Battle Cry Read online

  Bolan passed through the metal detector, raised his arms for an up-and-down pass with a handheld security wand, then waited for his shoes and carry-on to clear the X-ray machine. No weapons there, and nothing to excite the watchers even if they sought a closer look, but he was passed on without opening his bag.

  The rest came down to waiting at the designated gate until his flight was called, reading a travel guide to Scotland that he bought at Hudson News. A detailed map of Glasgow was included.

  By the time a disembodied voice announced the start of boarding for his flight, Bolan was more than ready to be on his way. A patient man by any standard, trained to lie in wait for days behind a sniper scope if need be, he still chafed inside at the inevitable downtime between his acceptance of a mission and the moment when he hit the ground running, embarking on yet another gamble with the Reaper.

  Every time he took a job from Brognola, his life was on the line. Bolan accepted that, but didn’t like to sit around and think about it, when he could be taking action to resolve the issue on his own terms, carrying the battle to his enemies.

  Rising to shuffle forward with the other passengers, when his row was called to board, Bolan looked forward to an opportunity for sleeping on the flight. Once he arrived, there might be no rest until he was finished with his job.

  Or until the job had finished him.

  The thought was there and gone, dismissed as unproductive and defeatist. Bolan always planned to win and to survive. Someday, when he ran out of time like every other human on the planet, he would meet his fate with eyes wide open, fighting back against the darkness.

  And he damn sure wouldn’t go alone.

  Chapter 4

  Glasgow: Present day, 4:36 a.m.

  Bolan had a split second to consider his options, peering at the redhead belted in behind the wheel of a tiny Ford Ka that looked as if it had been kicked in the back end by a giant. He could either squeeze into the shotgun seat, or run for it and hope Boyle’s shooters lost him in the dark.

  He squeezed, she nodded and the little car peeled out with squealing tires.

  “We won’t have long,” she said, working the clutch and five-speed shift as if she knew her way around a race track.

  Bolan checked his wing mirror and saw that she was right. Headlights were lancing out of Boyle’s driveway and swinging after them in hot pursuit. Just one car followed them, likely with three to five men packed inside it, while the rest scrambled to clean up Frankie’s house before the law arrived.

  “You always pick up strangers in the middle of a firefight?” Bolan asked her, cutting to the other chase.

  “Depends,” she answered with an unexpected smile. “Call it a whim.”

  “Whims can be dangerous,” he said.

  “You plan to shoot me, then?”

  “Depends,” he echoed her. “I have to see whose side you’re on.”

  “My own,” she said. “How’s that?”

  “It doesn’t tell me much,” Bolan replied.

  “Call it a spin on the old fable, then,” she said. “This time, the damsel saves the bad man in distress.”

  He flicked another glance at the wing mirror and said, “It works for me, except they’re breathing down our necks right now.”

  “‘O ye of little faith,’” she said, and smiled again, shifting the Ka’s transmission into fifth for greater speed.

  That gave the little car a boost, but they could only go so fast with the Duratec 1.6-liter engine under its hood. They had some kind of full-sized muscle car pursuing them, its occupants likely prepared to open fire as soon as they were close enough to aim reliably, and Bolan didn’t have to ask if there was any body armor on the Ka.

  “Hang on!” his savior warned, downshifting half a second later as they snarled into a sudden left-hand turn. She clearly meant to prove that what her compact lacked in power, it made up in handling.

  Bolan clenched his teeth, hung on and wished her well. He thought about his safety harness, just in case they hit something or someone, but decided not to use it. If they had to stop and fight, he didn’t want to waste an extra microsecond fumbling with an unfamiliar seat belt, when he could be sighting on his would-be killers with the Spectre SMG.

  Bolan was simultaneously checking out the street in front of them, watching the mirror, thinking through the moves he’d have to make if they were stopped, and watching out for landmarks to stay oriented with the street map he had memorized. He knew they were headed north when he got in the Ka, then west after the first turn, but it started getting hectic after that. They stayed with residential streets, but Bolan thought that they were headed in the general direction of the River Clyde.

