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  In these circumstances, coming from behind the Executioner and to his right, it could only mean one thing. The rifleman had called up a confederate, and now there was a second killer approaching Bolan from the rear.

  11

  The second player was a better woodsman than the guy with the rifle. Although Bolan strained with every fiber of his being to catch an indication, a hint, an echo of his approximate location, his ears relayed nothing but an occasional furtive slither from the part of the woods where he'd last seen the first gunner.

  Suddenly the shadows beneath the trees were filled with whispering. The breeze had freshened and branches high above swayed, but the low, muttering voices were not figments of the warrior's imagination. By some acoustic freak of tree trunks and irregularities in the ground, they seemed to come from all around him, a sinister murmur that swelled over the distant crackle of flames still licking parts of the burned-out Alfa Romeo.

  But Bolan knew those voices were much nearer than the wreck: the killers were in low-pitched radio liaison, secure in the knowledge that if their quarry did happen to be near enough to home in on one of the speakers and open fire, he would instantly transform himself into a prime target for the other.

  The hell with it. Bolan had played a passive role long enough. As a combat veteran he craved action, and he knew from long experience that the soldier acting first had the advantage.

  Okay, since he was aware, if only roughly, of his enemies' positions — and they knew nothing of his — he would use that advantage, stir the pot and see what floated to the surface.

  Immediately beyond the patch of thorny scrub there was a shallow depression buttressed on one side by the gnarled roots of a wide-boled oak. Bolan readied his prone body, tensing each muscle like a coiled spring, the Beretta in his right hand.

  Then he called in a loud voice, "Hey! Over here!"

  He moved the instant the last syllable left his mouth, rolling violently out from under the spines and into the depression. The sounds of his displacement were drowned in a savage blast of gunfire. The man with the mini-Uzi was no more than twenty yards away, his whole body shuddering with the multiple concussions as the subgun hosed half a magazine of 9 mm hornets into the scrub.

  Ripped stems and leaves were still in midair when Bolan, lying on his back in the hollow with the Beretta held in both hands above his head, triggered his own first salvo.

  He heard a smothered curse, a threshing among the bushes where the gunman had been hiding, then the sound of a heavy fall. Three shots from the Beretta had smashed into the guy's shoulder, crippling him but not taking him completely out of play. From the ground the wounded killer blazed the remainder of the Uzi's magazine one-handed through the undergrowth toward the hollow. At the same time, since the Executioner had revealed his position with that first burst, four separate rounds from a heavy-caliber revolver reverberated from a thicket of saplings fifty yards on the other side of the depression.

  But Bolan was no longer in the hollow. He was behind the broad trunk of the oak, pulse hammering and breath heaving with the sudden exertion.

  With the Beretta in 3-shot mode, he choked out a second message of death, special delivery among the roots of the bushes where the rifleman had fallen. This time he scored. A body flopped into the bushes and then lay still.

  Targeting on the Beretta's muzzle-flashes in the gloom, the second guy pumped four more .45 ACP boattails across the killground. White marks scarred the trunk of the oak tree as strips of bark flew wide, but the Executioner had dodged around to the far side... and now the decoy strategy paid off. For the second killer had already emptied his clip. The warrior had counted the shots.

  He stepped out into the open, stitching the remaining slugs from his weapon in a lethal figure eight across the stand of saplings. Two of the young trees split at the base and careened outward, allowing a heavy body to fall facedown to the forest floor.

  Bolan reholstered his weapon and walked across to the screen of bushes where the first man had dropped. The earth was black with blood from the guy's smashed arm and the gory pulp that had been his face. The double-barreled rifle was still slung across his back, but a small transceiver clipped to his lapel had been shattered.

  The mini-Uzi was lying nearby. Bolan felt the dead man's jacket pockets and found a spare clip. Since he hadn't expected a shooting match when he left his hotel in Liège, he wasn't carrying extra ammunition for the Beretta. He picked up the SMG and slammed home a full clip.

