Prairie Fire Read online

"Sorry, my fault."

  Toni swiveled, found the handsome stranger watching from the bedroom doorway. Through the pain, she tried a small, embarrassed smile.

  "Naturally clumsy," she told him.

  The blue eyes were warm, appreciative.

  "How's it coming?"

  Toni stood aside to let him view her work without obstruction.

  "Almost done. Besides, I'm running out of thumbs."

  He smiled, surveyed the partial roll of wire and little bag of nails that Toni had deposited on the double bed.

  "Have you got everything you need?" he asked.

  She nodded.

  "Two more windows in my... in the other bedroom. I can cover them with what I've got here."

  "Good. We've got about an hour, give or take. We need to have it ready by full dark."

  "I'll have it done," she promised.

  "Right. I'll check in with the others, then."

  And he turned away, retraced his steps in the direction of the kitchen. Toni watched him go, suppressing a sudden urge to call him back. What had she expected, anyway — a pat on the head or a kiss on the cheek?

  Toni recognized that they had spent their loving time together and had seen it slip away. There was nothing to look forward to but killing time from here on. And she would have to keep her fingers crossed, to pray that she was equal to the challenge — or it might be dying time.

  And for the first time that she could remember in the past two years, the lady had a positive desire to live.

  * * *

  Jason Chadwick gave the nail a final stroke, then set his hammer down atop the kitchen counter. He tried the door, put his weight behind it, but the nails held fast. The door refused to budge. And it would hold them for a while — long enough, at any rate, for him to bring the shotgun up and send a few of them to meet their maker. After that...

  The farmer felt a gnawing apprehension growing . stronger by the moment. It reminded him of nights in the Pacific, crouching in a hole and waiting for another human wave to break along the firing line in howling, bloody chaos. Gunfire and grenades, the roar of howitzers and reedy voices shrieking, mangled bodies thrashing in the fire-lit darkness.

  He would have liked a head count of the enemy, an inventory of their armament. The house would shelter them for a while against a force with handguns, even a rifle or two. But if the hostiles came in any kind of numbers, weighing in with heavy weapons, there would be no hope of holding out for any length of time.

  He glanced at Emma, busy sorting through the kitchen drawers, collecting anything that might be useful in a fight at close quarters. On the dining table, she had piled the carving knives and cleaver, an eighteen-inch barbecue fork, assorted other household tools and bits of silverware. They could strike some telling blows with that collection if the fight was hand to hand, but no amount of cutlery would stand against superior firepower.

  Jason wondered what his wife was feeling, how the siege was working on her mind and nerves. There was an unfamiliar tightness in her face, around the mouth and eyes, but otherwise she went about her task as if it was an ordinary everyday event. If she had any fears or doubts about their situation, she was keeping them securely locked inside herself.

  Voices reached his ears from the direction of the living room, and he frowned, reflecting on the change in Toni's attitude since their unwelcome guest had arrived.

  At first, Jason had regarded it as sympathy or pity for an underdog, the kind of feeling she might harbor for an injured animal, but now he saw that there was more to it. Much more.

  He had observed their faces when they came back from the barn together, and he studied Toni's mannerisms when she talked about the stranger or addressed herself to him directly. There was an animation in her face that had been missing since the night his boy was killed.

  And Jason did not know if she was falling for the man in black, but there was something ill-defined and growing stronger, more pronounced. It worried him, as much as if his own daughter had just announced that she was eloping and taking off for Hollywood.

  Jason wondered at his attitude, decided that his absent son was part of it. Some portion of him had assumed that there could never be another man for Toni, and he saw at once how damned irrational that was. But there was something else, beyond the pangs of posthumous parental jealousy; this man was dangerous — to Toni, all of them, and to himself.

  The stranger might, indeed, have sealed their fates already.

  The farmer felt protective toward his women, granted, and he made no apologies because of it. He had been raised respecting home and hearth, the sanctity of family. And he had gone to war in the defense of certain simple values that he cherished. Four long years of hitting beaches, ducking snipers' bullets, killing faceless enemies in stinking jungles — all to guarantee that home and hearth remained inviolate.

  The islands of the South Pacific were a world away, the enemy was different, but the basic issue never seemed to change. A man defended what he loved and what was his; if it cost a man his life, he paid the price and took as many of the savage bastards with him as he could.

  Corny values, certainly, the love of country, home and family. In recent years, it had become the fashion to despise America, to spit on patriotism and the flag.

  Jason Chadwick knew all of it was bullshit. He would never claim perfection for his country. She had faults, as did the members of his family and the man himself, but the farmer loved them fiercely, all together.

  Forty years ago and more, he had been ready to lay down his life — or take the lives of others — for his country's sake.

  Today, defending home and family, the farmer was prepared to kill again — or die.

  And it was all the same to Jason.

  Movement in the kitchen doorway drew his thoughts outside himself, and Jason turned to find the stranger standing there, surveying all their preparations. In a single sweep, his eyes took in the pile of cutlery, the screen secured across the windows, Jason's sturdy reinforcement of the door.

  "It's looking good," he told them.

  Jason frowned.

