Season of Slaughter Read online

  “The ampules! Where are they?” he repeated.

  The Filipinos looked among themselves. Outside, more automatic fire filled the air, punctuated by the sonic crack of a heavy rifle.

  “Doc, you better hustle it. They’re starting to leave the second bus. Toro and I got two,” Rochenoire’s voice called over his tac radio.

  One Filipino reached into his pocket and pulled it out, smiling. “Most everyone else packed theirs with their luggage, but we drew straws. I kept mine, in case someone tried to stop us.”

  “You’d kill all your people?” Rutherford asked, suddenly aiming the MP-5K at the man’s face.

  “We took one shot of atropine before we got on the bus,” the Biotoxin wielding terrorist said with a grin. “We’re protected from—”

  “That’s not nerve gas,” Rutherford answered. “That’s Botox. Botulinum toxin.”

  The man froze.

  He turned up his radio. “Play Dark’s speech.”

  “‘Well, slipping the Filipinos through as missionaries was a clever idea. Did you convince them the Botox was nerve gas and that they had atropine to protect themselves? Or are they suicidal fanatics?’” one familiar voice, Striker’s, asked.

  “‘We told them that the ampules were Tabur. They have atropine injectors hidden in their toiletry kits disguised as insulin syringes or asthma medicine,’” came the reply in a voice the Filipino man recognized. “‘Totally useless against a good virus.’”

  Rutherford nodded to the ampule-holding Filipino. “That is an extremely good virus. It’ll kill within forty-eight hours, strangling you to death by attacking your body’s breathing reflex. There’s not enough antisera in this entire city to protect the people in this bus.”

  The Filipino looked at his glass globe of death, eyes wide, sweat making his bronzed skin glisten. He looked back to Rutherford.

  “Put it down. Your fight is done,” the blacksuit growled.

  That’s when Rutherford saw knives appear in a dozen hands, setting sunlight glinting off their polished sides. The dark eyes of the terrorists locked on him.

  “No. It’s not,” the globe-armed Filipino said. He lunged at the blacksuit.

  Rutherford ripped off two 3-round bursts, 9 mm slugs smashing the man in the chest and kicking him backward. The ampule fell from shocked fingers as the crowd of Filipino terrorists rose as one. Only the fact that the center aisle of the bus was so tight and the seats were too high to climb over gave the Stony Man blacksuit an opportunity to pull back toward the door, submachine gun ripping out withering bursts of fire. Men screamed as slugs slashed through yielding flesh, but strong hands grabbed Rutherford’s gun arm, yanking him up and back into the bus. The sound of smashing glass filled the air and the bio-warfare expert looked to see the ampule, still rolling toward the driver’s seat.

  Instead, the breaking glass was the windshield, Ryker and his G-36 appearing at the hole. The brooding commando was holding the windowframe with one hand, his assault rifle was in the other, sling tight around his neck.

  “Let him go!” Ryker ordered.

  The Filipinos yanked harder, trying to drag up Rutherford as a human shield.

  “Toro!” Ryker boomed.

  Suddenly the entire bus was lit up, 5.56 mm slugs punching through glass and sheet metal, tearing on through human flesh, making the rioting busload of murderers jerk and dance as Martinez and Ryker cut loose. Rutherford pulled his Heckler & Koch with his off hand and brought it up and into the face of one Filipino, smashing a 9 mm skullbreaker between the eyes of one particularly strong man who had a deathgrip on his arm. The fingers let go and Rutherford tumbled backward. He scrambled, grabbing a railing, and hauled himself up into the driver’s well, hand grabbing the rolling globe of death before it fell to the next step.

  A Filipino howled and lunged for the blacksuit and the deadly bio-weapon. Rutherford snapped up his weapon and fired, watching his 9 mm bullets strike the man at the same time his face and upper chest were blasted into chunks by Ryker’s G-36.

  “The second bus is compromised!” Rochenoire yelled across the tac net.

  “Light it up! Light it up!” Rutherford ordered.

