s breastbone, lifting him off his feet. The Executioner had his hands free, once more, and he grabbed his adversary, adding extra thrust to hurling away Dark. He was aiming to dash the man’s skull against the doorjamb behind him, but with seemingly impossible catlike grace, the black-clad killer twisted, landing in a three-point crouch, balanced on his feet and one hand, the other clutched tight to his hip, fist clenched.

  Dark snapped his head up, glaring at Bolan, then the two men dropped back out of their wild phase. With a flash of crackling black fabric, the RING warrior faded through the door just as the Executioner pulled up his OA-93 from where it hung on his sling and ripped off a sustained burst. Splinters flew as wood and drywall exploded under the Executioner’s assault.

  He was torn between charging to the top of the steps and possibly getting caught in an ambush, and checking on Sable Burton. Bolan pulled a flash-bang grenade from his war bag, bounced it off the far wall and down the steps, then turned to Burton.

  “Are you okay? Can you walk?” The stun grenade detonated in punctuation to his statement, and he caught a flash of surprise in the professor’s eyes. He stuffed a fresh magazine into his weapon.

  “I can run,” Burton answered, getting unsteadily to her feet. “Brandon, you shouldn’t have—”

  “Shut up and follow me,” Bolan cut her off, taking her tiny hand in his. He pulled her along, passing the top of the stairs. He interposed his Kevlar-protected body between her and anyone still capable of fighting in the stairwell. Burton rushed past and out of sight, and Bolan caught movement below. He fired a burst of 5.56 mm hollowpoints at the shifting shadow, then spun, racing for the back porch.

  Burton was about to pull the door open when Bolan slammed his palm against it, blocking her. He tugged her back and away as the window exploded, the wood shaking as bullets knocked on it.

  “Well, that’s out as an out.” Burton laughed nervously.

  “Keep it together, Professor,” Bolan said gently. He realized that he hadn’t let her go, and the softness of her body against his was cutting through the adrenalized hyper-numbness of combat to awaken stirrings beneath the ceramic trauma plate over his chest. She glanced up at him, green eyes wide and swirling in a cascade of emotions. He broke eye contact with her out of sheer will and keyed his throat mike.

  “Jack, we’ve got gunners outside and blocking our exit,” Bolan called.

  “I’ve spotted them. Just waiting for your orders,” Grimaldi answered.

  “Burn ’em,” Bolan ordered.

  He glanced out through the window, spotting a flash of aged orange-yellow on the side street the alley fed into. His mind processed the image even as he heard the sudden thunder from above.

  Dragon Slayer dropped stealth mode in spectacular fashion, the sudden roar of spinning rotors drowned out only by the furious hellstorm of .50-caliber GECAL rounds. A porch across the way used to have a pair of armed riflemen. Now only two greasy smears remained. They made the error of trying to close the door on Bolan and his companion with their own weapons when they came under the gaze of Grimaldi and the helicopter’s gun camera targeting system. As soon as the crosshairs came on target, the multibarreled machine guns ripped to life, and the two riflemen simply detonated in an explosive spray of pulpy chunks and blood. The wood around them also disintegrated, chewed to pieces by the impact of thirty rounds of 750-grain slugs.

  The effect was like smashing two tomatoes against a wall with a sledgehammer. Bolan would leave it to the Chicago Police Department to sponge off the remains of the militiamen to determine if they were Arab or American. He threw open the door and exited to the porch.

  The dead were all going into the same metaphysical hole.

  “Jack, just before you opened up, I saw a vehicle heading off. It looked like a school bus, at least it looked that color,” Bolan stated.

  “I spotted two of them taking off,” Charlie Mott replied. “They were parked the next block over, in the shade of some trees, which is how we probably missed them.”

  “Two busloads,” Bolan repeated. Looking up, he saw a hatch to the roof. He climbed up onto the railing at the top of the porch steps and punched hard, knocking the door open. “Pick me up, we’re going after those buses.”

  “What about me?” Burton asked.

  Bolan reached down and took her hand. “You’ll be safe on the helicopter. Come on.”

  He hoisted her up, bracing himself in the trapdoor’s open mouth. It took her a moment to get her feet under her, and using his knee as a step, she scurried quickly up and through the opening. The Executioner slithered up like a mighty black python, hot on her heels. He was just in time to see the sling lowering from the side of Dragon Slayer.

  “Slip the strap around you and sit in it like a swing,” Bolan instructed the professor. She did so, holding on tight. The soldier grabbed the cable with both hands and as soon as he got his grip, the winch started pulling them both up.

  “Is this safe?” Burton shouted over the roar of the helicopter’s turbines.

  “The winch is rated for six hundred pounds.” He glanced down, then smiled at her. “And we’re not gonna get dropped by Jack.”