  For what? Hoping to lose their trackers in a maze of byways? Or to find a place where they could stand and fight?

  He took a closer look at the woman who had rescued him. Her face was set in grim determination, and if he had to guess, he’d say that she was every inch a pro.

  So much for whimsy and coincidence.

  Bolan had to ask himself what kind of pro she was, who she was working for, and how she’d happened to be passing Frankie Boyle’s house at the very moment when he needed help.

  If help was even what she had in mind.

  Forget about the smile that could disguise a plan to kill him. But if that was all she wanted, why play out the whole charade to start with? She could just as easily have shot him on the street—or spared herself the whole routine by letting Boyle’s men do the dirty work. And would a gutter thug like Boyle even have a female hitter on his crew?

  Unlikely, but it wouldn’t be the strangest thing the Executioner had seen.

  Not by a long kill shot.

  Wondering if he would have to kill the woman while they sped along at sixty-something miles per hour in her little clown car, thinking that the crash would likely kill him, Bolan watched his mirror, watched her hands and watched the road, hoping his wild ride through the night was nearly done.

  “THERE’S TWO OF ’EM,” Des Buchan said, pushing the BMW 3 Series Saloon to catch the fleeing midget car.

  “Ya reckon? I thought it was drivin’ by itsel’,” Roddy Lauder said, laying on the scorn.

  His driver winced. Started to say, “I just meant—”

  “Shoosh and watch the feckin’ road, will ya?” To the others, in the backseat, Lauder snapped, “And have your shooters ready!”

  Graeme Godley and Harry Baxter didn’t answer. They knew better than to question Lauder when he was in a foul mood, and the job was simple anyhow. Run down the gunner who had shot up Boyle’s place, along with whoever had plucked him off the street outside, and do them proper. Boyle hadn’t asked for tokens this time, since the cops would be in every nook and cranny any minute, but Lauder knew there was a camera in the BMW’s glove box he could use to snap some pictures when they’d finished.

  Something for the old scrapbook.

  The fella they were chasing had an automatic weapon, and it wouldn’t do to overlook the driver at a time like this. Say one more gun, at least, and even with the odds at two-to-one against them, they were dangerous. Just look at what the one alone had done to Boyle’s bodyguards before the reinforcements sorted him.

  Except, they hadn’t sorted him, had they? No. They’d let him skip.

  An error Roddy Lauder and his boys were duty-bound to fix before they showed their faces around the boss again.

  Should be no problem there, with the equipment they were packing. Lauder had a Mossberg pump-action shotgun cut down to basics, loaded with six rounds of No. 1 buckshot and his pockets rattling with spares. His backup was a SIG-Sauer P-239 chambered in .357 SIG, because he liked the kick and bang.

  Godley and Baxter both had TEC-9 pistols from the States that had been modified to fire full-au
tomatic by a Glasgow gunsmith, after Boyle bought a shipment of them from a fella who was cozy with the mafia in New York. Cheaper than MAC-10s by a long chalk, they could unload their thirty-two rounds in a couple of seconds and nail any bastard unlucky enough to be standing downrange.

  Des Buchan had only a pistol, he knew, but it was a corker, an Israeli Desert Eagle that weighed in around five pounds when it was loaded, and no wonder Des was always bitching about problems with his back, the way his holster dragged one shoulder out of line. Lauder had seen him shoot the damn thing once, and reckoned it could knock the little Ka that they were chasing off the bloody road, all by itself.

  But all the hardware in the world wouldn’t accomplish anything unless they caught the intruders they were chasing. Going back to Boyle empty-handed wasn’t an option. In fact, they might as well just park the BMW and shoot one another if they couldn’t bag their men.

  Boyle wouldn’t let them off that easy, if they failed.