  Outside, Martinez, whose G-36 was fitted with an HK-79 grenade launcher, cut loose with a single booming round. The motorcoach lurched, a massive fireball spitting out of its side. The luggage compartment was the target of the big blacksuit’s weapon, a thermite charge punching through the thin metal and detonating just inside. At thousands of degrees, it would crack glass and cook the viruses in their ampules. The jetting fireball to the outside through the entry hole was only indicative of the initial fury. Up through the floorboards, more flame roared.

  “I’ve got two men running!” Rochenoire warned. “Heading back to the entry gate! I see something reflecting in their hands!”

  Rochenoire’s rifle boomed loud enough to be heard over the tac-net radio.

  “One runner!” he called.

  “I’ve got the other!” Ryker yelled.

  Rutherford slid out of the bus, watching the wiry form of the blacksuit racing down the ribbon of road, G-36 discarded on the ground.

  Martinez was busy hammering out bursts, keeping burning terrorists from escaping with more of the deadly Botox. Rutherford started forward, pistol gripped tightly, to assist the big man when a pair of arms wrapped around his head and throat, crushing down on his windpipe. He tried sucking in a breath and found another pair of arms wrapping around the hand holding the glass ampule of death. He struggled hard, stars flashing across his vision as a punch slammed into his kidney. He coughed and snaked his gun hand around and under his armpit, pulling the trigger as he did. The body on his arm went limp, blood spraying and soaking his back and leg, weighing him down.

  The vise grip on his neck was still unyielding, and he was feeling the blood hammering inside his skull, trying to escape and get back into his circulatory system. The pressure was crushing. Rutherford, however, wasn’t going to play around trying to peel a headlock off him. This wasn’t professional wrestling. Instead he brought the muzzle of the H&K to the Filipino’s elbow and pulled the trigger. Bone and gore exploded as the joint disintegrated. The stranglehold on his throat was gone and fresh oxygen poured through his bloodstream back into his brain.

  The ex-Green Beret spun, slamming his wrist, hand and the butt of the pistol into the side of his wrestling partner’s head. He stomped the Filipino’s foot and pushed away and took a step back. He spotted the bloodied and wounded man, glaring hatefully at him, the only glint of hope showing in the eyes of one man watching the glass sphere full of Botox in his hand. Rutherford mentally ran over the number of shots he’d expended from the USP and knew that against six men, even when they were wounded, he wouldn’t have enough, not in a mad rush.

  “Ryker took down the runner!”

  “Charles,” Rutherford whispered, “I’m surrounded.”

  “Shit, Doc. Hang on.”

  “Where’s Toro?” Rutherford asked.

  “He went down. A secondary blast from the second bus,” Rochenoire answered. “Dammit. Step back. I don’t have a clear shot on any of the tangos.”

  “There’s not enough time,” Rutherford grated.

  “What are you?” Rochenoire began, but Rutherford gave a hard shake of his head. His earpiece popped free. He let go of the pistol, letting it clatter to the ground.

  The Filipinos charged him and Rutherford spun, clutching the ampule tight against him. Hands clawed at his chest. He felt the hot fire of a knife plunge into his side, carving his flesh even through his body armor. Wincing, he still managed to rip a soup-can-shaped object from his chest harness. Another blade slashed across the back of his exposed neck, clinking off the bone.

  Reaching paws plucked the two orbs from his hands.

  “What the fuck?” a Filipino holding Rutherford’s canister said, looking at the almost-glowing glass sphere held by one of his partners.

  “The Botox doesn’t leave this stretch of road
,” Rutherford croaked as he released the pin on the insurance clause he’d strapped to his chest. The blacksuit closed his eyes peacefully. The fuse on the AN-M14 TH3 thermite grenade finally sizzled down to zero.

  The 4000-degree Fahrenheit fireball didn’t hurt at all. Especially knowing that the deadly germs wouldn’t harm another soul.

  THE EXECUTIONER HEARD Charles Rochenoire’s shouted “Fuck!” over his tactical radio, and keyed his throat mike.

  “What happened?”

  “Dammit. Doc blew himself up!” Rochenoire answered, choked with tears.

  Bolan felt a pang of regret as the train pulled into the station. “Rutherford?”

  “Yeah. He said he was surrounded. He had one of the ampules. I think Toro’s down, too.”

