tried to struggle to his feet, but a muddy boot kicked him in the face and he fell back to the ground. Rachael’s husband rose again, this time getting as high as his knees before one of the men hit him with the wooden end of his gun in the side of the head.
The rough hands grasped Rachael’s shoulders and pushed her toward the door. When she tried to turn back someone punched her in the stomach and she felt the air rush from her lungs. As she started to fall she cast a look over her shoulder and saw John trying to get up yet again, but with his ankles still bound and his hands tied to his waist it was futile.
Gasping for air, Rachael was dragged out of the barn into the bright sunlight. As soon as she caught her breath again she began to struggle. But her efforts were as ineffective as John’s had been. The terrorists pulled, pushed and carried her toward two trucks parked just outside. Rachael doubled her efforts to strike the men with her elbows and even snapped her teeth at an arm that got too close.
“John!” she cried one final time as she was lifted into one of the trucks next to Kim Tate, and then the hood was pulled back down over her eyes.
It was only then, as she sat impotently listening to the truck engine start and feeling the wheels beneath her begin to roll, that the miraculousness of the sign God had given her earlier suddenly struck her. She had just watched John try three times to get to his feet and come after her. Three times he had been unable to do so, or to defend himself against the boots and rifle butts of the terrorists because his hands were still tied to his waist. Which meant he had not worked a hand free earlier as she’d thought, and it couldn’t have been his hand comforting her by squeezing her shoulder.
But a hand had been there, warm and loving, just the same.
THE REVOLVER in the elderly man’s hand looked like an ancient Spanish Star. The rifling, Bolan suspected, had been burned out before the Executioner was born. Or perhaps the old man at the top of the steps was simply a poor shot. Whatever the reason, although he was less than ten feet away, when the man Bolan assumed was Mario Subing pulled the trigger, the shot missed.
The antique wheel gun exploded almost in the Executioner’s face. But the shot struck to his side, splintering the already rotten wood of the handrail above the steps and causing it to collapse in pieces over the staircase.
Bolan hadn’t slowed at the sight of the revolver and now ducked his head as he continued to charge up the steps. Before the wrinkled, white-haired man on the landing could pull the trigger again, he thrust his head under the gun and into the man’s chest.
The Executioner’s force drove both men back through the doorway into the one-room stilt house; they dropped to the floor in a jumble of arms and legs. But old as he might be, frail as he might look, Mario Subing still managed to hold on to the gun as Bolan came down on top of him. And even after the Executioner had clamped the fingers of one hand so tight around his wrist that the dry old bone threatened to snap, he strained to maneuver the barrel back around at the big American.
Bolan didn’t want to break Mario Subing’s arm and he didn’t want the old man to break it himself as he struggled. Relaxing his grip, he reached out with his other hand and caught the double-action revolver. Sliding his fingers behind the hammer, he clamped it to the frame to keep it from being cocked then ripped it from the aged fingers.
Mario Subing shrieked out a long stream of what the Executioner had to guess were choice Tagalog expletives.
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