  DARK EXECUTED a baseball slide down the stairs moments before the first 5.56 mm tumblers crashed and smashed into the wall. Looking back, he saw that the burst was perfectly centered on where he had been moments ago, a blistering hailstorm of death that had almost punched him out of the world, body armor or no, with a scythin
g slash that would have cut through his exposed head.

  Gunmen were racing back up the stairs, only a couple of them, though; the others had had enough sense to follow orders. Dark didn’t care about fools who ignored him, and waved them on past, squeezed by and leaped down to the next landing. Something thumped down the steps to meet the rushing Fists of God. The mercenary grabbed the railing and yanked himself hard around the corner one more time. Even so, spilling out onto the bottom landing of the stairwell, he was hit by the shock wave from Stone’s grenade. The thunderclap wasn’t deafening, but Dark had to grab the wall to maintain his balance. Concussive force in the space of the landings would have proven all but crippling to the terrorists as they charged after Bolan.

  Business was picking up, and the murderer in black wasn’t going to be around to take the fallout from Stone’s blitz. He was in the middle of a storm, and even though he’d managed to blunt most of his enemy’s attacks, his knee was stiff and his head and back both ached. Stone proved himself, with their second confrontation, to be a man not to be fucked around with. Now he understood Adonis’s giddy reaction to his conversation with the big mystery soldier. A jolt of adrenaline charged through him at the thought of facing an equal, a superior warrior with the skills to make his life a challenge.

  Shooting fish in a barrel made for petty amusement, but wrestling with a shark, now that was the thing that got the blood pumping and promised you an opportunity to see the face of God and meet your judgment head-on. Dark burst out the front door, hearing the chatter of gunfire behind him. He pulled his radio and brought it to his lips. “Perimeter, contain the building!”

  Answers in English and Arabic came to his ears and Dark stuffed the radio back into his coat pocket, racing for the school buses that were already crawling to the corner, men boarding while they were on the move. As soon as he cleared out from under the shadow of the building, he glanced back, spying a sleek, knife-tailed helicopter hovering silently, but only for a moment. In a heartbeat, the full roar of the engines and rotors washed down over him like an avalanche of sound. A heartbeat later, an even louder portent of doom filled the air as a turret on the belly of the flying beast opened up, spraying a short burst of heavy-metal thunder toward the alleyway.

  Dark knew his snipers were dead meat and finished his mad dash to the school buses, legs burning as he cross the final few yards in three ground-eating strides, hand gripping the rails. He yanked himself through the door even as the ground beneath him started flashing past at greater and greater speed. Stuffing himself inside the bus, he looked back and saw the doom-spitting stealth copter hanging over his former headquarters. A sling was descending out the side door. He watched it lower to the roof as the bus retreated.

  Dark snapped his gloved fingers, smiling at the man he knew the winch line was intended for. “Catch you later, Colonel Stone.”

  The buses drove hard toward the L-line and Dark smiled with the beginning tingles of victory. That’s when the giant dragonship swerved from the roof, spinning and diving toward the street behind them, its rotorspan fitting easily between the rows of two-story brick homes.

  Dark’s eyes narrowed but sparkled with a glimmer of glee.

  He admired a guy who wouldn’t give up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Get closer to them. I don’t want to risk hitting any bystanders, but we’re not going to lose them,” the Executioner ordered Jack Grimaldi from within the cabin of Dragon Slayer.

  The sleek war machine continued on the tails of the pair of buses, keeping deftly between the buildings and within sight of its prey.

  “I’ve got an image of both buses on infrared,” Mott confirmed. “Switching it to your display panel in the back.”

  Bolan looked, seeing the shapes of the two vehicles as dull blue outlines with hearts of bright yellow, and seething with humanoid-blob shapes colored in red. Between both buses, he counted approximately four dozen men on board. “All right. Hold off on firing on them. This is a residential neighborhood and I don’t need a .50-caliber round bouncing off asphalt and plowing through three living rooms and a baby’s bedroom.”

  “We know, Sarge,” Grimaldi answered. “Are you going EVA?”

  Bolan started strapping himself into the harness again. “With a vengeance. Swing over the first bus. We stop that, given the kind of parking on these streets, we’ve got the second one pinned.”

  He threw open the door and glanced at Burton. She was clutching her seat, green eyes wide as she looked at the buildings whipping past the windows. Giving him a look, she took a deep, desperate breath.

  Bolan winked, then kicked out the door. He heard her yelp in surprise at his sudden drop, and then he only heard the sizzling whine of the winch decelerating his rapid drop. His boots slammed the yellow roof of the first bus and he hit the release latch on his harness. The bus accelerated with the sound of the Executioner’s arrival.

  Gunfire ripped through the roof of the bus. Bolan scrambled, racing ahead of the sudden rattle of bullets piercing metal, holes chasing his heels as he ran to the back of the bus.

