Don Pendleton: Renegade Agent

Bolan got out of the car, stood by its side but did not interfere.

"Gassed up?" Toby asked.

The guy she'd called Buddha — whether the nickname came from his meditative practices, or that godly gut, Bolan was not sure — stared at her. Toby repeated the question, a little more sharply. The guy nodded.

"Start her up, Buddha." Bolan went into the shop, found a rag and a coil of insulated radio wire on a workbench. Behind him he heard the noise of the chopper's six-cylinder power plant starting up. A few moments later, Toby herded the fat guy into the dimness, and a few moments after that he was lying in a corner on his stomach, gagged and trussed like a turkey.

Bolan checked his chronometer and said, "Three minutes."

"Three it is, Captain Numbers," Toby said. "And counting." She reached out, touched his arm.

"Be good," she said softly, "Captain Wonderful."

Be good, for sure.

Be good or be dead.

The armory was a windowless metal Quonset hut, the line of its ground-to-ground curved roof broken only by an oversized air-conditioning unit.

Two khakiclad Arabs flanked the door, automatic rifles with web belts slung over their shoulders.

Mack Bolan came around the corner of the hangar opposite. He paused just long enough to pull the Litton Night Vision Goggles into place, then floored the open jeep he had commandeered, aiming it at the two guys. One of them managed to drop to his knee and sent a burst of autofire through the jeep's free-standing windshield. But by then Bolan had bailed out, coming down on his feet, rolling on his good shoulder. The front of the jeep tore a ragged hole in the flat front end of the Quonset hut.

Someone inside shouted.

One tire of the jeep was resting on the chest of the guy who had fired. His partner looked up from the other side, and Bolan's Beretta spit a silenced 9mm whizzer into his forehead.

Another guy threw open the door, gaped at the jeep, started to say, "What the hell..." The Beretta punched the rest of the words right back down his throat, and Bolan followed the body as it fell back inside the building. A row of high-wattage bulbs ran along the spine of the curved ceiling.

Bolan raised the Uzi and distributed a full 32-round magazine along that line, and the armory plunged into near-blackness, the only light trickling in from the rip the jeep had made in the wall.

Answering fire raked Bolan's position, muzzles flashing like stroboscopes in the darkness.

But the man had moved on. His hands worked busily, dropped the clip from the Uzi, reversing it, seating it in the pistol-grip, racking back the cocking handle.

His eyes scanned the cavernous room, everything clear as daylight through the NVD goggles, while other men shouted in anger and fear, waiting for their own eyes to adjust.

Crates of all sizes and descriptions were stacked on pallets, the pathways between them narrow canyons. In the canyon in front of Bolan, figures appeared. The Uzi chattered, its flash hidden, and four arms, four legs, two torsos fell into a tangled pile on the poured-concrete floor. These men had reverted to the animals they were, the animal's primal fear of darkness and the unknown cutting at their confidence and effectiveness.

Now the dark warehouse was a pandemonium of shouting, cursing men groping toward the thin wash of light at Bolan's end of the building. Somewhere across the room an autorifle spoke, the muzzle flash directed away from Bolan. Someone screamed out pain, shot by his own side. The Man from Hellfire stepped over the bodies and into the inferno. The Uzi flamed its nine millimeters of firepower, and gut-reamers exploded through terrorist flesh. The man walked on, while savages suddenly visited by savagery of a new sort bellowed and bawled and bumped each other. Bolan sent them encouragement via the scream of the Uzi, the whisper of the sweet Beretta.

Other guns talked, but they accomplished nothing more than a revelation — a revelation answered by return fire that did not miss. Up and down the canyons behind the ceiling-high stacks of arms and other tools of the Savage, the man proceeded and his two guns talked.

At the end of an aisle, three wild-eyed candidates for another world scrambled into the open and found that world, when a sweeping burst of hollow-points tumbled through them to burst their torsos like ripe melons.

The man walked on, and the firestorm he left in his wake consumed only two of the allotted three minutes, followed by a moment of silence as profound as sleep. Yeah, the sleep of evermore.

Then, from outside, came shouts and gunfire and the distant whup-a-whup of the chopper's rotor.

The man found the crate he was looking for, ripped the top free. Inside were lengths of what might have been PVC piping — but was not. The man grabbed three lengths.

Then he turned back through the sickly sweet smell of fresh blood that mixed with the sharper acrid odor of gunpowder. His eyes were moving and alert, but he did not care to look over his handiwork. The job was not quite over.

Another jeep with a tripod-mounted .50-caliber heavy machine gun on the open back deck was parked between the armory and the helicopter hangar. The gunner was hunched over, trying to fire the gun in an almost vertical line at the chopper hovering 100 feet above him. The jeep's driver was leaning back, holding the belt so it would not foul.

Bolan swept the Uzi from the belt-man to the gunner. The gunner's sudden deadweight dragged down on the trigger, and the big machine gun went on spitting harmless slugs into the air until the belt jammed. Dust swirled as Toby set the chopper down in front of Bolan. Another jeep was barreling down the street toward the helicopter. Bolan dropped to one knee, emptied the rest of the Uzi's magazine into the front of the hurtling rig. For a moment it neither slowed nor changed course.

Then, less than fifty feet distant, the jeep swerved to the left at an impossibly sharp angle. It flipped into the air. As Bolan dived into the copter's cockpit, he had a visual flash of a body cartwheeling through the air, arms and legs outflying. When the jeep blew, he and Toby were still close enough to the ground to feel the leading edge of the shock waves. Bolan slipped on his headset in time to hear her ask, "What now, Captain Fire?" Somehow the adrenaline of the armory blitz had overcome the pain in Bolan's shoulder, but it returned with a vengeance as he slipped into the gunnery harness anchored to the front passenger seat's frame.

The human resistance below had been broken, and the means to finish off the armory was in Bolan's hands.

But he knew that it was not enough. No one Edwards, Khaddafi, or anyone like them — would exploit this U.S. base again. The mission would only be done when Bolan had wiped it off the face of the earth.

"The planes, Toby," Bolan said. "It's mop-up time."

Toby kicked the little bird into a side-slip, and they skimmed the top of the hangar before she pulled up, holding steady at 100 feet, just upwind from the big bellied C-119 Flying Boxcar. Bolan selected one of the Light Artillery Weapons he had liberated from Edwards's cache. He pulled the pins to' expand the disposable fiberglass tube, raised the pop-up sights. His right foot groped out the door for the skid, found it, let it hold his weight, then he leaned farther out. The gunnery harness would not reach.

Toby turned in time to see his hands working to free the buckles. "Oh, no, you don't," she snapped.

"I have to be completely clear of the cockpit," Bolan smiled tensely, "or the backburn knock us out of the sky."

"You're hurt, Mack," she began to plead.

"Hold her steady," Bolan interrupted, then stripped off the headset. He held the LAW in his right hand, grasped the doorframe with his left, ignored the wrenching pain.