of the crippled chase car when one of them spotted Bolan emerging from the carport.
The soldier was a combat shooter borne of both training and long experience. He knew the mistakes men made in armed battle, and he knew how to exploit these mistakes. In a half crouch, walking smoothly and quickly with a gliding, heel-to-toe gait, he came at them, his weapons extended, his wrists canted at very slight angles to bolster the stability of each shooting wrist and maximize the visibility of his sights. The Executioner bore down on them, irresistible force and immovable object in one battle-ready vessel.
He fired.
The Desert Eagle bucked in his fist, its gas-operated action, tuned by Stony Man Farm armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger, cycling smoothly and lethally in Bolan’s grip. The Beretta sang in deadly harmony, tapping out a staccato rhythm with each squeeze of the trigger. Bolan’s 3-shot bursts found their mark, stitching first one, then another, blasting the gunmen center of mass. The Desert Eagle’s heavier rounds took two more targets as Bolan angled for precise head shots. The hollowpoint slugs dug wide holes through their targets. Bolan’s mercy, for mercy it was, lay in a quick end to enemy lives lived cruelly and violently.
Bolan never stopped moving, never stopped closing in. As he got to contact distance he fired a triburst through the throat of one man, emptying the Beretta’s 20-round magazine. He fired the last shot in the Desert Eagle, too, but that did not slow him. Instead he savagely pistol-whipped the nearest gunman, bringing the butt of the Desert Eagle down across the bridge of the man’s nose. He drove a follow-up knee strike into the man’s abdomen and then slammed the empty pistol onto the back of the man’s neck as the gunman doubled over.
His foes were all neutralized.
Still moving, seeking cover behind the chase car, he reloaded and checked every direction around him. Rarely was a professional killed by the enemy he could see; the deadliest bullets came from guns fired by unseen hands. Bolan, once in combat, maintained vigilant awareness of his battlefield throughout the engagement.
He heard the steady cracks of Davis’s Glock from the other side of the abandoned structure he faced. The pistol’s bark was punctuated by long, withering blasts from an automatic weapon. It was a Kalashnikov rifle, judging from the distinctly hollow metallic sound Bolan knew only too well. Davis was outgunned, for certain—but not for long.
Bolan holstered the Beretta and held the Desert Eagle before him in a two-handed grip. He ran for the gap separating two almost contiguous buildings, turning sideways and pushing the weapon forward in his right as he sidestepped. He cleared the far side, looking for Davis—
A tire iron missed his head by inches.
The soldier’s habitual combat half-crouch saved him. The enemy, a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit whose head was as bald as an egg, swung the tire iron again, trying to bring it down on his adversary’s shoulder, perhaps to break his clavicle. Bolan snapped out a low side kick and broke the man’s ankle.
There was a revolver in the thug’s belt, but Bolan took quick note of the long, empty casings on the ground. They were .357 Magnum shells, at a glance. Bolan and his attacker stood in the lee of an abandoned, burned-out station wagon that had to be more than thirty-years-old. Beyond that, Davis, taking shelter behind a makeshift battlement consisting of a stack of rusted and stripped appliances dumped in front of the building, was holding his own. He was firing from cover at a knot of gunmen crouched behind a concrete barrier. The barrier was apparently something installed to prevent through traffic.
The bald man was howling in pain. He clutched at his ankle and made no attempt to go for the gun in his belt. Bolan surmised that this was why he’d been wielding a tire iron in the first place. Evidently he had run out of ammunition and had withdrawn to a backup position, perhaps even lying in wait for Bolan specifically. If that was true, and odds were good that it was, the opposition was even more organized than the soldier had suspected. This implied not just professional, paid hitters, but gunners of at least moderate experience.
Bolan paused long enough to secure the injured man with two sets of plastic zip-tie cuffs, binding the prisoner’s hands and then securing his good leg to his wrists. That would hold him for the moment, anyway; there was no time to do more.
The Executioner took a two-handed grip on the Desert Eagle and braced himself against the roof of the derelict station wagon. As he did so, one of the gunners tracking Davis saw him and jumped up. He swung his Kalashnikov in a wide arc, trying to track Bolan while holding the trigger down and spraying on full-auto.
The bullets went wide. The shots ripped across the torso of the fallen hitter, ripping open his chest and killing him. Bolan took careful aim and put a single .44 Magnum slug through the left eye of the man who had done it. The gunman fell instantly, firing out the remainder of his magazine harmlessly into the littered asphalt. Bolan ducked briefly to avoid a bees’ nest of ricochets.
He fired once, then again. Twice his bullets found their marks, snapping back the skulls of gunmen who did not realize they were vulnerable. The distance was long for a pistol, but there was no finer long-distance marksman than Bolan. The soldier waited to see if another enemy would be careless enough to move into the kill zone. There was more gunfire from the opposite side of the barrier, which drove Davis back to cover as he tried to join in the fray.
The angle was bad. Bolan shifted his position to the other end of the station wagon, but this presented a new problem. Davis was between him and the rest of the shooters.
Bolan carefully surveyed the situation. He watched for a rhythm, if any, as the gunmen broke cover to shoot at Davis and in Bolan’s general direction. A few bullets struck the old station wagon. They were nowhere near him.
He spoke aloud for the benefit of his earbud transceiver.
“Davis,” he said. “Duck.”
The detective dropped immediately. Bolan fired once, taking one of the remaining gunmen between the eyes. The others reacted to that, crouching down more carefully behind their concrete shield. Bolan simply waited.
Somewhere in the distance, police sirens could be heard. The firefight had finally drawn the attention of law enforcement. Davis hadn’t had a chance to call for backup, at least not while within the range that Bolan could overhear. No doubt the gunfire itself had generated frantic calls from citizens near this abandoned zone.
“Stay down,” Bolan said.
Bolan retrieved a fragmentation grenade from his war bag. He pulled the pin, let the spoon pop free and waited, counting in his head. Davis caught the movement and eyed him curiously from his vantage point, covering the top of his head with his folded arms as he lay on his stomach. Bolan nodded once and then tossed the grenade.
The bomb exploded just as it hit the lip of the concrete barrier. The men not caught by shrapnel from the grenade absorbed the spray of concrete fragments the explosion kicked up. Guns clattered to the pavement. As the boom echoed from the nearby brick buildings, nothing else moved.
Davis pushed himself to his feet.
Bolan moved from cover. He walked over, weapon ready, listening and watching to see if another ambush would be forthcoming. They had been attacked too many times already for him not to expect it at any moment. The sirens continued to close, but they were still some distance off.
“They’re going to take a few minutes to find us,” Davis said.
“Do I look that excited?” Bolan asked.
“You’re
