edge of the flatbed and looked around the corner of the cargo loaded onto the car in front of him. Next to the tracks below the SUV, men stood on each side of the passing train, both armed with AK-47s. At the current speed, Bolan estimated he’d be next to them in about three minutes and he’d be exposed for a clean shot from above as well as from both sides.
His eyes darted around the flatbed for a place for him to hide. Even if he got under the tarp, he didn’t know if there would be something he could get behind to afford cover from gunfire, but he certainly couldn’t stay where he was.
Pulling his combat knife from its sheath, he sliced the closest restraining rope. The freed corner of the tarp flapped up, exposing the bottom half of wooden crates stacked so tightly and neatly against one another there wasn’t room for a mouse to crawl between.
As he put the knife away, the Executioner leaned back and looked down, viewing the heavy coupling mechanism linking his car with the one in front. There was a wide space between the clamp and the beginning of his flatbed. With less than a minute and a half remaining before he’d pass under the bridge, Bolan decided the coupler was his only chance for getting past the SUV.
He lowered himself onto the rod between cars, held on tightly to the greasy coupler and slid himself under the flatbed. At first, he thought he’d have to hold his legs up to keep his heels from dragging on the tracks, but once he got under the cargo deck, he discovered there was a beam running across the car about a foot below the flatbed’s underside. Bolan slid his legs into the space and found he could balance himself faceup, mere inches below the flatbed’s deck. And, although he felt pinned in this position, the supporting beam allowed him free use of both hands.
As the train neared the bridge, he wiped his greasy hands on the front of his shirt before drawing his Beretta from its shoulder leather. With his other hand, he pulled the Desert Eagle from his hip holster.
The flapping tarp caught the attention of the men on both sides of the track. Thinking that Bolan was hiding under the canvas, they began spraying the cargo with gunfire, the cracking of 7.62 mm rounds masked by the sound of the train. With their eyes focused on their target, they stitched holes across the tarp in a crisscrossing pattern from corner to corner, never seeing the man suspended in the dark shadows beneath the railroad car.
As he passed between them, Bolan fired with both hands, his weapons spitting death. The rifleman on the right side was hit inches above his belt with three of the Beretta’s 9 mm parabellum rounds. They shoved him backward, his rifle sending a spray of bullets wildly into the air as his finger froze in a death grip on the AK-47’s trigger until the magazine was spent and the bolt clicked onto an open chamber. As he stumbled under weak knees into a sitting position, he dropped his weapon, never knowing the origin of the rounds that were ending his life. With a short low scream that turned quickly into a hard grunt, the gunner fell onto his back while clutching his guts in a futile attempt to stem the flow of blood that surged warm and steaming into his hands.
The man on the left was dispatched by two heavy rounds that roared within a millisecond of each other from the mouth of Bolan’s Desert Eagle. The steel-jacketed rounds caught the guy midchest, tossing him like a rag doll into the brush alongside the tracks where he landed on his back, arms outstretched.
On the bridge above, the men standing next to the SUV searched for the source of gunfire but, before they could locate it, Bolan’s flatbed passed under their position and he became shielded from their weapons by the cargo strapped to the car behind him. Cursing, they scrambled to the other side of the bridge and watched the cars passing underneath. Two of the four opened fire with their Uzis, hosing the flatbeds with a steady stream of 9 mm rounds that sparked and whined as they ricocheted off the metal couplings and tracks.
Once he was beyond their position, Bolan quickly holstered his weapons and pulled himself out from under the railroad car. He peered around the edge of the bullet-riddled canvas in time to see four men dropping from the bridge onto the cargo-laden flatbed three down the line from his. The fixed wooden stocks on their Uzis told Bolan they were carrying older models, but even the earliest versions were formidable killing machines.
The men were obviously planning to work their way forward until they came to Bolan’s position. As he visualized his attackers working as a team, covering one another with a forward wall of lead while advancing up both sides of the cargo on each flatbed, Bolan knew there was a strong possibility they’d successfully reach him.
He scrambled to the other side of his car and peered around the corner. A hail of bullets ripped the canvas directly in front of his face, causing him to pull back out of their line of fire. But in the short seconds before he ducked behind cover, he had seen enough to know his pursuers were employing the exact tactic he suspected. One of them had already begun inching along the outside of their cargo load.
A trestle passed overhead, and Bolan began counting. Switching the fire selector on his Beretta to the 3-round burst mode, he reached around the side of the shredded tarp and pressed the trigger, exposing no more than his hand for a few seconds. The triburst forced the gunners to duck, giving him the seconds he needed to sneak another quick look. The man halfway up the side of the flatbed directly behind Bolan’s had been hit in the upper chest and was holding on for dear life to a rope laced across the cargo. Bolan fired another 3-round burst, and the man’s head exploded in a crimson bloom of brain matter and bone splinters that splashed onto the canvas tarp. As the man’s lifeless body slid to the ground, his legs fell at an angle onto the tracks where they were severed by the train’s heavy steel wheels as cleanly as if by a guillotine.
A return volley made Bolan pull back behind the cargo, but not before he saw the trestle pass over the end of their car. He had counted to thirty-two from the time the trestle passed over his head until he saw it clear the car where his attackers crouched. He lunged to the other side of his car and fired a few bursts down the left side of the train, reloaded, then jumped back to the right side and repeated the action. For the time being, his opponents were remaining behind the cover of their cargo.
Bolan leaped to his full standing position, grabbing a quick look across the top of the tarps. As he had expected, his movement was met with a blizzard of lead that forced him back down, but not before registering the angle at which one of the men was climbing onto the top of the cargo. With the same technique he had used for the assailant trying to rush the side of the flatbed, Bolan fired above the tarps without looking, thereby giving his foes the smallest target possible by only exposing his hand for the few seconds it took to press the Beretta’s trigger. The howls and shrieks of fury immediately reaching his ears told him he had found his mark. Stealing a quick glance over the tarp, he saw his opponent fall from the top of the cargo before the remaining two forced Bolan down with a spray of bullets.
Bolan fingered the remaining magazines in his combat belt while considering his options. By randomly firing quick bursts along the sides and over the top of the cargo loads without giving his enemies more than a second to return fire, Bolan knew he could keep them pinned down, preventing them from rushing his position. It was a classic Mexican standoff, but they had all the time in the world to wait until he ran out of ammo.
Holstering the Beretta, he unhooked an M-68 fragmentation grenade from his web belt and reached into the pouch containing the grappling hook he had used to jump the train. The thin cord was still knotted in place, cinched tight onto the hook by the strain of pulling him on board. While keeping a lookout for the next trestle that the train would pass under, Bolan tied the apple-shaped grenade to the cord’s free end, sliding the knot so the hook hung about three feet from the explosive. He set the fuse for slightly longer than thirty seconds, pulled the pin and held the grenade in his right hand while he drew the Beretta with his left.
Scrambling from side to side, he fired 3-round volleys first from the right side, then from the left, keeping his attackers crouched behind the canvas-covered freight loaded