  The other driver accelerated, bringing his vehicle up hard and fast. Dark and a couple of other gunners leaned out the windows, aiming weapons at him. Bolan took the last strikes off the end of the roof at full speed, leaping with all his might, aiming his OA-93 ahead of him, holding down the trigger. The windshield detonated as thirty rounds of 5.56 mm NATO smashed through, turning glass to diamond-like chunks. The driver jerked and the school bus swerved hard into a row of parked cars. Behind him, the Executioner could already hear the strained shriek of brakes as his booted feet crashed onto the hood of the chase vehicle.

  Letting the subgun flop freely on its sling, Bolan grabbed the roof of the bus and swung his feet through the shattered windshield. Bodies were already pouring out the windows, and he caught a flash of Dark, one of the first on the ground. Still, there were plenty of bloodthirsty souls waiting in the bus, bringing their guns to bear on the wraith in the blacksuit that had just barreled into their midst.

  The Executioner threw himself to the ground, filling his fists with the Desert Eagle and the Beretta 93-R. He held the mighty Magnum in reserve, but the 9 mm machine pistol chattered out 3-round bursts that tore through knees and thighs of the half-concealed gunmen. They shrieked and desperately tried to retreat, several charging for the rear exit when Bolan let the powerful .44 Magnum Desert Eagle thunder and shatter the air inside the bus-turned-charnal-house, bodies jerking as 240-grain, torso-smashing hammers punched through exposed backs and out chests, tearing into men in front of them. After the initial exodus, nobody escaped the bus and the center aisle was heaped with torn, ruptured bodies, dead and wounded, all leaking their lifeblood.

  Springing back to his feet, Bolan turned to cut off the rest of the terrorists as they caught up to the first bus. He holstered his empty handguns and grabbed up the OA-93 again, ramming home a fresh magazine. Dark paused, looking back, and swung up both of his Calico subguns, peppering the empty front windows with a salvo of Parabellum rounds. The Executioner dived beneath the dashboard. He lost sight of the enemy force for a moment.

  “Jack? What are they doing?” he called through his throat mike.

  “They’re pulling out and heading for the next intersection. I think they’re going to try to get under the next viaduct,” Grimaldi answered.

  “Do we burn it?” Mott asked.

  Bolan heard Dragon Slayer thunder overhead and he poked his head up, looking toward the fleeing bus. His eyes scanned the viaduct and he noticed an elevated train station, the fabled Chicago “El.” His brow furrowed. “Dammit!”

  “Striker?”

  “Hold your fire! That’s a crowded train platform they’re heading for!” Bolan said. He leaped out the open side door and raced through the intersection. Cars beeped and honked at the passage of the tall man in black toting the fearsome subgun. Pedestrians on the sidewalk were already shell-shocked by the previous crowd of armed men swarming past
and into the school bus, but some pointed in fear at him.

  Gunfire broke out up ahead, and Bolan could see that the bus had ground to a halt. A Chicago Transit Authority ticket booth had been chewed to ribbons by a merciless cloud of lead, and the Executioner grit his teeth in impotent rage. More helpless innocents were dying, and there was nothing Bolan could do about it.

  “Jack! Tell Buck that Dark’s bringing his gunners in through the subway system! The train leads right underneath the major terminals at O’Hare!” Bolan shouted as he charged up the staircase. A militiaman sidestepped out at the top of the stairs and the Executioner didn’t blink, triggering the Olympic Arms subgun, a 3-round burst that blew out the AHC murderer’s intestines and severed his spine. Bolan vaulted over him before he even hit the ground, watching the last few terrorists charging on board the train as the doors shut.

  Dropping the OA-93 on its sling, Bolan put on a burst of speed. Leaping from the platform, he grabbed one of the El car’s rails as it pulled out from the station.

  “We’ve got Buck apprised. But those are gunmen. They’re not going to be able to get on an airplane. What about the guys carrying the Botox?” Grimaldi asked.

  Bolan pulled himself tight against the side of the silvered train, watching the city flash by his back. “The guys carrying the Botox would be with the ones disguised as the Filipino missionaries. That’s who had the tickets. Dark’s leading a diversionary force!”

  “It’s a hell of a diversion, Sarge,” Grimaldi admitted.

  “We’ve got a dozen squad cars pulling alongside the train,” Mott added.

  Bolan looked down at the hurtling Chicago police cars on the street below, their light racks strobing out red, white and blue, sirens howling above the rush of wind over his ears. He clenched tighter against the side of the train. “It’s a hostage situation here. Dark’s got a solid-gold advantage with the people already on this train. Someone get in touch with CTA central control. Clear the tracks. And tell Buck that I need a reaction force at the O’Hare train terminal as soon as possible.”