the lab, creating the impression that an entire team of scientists was in the midst of conducting research.
A doorless frame leading into a free-standing room in the far corner of the lab was in the general area where Tokaido had told him there might be a stand-alone apartment, presumably for Dr. Zagorski.
As soon as Bolan heard the door close behind him, he rapped the guard at the base of his neck with the Beretta’s hand grip. The man exhaled heavily and went down like a sack of grain.
“Dr. Zagorski!” Bolan called out as he slipped a nylon tie wrap around the guard’s wrists, securing them behind his back.
A woman dressed in a dark blue night robe appeared in the open door frame, her disheveled reddish-brown hair testifying to the fact that she had been roused from sleep. Despite her rumpled appearance, Bolan recognized her immediately from the photos Hal Brognola had shown him at their initial meeting.
“Get me a weapon,” she said before dashing back into the room.
Bolan opened the door and grabbed one of the guards’ P-90 submachine guns leaning against the wall. As he was pulling back into the lab, the stairwell door he had used flew open, and four or five men dressed in identical gray jumpsuits charged forward, their automatic rifles spitting lead. Tossing the P-90 behind him into the lab, Bolan returned fire with his Beretta, catching the lead man in the chest with a 3-round burst. The steel-jacketed 9 mm rounds hammered him backward into the path of his oncoming comrades, who threw themselves to the floor in order to get out of the intruder’s line of fire.
Sonia Zagorski, fully dressed in jeans, running shoes and a forest green windbreaker with large flapped pockets in the front, ran to Bolan’s side as he slammed the door.
“Push this up against it,” she said, motioning to one of the heavy slate-topped work stations.
The ten-foot, four hundred pound unit was on casters, enabling them to position it against the door before locking the wheels in place.
“That won’t hold them for long,” she said while grabbing the P-90 from where it lay on the lab floor. Leaning over the fallen guard, who remained unconscious and breathing heavily, she relieved him of three full banana clips, shoving them into one of her windbreaker’s front pockets.
“Help me drag him over to the wall,” she said, grabbing the guard by a handful of fabric at the top of his shoulder. “He doesn’t have to die.”
Bolan nodded and they quickly shoved the limp man against the wall next to the door where he’d be away from the hail of bullets that was sure to commence momentarily.
“Do you have rope?” Zagorski asked, as if she was leading Bolan.
“Can you use that?” he replied, motioning to the submachine gun while pulling the grappling hook and cord from its pouch.
The attractive doctor, in whose hands a P-90 submachine gun looked out of place, deftly slid the bolt to the rear and released it, chambering the magazine’s first round.
“Let’s go,” she said, flipping the safety to its off position as the door began to disintegrate under a barrage of automatic fire from the guards on the other side.
The smell of cordite seeped into the lab to mix with the rising stink of combat and death, while the air filled with the chilling chatter of automatic weapons. The laboratory door started shattering in the center panel above the workbench, the hole growing wider under a steady torrent of bullets.
A gap appeared in the section above the slate-topped table, through which Bolan could see two men firing P-90s on full-auto. He responded with his Desert Eagle, the oversize handgun roaring in the lab’s enclosed space with ear-popping concussions as he hit the first gunman squarely in the chest. The heavy slug lifted him clean off his feet before slamming him into the wall on the other side of the corridor. He hung in place for a moment as if he had been tacked there by a giant entomologist, then slid slowly to the floor, leaving a messy red streak in his wake.
In the microsecond before the other guard had a chance to dive for cover, Bolan again squeezed the trigger. The round struck the guard in his chest inches below where he cradled the FNH submachine into his shoulder, exiting through a shattered shoulder blade. A spewing jet that included a handful of shredded tissue that moments earlier had been a section of the man’s beating heart splattered the distant wall. The force twirled him erratically out of control, his finger frozen in a death grip on the P-90’s trigger as he spun to the floor. For a few instants until his clip was exhausted and the firing pin clicked onto an open chamber, steel-tipped bullets flew randomly in all directions, the ones entering the lab ricocheting wildly off slate panels and scientific equipment before embedding themselves in the walls or ceiling.
Hot lead continued slicing the air, the altering trajectories of rounds whizzing through the opening in the door reflective of the shifting positions assumed by the gunmen outside as they scrambled to stay away from Bolan’s deadly line of fire.
Although their enemies’ efforts had so far been largely ineffective, the rounds flying through the laboratory like angry wasps were life-threatening to both Bolan and Zagorski. The situation was not progressing in their favor, and from all indications, it would get worse if they stayed where they were.
As if in response to Bolan’s thoughts, Zagorski leveled her submachine gun at the window and let loose with a 30-round clip while tracing the frame’s outline where it connected to the castle’s rock walls. The window was clearly a recent addition to the laboratory space, a wooden prefab unit that crumbled outward as neatly and cleanly as if it had been demolished by a team of licensed masons. The resultant wreckage sprayed a cascade of wood splinters and glass shards onto the narrow space between the monastery and the woods where Bolan had hidden the roving guards’ bodies, littering the tight area with deadly debris.
The window opening began receiving fire from down below, lethal lead adding to an increasing stream of bullets flying into the lab through the damaged door. Zagorski shoved the barrel of her weapon out the window, and without aiming fired her ammo in a steady burst that swept the area, forcing the guards to seek cover. When her first magazine was empty, she released the spent clip and in one fluid motion, grabbed a 30-rounder from her jacket pocket and shoved it into place while stealing a glance at Bolan. With one hand, he was securing the grappling hook to a heating pipe he was sure would support their weight, while with the other, he fired occasional rounds from the Desert Eagle to keep the guards on the other side of the door from mounting a charge.
Zagorski pressed herself as tightly as possible into the lower corner of where the window had been. Taking advantage of firing from a higher position than her enemies, she began practicing the very same elements of combat discipline Bolan had taught to hundreds of infantry soldiers around the world.
With the patience of a cat waiting for a chipmunk to emerge from under a log where it had disappeared five minutes earlier, Zagorski kept the edge of the barrel barely inside the room, out of sight from those on the ground while she peeked over the edge of the sill. One of the men below let his panic get the better of him and made a dash for what he perceived to be a more advantageous position. Zagorski engaged him with a well-aimed 3-round burst.
The gun’s sights had not been battle zeroed for her specific aim, causing the rounds she fired to fly almost a foot to the front and left of where she thought they would hit. The guard froze for a millisecond as he realized he was under attack, giving Zagorski the time she needed to realize the differential in the rifle’s sights. She immediately took corrective action by aiming slightly behind her target before letting fly with another quick burst of lead.
In
