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  Suspecting a trick, Bolan waited a full second for the guard to draw the hidden weapon, then he fired again, this time hitting him in the shoulder. The guard staggered, but there was no explosion of blood. The bullet simply flattened into a silvery gray pancake.

  Body armor!

  Quickly changing targets, Bolan fired again, this time at the groin. The same as before—the 9 mm bullet pancaked on the body armor. The guard violently exhaled, his Colt .45 pistol falling from a twitching hand. With a low groan, the guard fell, the Colt tumbling away.

  A brief inspection made sure that the man was simply unconscious and not badly wounded. Satisfied, Bolan started to go when the radio holstered on the guard’s belt crackled with static.

  “Section four, sitrep,” a woman ordered over the small speaker.

  Yanking out the radio, Bolan thumbed the transmit switch and crudely grunted in reply, then continued to make assorted sounds of pain.

  “Sweet Jesus, Hannigan, just give me a goddamn Code 19 if you’re on the crapper,” the woman snarled, clearly disgusted.

  “Nine...teen...” Bolan groaned, then broke into a rough cough.

  “Acknowledged!” she snapped in annoyance, and the radio went silent.

  Turning off the radio, Bolan did a fast sweep across the roof for any more guards, but found only a few lawn chairs next to a cooler full of melting ice cubes and some bottled beer. Great. This was where the staff hid for a beer break. It would be the first place that security would check once they discovered that—

  The fire alarm stopped.

  In the ringing silence, Bolan rushed to the nearest exhaust fan and shot the retaining bolt. It snapped off with a loud crack and went flying away. Yanking off the rotating housing, he pulled the arming pin from a smoke grenade but left the safety lever in place, and threw the bomb down the dark shaft. Bouncing and clattering off the sides of shaft, the military sphere disappeared into the darkness below. Going to the next fan, Bolan did the same thing again.

  The smoke was harmless. However, there was no way to find Ziggy Nine inside the labyrinthine structure, so Bolan would simply have to make the drug lord come to him. Fire was dangerous enough in any factory, but the fumes of a burning meth lab were worse than lethal. Even if you initially survived, the fumes could cause permanent damage to the lungs, so Ziggy would probably be the first person out of the building. If not, there was a police-issue gas mask in the soldier’s backpack, along with a filled NATO syringe of antitoxin, just in case of an emergency.

  Running out of smoke grenades, Bolan sprinted toward the other end of the long building. There were no radio antennas, exhaust fans or anything else sticking up from the roof along this stretch. As he approached, Bolan saw that his guess had been correct. It was a small helipad.

  Just then he heard muffled explosions far below and a new alarm started; a wailing that cut through the clanging bell of the fire alarm like a laser through butter. Bizarrely, he also heard the sound of several chattering machine guns, although what the guards were shooting at Bolan had no idea.

  Without warning, a section of the roof cracked apart and hinged doors slammed aside as an elevator full of people rose into view. There were six big men wearing body armor and carrying M16 assault rifles, along with a short skinny man in a dark business suit, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

  Nice to finally meet you, Ziggy, Bolan thought.

  “Freeze! This is the police!” the soldier yelled. “You’re all under arrest!”

  Snarling a curse, Ziggy dropped into a crouch as the guards ruthlessly cut loose with their assault rifles. With the enemy clearly identified, Bolan answered back with the Beretta and the Desert Eagle, the combined discharges splitting the night.

  Three of the guards fell, their throats spewing geysers of life at the distant stars. But the others kept firing, spraying streams of hot lead blindly into the darkness.

  Even though he was moving while shooting, Bolan got hit twice by the guards, but the 5.56 mm hardball rounds failed to penetrate his NATO body armor. The 9 mm rounds from the Beretta flattened on their armor in turn, but the steel-jacketed .50 rounds from the booming Desert Eagle punched clean through the chest of the remaining guards in crimson ruination.

  “Give it up, Fairweather!” Bolan shouted, reloading.

  “Blow me, pig!” Ziggy snarled as the line of landing lights edging the helipad started brightly glowing and there came the dull throb of a helicopter from above.