  A crackle of static broke the forest silence. Bolan stepped over to the second man and rolled the body over. The rifleman's features had been obliterated, but the warrior knew this one: it was the first perimeter guard he'd spoken to on the Latta estate. White splinters of bone pricked through the red ruin of his chest, but the transceiver above was undamaged.

  "I'm asking you again," the voice behind the grill complained. "Did you waste the bastard?"

  Bolan unclipped the transceiver, thumbed the Send button and growled, "Yeah. It's over."

  "Okay," the voice replied. "Wait by the roadside. We'll pick you up in the heap. Three minutes."

  Bolan walked out of the wood and crouched behind the gutted Alfa. It was almost dark. The night air was bitter with the odors of burned rubber and plastics. Tongues of flame still licked occasionally at the mangled remains of the engine, sending whiffs of oily smoke across the hillside.

  Three cars on the road from the escarpment looped down toward the trees, their headlights gleaming against the oncoming night. Most of the NATO personnel drove home to the city on the far side of the bluff, but a few lived in villages between the research station and the German frontier. Bolan let them pass: the people he was waiting for would be coming the other way.

  Soon he saw light flickering between the trees. A car was climbing uphill on the far side of the woods. The headlight beams swung around the tight curve on the right of the ditch and slowed, approaching the wreck.

  A voice called out, but Bolan stayed where he was, out of sight. The car stopped twenty yards away.

  A door opened, actuating a courtesy light that illuminated the interior and revealed three men. The guy in the passenger seat got out, stared toward the Alfa and called, "Weber! Ghinzani! Where the hell are you?"

  Bolan stood up behind the charred chassis of the convertible, holding the mini-Uzi at waist height, his scorched right hand around the pistol grip, his left grasping the grooves behind the gun's stubby muzzle to minimize climb.

  "You'll find the bodies in the woods!" he shouted and squeezed the subgun's trigger.

  Bolan had no compunction. These men were coldblooded killers, members of one of the most ruthless and callous organizations the world had ever known. Five gunners had been sent out with orders to shoot him down. Mercy wasn't a word that figured in the Mob vocabulary. Bolan, on the other hand, had once been known as Sergeant Mercy, because of his compassion for Vietnamese civilians caught up in the horrors of war. It was not a quality he was prepared to extend to the Mafia.

  But at least he would let his presence be known before he fired.

  The gunner standing by the door of the sedan reacted. Flame blossomed from a gun in his hand, and a hail of lead caromed off the blackened steel spars of the wreck.

  But the warrior's finger had already tightened on the trigger, and the Uzi's short, sharp burst crucified the gunman against the open door and shattered its window before he slid lifeless to the ground.

  The driver smashed a hole in the windshield with the butt of his automatic and was hosing a concentrated deathstream toward the wreck within milliseconds of Bolan's opening blast.

  The Executioner ducked behind the sportster's engine block as the high-tech slugs beat a harmless tattoo against the flame-scarred alloy. From the gravel on the far side of it, Bolan's second burst printed a tight pattern on the driver's chest.

  The third man had hit the rear door at the first outbreak of shooting and dived to the ground on the other side of the car.

>   Bolan advanced into the open in a combat crouch. He heard scrabbling noises from behind the sedan, but he held his fire: he wanted the car usable, even with the windshield and one window missing.

  He figured on tempting the last gunner out into a vulnerable position, waiting to see first which way the guy was going to attack.

  The guy wasn't. He'd opted for running.

  He was already on top of the bank, darting along the rock slope above the ditch, legs churning wildly as he raced back the way he had come.

  Bolan fired the last few rounds in the Uzi's magazine when the gunner was well clear of his car, around forty yards away.

  The fugitive spun around with a high-pitched scream, fell and rolled back to the road. But he was up again an instant later, staggering drunkenly, his shattered right arm hanging useless at his side. Sobbing for breath, he started once more to run.

  The Executioner let him go.

  After the roar of gunfire, the night seemed strangely silent. Bolan realized that the engine of the sedan was still quietly idling.