  "We've done the best we could," he answered. "It won't hold 'em very long."

  "With any luck, it may not have to."

  A final glance around, and the stranger vanished back inside the living room. Jason watched him go and felt the mix of jumbled feelings stirring in his gut again.

  He did not fully understand the stranger, did not necessarily trust the man completely, but he recognized their only hope of living through the night. Whatever his designs and motivations, this one was a cool professional, no doubt about it. And deep down, underneath the nagging dread and fear of death, he was damned glad to have the stranger with them now.

  15

  "Will this really work?"

  Bolan read the doubt in Toni's voice and tried to reassure her. Cautiously.

  "In theory, sure. But it's the outer line, remember that. We'll slow them down, maybe take a couple out along the way, but it won't keep them out indefinitely."

  Toni nodded, and her expression told him that she understood the gravity of his remarks. She watched him nervously as he continued with his final preparations for the coming battle.

  With the wire cutters he had taken from the barn, Bolan clipped the unplugged electric cord where it connected to the toaster. That done, he split the leads along the length of the cord almost to the plug. Then he smoothly stripped the insulation back a few inches from the cut and unraveled all the shiny copper wire inside. Another moment, and he determined the live strand, tying it to a corner of the makeshift screen nailed up across the window above the kitchen sink. Then he fastened the other lead to a plumbing pipe. He hesitated, stood well back in case of unexpected sparking, and plugged the cord into a nearby outlet.

  Nothing happened, and the soldier flashed a little smile of satisfaction to the lady. At a glance, the screen of chicken wire looked totally innocuous, but anyone who touched it would receive a lethal jolt of curr
ent.

  Windows in the living room and bedrooms had been similarly armed, connected to the stripped and severed outlet cords of household lamps. Each electric screen would constitute a circuit in and of itself; the breaching of a single window by their enemy would leave the others primed and fully operative, waiting for a deadly contact.

  Unless someone outside got clever and decided to cut off their power at the source.

  A glance outside confirmed that they were swiftly losing daylight, and the warrior hastened to complete his preparations. There was a single window waiting to be rigged, the broad one facing out on the Chadwick porch. With practiced moves he took the long extension cord and clipped its rubber socket off one end, removed the heavy insulation in a single fluid motion. Soon he had the cord connected firmly to the screen of chicken wire, its other end plugged in beside the toaster cable.

  They were ready, except for one last detail.

  Bolan took the lamp with its plastique attachment, knelt to place it close beside the kitchen door. He calculated ranges, distance and trajectory, positioning the lamp precisely. It would have to clear the door when that was breached and still be visible from his position in the living room.

  When he was fully satisfied with the position of his booby trap, the warrior raised its decorative chimney, used a wooden match to light the wick. A pungent smell of burning sulfur filled the Chadwick kitchen, and he was reminded briefly of the battle smells that linger on a killground.

  Fire and battle smoke. The smell of death. A whiff of hell on earth to make believers of the living.

  Delicately, Bolan set the wick for minimal illumination. In a fully darkened room, the lamp would cast its light around a radius of less than eighteen inches. But the dim illumination would be adequate to make his bull's-eye of adhesive tape stand out in stark relief against a darkened background.

  Accuracy was the problem, sure.

  Once the door was broken in, there would be seconds left to make the shot with a completely unfamiliar weapon. At his maximum efficiency, he might get off two rounds before the enemy responded with converging fire or kicked the lamp away and out of Bolan's range.

  A moment, two at most, for the shot of a lifetime. If he screwed it up, with hostile guns inside the house...

  "We're as ready as we'll ever be," he told the others. "Better take your places. Anything can hit us now, from here on in."

  The four of them regrouped inside the parlor, moving toward their designated stations. Bolan crouched beside the farmer's padded easy chair, prepared to cover both the kitchen doorway and the parlor window. Jason Chadwick took position facing Bolan, at the far end of the parlor; from his place, the scattergun commanded doorways to both bedrooms and the lavatory. Over by the fireplace, with the sofa pulled around to offer shelter from incoming fire, the women huddled close together, keeping low and out of sight.

  It was a shaky fortress, badly undermanned, but the warrior and his meager troops were out of time. Considering the limited resources, Bolan knew that they had done their best.

  There was a human factor, yeah, where nerves and guts and heart came into play. One man or woman-grim, determined, motivated — could become an army in the proper cause.

  Outside, a cloak of darkness settled across the landscape, turning fields of corn into a dark, amorphous mass outside the windows. By the barn, a light atop the wooden power pole was triggered by a photo cell, providing pale illumination for a portion of the barnyard.

  Inside the darkened house, Mack Bolan and his little troop of conscripts settled down to wait.

  * * *

  The Cowboy took a final drag on his cheroot and dropped the butt, ground it out beneath the heel of an expensive hand-tooled boot.

  The hunter knew instinctively that it was time to move.

  The gunners seemed to feel his tension, drifting toward him without any verbal summons. They formed a ring around him in the dusk, their muffled conversation dying down to whispers, finally stifled altogether.

  "Time to start the ball," he told them all, unnecessarily. "1 want a ring around the house, each man at his assigned position. Tommy, take a couple of guns and try to get inside the barn."

