Terrorist Dispatch (Executioner) Read online

  He didn’t rush the climb, pausing below each landing on the way to watch and listen for lookouts. Eleven floors, twenty-two zigzag flights, and Bolan guessed that any sentries would be posted at the top, or in a pinch on ten. Melnyk would not want neighbors blundering into his goons and getting spooked, calling the management or the police to register complaints.

  And speaking of the cops, he knew they would be on their way to Melnyk’s place, sooner or later. It was only natural, when one godfather bit the bullet, for detectives to interrogate his rivals. Whether they’d show up tonight or sometime in the week ahead was anybody’s guess, but Bolan wanted to be done with this part of his job and gone before they came sniffing around.

  Coming up on the tenth floor, Bolan heard the sounds of muffled conversation from above. He paused, made sure the Colt was ready and proceeded, one step at a time. As soon as he saw feet and legs, he slowed, then mounted two more risers, until he was looking at the first soldier’s belt buckle.

  Close enough.

  He aimed and fired one nearly silent shot, gutting his faceless enemy, then rushed the others, and to hell with stealth. Speed mattered now, and making each shot count.

  Bolan caught the second sentry with a 5.56 mm mangler to the chest, slamming him back against a concrete wall and smearing it with bright blood from the exit wound. Dying before he fell, the shooter still squeezed off a wild burst from his MP-5, sending a storm of deadly ricochets past Bolan, crackling down the stairwell.

  The Executioner saw the SMG kick loose from dying fingers, so he concentrated on the third and final sentry on the staircase. The gunner was retreating toward a metal fire door, brandishing a Mini-Uzi, but he hadn’t fired it yet, maybe afraid of wounding his companions. As they fell, he lost that last restraint and brought his weapon into line with Bolan’s face.

  Too late.

  The AR-15 cracked out two more shots, the furthest thing from silent now, and dropped Bolan’s last target where he stood. The guy fell like a sack of dirty laundry, and his Mini-Uzi clattered down the stairs past Bolan, bouncing as it went. Instead of grabbing for it, Bolan let it go, already focused on the door three men had sacrificed themselves to guard.

  * * *

  DIMO LEVYTSKY WAS on his walkie-talkie, shouting for the staircase sentries, none of whom were answering. He cursed them seven ways from Sunday, but it did no good. The gunfire had not lasted long, but the gangster liked the silence even less.

  It told him something had to be desperately wrong.

  Not cops. He knew that much instinctively. American police came in with warrants. They would have roused the building’s super, commandeered the elevator and arrived in style, though almost certainly with people on the stairs, as well.

  Hitting the stairs alone meant something else, and Levytsky knew it had to be bad news.

  He’d left Melnyk with most of his gunners around him, all armed with Kalashnikov civilian models, modified to fire full-auto by an outlaw gunsmith in the Bronx. They would not hesitate to kill—or die—for their godfather when the enemy revealed himself.

  One enemy? Or was an army coming up the fire stairs, drawing closer by the second?

  Levytsky led his most trusted soldiers to the fire door, kept unlocked to satisfy the city fire marshals who dropped by unexpectedly, writing citations if they noted violations of their rules. He knew the staircase sentries should have checked in via radio by now, if they had beaten back intruders from below. Their silence told him they were either dead, or else so badly wounded that they could not warn their comrades on the penthouse level.

  Call it three men down.

  When they had nearly reached the fire door, Levytsky stopped and sent three men ahead. “Find out what’s happening,” he ordered. “Use your freaking radios, no matter what.”

  The point men reached the door, which had no window to permit a view of the descending stairs. It opened blind onto the landing, with a sign that warned escaping residents to check the door for heat before they opened it, perhaps admitting flames.

  Melnyk’s second in command stood watching, gripping an MP-5K machine pistol, while his point men opened the door and pushed it back, fluorescent light spilling across the threshold from the stairwell. For a second, Levytsky thought the landing might be clear, but then he heard the crack of a rifle, followed by two more, and his point men were taken out of play, dropping hard to the floor before they could return fire.

