old Ford Fairlane with a huge dent in the front fender. Two men stood between the vehicles, their arms waving wildly as they shouted at each other. To the average tourist it would have appeared that they had just been involved in an accident and were attempting to assign the blame.
But Bolan was neither tourist nor average. And neither was Latham.
“Kidnappers,” Latham said quickly as he pulled the Browning from his waistband. “Fake car accident. Standard ploy.”
Bolan didn’t need to be told. The Desert Eagle had come out of its holster the moment he’d seen the two cars. Now, as the two arguing men turned to face the Cherokee, he held the big .44 Magnum pistol just out of sight below the dashboard.
Both men wore dingy brown shirts, the tails untucked over baggy, tropical fabric slacks. They smiled as they began to casually walk forward as if to ask for assistance.
Then the shirttails came up and both men pulled pistols from their belts.
The Executioner twisted the door handle, threw open the door and leaped from the Cherokee. As he did, he saw a half dozen more men with AK-47s suddenly rush out of the jungle at the side of the road. The outbreak of automatic rifle fire behind him told Bolan that even more gunmen had appeared from the jungle on the other side of the road. As he dived below a burst of 7.62 mm rounds he wondered briefly if Latham had gotten out of the car. He hadn’t heard the man’s door open amid the explosions.
Bolan returned his attention to the men on his side of the vehicle. Latham was either alive or he was dead. Either way, there was nothing the Executioner could do to help him at the moment.
Another volley of fire struck the Cherokee as Bolan hit the ground and curled his body into a shoulder roll. As he rolled he caught a flash sight of the six men in front of him, his brain registering the fact that they wore a mixture of camouflage and more traditional dress. He wondered briefly if kidnapping was really their objective. The ambush was taking on more of the aura of a well-thought-out terrorist op.
Maybe even an assassination. Did the Tigers know he was on the island?
The Executioner pushed the possibility to the back burner for the moment. Right now it made little difference who the men were or what they wanted. They meant to kill both him and Latham, and at this point the important thing was to make sure they didn’t get it done.
Bullets struck the highway’s shoulder to both of the Executioner’s sides. Huge chunks of black asphalt, heated to softness by the hot Mindanao sun, ripped open as if tiny earthquakes had erupted. Bolan’s brain raced at near-inhuman speed, analyzing, evaluating, taking in the details of the situation. He weighed the odds and calculated the percentages of every possible course of action as he rolled beneath the onslaught.
The bottom line was grim. He was outnumbered and outgunned. There were six men directly in front of him, and even if he could make it to the rear of the Cherokee some of them would still be angled for clear shots. But the rear of the vehicle was the nearest thing to cover available so it was toward that goal he would have to fight.
Bolan rolled again amid a shower of lead. The gunmen on Latham’s side of the vehicle continued their assault, their rounds exploding from that direction.
The Executioner rolled up to one knee and lifted the Desert Eagle. The enemy had both superior manpower and firepower. He and Latham had superior thinking, superior thinking that could be turned into superior strategy. And both the thinking and the strategy would have to be far superior.
The Executioner pointed the barrel of the Desert Eagle at the man closest to the rear of the Cherokee. Heavyset and bareheaded, the would-be kidnapper wore what looked like faded blue gym shorts and sandals below a camouflage BDU blouse. A tap of the trigger sent a 240-grain semijacketed hollowpoint round exploding from the .44 Magnum pistol’s barrel. It drilled through the third button in the stenciled leaf-pattern cammie shirt, snapped the man’s spine in two, then blew on out of his back taking with it a hurricane of mangled muscle tissue, blood and splintered bone. The man himself went limp, collapsing to the ground like a dropped rag doll.
The soldier swung the Desert Eagle to his left, toward the next man closest to the rear of the Cherokee.
This man sported a stringy mustache and equally wispy growth of beard. Like the gunner who had fallen before him, he, too, would still have a direct line of fire at the back of the vehicle once Bolan reached it. Which meant he had to go next.
The Executioner squeezed the trigger once more and a second .44 Magnum hollowpoint round blasted from the barrel. It caught the attacker high in the chest, the velocity throwing him backward into a complete flip in the air. He came to rest on his belly, his chin caught on the ground, his face staring back at the Executioner. But the open eyes above the thin mustache saw nothing. Nor would they ever again.
Four more kidnappers remained on his side of the Cherokee and their return fire now zeroed in on Bolan’s sides. He rolled to the ground again, angling toward the Cherokee’s rear, the rounds exploding in his ears. One bullet cut through the sleeve of his blue chambray shirt, scorching the skin on his arm as it passed. The Executioner barely noticed it as he pulled the trigger, sending another pair of rounds into the blurry mass of camouflage that whirled past his eyes. As he continued to roll he caught another flash picture.
But this time the picture was of Charlie Latham. The Texan had indeed exited the Cherokee. Somehow he had even made it to cover beneath the vehicle.
Coming to a halt on his stomach, the Executioner extended the big .44, gripped in both hands. The four men still in front of him had expected him to rise to his knees and their auto-volleys raged high over his head. Bolan pulled the trigger back once more and watched a man wearing a mud-stained yellow T-shirt take the result between the eyes. The top of his head disintegrated from the nose up.
Three down, three to go. But that didn’t count the attackers on Latham’s side. Or the two men posing as auto accident victims to his front. In the back of his mind, as the front dealt with the more immediate crisis, the Executioner registered that the phony drivers seemed to have disappeared.
Bolan swung the .44 left again, letting the front sight fall onto a burly, bare-chested Filipino wearing nothing but camouflage pants. His long, straight black hair was tied back from his face with a white cloth. The white made a perfect target. The Executioner let the sight fall on the bright strip across the man’s forehead then pulled the trigger. The would-be kidnapper lost the top half of his head the same way his friend had.
With four of the assailants on his side now down and out of the game, the Executioner rolled behind the Cherokee and came up onto his knees, his head just above the bumper. On Latham’s side of the vehicle he saw two men firing at the Cherokee. One .44 Magnum round took out a clean-shaven kidnapper wearing blue jeans and a BDU blouse. A second after he’d pulled the trigger, the Executioner saw a faint red dot appear on the black T-shirt of another man. The sun was too bright for Latham’s laser sight to be at its best, but at close range it could at least be seen. He heard a boom from beneath the car and the man in black went down.
Bolan smiled inwardly as he fought on. The red dot meant that both the Crimson Trace laser sight and Charlie Latham were still working.
Another massive Magnum round from the Desert Eagle took out a young Filipino with an acne-pocked face. Now, with both sides temporarily clear, the Executioner dropped the near-empty magazine from the Desert Eagle, jammed a fresh load between the grips and transferred the big gun to his left hand. As he drew the Beretta 93-R with his right, rounds continued to pepper the vehicle from the front.
Bolan took