  "It's done."

  The Cowboy felt their hunger for the kill, knew that they were anxious to be off about their bloody business. They were up for this one, nerves strung tighter than piano wire by hours of waiting in the sun. Their collars might be limp with perspiration, but the men inside the crumpled suits were lean and mean, prepared for anything.

  They were the best of their kind that blood money could buy, and the Cowboy would expect his money's worth tonight.

  It was show time, right, and he was occupying center stage, with hungry eyes examining his every move. The men upstairs would judge him by his troops' performance, and if they let him down, the Cowboy would be burying his failures there, among the rows of corn.

  "Stay on your toes," he told the ring of silent faces. "If anyone is planning to break out of there, they'll make a move tonight."

  A general grumbling, with snickers interspersed. The sound reminded him of empty stomachs growling, jungle predators anticipating food. Raw meat, perhaps, still ripe with blood.

  "I don't want any shooting at the house until I give the word," he said. "And use the silencers. A sound out here will carry twenty miles, and I don't want a flock of rubberneckers dropping by to watch a turkey shoot."

  A voice was raised beside him, on his left.

  "Suppose they rabbit?"

  "Anything that moves outside the house is bought and paid for."

  "Goddamn right."

  He looked around at them, demanding their attention by a force of will alone.

  "I meant what I said about those silencers. I hear a gun out there tonight, it damn well better not be one of ours."

  They were moving out in twos and threes, rustling through the darkened rows of corn to find their places on the firing line. He watched them go, his two lieutenants hanging back and waiting for instructions.

  Out there in the darkness, the Cowboy knew his prey was waiting for him, every sense alert and nerves on edge. It would be nice if he could twist the knife and let them squirm before his men delivered the final killing stroke. A nervous enemy was often careless, made mistakes.

  If he could get them going somehow, string them out and have them jumping at their own damn shadows, it would be a bonus.

  And the inspiration struck him, suddenly.

  "I want a landline to the house," he said.

  "How's that?"

  "A patch. We cut the line; 1 want it fixed again — just long enough to make a call. Can do?"

  "Well... sure. Hell, yes, no problem."

  "Fine. So do it."

  Tall and solitary in the darkness, he could feel the old excitement rising in him now, the way it always did before a kill. A few more moments for his men to take position and everything would be in readiness.

  The Cowboy smiled, his mirrored shades lending menace to the wolfish grimace on his face.

  16

  Waiting is a part of war, and darkness can be friend or foe, depending on the warrior's own experience and ability. For Bolan, it was neutral, a familiar state of being where he lived and fought as easily as in broad daylight. Easier, perhaps, if he was able to precipitate the battle, seize the initiative and follow through to victory. And he was used to waiting, right, in steamy Asian jungles, or the cluttered alleys of a major urban center. He had lain in wait for hours, days, to get a shot at some elusive enemy.

  But he was used to playing the offensive team, accustomed by experience to waiting for a swift and sure assault. In Nam, and later — in his wars against the Mafia and urban terrorists — the game was hit and run, surprise the enemy and run him ragged, never resting. He had no time for digging trenches, fortifying outposts. Every stationary moment gave the enemy a chance to push ahead, trample the gentle civilizers underfoot.

  Throughout his long crusade, the Executioner had op
ted for a lightning war, preferring always to initiate a strike rather than repelling one. In modern war, the first shot fired could be decisive, and it went against the Bolan grain to give up that advantage to the opposition. Still...

  Circumstances altered cases, dammit, in a battle zone. Tonight, the jungle fighter's options were severely limited — by his surroundings and his injuries, the shortage of supplies and able troops — and he would have to sacrifice that opening-gun advantage. Grudgingly, reluctantly. Mack Bolan was compelled to fight a grim defensive war.

  And duty was a part of it, certainly, the sense of obligation that was keeping htm inside the house and waiting for the opposition to arrive in force. He had delivered Jason Chadwick's family into peril, and he had to get them out of it again — or perish in the attempt.

  He owed these people something, right. A helping hand. A chance. The possibility — however slim — of living through the terror that had followed him into their gentle lives.

  Sergeant Mercy owed them that much. And the Executioner would make delivery on the obligation if he could.

  For Jason and Emma.

  Most especially for Toni.

  The sudden jangling of the telephone was startling. Like the whirring of a dentist's drill, it seemed to bore inside the brain and find a pulsing nerve.

  Toni Chadwick gasped, a frightened little sound, suppressed at once. The farmer cursed beneath his breath, and Bolan heard him shifting his position, making ready to repel surprise attackers, almost as if he was expecting them to enter through the trilling kitchen phone.

  And it could only be the enemy, Mack Bolan knew. No believer in coincidence, the fighting man could not believe their sole communications link had not been deliberately severed, and now, for reasons still unclear, had been temporarily restored.

  The soldier put his mind in overdrive, discarding possibilities as rapidly as they arose. No matter how he tried to think the angles through, he came up empty. There was simply no way anyone could harm them with the shrilling telephone. No chance of high-explosive charges planted in the earpiece, for example, and no serious risk of snipers if he took the natural precautions.