  Two gunners edged forward, firing through the open doorway, burning up their magazines without a clear target in sight. Levytsky left them to it, turning on his heel with a curt order to three other men, and raced back toward where he’d left the boss.

  * * *

  BOLAN HAD PAUSED deliberately on the final landing, well aware that gunfire in the stairwell would have roused the penthouse occupants, as well as any tenants on at least a couple of the floors below. He couldn’t guess how many sleepy, frightened hands were clutching telephones and dialing 911, but after this night’s bloody work, he knew police would be ready to roll, roughly a mile from the Ninth Precinct to Szold Place, maybe six minutes with their lights and sirens at that time of morning, with the traffic thinner than it ever was in prime time.

  Still he waited, knowing that a leap beyond the fire door, into waiting guns, was tantamount to suicide.

  It didn’t take the shooters long to get their marching orders. Bolan couldn’t see them, but he heard them coming. When the knob turned, he was ready, crouched below the line of sight for any man of average size. He glimpsed one scowling face and put a bullet through it, followed with a kick that slammed the heavy metal door back into two more men and sent them reeling from the impact, struggling to keep their balance. That was hopeless as he shot them both, a single round for each that sent them sprawling, then brushed past the door in search of other targets.

  Two were facing him with submachine guns, others running down the short hallway, escaping toward the penthouse entrance. Bolan dropped and rolled, the rounds from their SMGs rattling the door behind him, ripping through its outer layer, then dropping down into the hollow core designed to offer three hours’ protection against raging flames.

  Bolan started rapid-firing when he hit the floor, still rolling, thankful that the soldiers hadn’t bothered donning Kevlar. They skittered through a jerky little dance, one crumpling to his knees, the other toppling over backward, triggering a last long burst into the hallway’s thin acoustic ceiling panels.

  Still on the floor, Bolan squeezed off a parting shot at the retreating soldiers, nailed one in the lower back, and sent him sprawling as the others cleared the penthouse entryway and slammed the door behind them. When he rose and moved in that direction, the last guy he’d clipped was moaning, mouthing words that had to be profanity, and straining to retrieve a TEC-9 stuttergun he’d dropped when he went down.

  It was beyond his reach, and since his legs no longer functioned, he was getting nowhere fast. Bolan relieved him of frustration with a mercy round through the head and turned to face the door that shielded Stepan Melnyk and the last of his defenders.

  Mounted over it, a CCTV camera peered at Bolan from on high. He took it out with one more round, blinding his enemies inside the high-rise pad, and thought about the problem that confronted him.

  His time was running out. Police would soon be on the scene in force, and he could only guess how many guns were waiting for him in the penthouse proper. Not the bravest thugs in town, the way they’d turned and bolted while their comrades died, but they would fight like any other cornered rats when it came down to that.

  The only thing that Bolan had on his side now was shock and awe.

  * * *

  “WHAT THE HELL’S he waiting for?” Melnyk asked no one in particular.

  “Maybe they got him,” someone answered.

  “Bullshit! Don’t you think th
ey’d tell us, so we could get out of here before the police show?”

  “Maybe they got each other,” someone else suggested.

  “Great,” Melnyk replied. “Why don’t you go out there and check?”

  “Well, I—”

  “It’s not a question! I said—”

  But before he could repeat the order, Melnyk had to duck and cover, as rapid-firing shotgun blasts began to rip the place apart. They punched holes in the wall the size of dinner plates, six feet or so apart, spraying the room with buckshot, shattered wood and drywall as his men ducked and scurried for whatever cover they could find.

  Melnyk himself was busy scrambling, so he didn’t count the blasts. What difference did it make? The place was trashed already, his damage deposit shot all to hell, and all he could think of was finding a safe place to hide. The best he could do was a sectional sofa, twelve feet of leather and heavy construction, but the furthest thing on Earth from being bulletproof.