  “Kill the son of a bitch!” Ziggy screamed.

  As if in reply, there came the high-pitched whine of an electric Gatling gun spinning to operational speeds.

  Knowing what to expect next, Bolan took refuge behind a squat air-conditioning unit. A split second later a thundering barrage of high-velocity bullets slammed into the roof where he had just been standing. A ricochet slammed into the middle of his back and Bolan was galvanized motionless for a moment, nearly blind from the unexpected burst of incalculable pain.

  As he struggled to recover, the Gatling gun ceased firing and a Black Hawk helicopter landed on the helipad in a hurricane of hot air and exhaust fumes.

  Ducking under the spinning turbo blades, Ziggy rushed forward to yank open the side hatch.

  In a surge of adrenaline, Bolan broke cover and charged forward. “Freeze!” he bellowed, brandishing the Desert Eagle.

  Laughing in reply, Ziggy started to close the hatch.

  With no other course available, Bolan threw the empty Beretta with all of his strength. It landed on the track and the hatch jammed in place, still half open.

  “Son of a... Take off!” Ziggy yelled, struggling to close the hatch. “Now! Take off right fucking now!”

  His face unseen inside a mirrored helmet, the pilot nodded in reply and the engines revved to full power.

  The aircraft started to lift off the roof when Bolan reached in through the partially open hatch and grabbed Ziggy by the throat. Horrified, the man pulled out a 9 mm Glock pistol and fired at point-blank range. The Executioner managed to turn just in time, the slug glancing off his body armor, but the impact knocked the air from his lungs.

  The Black Hawk was still rising and now the pilot angled the helicopter to try to dump Bolan out. As it tilted, the soldier smacked aside the Glock and grabbed Ziggy by the arm.

  “If I go, you’re coming with me!” he snarled, trying to get a leg inside the aircraft.

  Wild eyed, Ziggy screamed in terror, his hands grabbing at anything for purchase. His fingers slipped off a leather seat, and then he jerked open the door to a refrigerated liquor cabinet and a bottle of vodka fell out to roll away. In a panic, Ziggy clawed at a dangling seat belt and finally got it firmly in his grasp.

  Now that the drug lord was anchored, Bolan used Ziggy as a ladder to try to climb on board.

  Realizing his mistake, the pilot quickly leveled out the Black Hawk, then accelerated toward the water tower.

  As the structure loomed, Bolan exerted his full strength and hauled himself into the helicopter a split second before the roof of the wooden vat noisily scraped along the side of the aircraft.

  “Nice try,” Bolan growled, drawing the Colt and firing. The Beretta was slammed free from the track, spinning away into the night, and the hatch slammed shut.

  “Are you insane?” Ziggy demanded, rummaging underneath one of the leather seats.

  As the drug lord pulled out a revolver, Bolan smacked the weapon out of his grip with the barrel of the Desert Eagle.

  “No more games, Fairweather,” Bolan rumbled, pressing the hot barrel of the gun against the man’s temple.

  Ziggy cried out as the steel sizzled on his flesh. “Whatever you want, it’s yours!” he blurted. “You got no idea how rich I am! Don’t kill me. Anything you want is yours! Girls, gold, just name it!”

  “Keep flying on t
hese coordinates,” Bolan commanded, passing a folded slip of paper to the pilot. “And if you say anything on the radio, anything at all, your boss dies.”

  Accepting the paper, the pilot merely grunted and leveled out the flight path of the speeding aircraft.

  Shoving the drug lord into a seat, Bolan sat opposite the man and said nothing, letting the tension build.

  “Okay, what’s the deal?” Ziggy said slowly, testing each word as if it were a splintery wooden board. “You ain’t no cop—that’s obvious, right?”

  Bolan waited a moment before giving a small nod.

  “Thought so,” Ziggy said. “So is this a kidnapping, revenge or do you want information?”

  “Everybody says you’re smart,” Bolan said. “Here’s the deal. You tell me what I want to know...then you go away and retire someplace very far away.”

  “Retire!” Ziggy gasped. “Me?”

