was soaked with blood along the right side and his ribs felt bruised from the tumble but his adrenaline was running through him in currents of electricity.
He sensed movement and turned his head, the muzzle of his pistol shifting in tandem and steel-steady in his grip. His finger lay welded on the smooth metal curve of the trigger taking up the slack. He saw a shape crouched under an old metal office desk and his arm straightened, his finger tightening on the trigger.
The girl’s lips quivered with fear, and her thin cheeks were smeared with dirt. Her lower lip was split and swollen so that a trickle of blood had run down her chin and dried like a string of chocolate syrup.
Narrowing his eyes, Bolan lowered the pistol. He got to his feet and looked around. Off to his left on the edge of a pile of corpses strung out like toys by the grenade blast, a triad hardman climbed to his feet and staggered away. Bolan shifted, seeing only the motion at first. Then his eyes went to the hands. In hostage rescue situations the shoot teams always looked to the hands in their split-second decisions. Empty hands: no shoot. Full hands: shoot.
The shuffling figure grasped one of the utilitarian machine pistols. The handgun in Bolan’s fist spit a triburst, the soft-nosed bullets burrowing into the gunman, cracking his wing-shaped shoulder blade like hammers on a plate.
The man spasmed, his back arching and the machine pistol clattered and bounced off the concrete. The gunner staggered toward a line of fifty-five-gallon oil barrels. He screamed once in pain and staggered, close to going down. His arm came out, and Bolan figured it was a last desperate attempt to stop his fall before he died. The hand came down. Too late Bolan saw the apparatus attached to the industrial barrels by twisted lines of thick coaxial cable.
There was a sharp, dry metallic click and suddenly glowing red LED numerals blinked on in the swatch of gloom as Bolan put a second burst into the man and dropped him dead. The numbers glowed dark red and stood out starkly against the gloom: 00:00:30.
Bolan leaped forward. The demolitions a group like this seemed capable of couldn’t be that complex. He wasn’t a Gary Manning or a Hermann Schwarz, but he could defuse most simple trigger explosives.
He had almost reached the charges—the number display read, 00:00:28. His eyes fairly danced across the apparatus, taking in the details of the construction, hunting for connection points, trailing wires.
Then the girl shot him in the back.
He grunted hard at the impact and spun even as the echo of the shot was still bouncing through the cavernous warehouse. He felt a sting like a razor slice along his left arm, and the middle of his back felt as if he’d been blindsided by a sledgehammer.
He didn’t have time to question why it had happened. He was a man with a gun and men with guns didn’t often solve problems in Croatia. The only men with guns the girl had seen, he understood intuitively, had been the ones intent on using her up and throwing her away.
He spun and dropped and fired quickly. His bullets found the floor in front of her and there was a risk of ricochets but he was an expert with his weapons and had no choice but to take the risk. Concrete chips sprang up and slapped the girl with granite shards. She screamed but stubbornly held on to the machine pistol.
Bolan shifted the muzzle and punched a burst through the frame of the desk beside her head, already starting to surge forward. The rounds flattened as they punched through the cheap metal, and the girl screamed again.
From the top of the stairs Karen Rasmussen answered that scream with one of her own.
Bolan felt relief like a punch in the gut when the girl finally panicked enough to drop the machine pistol. He leaped forward and kicked the weapon across the room and snatched her up by the arm.
“American!” he growled.
The girl looked at him and more tears came, but he could feel her tense in his grip as her fear and confusion overtook her. Then she clung to him for a moment and he felt hope. She let out a sudden, sharp piercing scream and her fists began to windmill as she fought him with desperate energy. He looked to the digital timer.
00:00:22.
He wanted to yank the girl free as the clock slid to 00:00:21, but she was glued to him like a wildcat, scratching and clawing and trying to bite. He forced himself to hold on despite the hurt in his back where the Second Chance ballistic vest had stopped the slug. He yelled for Karen Rasmussen to run, and turned away, scanning the big room for the way out he had seen on his initial reconnaissance.
He saw the door and the padlock hanging off the chain from the inside in the same instant. He’d shot the man charged with manning the entry post on his own way down the stairs and saw that body sprawled on the floor, outflung hand inches from an assault rifle.
00:00:21.
“Karen!” Bolan barked for a second time.
“I’m coming!” The teenager answered, and he could hear her running down the stairs.
He tucked the wildly flailing girl under his arm and moved toward the door. He brought up his handgun as he did so, approaching the lock at an angle. He was stunned by the ferocity with which the triad clique had been prepared to defend its base of operations. With the death penalty so frequently employed, maybe they felt they had nothing left to lose.
He saw more clusters of fifty-five-gallon drums connected by television cables designed to carry electronic impulses and digital signals. The triad team had cobbled together a devastating mixture of low-and high-tech. What it lacked in complexity Bolan felt sure it would make up for in raw, explosive power.
00:00:20.
Squeezing the girl tightly, Bolan lifted the pistol and fired into the big padlock holding the thick links of chain together. The metal padlock jumped at the impact like a fish on the end of a line and split apart. Bolan stepped forward and struck out with the tread of his boot, catching the mechanism and ripping it down.
Karen Rasmussen joined him as the thick chain dropped to the floor. The girl was almost epileptic in her spasm now as she kept shrieking a word over and over again, the same liquid syllables in screaming repetition, but Bolan didn’t know the word, didn’t think he even recognized the language. He stuffed his pistol into its shoulder holster to better control the twisting girl and reached out to pull the warehouse door open.
00:00:19.
Karen Rasmussen threw herself against the handle and heaved her weight against the sliding structure. It came open easily and she stumbled through, Bolan rushed out after, running hard. The little girl bucked in his arms.
He heard a car door open and saw the flash of a dome light out of his left eye even as he was turning. He saw an Asian man in a leather coat with a long ponytail hopping out of a sleek black Lexus, one of the team’s ubiquitous machine pistols filling his hands.
Bolan dropped the twisting girl as he brought up his handgun. Rasmussen was screaming, her voice raw now, hands up around her face and standing directly in his way. He struck her with a heel-of-the-palm blow to her shoulder blade as the gunman lifted his machine pistol, and she spun away from him.
The Executioner leveled his silenced weapon, just catching a sense of the girl darting away from him. His finger found the trigger a split second before the other man’s and a 3-round burst struck the Asian in the chest. The man staggered under the triple impact and came up against the edge of the car. Bolan pulled down and stroked his