  Diving across the sofa’s back, he landed on Dimo Levytsky, there ahead of him, and drove the wind out of his chief lieutenant’s lungs. Melnyk rolled off his gasping second in command and sneered at him. “Seems like what you’re really good at in a fight is running, Dimo.”

  “Hey, Boss, I—”

  “Shut up and help the others stop this son of a bitch before he kills us all!”

  “Okay. Sure thing.”

  Levytsky was rising when a final shotgun blast took out the door. There was no way that Melnyk could mistake the sound of its wood splintering. From where he lay, he couldn’t see his enemy approaching, but the shotgun switched off for some military-rifle pop-pop-popping at his men while they fired back, some of them crying out as they were hit.

  Melnyk’s second in command had recoiled when the door blew inward, quailing in the face of close-range hostile fire, but his boss wasn’t letting him get off that easily. He jammed his pistol under his lieutenant’s jaw, grinding the muzzle into him and gritted, “If you want to hide, you’re no damn good to me. Get up and fight, or say g’bye right now.”

  “I’m going, Boss. I just—”

  A sharp blow with the pistol shut him up and got him moving, scrabbling along the sofa’s length on hands and knees, calling in Ukrainian to the others as he went. One of the soldiers who had answered Levytsky’s call sped past him, ran into a bullet, did a little stutter step and fell beside Melnyk, his MP-5 creasing the godfather’s scalp as it dropped. Melynk fired off a blue streak of curses, then clutched at the weapon with one hand, the other stuffing his pistol back under his belt.

  Better.

  If nothing else, at least now he could try to take some of his faceless adversaries with him when he died.

  * * *

  BOLAN WISHED HE had grenades, but he was making do with what he had. Clearing the penthouse doorway, once he’d blown it open with a round from his 12-gauge, Bolan dropped the Remington and switched back to the Colt AR-15. He’d swapped out magazines before he started using buckshot on the walls, ditching one partly empty mag in favor of a full 30-round load. It would be smarter, safer, he’d decided, than reloading in the midst of close combat, when cover might be sparse to nonexistent.

  And somehow, against all odds, it seemed that he had caught them unprepared.

  The hostiles knew that he was closing in, but watching as half a dozen of their comrades died, combined with the barrage of shotgun fire, had clearly dulled whatever fighting edge they’d once possessed. Only one soldier waited for him in the parlor, on his feet, wearing a battle face, and even he was slow enough that Bolan dropped him with a double-tap before he managed to get off a single shot.

  That broke the spell, though, and another six or seven weapons opened up at once, all firing blind from cover in the living room or thrust around the corner of a doorway leading to the kitchen. Bullets drilled the walls and ceiling, shattered lamps and sent expensive-looking artwork tumbling to the floor.

  So far, no lucky hits.

  Bolan dived toward a massive recliner, rolled on past it as a couple of his adversaries sighted in. The Executioner came out on the other side, marking their forms and muzzle flashes, putting down two more. He couldn’t say if they were dead or only wounded, but the way they’d fallen told him they were out of action for a while, at least.

  Motion was life, and Bolan kept it going, rolling past the recliner to a heavy wooden coffee table, flipping it onto one edge and wriggling in behind it as a burst of Parabellum rounds came close enough to pepper him with splinters of mahogany. They stung, but didn’t slow him as Bolan drew the Glock from shoulder leather with his left hand, awkward but still doable while clinging to the AR-15 with his right.

  Time for another round of shock and awe.

  He burst from cover, firing both weapons simultaneously, taking down a pair of shooters who had ceded common sense to wishful thinking, leaving cover prematurely. Next, he saw Dimo Levytsky rising with an MP-5K submachine gun, cracked his Adam’s apple with a .40 S&W round and watched him drop back out of sight behind a massive sofa.