  The Executioner glared at Dark.

  “Something wrong?” the madman called from the other car as it ground to a halt.

  “You lost the Botox,” Bolan told him. “And I lost one, maybe two men.”

  The doors opened and Bolan, the terrorists and their hostages stepped out onto the platform. Frightened people circled the gunmen, sobs filling the air.

  “Go ahead. Open fire. Maybe I’ll be dead before half these people die.”

  Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not my plan.”

  “Just how are you going to do it?” Dark asked.

  “That would be telling,” Bolan answered. He turned and made an arm motion, keeping the people in the last two cars in place. They took the signal and stayed put.

  Dark turned back and pointed to the engineer. “Take them away.”

  “Not going to go through me to get more hostages?” Bolan asked as the driver raced into the first car.

  “No. We can afford a couple extra bodies,” Dark responded.

  Bolan circled the group, watching the train back out of the station from the corner of his eye. The platform was parallel to three others, separated by four sets of train tracks. Slabs of walkway were along each wall, and the roof was amazingly high from the Executioner’s perspective. If he measured it, he’d figure it to be seventy-five, eighty feet high above the tracks, with escalators leading to each platform swooping up to a walkway leading off into a cavernous tunnel to the right. The train had come through a half mile underground into the womb beneath O’Hare’s terminals, and he knew that they were right beneath the complex of buildings where passengers were probably packed.

  The tunnel, though, was empty of the enemy. All he could see were the black-clad figures with Heckler Y Koch G-36 assault rifles, aiming down from the choke points at the top of each set of escalators and stairs. Bolan knew that the men and woman behind those rifles could put a bullet through a target the size of a playing card at one hundred meters with the accurate, well-calibrated combat weapons. The only problem was that as good as they were, Buck Greene and his forces simply didn’t have the ability to take out more than a handful of targets in a second. And after that second was up, the terrorists would react with their own gunfire, slaughtering hostages.

  According to Greene, the National Guard and O’Hare security were keeping the crowds of civilians back from the entrance of the tunnels, themselves beneath the main concourses matriced above. Right now, they were at the very bottom of the airport, only utility tunnels conceivably running below his feet. He felt the empty glass sphere in his pocket and narrowed his eyes.

  Bolan pulled it from his pocket, letting the reflection of the fluorescent lights high above flare dramatically. He looked down at it, then up at Dark.

  “Funny thing, these. They take a particularly hard impact to break,” Bolan said, rolling the ball designed to hold death between his fingers, keeping it hidden enough so that, watching from twenty feet away, they couldn’t tell it was empty. “But they will eventually break.”

  Dark’s eyes narrowed. “He’s bluffing!”

  Bolan glanced up, seeing doubt forming on some faces. Two men, one of whom Bolan recognized as the AHC terrorist Dark had slammed face-first through a window, was staring daggers at their leader. He returned his gaze impassively to the globe in his hand. “There’s enough sera in these spheres to take out a small town, or a company of soldiers.”

  The hostages were terrified, but panic was sweeping across the group of gunmen. Bolan had an ace in his hand, to them, because you couldn’t shoot a virus. Even if they blew away their human shields, eventually they would succumb to whatever horrors the Executioner gripped in his hand. The riflemen that were staring down at them were suddenly of no consequence.

  He kept up the pressure. “And of course, these were designed for airburst. There’s more than enough antisera being shipped in to protect the men aiming those nasty black rifles at you. However, I don’t think we’d have enough to spare on a gunman hiding behind a hostage. I think saving the taxpayers’ money on life-saving drugs for you and a trial would be all for the best.”

  The gunmen were shifting now. Instead of ringing themselves with hostages, they were shoving their captives to form a wall between them and Bolan, as if the human bodies they hid behind could somehow stop a sudden wave of death.

  Dark was standing in front of that wall of humanity, glaring back at his troops as they cowered in retreat. “You’re good, Stone. Very good. But my boys are still behind cover.”

  Bolan looked at the wall behind the terrorists. It was the middle of an arch over tunnels that lead a short way even deeper beyond the platform, though in each entrance a red and blue concrete divider with yellow and black stripes across the top prevented further progress of the trains. He looked back to Dark and shrugged, then lobbed the glass ampule up and over the group of people, sailing it to shatter against the concrete wall behind the terrorists.