  “Either that, or buy a coffin,” Bolan said. “I really don’t care which it is. Your choice.”

  A long minute passed with Ziggy breathing hard.

  “Deal,” he muttered. “You got me once, which means you can get me again.”

  “Yeah, I can.”

  “Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

  Bolan started to reply when he saw the man’s face go blank. Honed in a thousand firefights, his combat instincts flared and Bolan twisted with the Desert Eagle blazing.

  The pilot gave a high-pitched scream as the .50-caliber slug slammed a derringer out of his hand, a finger flying away with the tumbling weapon. As the pilot grabbed his hand, blood gushed from the ragged stump to splash across the control console. In response, the helicopter veered to the side, the engines revving madly.

  Without turning, Bolan grabbed Ziggy by the throat and shook him hard, but never took his eyes off the cursing pilot. “Keep flying and you live,” Bolan declared.

  “But my finger...” the pilot yelled, trying to fly with one hand, the other tucked under a blood-smeared arm.

  As the tilt of the helicopter took on a more pronounced angle, Bolan reluctantly looked around to find the finger lying on a rubber floor mat. Picking it up, he yanked open the liquor cabinet and tucked it into a plastic tray of crushed ice.

  “That’ll keep it fresh for an hour,” he said. “So land at the nearest hospital. Got an ETA?”

  “Fi-fifteen minutes,” the pilot spluttered, struggling to operate the control stick. “But I can’t land with just one hand.”

  “I’ll help...when the time comes,” Bolan said, turning his gaze back upon Ziggy. “As for you...”

  “Thought we had a deal,” he said nervously.

  “We do,” Bolan replied, leaning back in the comfortable leather seat. “Start off by telling me how you escaped from prison so fast.”

  Ziggy wet his lips. “Well, you see...” he began with a crooked smile.

  Bolan raised the Desert Eagle. “One lie and you die,” he stated bluntly.

  Hunched low in the leather seat, Ziggy stared at Bolan with open hatred. “Fine. How much detail do you want?”

  “Everything,” Bolan said. “Tell me everything.”

  “Well, there was this big-ass Black Hawk helicopter....”

  Chapter 4

  Tucson, Arizona

  A clatter of utensils and plates filled the air of the prison dining hall, along with the hushed murmur of a thousand low conversations.

  “What am I still doing in here?” David Styers muttered under his breath.

  “Did you just speak without permission, convict?” a nearby guard growled, a hand going to the electric-shock baton hanging at his side.

  “No, sir!” Styers said hastily, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. “Never, sir!”

  Some of the older prisoners chuckled at his prompt response.

  “Keep it that way, convict,” the guard snarled, tapping the baton.

  Eyeing the baton, Styers said nothing in reply. He’d heard that, many years ago, a prisoner had grabbed a baton to use on a guard. For some unknown reason, the device had violently exploded, blowing off his hand. Nobody had tried again since then.

  As the guard walked away, somebody at a nearby table softly meowed. Impotent rage filled Styers at the lack of respect, and he flushed in embarrassment. At the sight, everybody at the table silently laughed.

  A wild rush of emotions flooded the man and Styers burned to shout at everybody it wasn’t his fault. But bitter experience had taught him that was a bad idea. Not only would nobody believe him, but the beating he’d receive from the guards would be swift and merciless.

  Dimly, a small part of his mind chided Styers that he had never showed anybody mercy, even when they’d begged. But he dismissed that fleeting revelation as just a lingering ghost of his foolish childhood. There was no God, no heaven, no hell, no right, no wrong. Merely pleasure and pain.

  The dining hall of FCC Tucson was huge, large enough to hold all 2,000 prisoners in case of a natural disaster. The orderly rows of steel tables were welded to the rebar buried under the concrete floor, the soft plastic chairs were too pliant to use as bludgeons, and the cheap aluminum plates and cups too flimsy to sharpen into shivs, prisoner-made knives.

  Even the aluminum sporks—there were no forks or knives—were too lightweight to use for anything dangerous without first melting them down in an industrial forge. On top of which, each spork was numbered and counted after every meal. If any went missing from the inventory, every prisoner and cell got thoroughly searched. Plus, until it was found, the prisoners ate with their bare hands. So sayeth the lord, more commonly known as the warden.

