Don Pendleton - Twisted Path

The thug took a dive down the stairs, rolling over the smooth steps until he came to rest in an untidy heap.

Bolan didn't bother to check if the guy was dead. His mind was focused on reaching his prey.

Raimondo saved him the trouble of searching by casually stepping from his quarters, a thin cigar clenched between his teeth.

A snub-nosed .38 stared at Bolan.

The warrior halted, gauging the distance and considering his options. If he tried a rush, Raimondo would riddle him before he could make it five feet from where he stood. If he stayed where he was, he was a dead man. Forward, backward or stand where he was, Raimondo had him dead to rights.

Like hell he did.

"Congratulations, Blanski. I expected you would be dead long before this. But never mind. Now I shall have the pleasure myself."

"A gun, Raimondo? Hardly fair. Wouldn't you like to try this man to man? If you aren't too scared of me, that is."

The drug merchant laughed mirthlessly, although the gun never wavered from Bolan's chest. "Do not think that you can trick me into something as foolish as that. I will not fall prey to your amateur psychology. This is not your American West, and I am certainly not some John Wayne. I do not care how I win, as long as I win. This gun is a favor that I have had to pay the prison officials very dearly for. Now it will repay my investment. I have buried many other strong fools before you, and I shall crush many more. Now, go to hell, Blanski."

Bolan watched Raimondo's eyes for the faint tensing he knew would precede the tightening of the trigger finger. At that instant the Executioner dived forward.

A red-hot pencil traced a line along Bolan's back, as the bullet carved a groove through the hard flesh topping his ribs, but luckily missing bones and vital muscles.

Bolan hit the stone floor hard, rolling onto his shoulder. As he completed the roll, he flung the knife at Raimondo. Bolan mentally crossed his fingers, for if Raimondo were sharp, this might be his only chance.

The warrior finished his roll in a half crouch, tensed to dodge another shot. There was none.

Raimondo sprawled in the corridor, one eye staring at the ceiling. Bolan's knife lay buried to the hilt in his other ruined eye.

When Bolan emerged into the sunlight, he was engulfed by prisoners cautiously but hastily edging their way past him into the prison block. Each was in a frenzy to raid Raimondo's area, to loot what they could before the guards came and took what remained.

As he traced his way back across the yard, Bolan became aware of the new wound. He could feel his shirt sticking to his flesh, captured there by the congealing blood. Everything else hurt, too, and now that the adrenaline rush had worn off, Bolan thought that he could count every bruise on his body with his clothes still on.

Things were rotten, but at least they were starting to improve. Raimondo was out of the way, a minor annoyance settled, another savage who could never prey on anyone else.

One down, and how many million to go?

Bolan wrenched his mind away from the futile speculation. Sure, there would be someone else jockeying for the fallen drug lord's throne, but one down was better than nothing. One step at a time.

One less obstacle to keep him from his primary objective, his date with the Shining Path.

Stone was waiting, still reading, when Bolan returned to the cell block.

"Ally need a keeper, Blanski," the older man observed as he gingerly pulled the shirt from the clotted wound. "Not very pretty, but not deep, either. Another scar to add to your numerous collection. Lurigancho hasn't been very hospitable to you so fat, has it?"

"I'll live," Bolan replied between tightly clenched teeth, as Stone poured what seem like liquid fire along his back.

"I have no doubt about that. You're a survivor type and Raimondo wasn't. He was a weak man, as most bullies are, who ruled through fear."

"What's a survivor type?"

"That's easy. Survivors survive."

Bolan laughed in spite of himself, regretting it immediately as his aching body protested.

A few minutes later, they had a visitor.

Libertad stood in the doorway, looking grim.

Four of his men filled the corridor behind him.

"I did as you suggested, Blanski," Libertad spit. "We got the guns exactly as you said we would. But they are useless! The breechblocks are missing, so they might as well be scrap metal. Is this how you will deal with us? I want an explanation before I order my men to kill you, slowly."

Bolan acted unimpressed by the other man's anger. "Of course the breechblocks are missing. I wanted to demonstrate that I could deliver on the weapons, not to make you a gift with no guarantees from your people. Once we're out of here, you'll get your breechblocks, your rockets and your ammo. But you won't get a damn thing more until I can take you to it personally."

Bolan realised that he was taking a calculated risk. If the Path refused the bargain, then he didn't have any more chips to play with. He certainly wasn't about to deliver working weapons to the very people he had come here to destroy. And if he had to get out of here on his own... well, he might be spending more time here than he'd planned.

"Why shouldn't I just make you tell me where the weapons cache is," Libertad sneered at Bolan.

Bolan knew that he had won. The terrorist leader was acting a part now, as much for his own men as for Bolan. The moment of danger had passed. "In the first place, you need me, or someone like me, and we both know it. I've got what you want, and I'm prepared to deliver as soon as we get out of here and to keep on supplying your little war until you run out of targets. And in the second place, you couldn't make me talk if I didn't want to, and you know that, too." Bolan held Libertad's eyes until the terrorist turned back to his men, gesturing them away with a wave of his hand.

He paused in the doorway as he was leaving, and said, almost as an afterthought, "Be ready tomorrow. At sundown."

Bolan settled carefully facedown in his cot.

He'd be ready for the Shining Path, all right.

But would they be ready for him?

Antonia de Vincenzo paused outside the door leading into the Revolutionary Council chamber, rehearsing the answers to questions she was most likely to be asked.

She had left Lima two days ago for the mountain hideout near Ayacucho, high in the Andes. Her great beauty and apparent membership within the Peruvian upper strata had made her journey an easy one.

How strange that the very qualities the wealthy establishment admired in her were the ones that alienated her from her true people, the Indians.

Her arrival unannounced at the Shining Path's secret headquarters was bound to raise the suspicions of some of the party commissars. With a last deep breath she pushed into the meeting room.

The council members were ranged on hard-backed chairs around a simple trestle table. The aged and worn men looked more like farm workers discussing a harvest than the leaders of a secret terrorist movement.

"Tell us why you have returned, Antonia." How typical of the chairman. He didn't bother to waste time on pleasantries, and yet concealed a merciless ruthlessness behind a mild, almost fatherly manner.

Antonia was not fooled, having known the chairman since she was a child. Her father had been an academic along with Gonzalo when their glorious leader had only been a humble university professor, and had been one of the first to join the new movement. Her father was long dead, killed in an early skirmish, but the chairman had prospered.

"My employer was murdered by an American over some business matter. With the police conducting an investigation, it hardly seemed prudent to remain in Lima." She couldn't very well tell the council that she had been in secret communication with the notorious General Palma, the self-styled "Scourge of the Shining Path." Or that she had fled for her life, fearing that his smooth compliments were meant to lull her while he arranged for her death. To admit knowing him would be to invite the council to flay her alive for information, a fate she preferred not to think about.