  “Faster!” he snapped at Buchan. “You’re drivin’ like a scaredy-cat.”

  “The hell!” Buchan answered, but he put it on the floor and milked a few more miles per hour from the racing engine.

  “Makin’ for the Clyde, are they?” Godley asked from the back.

  “I don’t know what they’re thinkin’,” Lauder said. “Just catch ’em, right quick!”

  “This thing don’t fly,” Buchan answered back.

  “Maybe we need another pilot, then.”

  That brought a muttered curse and yet another burst of speed, closing the gap between their BMW and the Ka. He had to give the other driver credit, though, for whipping turns each time they gained a bit.

  Wherever they were running to, Lauder was sticking to them to the bloody end.

  And bloody it would damn well be.

  THE KA WHIPPED through another squealing turn, and when they straightened out again Bolan inquired, “Is there a destination in our future?”

  “Almost there,” the lady said.

  He didn’t press it. Shifting slightly in his seat, the soldier kept the Spectre’s muzzle pointed at the floorboard but relaxed his right knee, clearing up his field of fire. He’d turned the SMG around for left-hand firing when he got into the car, accommodating the realities of right-hand drive, but still hoped that he wouldn’t have to kill the woman where she sat. Bolan recalled the first time he’d been forced to stop a female killer with a bullet, half a world away from where he sat, and in another lifetime. If he never had to make that choice again, it would be too damned soon.

  So he hung on and waited, checking out the chase car’s progress in his mirror, making sure the redhead didn’t let her hands stray from the steering wheel and gearshift. If she reached under her jacket, or went groping for her bag…

  “And here we are,” she said. But showed no sign of slowing, much less stopping, as they made another turn and roared into a short block lined with fish markets and smallish seafood restaurants.

  Some kind of wharf lay dead ahead, and for a second Bolan thought she meant to drive out there, the riverside equivalent of a box canyon, but the Ka’s headlights revealed a pair of heavy metal stanchions that blocked vehicle access to the pier.

  Instead of charging straight ahead, the woman cut another sharp right-hand turn and raced along the riverfront for about a hundred yards. There were a few boats moored on Bolan’s side, all dark and seemingly deserted, but he concentrated on his mirror and saw headlights coming after them again, switching to high beams.

  The shooters wanted light to work by when they opened up.

  Two hundred yards ahead, Bolan saw empty darkness and assumed that they were running out of road. He didn’t know if it would mean another right-hand turn, putting the river at their backs and running back toward town, or if the option was a launch into black water. Bolan didn’t fancy going for a swim, and flicked a leftward glance to verify that he could reach the handle on his door, and that it was still unlocked.

  “Don’t worry,” the lady said. “I’m not taking you to feed the water kelpies.”

  “Good to know,” Bolan replied, without a clue to what she meant.

  “I’d hoped to lose them, but they’re sticky,” she continued. “Are you halfway decent with that shooter?”

  “Halfway,” he allowed.

  “Let’s see, then.”

  As she spoke, the redhead revved the engine, then slammed on the brake and spun her steering wheel hard to the left. The Ka spun through a dizzying 180, various components making noises they were never meant to utter, and the car wound up facing back the way they’d come, with the chase car’s high beams glaring into Bolan’s face.

  “Best to get out now,” she advised him, sounding almost casual about it. “Just in case they ram us.”

  She took time to loop the long strap of her purse over a shoulder, while she drew a semiauto pistol from a holster Bolan hadn’t seen. He made it for a Glock, but couldn’t guess the caliber or model as she bailed out of the Ka.

  Bolan had no bag to retrieve, but thought about his other hardware in the hired car he had left behind. Some of it might have come in handy, but it was far beyond his reach. There was a chance he’d never get it back, even if he survived the next few minutes, but he put that out of mind and focused on the task at hand.

  Survival.