  He dragged the dead killers to the side of the road, forced the crippled door shut, climbed behind the wheel and drove back toward the escarpment with his jacket slung over the bloodied driver's seat.

  Nobody attempted to stop him on the way to the city. Windshields did get broken on country roads, and he junked the sedan before the streetlights were bright enough for someone to distinguish the bullet holes in the door.

  He walked half a mile, picked up a cruising cab and went back to his hotel.

  12

  They came for him before he'd finished his breakfast coffee, two sturdy men of middle height flashing plasticized ID cards decorated with the black, red and yellow Belgian flag striped across the top left-hand corner.

  "Police," the older of the men announced. "We must ask you to accompany us to the central station, Mr. Bolan. There are one or two questions the chief would like you to answer/'

  "The name is Belasko," Bolan said. "Mike Belasko, journalist. You want to see my papers?"

  "There will be time for that later. It is less a question of identity than a matter of an abandoned Buick and four dead men in the woods below a certain NATO base."

  Bolan's eyebrows rose. "And you think this Bolan can 'help you with your inquiries,' as they say? So why come to me? I think you better allow me to go to my room to get proof that I am who I say I am."

  "No!" the older cop said sharply. The younger man unbuttoned his jacket and let it fall open enough to reveal the butt of the automatic that was tucked into his waistband.

  "Come with us now." He jerked his head toward the door. Bolan shrugged and rose from the table.

  A blue light flashed on the roof of the black Mercedes that was waiting at the foot of the steps leading down from the hotel entrance. A uniformed cop with an automatic rifle sat in the far corner of the rear seat; another man, apparently unarmed, was at the wheel.

  Bolan was hustled in beside the guy with the gun, the younger plainclothesman got in beside him and closed the door and the older cop sat beside the driver. He picked a microphone from beneath the dashboard and spoke into it.

  "Car D Danielle calling base. We're returning with the prisoner."

  There was a reply, but Bolan couldn't make out the words. The driver gunned the engine and the Mercedes shot away from the curb, laying down a patch of rubber.

  Ten minutes and one mile later, they were cruising northeast along the Quai St. Leonard, on the other side of the Meuse. Bolan, familiar with the city, asked, "Just where are we going? Police headquarters is between rue Maghin and rue St. Leonard."

  "No talking," the older man snapped from the front seat.

  "You already passed city hall and the immigration offices, but if we're..."

  "Silence!"

  Bolan gave up on conversation, but he'd been tipped. These guys weren't for real. And they should have been prepared to handle his questions. It stood to reason that he might know the city.

  The whole setup was strictly amateurish. The flashing blue light on the roof, for instance, was the magnetic type clapped on by doctors when they needed to cut through traffic on an emergency call. On a genuine Belgian police car, the flasher would have been a fixture.

  The car radio was nonstandard: the handset was shaped differently from the models equipping regular prowl cars in Liege. And no real police officer would refer to a man supposedly being brought in for routine questioning as "the prisoner."

  A lot of routine was missing from the scripted dialogue they used getting him out of the hotel. But the real clincher was the use of his name.

  No policeman in Liège — in Belgium, in the whole of Europe — could possibly know that a man named Mack Bolan was in town: he'd arrived secretly in the kidnappers' plane, with no papers, and had never appeared since his escape as anyone but Mike Belasko.

  But Fraser Latta and his Mafia friends knew.

  Bolan sighed. There were no options here, only one thing he could do, and he figured he could get away with it.

  Bringing it down to basics, the operation was no more than a question of mathematics. That and the right road conditions, with traffic heavy enough and fast enough to keep the driver busy.

  The man holding the automatic rifle had positioned it vertically, with the butt resting on the floor. The gun was a Kalashnikov AKM. The length of the assault rifle, Bolan knew, was thirty-four and a half inches. The Mercedes was the 16S version of the 2300 model, and the distance between the roof and the rear seat was... thirty-four and a half inches.