  Two guys came for Bolan from the kitchen, firing as they ran, forgetting that it always helped to aim. He clipped them both and saw them fall together, one atop the other as they hit the floor and stayed there.

  Sudden silence settled on the penthouse. Bolan didn’t trust it, hadn’t found the boss man yet, so he kept moving, circling gingerly around the long sofa that was the parlor’s centerpiece. Three men were huddled on the floor back there, but only one of them was breathing now.

  “It’s over, Melnyk,” Bolan told the godfather. “You want to stand up like a man or go out on your knees?”

  “Smart bastard,” Melnyk grumbled, struggling to his feet, his back still turned to Bolan, obviously trying to conceal some weapon clutched against his abdomen.

  So Bolan shot him in the back with the Glock, low down. A submachine gun clattered to the floor, while Melnyk slumped against the sofa, yelling out his pain. Then suddenly it seemed that he was weeping.

  “Smart guy,” he rasped.

  “One of us is,” Bolan replied. “I have a question for you. Who’s your contact in Kiev?”

  “Go to hell!” Melnyk spit back at him.

  “You first. You’ll bleed out before the paramedics arrive,” Bolan said.

  Downstairs, still two or three blocks out, a siren wailed.

  The Executioner dropped the AR-15 where he stood, holstered the Glock and headed for the stairs.

  7

  From the East Village, Bolan zigzagged through Manhattan, heading to JFK International Airport. The trip was sixteen miles and change, which translated to twenty-seven minutes on the road at 1:30 a.m.

  With ample time to kill, he drove around the airport’s long-term parking lot, disposing of the Glock and shoulder rig. He stripped the weapon, dropped its magazine in one trash can, its slide and barrel in another, grip and trigger assembly into a third, and holster in a fourth, before proceeding to the drop lot for his rental company. Once there, he slipped his keys and contract through a mail slot in the door—nobody working in the office at that hour—and began his long stroll to the terminal.

  At that hour of the morning, JFK was relatively quiet. Most airlines wouldn’t start selling tickets until 5:00 a.m., but Bolan had eliminated the middleman, going online from a Starbucks coffee shop parking lot to arrange his itinerary while police were still picking over remains of Stepan Melnyk’s crew and wondering who’d put them down.

  The State Department’s website carried travel warnings for Ukraine, advising all Americans to stay away if they were not required to visit on some vital errand. No tourist visa was required for visits lasting less than ninety days, so he was clear on paperwork. As far as money went, foreigners were required to declare any bankrolls of ten thousand euros or more, but Bolan trusted the false bottom in his suit
case, shielded against X-rays, to conceal most of the stash he’d picked up in New York.

  He required no paper ticket, having booked online, so he proceeded to his departure gate after he stopped to buy two newspapers along the way.

  His exploits hadn’t hit the New York Times yet, a lapse for the city’s “newspaper of record.” The New York Post was doing better, in its garish tabloid style, with photos of the previous afternoon’s crime scenes, but was still playing catch-up with the final denouement in Brighton Beach and the East Village.

  As a rule, Bolan had little interest in the spin reporters put on anything he did. Most of his foreign missions never got a mention in the States, while those that caused a stir were normally attributed to conflict between rebel groups, criminal elements, whatever. While he craved no personal publicity, far from it, he was frequently amazed at the degree of ignorance and apathy his fellow citizens displayed toward world events and groups that threatened their security.

  What had the country come to, when politicians in the national arena spoke of Africa as “a country,” confused Islamic radicals with “communists” or closed their eyes to the perils and promise of modern science? When everyone was angry about something, but two-thirds of them were too lazy to spend five minutes voting every other year, what lay in store for the United States?

  These moods came over him from time to time, but lasted momentarily. This morning, waiting for a flight halfway around the world to yet another combat zone, he shook it off as always, focused on his mission of the moment, and determined that he’d give it everything he had.

  It was the only way Mack Bolan knew to play the game.

  Kiev, Ukraine