Don Pendleton: Save the Children

Denise stepped close to Lana until their faces were only inches apart. Denise lifted her gloved hand and softly stroked the fingertips along Lana's bruised cheek.

"You shouldn't call David names like that, dear," she said softly. "I am his mother, after all."

"I'm sorry." Lana closed her eyes. "I was wrong."

"That's more like it," Denise murmured sweetly.

Lana spit on the floor between Denise Parelli's feet. "I should have said that he's a son of a bitch!"

Denise sighed.

"My dear, my dear. I'm afraid you leave us no choice but to teach you some manners."

"The hard way," David chimed in.

His smile said he was savoring the experience. He nodded to a hood standing next to Lana.

The nearby soldier stepped up and slammed the butt of his shotgun into the small of Lana's back.

She cried out and fell to both knees, scraping them on the rough concrete when the man holding her released his grip.

Against the wall, the children saw this and began whimpering, a strange, eerie sound in the spacious warehouse, as if they knew that the brutalized young woman was the closest thing they had to a friend in this horrible nightmare.

David lifted his hand to the soldier who had struck Lana.

"No more." He looked down at the woman sprawled before him and licked his lips in anticipation. "Not yet, anyway. Business first."

He stepped over to Lana, reached down, cupped her chin in his hand. He jerked her head up so that she had to look at him.

"Don't touch me, slimebag," she snarled vehemently.

"When this is over," he told her with a reptilian smile, "we won't need you for anything. Except for maybe one thing... until you die. That oughta be lots of fun. For me, and for the boys."

Before she could respond, there was the rumble of a truck's engine outside and the loading dock door began to screech upward.

The big trailer rig had been backed up to the warehouse loading dock, its rear doors wide open.

The foreman walked in from the loading dock.

"We're ready to load, Mr. Parelli."

David lost interest in the woman sprawled before him. He looked at his mother and saw the barely perceptible nod. "Load 'em up and move 'em out." He looked back at Lana with a leer. "Then we fix you."

The fashionable neighborhood bordering Evanston was quiet. There were lights on in some of the big houses behind manicured lawns, but few cars moved along the broad, tree-lined boulevards.

Bolan parked Lana Garner's car a block away from Senator Mark Dutton's house, where he lived with his wife and teenage daughter.

Bolan had chosen one of the darkened houses when he parked the car. He loosened the bulb in the dome light and there was no flash of illumination when he slipped out of the vehicle, quietly closing the door and angling for the thick shadows underneath trees.

It took only a few moments for him to make his way through the backyard toward a high wooden fence that closed off the Dutton property from prying eyes.

Bolan paused, listening intently for a moment, hearing nothing from the other side of the fence.

A door slammed somewhere, but it was several houses away. A couple of dogs in the neighborhood were barking sporadically. He heard nothing else, nothing from the direction of the Dutton residence on the other side of the fence.

He reached up, grasped the top of the slats and vaulted over, his booted feet landing with a muffled thump in the backyard.

The rear of the Dutton house was dark. Wind rustled tall evergreens in the yard.

Bolan started toward the senator's residence, slipping the night vision goggles he wore into place.

The sound of the wind almost covered the rush of footsteps from behind.

He dropped to one side, the thought flashing through his mind that this guard was more competent than most. He heard the hiss of a knife blade through air, coming at him.

He spun and snaked his arm out, blocking the stab.

The sentry let out a grunt, pulled back and slashed again.

Bolan felt a line of fire race across his right forearm as he blocked this slash. His left dipped and the Gerber MK II combat knife sheathed mid-chest seemed to spring into his hand.

He pivoted as the blademan danced back again. Bolan snapped a kick to the guard's knee.

The man yelped in pain and staggered.

Bolan moved in, looped his bleeding right arm around the man's neck to stifle a cry. He drove the blade of his knife into the guard's back, expertly guiding it between the ribs, into the heart.

The sentry gave a mighty lurch in Bolan's grip, then went slack.

Bolan lowered the body to the cold ground. He wiped his knife clean on the dead man's jacket, sheathed the weapon and quickly frisked the corpse. He found a Colt .45 in shoulder leather and id claiming that Louie Caputo had been licensed to carry a concealed weapon in his capacity of security coordinator for Tri-State, Inc.

Bolan stood, confident that he had taken the life of nothing more than a Mafia street goon... posing as a private detective... put here by the family to bodyguard the senator.

Bolan's pocketknife had a back door of the senator's house open in less than ten seconds.

It took about three times as long to find the button of a burglar alarm and disarm it, then Bolan stood inside.

The house smelled of fragrant odors from a roaring log fire.

Bolan himself smelled of the brutal night.

Cold.

Sweat.

Tension.

He moved through the strange air of other people's lives, lives he could only guess at.

He spotted a staircase and moved toward it, careful not to nudge anything in his way, his NVD goggles guiding him.

At first he didn't notice the light, only saw it peripherally as he moved past, then it registered: a thin line of light beneath a tall door leading to the basement.

His gloved hand turned the knob slowly.

A steep staircase descended into shadow.

He took the steps one at a time, breathing slowly.

The basement was well furnished. At the end nearest him was a bar that could easily accommodate twenty or thirty people.

He heard sounds from behind a half-open door between the bar and where he stood. He moved toward it, negotiating a pool table, sliding the night vision goggles up, knowing he had found the senator alone down here in his study while Mrs. Dutton and their teenage daughter slept somewhere upstairs.

Good, thought Bolan.

He eased up to that half-open door to look inside.

The senator was seated in an overstuffed armchair, nursing a drink, his back to Bolan. The politician's attention was riveted to a TV screen that was playing a videotape from the VCR atop the set.

Bolan detected a faint, wheezing sound, and it took him a second to realize what it was.

The senator was breathing heavily, thinking he was alone, entranced by what was on the screen.

Bolan saw it, too.

The image of young girls, no older than eight or ten, looking frightened, terrified by someone off camera. The children were parading naked before the camera as if they were in a beauty contest...

Bolan had to restrain himself from emptying Big Thunder into the man's head. Disgust, rage and bile rose in the soldier's throat, but he kept his hands empty.

The senator was so transfixed by the images on celluloid that he was not aware of the Bolan presence until he touched the Off button of the unit's remote control device, making the young girls disappear to a pinprick of light, then nothing.

The senator saw Bolan and half jumped out of his chair, almost knocking over the drink on a small table next to his chair. Bolan came around to stand before him, clamping a big hand over Dutton's face and pushing him roughly backward into the chair.

Dutton's eyes bulged fearfully as Bolan brought his hand away from the other man's mouth.