Dick Stivers - Royal Flush

The VC was dead, drilled through the heart.

Bolan drew a deep breath.

He moved forward on his belly, leaving the dead sentry behind him.

Another few minutes brought him to his goal.

Bolan huddled in the thick choking growth and peered out into a clearing that was illuminated by a small fire.

There were at least fifteen Vietcong in the camp.

Some of them were drinking, some were gathered around a cooking pot suspended over the fire.

Most of the huts that made up the village of Xan Lung had been destroyed, but a few were still scattered around the clearing.

Dominating the scene was a bombed-out concrete building — the abandoned munitions dump. Parts of it had been leveled by American shelling. Sections of the roof had collapsed, but the walls still stood for the most part.

Bolan's eyes flicked from figure to figure down there, checking out everyone.

There was no sign of Jill Desmond.

She was either inside one of the huts or inside the munitions dump.

Or she was dead.

A choked scream from the munitions building gave Bolan his answer.

There were too many of the enemy for a grandstand play to be successful.

Unless it was one hell of a grandstand play.

He circled the camp, encountering no more lookouts. They had to feel secure; this was their territory.

Bolan returned to his original position at the back of the munitions dump.

There were three sentries posted behind the building. They looked none too alert, though, and they were huddled fairly close together. That would help.

The sentries laughed and talked among themselves as they passed around a liquor bottle.

Bolan hoped the noise of their voices would be enough to cover up what happened next.

Bolan raised the M-16.

He squeezed the trigger.

He did not see the bullet zip through the eye of one guard. He was already tracking to the next, firing again.

The second man kicked into a loose death sprawl. He hit the ground a split second after the first.

The third sentry actually got his mouth open to yell as he tried to bring his weapon up into firing position.

Bolan sent a slug sizzling into that open mouth. Flesh and bone erupted out the back of the head.

The three kills had taken seconds.

Bolan waited until he was sure the guards' deaths had gone unnoticed. Then he moved out as silently as a flitting moth.

He slung the M-16 over his shoulder, stepped over the bodies and took a running leap at a low wall of the building.

He went up the wall easily, lithely.

When he reached the top, he lay flat.

No sounds came from the other side.

He had to chance it.

He swung himself down through the bomb-damaged roof into the building.

It was dark and still inside.

Nothing moved.

The fire outside cast a feeble glow down through the opening where the roof had once been.

As Bolan's eyes adjusted, he saw that the floor was littered with rubble from the collapsed roof. Moving carefully, he skirted the bigger chunks and made his way toward a heavy wooden door set in one wall.

The door was not fastened, just rested against the opening in the wall.

Bolan grabbed both edges of the door and shifted it sideways, creating a space just large enough to slip through.

Before him was a narrow corridor that was a little brighter than the room Bolan stepped from.

At the end of this hallway there was another door, which was ajar. The glow from a lantern filtered into the passageway. The floor of the hall was also covered with broken chunks of the roof.

Bolan padded along a pathway through the junk, taking great care not to set off a clatter, however slight.

As he had suspected, the hallway led to a main room at the front of the building. He stopped before he reached the door and flattened himself against the wall.

"You are a very stubborn woman," a man's heavily accented voice snarled.

"And you're a murderer of women and children."

Jill Desmond's voice was cold and flat and showed not a trace of the terror she must be feeling.

Bolan could not help but smile in the gloom.

Bullheaded she might be, but Jill Desmond, journalist, had guts.

"We can make things very unpleasant for you, Miss Desmond." The accented voice continued.

Has to be the VC leader, Bolan thought.

"If you will only cooperate with us, things will go much easier for you."

"Bullshit," live-wire Desmond shot back. "You'll do what you want anyway, no matter what I say. I won't give you the satisfaction of seeing me beg."

"That is regrettable." The VC sighed. "I must therefore summon assistance in this interrogation."

Jill was cold.

Tropical country or not, she was cold. Fear made her that way.

She didn't have to be told what cooperate meant.

If she gave in, she would be smuggled north to Hanoi and made to parrot their line of garbage.

And garbage was what it was.

She knew that now.

They called themselves freedom fighters and patriots. No way. They were murderers, rapists, cold-blooded ravagers of the weak and defenseless.

Who was there to stop them?

The VC grunted his frustration. He grabbed Jill's hair, lacing his dirty fingers through her chestnut strands, and pulled cruelly, bringing a gasp of pain from her lips.

Then he gave her head a rough shove and stepped toward the door to call the torturers. The real interrogators.

Jill sensed movement behind her. She twisted her head to see what awful thing was going to happen next.

A tall young American soldier with chips-of-ice eyes stalked into the room.

Recognition flared in Jill's brain.

Sergeant Bolan!

The rifle in Bolan's hands spit death.

The round from the M-16 caught the VC leader in the throat. The man's neck disintegrated as blood splattered all over the room. The dead man tumbled and sprawled into a corner.

Jill Desmond, her fatigues torn but not indecently, sat tied in a crude wooden chair.

One quick step put Bolan beside the chair where Jill sat. Her eyes were wide, stunned, shocked by the violence she had seen and experienced tonight. But she was coherent. Bolan unsheathed his knife and cut the cord that bound her.

"You okay?" Bolan asked in an urgent whisper.

She took a deep ragged breath, then nodded.

"How did you find..."

Bolan interrupted the question with a gesture. "No time. Let's get out of here."

He walked to the dead officer and bent down. He rolled the corpse over and stripped the uniform jacket from it.

"Here," he snapped, and threw the garment to her.

Jill flinched from the jacket. It was specked with blood in places. But common sense and survival instinct prevailed over her revulsion.

She slipped into the jacket, knowing she would have to wear something over the torn fatigue tops or the jungle growth would flay her flesh to ribbons.

Bolan grasped the VC corpse and hauled it away from the door, shoving it against a wall where it would not be seen unless someone came all the way into the room. Then he extinguished the kerosene lantern that sat on a table.

In the last instant of light before the lantern went out, he saw Jill watching him. She was damned attractive, even after everything she had been through tonight.

He grasped her arm in the darkness.

"Come on."

He guided her into the narrow corridor that led to the back of the building.

She stumbled several times over the rubble, but Bolan's firm grip kept her from falling.

They had to hurry.

Much as he might have liked to take it easier for Jill's sake, they could not afford that luxury.

They had to get out of Xan Lung before the VC leader's body was discovered.

A startled shout echoed down the hallway, then harsh yells.