  A maximum-security facility, all of the steel doors locked from the outside, the windows were too small to crawl through and were made of Lexan plastic capable of resisting a .50 rifle round. There were no fire exits.

  Pairs of guards in full combat armor and helmets patrolled the catwalk above the dining area, carrying bulky Thompson machine guns. A lot of the newcomers thought it odd that the guards would carry such old-fashioned weapons. That was, until they saw the mandatory demonstration.

  The Thompson was equipped with a computerized laser pointer. Wherever the red dot of the laser was, that was exactly and precisely where the bullets would strike. It was impossible for a guard to miss. Shuffling along the line of prisoners, David Styers could feel the eyes of the other prisoners watching his every move. Most were just curious. Anything new was interesting. But a few of the more hulking prisoners looked at the slim man as if he was a fresh item on the menu yet untasted.

  I’m a mass murderer! You should all fear me! Styers silently screamed at them, his temples throbbing. The FBI certainly had. When they’d finally tracked him down, there had been dozens of police cars, helicopters and snipers all over the place.

  Running into a college, Styers had killed a dozen people as a diversion, but the Feebs had been relentless. They’d ignored the dead and the dying, leaving them to the mercy of the police and paramedics following close behind. The FBI had concentrated on getting him at any cost.

  At first it was tranquilizer darts, but when those failed, out came the handguns. The noise of the discharged weapons had echoed inside the college library, ringing like holiday bells to overwhelm the screams of the terrified people Styers had run past, stabbing some, shooting others. What fun! If it hadn’t been for the body armor he’d stolen from the crippled soldier, Styers would have died then and there.

  Which would have been preferable, Styers mentally raged, shuffling along the line. A dozen people. He had killed a dozen people at the college just that day alone.

  But when the FBI sniper wounded him in the leg, Styers had shot back blindly and killed a kitten sitting on a windowsill. Big deal. They were just rats that purred. He’d slaughtered dozens of them with a hammer as a child befo
re he’d switched to the homeless. But no, shoot a fluffy kitten as an adult, and suddenly everybody starts meowing at the mere mention of his name.

  Was that his legacy? Was he going to be remembered, not as a towering monster, a terror in the night, but as a punch line? It was almost too much to bear.

  “What’ll ya have?”

  With a start, Styers awoke from his reverie.

  Standing behind the long row of steam tables, the trustees in aprons and hairnets were dutifully ladling out strictly measured portions of some kind of food-like substance with the dull regularity of robots. The smell was revolting, but there was nothing else to eat in this living hell.

  “I said, what’ll ya have?” asked a bald prisoner in a stained apron. The words were spoken as if he said those exact words a million times a day.

  “Anything good?” Styers asked hopefully, looking over the display of steaming meats and vegetables with obvious dismay.

  “The potatoes are rather Castle,” the bald man said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

  Icy clarity shot through Styers at that word. He almost smiled but managed to stop himself just in time. “Queen’s pawn to queen four,” he replied in a hushed voice.

  Nodding, the bald man slapped a hot dog onto the plate, followed by a heaping mound of potatoes. Then he covertly sprinkled a white powder onto the potatoes before ladling hot brown gravy over everything.

  “Next! What’ll ya have?” he asked, turning to serve the next man.

  Almost bursting with excitement, Styers rushed off with the tray of food, barely able to contain himself. Finding an empty table, he sat and stared at the potatoes like a gypsy trying to commune with the spirit world. Then he grabbed a spork and dug in, stuffing the food into his mouth.

  Surprisingly, the potatoes and gravy were rather good, although with a slight metallic taste. Not sure if that was normal or something special just for him, Styers continued eating until the world seemed to slow down and voices muted.

  Groggily, he looked around. Everything was blurry, as if he was underwater, and by now Styers could only hear weird gobbling sounds. A cold was seeping into his limbs, spreading out from his stomach, and he eagerly went back to the food and tried to shovel more into his mouth.