took note of how the three were set up. He figured they would be facing his objective. He switched the earpiece back on.
The beat was coming in as an almost steady tone, and the note had changed, indicating Bolan was slightly off center. Before turning the signal off, he mentally extrapolated the sound with his position and that of the ambush, arriving at a spot about fifty yards from where he thought Oxford’s body would be buried.
He withdrew a powerful penlight from his front shirt pocket and rotated the lens to produce a beam. Sliding the Desert Eagle from its holster, he stood and took a step forward.
“Everyone freeze!” he shouted in a voice full of authority as he held it out at a full arm’s length to the left of his body.
The three men, suddenly illuminated, simultaneously made the wrong decision. As the two men flanking the third threw themselves to the ground, the man in the middle turned and fired a pistol, the round snapping the air directly beneath Bolan’s penlight, which he switched off while lunging to his right. In midair, he squeezed the Desert Eagle’s trigger once, and the throaty roar of the weapon delivered instant death to his attacker as the heavy round slammed through the man’s chest, exiting through his back in a messy hole the size of a heavyweight’s fist.
Bolan rolled quickly as bullets from the other two gunmen sliced the air where he had been a split second earlier. Using one of the muzzle-flashes for a target, Bolan fired two shots so close together that they echoed across the moors as a single retort. He immediately heard the heavy thump of a body being hammered into hard earth, and all was still.
Continuing his roll to the right, Bolan strained his ears for the sound of his enemy’s breathing. In the sudden silence, he could hear it—raspy and quick. The man was off to his left, about ten yards away, and apparently still standing upright.
Bolan considered taking him alive in order to gain some intel about the communiqué. Before he could initiate his next move, however, panic apparently got the better of his adversary, who abruptly let loose with a barrage of automatic pistol fire aimed a full four feet above Bolan. With the shooter illuminated by his series of quick muzzle-blasts, Bolan zeroed in from his prone position and fired once, drilling a hole through the man’s gut. The force of the Eagle’s .44-caliber punch threw the hardman four feet and he crumpled into a lifeless heap, oozing intestines that shimmered and shone black in the intermittent moonlight.
Like most firefights, this one had been quick and violent.
The acrid smell of cordite hung heavy in the air, mingling with the fresh stink of death that filled Bolan’s nostrils. He remained in his prone position, listening intently for any sound of life. After a good thirty seconds, he rose to his full height. Holding the penlight out to his left again, he switched it on.
All three men were dead.
Bolan quickly scanned the area, anxious to complete his mission. There was no vehicle, which meant that these men had either left their means of transportation somewhere and walked to the site as Bolan had, or they had been dropped off by other team members who were still very much alive.
In the beam of his penlight, tire tracks were visible in the dirt, confirming Bolan’s worst-case hunch. He rushed forward to check the bodies, intent on removing any identification they might be carrying. As he patted down the first corpse, he noticed the gleam of a silver chain around the man’s neck. With the same motion he had used more often than he wanted to remember when pulling the dog tags from a fallen comrade, Bolan snapped the chain free and stuffed it into his pants pocket. He continued checking the body for identification, and, finding none, moved on to the other two with the same results. None carried ID of any kind, but all three had worn a medal around their necks.
Turning his back to the bodies, Bolan switched his earpiece receiver back on. The signal was strong and steady, and as he sprinted to the spot he had selected before the firefight broke out, the tone became solid. In the moonlight, Bolan could see the dim outline that had the correct dimensions for a shallow grave. When he stood over it, the earpiece told him he had found his mark.
He pulled the foot-long combat knife from its sheath and plunged it into the soft earth. Just as the hilt touched ground, the tip of the blade made contact. In the distance, Bolan could hear a new sound—the steady drone of a vehicle that sounded big. He didn’t know for sure how distant it was, but the way sound traveled over the moors, he thought he had at least five minutes before it would reach him. He began to claw at the grave, moving the loose soil to both sides. In less than a minute, he reached the body. Holding the penlight with his teeth, he saw that luck was with him—the end he had chosen to clear exposed Oxford’s head, the upper portion above the agent’s eyebrows mangled and singed around the edges by the point-blank shot that had taken his life. The bottom half of his face was smeared with dirt and, after three days in the grave, swollen beyond recognition.
Leaning forward, Bolan grabbed the corpse’s head and brushed the dirt away from its mouth. Placing the point of his combat knife at a spot directly beneath Oxford’s earlobe, he opened the agent’s cheek with a quick forward slice, revealing teeth that shone like pearls in the penlight’s beam. In the back of the dead man’s throat, insects scurried to escape the sudden illumination.
Bolan pushed the flap of bloodless skin away so he could insert the tip of his blade under the last molar. In the back of his mind, he was aware that the vehicle was drawing closer, coming slowly due to the winding roads, but approaching, nevertheless, at a steady pace. As he twisted the knife’s handle and the dead agent’s tooth popped free, Bolan wondered what had prompted its approach. Whether it was responding to the sound of gunfire traveling a great distance through the clear still night, or a missed call-in from the men waiting in ambush, the result was the same—there was no time to retrieve Oxford’s remains. But Bolan had the most important thing he had come for and he could mark the body’s location for a future pickup by placing his earpiece with the corpse.
He dropped the extracted molar into the same pocket containing the chains he had taken from his would-be ambushers, shoved his earpiece down the front of Oxford’s blood-enrusted sweater and hurriedly pushed the dirt back over the body. Just as he was finishing, he caught the glimpse of approaching headlights winding their way down the side of the shallow bowl-shaped valley less than a quarter of a mile away.
After smoothing the earth back over the shallow grave, he ran at full speed for a stand of trees and thick bushes about a hundred yards away. He had progressed less than ten feet into the woods when an SUV burst out of the adjacent hillside pasture onto the flat land of the moors, and the night was suddenly filled with the eardrum-splitting sounds of AK-47s chattering in full-automatic mode.
The air surrounding Bolan became a deadly beehive of activity as bullets whizzed by with the distinctive snaps of 7.62 mm bullets. He dived to the ground, scrambling for cover.
2
The furious fusillade ended abruptly, and Bolan heard the distinctive metallic rattling of empty magazines being ejected, followed by the slide and click of new ones being rammed home. In the sudden silence, rendered more profound by its extreme contrast to the deafening uproar from the AK-47s that still echoed in his brain, a wide beam of blinding light painted the trees and thick bushes with broad strokes, sweeping back and forth through the stretch of woods like a prison spotlight.
From his prone position in a tiny depression behind a stout hickory, Bolan flexed his legs in preparation for his departure. He peered through the lush foliage, inches above ground level, to where the SUV stood like an alien being, its modern technology seeming anachronistic against the barren landscape.
Accompanied by the racing sound