  Panicked hostages and militiamen alike dived to the ground or raced forward to escape Bolan’s bluff.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Buck Greene had known that the Executioner was a man of great battle savvy. He was one of the most blooded, experienced soldiers alive. He’d rarely seen the man in action, had only glimpses of his battlefield skills as he’d assisted in repelling assaults on Stony Man Farm from the forces of COMCON, or the hypnotized members of Able Team. It was only now, watching him coordinate Dark and his forces into a corner, and bluff them into blind panic, that he truly understood the skill of the soldier.

  It was one thing just to go blazing insanely into action. But thinking with his guns wasn’t what kept the warrior alive through countless battles with the forces of organized crime and the wet works sections of some of the most ruthless intelligence agencies in the world. Even the savage street cunning of terrorist organizations would have been enough to pin down and slaughter one man who wasn’t a tactical genius. But the genius just wasn’t in combat movement.

  It also came in the form of psychology.

  It was all about the bluff, being someone who was either important and had purpose, or was just completely relaxed and part of the backdrop.

  That bluff was also a weapon that the Executioner had used to slash apart alliances, a deadly cutting tool that wrecked faith and trust and set partners against each other, leaving them off balance for his own deadly Bolan blitz, a final knockout punch that smashed the remnants into useless garbage. Greene knew the after-action reports that detailed these things, reconstructions from law enforcement agencies and data picked up by the Farm’s cybercrew.

  Watching the man at work, though, was like seeing a master sorcerer work his spells. A determined, hostage-holding force was suddenly thrown into disarray by a single, empty glass ball.

  “Take them!” Bolan’s voice growled over the tac radio. “No survivors!”

  The Executioner yelled again. “The third rail’s off! Take cover!”

  To his left, Jager was first on target with his G-36. A 3-round burst drilled into a Fist of God soldier just above his collarbone. From the angle, the slight rise of the high-tech rifle on recoil sent the second and third bullets sheering off the gunman’s jaw and smashing his nose down an
d out the back of his neck in a volcanic blast of gore. It was as though he’d run into an invisible clothesline, his legs kicking out in front of him, his body flopping hard onto his back. The blacksuit on his immediate right fired a longer burst on full automatic, sweeping two targets with an extended blast of 5.56 mm NATO hollowpoints, catching them both in their chests, ripping them through and through.

  The youngest of the blacksuits, John Carmichael, opened up, stepping out in the open and making himself a more attractive target to the killers below. It was a crazy, almost suicidal ploy, but the gunmen below were too frantic and terrified to aim well, especially with hostages jostling past them. Pulling the stock of his G-36 to his shoulder, he fired off three quick shots in rapid succession, semiauto all the one. One bullet, one target, and three of the terrorists crashed to the ground before the blacksuit took a dive to avoid a wave of gunfire flashing up toward him. The easy mark denied, the terrorists realized that they were too far separated for the civilians to make decent human shields.

  Priest and Greene cut in with their HK autorifles, sweeping the gunners as they were disorganized and demoralized. Bodies twisted and jerked, coming under assault from two levels as Bolan had joined the party now, having held his fire until the hostages instinctively threw themselves off the platform and onto the tracks, seeking the safe shelter of the concrete slabs. The terrorists, certain that Bolan’s warning was a trap, and seeing Dark take a flying leap from one walkway to another, were huddled out in the open.

  Cover and concealment weren’t their strong points, and Greene’s rifle ripped out a staccato lesson to the doomed terrorists, bullets smashing and pulverizing flesh and bone. Impacts shattered the tile-covered concrete the Stony Man security chief was crouched behind, but he didn’t allow himself to flinch. As long as enemy fire was hitting something solid and not him, he was going to keep pouring on the heat.

  The last demoralized terrorist hit the ground, blood still pouring from his sieved torso, and Bolan was taking off on foot, reloading his OA-93 assault pistol as he raced along. Greene scanned around, looking for a trench-coat-wearing corpse, and realized that Dark had once again escaped. Greene rose slightly.