  The width of the rear seat was fifty-five inches — fifty if you allowed for the intrusion of the elbow rests.

  It followed that if the gunner brought the butt of the AKM up to seat height, he would be unable to wheel the rifle Bolan's way, because the muzzle would hit the roof. But if he contorted himself and swung it with the butt lower than that, by the time the barrel was horizontal the muzzle would be more than halfway across the width of the seat. And the Executioner was squeezed into the center.

  In other words, as a weapon to menace Bolan while the car was moving and the rear doors closed, the Kalashnikov was useless.

  Unprofessional, he noted, and inexperienced. They should have leveled the gun before Bolan got in, then shoved him into the corner with the muzzle boring into his gut. Either that or kept him covered all the time with the automatic that was still tucked into the waistband of the man on his other side.

  With a team this stupid, Bolan reckoned he could act before the guy even whisked the gun out.

  His opportunity came a few miles east of the city. They passed a long-distance expressway direction sign. White lettering on the green background indicated: E5-Aachen, Cologne: 2000 m. Just under two kilometers later, the Mercedes filtered right and sped up the ramp that connected with the turnpike leading to West Germany.

  Bolan guessed he was on the way to the Mafia boss, Maccione, who lived in Cologne. He wondered how they aimed to get him across the border. Unconscious in the trunk?

  He didn't intend to wait long enough to find out.

  There were five lanes of traffic moving at the legal speed limit on the expressway, and the line of cars, buses and trucks moving up to join them were traveling slightly slower. A driver needed all the concentration he could command to slot himself neatly into the stream as it passed.

  It was the opportunity Bolan had been waiting for. He made his play as the two roads converged.

  Since he was unarmed — they'd frisked him expertly enough before they left the hotel — he thought it was safe to contrive a yawn, lean back in the seat and lace his hands behind his head. Safe enough, anyway, not to make them think he was planning anything.

  They were suspicious nonetheless. "Put your hands down!" the man with the AKM snarled.

  "Whatever you say," the warrior replied equably.

  He unlinked the hands, then, with frogleg agility shot out his two arms, circled the necks of the men sitting on each side of him and
brought their heads crashing together.

  The impact wasn't enough to stun them, but it was the surprise element Bolan was counting on. Before they had recovered, his hands were freed — the left grabbing the wrist of the guy with the automatic, the right, bandaged because of the burns, jolting stiff-fingered into the uniformed cop's belly.

  The gunner with the AKM doubled over, gasping for breath; the man with the automatic jerked the gun out of his waistband and tried to force Bolan's arm back so that the muzzle was pointing at his chest; the older guy in the front passenger seat whirled around, leaned over the seat back and reached for the Executioner.

  Bolan slid right down in the seat until he was lying almost flat, using both hands now to haul the gunner, face upward, on top of him.

  The driver cursed, wrestling the wheel as the struggling bodies lurched against his shoulder, sending the Mercedes veering into the faster traffic stream.

  Somewhere among the tangle of limbs the gun went off. Bolan's steely grasp tightened, the muscles on his arms stood out. A second, and then a third shot rang out, deafeningly loud inside the sedan.

  The man leaning into the back uttered a choking grunt, then blood poured from his gaping mouth onto the gunner. The slugs that had cored his chest and ripped apart his lungs smashed out between his shoulder blades and shattered the windshield.

  The driver braked fiercely, swearing again as the Mercedes slewed sideways with locked wheels. A flatbed truck laden with crates of fruit caught the rear fender a glancing blow and spun the car around. It came to rest facing the wrong way on the soft shoulder in a litter of apples, oranges and splintered wood.

  Bolan, using all his strength, had heaved the gunner off himself and onto the guy with the Kalashnikov. Now he slid out from under, hit the door handle and dived out of the vehicle.

  He landed in a shoulder roll, leaped the low barrier and slid down the grassy embankment of the expressway.

  Three shots were fired, two from the automatic and one from the AKM. None came anywhere near him. Then the warrior was among the bushes that covered the bottom of the slope.