  The Spectre’s maximum effective range was listed as one hundred yards, and while the weapon’s Parabellum rounds could kill beyond that distance, no one in his or her right mind ever tried to score hits with an SMG over the full length of a football field. Cut that by half, and you’d be lucky if one bullet from a 12-round burst did any lasting damage to a man-sized target. Submachine guns were intended to fire pistol ammunition, and most shoot-outs using handguns happened at a range of thirty feet or less.

  So Bolan waited, crouched behind a handy garbage bin, tracking with the gun’s iron sights. The high beams couldn’t blind him from here, unless the speeding car swerved toward his hiding place. In which case he had bigger problems than the glare of headlights.

  Fifty feet and closing. Almost there.

  He heard the redhead’s pistol crack, a classic double-tap, and still he waited. Gave them five more yards, imagining the driver’s face behind that tinted windshield glass, before he let the Spectre rip.

  “THEY’RE DONE NOW,” Des Buchan said, and cackled with delight.

  “They’re not done if they’re breathin’,” Roddy Lauder contradicted him. “Just get us there, an’ don’t go smashin’ into their toy car.”

  He thumbed off the Mossberg’s safety and powered down his window, just in case he got a chance to pot one of the people he was gunning for off to the riverside. It had surprised him when the car that they’d been chasing made a racing turn and faced back toward them, then stopped dead, its driver and the shooter bailing out, but he supposed they’d seen the writing on the wall.

  Nowhere to run, but they could still peel off and try to hide.

  That made it awkward, with the warehouses along the riverfront. They could be all night checking shadows, looking for the pricks who’d shot up Boyle’s house, and Lauder knew that workmen started showing up along the river prior to sunrise. Still, his orders had been clear. He couldn’t go back to the boss without a pair of scalps to show for it.

  He was about to caution Buchan, tell him to slow it down, when muzzle-flashes winked in front of them on either side, and someone hit the windshield with a sledgehammer. Buchan made a raspy hawking sound, as something warm and wet spattered the right-hand side of Lauder’s face. The salty taste of blood was in his mouth and nearly made him gag, recoiling from the faceless corpse beside him, in the BMW’s driver’s seat.

  “Jaysus!” someone behind him blurted, maybe Graeme Godley, then the BMW swerved off to the left, with one of Buchan�
�s arms stuck through the steering wheel, his weight dragging it over as he slumped toward Lauder, spilling blood and muck.

  “Jump clear!” Lauder barked, clawing at his door handle, hoping Baxter and Godley had the sense to bail before Buchan ran them off the dock and out into the Clyde. Somehow, he kept the Mossberg as he tumbled from the car, wrenching his shoulder on impact and cursing at the pain.

  Baxter struck pavement several yards beyond, while Lauder lurched and staggered to his feet. He heard the other man’s TEC-9 clatter on the blacktop, Baxter bleating, then it was a rush to find the nearest cover he could manage before someone cut him down. Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.

  Still, he had to pause and glance back when he heard the BMW strike some solid object, crunching in the bumper and the grille. Against all odds, it hadn’t gone into the drink, but hit one of the tall, tarred posts that marked the river’s edge where boats were moored. Lauder had time to see Godley leap out of the car, running almost before his feet touched down, then gunfire crackled from the shadows and he dived headlong behind a steel cargo container streaked with rust.

  Not perfect, but the bullets couldn’t reach him there, until the shooters moved around to get a better angle on him. In the meantime, Lauder heard one of the friendly TEC-9s stutter, helping to distract the enemy and maybe even score a fluky hit, if he was lucky.

  Embarrassed at hiding and anxious to get in the fight, Lauder clutched his shotgun in a white-knuckle grip and edged forward, crouching for another moment in relative safety and steeling his nerve before he leaned out for a look at the battleground.

  Nothing in sight from that point, but he counted the flashes from four different guns, knew his boys were still in it and raring to go. If he didn’t jump in pretty soon, they’d be spreading the story all over by this time tomorrow. Or else they’d be dead, and him with them.