Don Pendleton - Blood Testament

Now someone wanted the Brognola blood...

Helen dismissed this grisly train of thought and concentrated on the here and now, her children. They were intelligent with the resilience of youth, but they were in a cage from which there might be no escape. Without their father's history of dealing with the savages, they were completely unprepared for what was happening around them.

Helen knew they would resist when it was time, but what could Jeff accomplish in the face of armed professionals?

She worried most about Eileen and what she might be forced to suffer once the signal for their execution had been given. Two of their abductors — the gorillas, Gino and Carmine — had been ogling her from the beginning. If they were unleashed with time to kill before they finished it...

She closed her mind to the disgusting, painful images and concentrated on discovering a means of self-defense. A gun would be ideal, of course, but there was little chance — no chance — that she could get her hands on any of the hardware carried by their kidnappers. She would stay alert in case they dropped their guard, but in the meantime they were down to bare survival with the tools at hand. Provided they could find the necessary tools to start with.

Helen forced herself to study her surroundings carefully, alert for anything she might have missed. A simple bedroom with adjoining bath, the furniture comprised a queen-sized bed devoid of sheets and blankets, with a pair of mismatched wooden, straight-backed chairs. The empty closet had been stripped of hangers, anything that could have been converted to a weapon. In the tiny bathroom, drinking "glasses" made of styrofoam were something less than lethal.

Still, there would be something. There was always something.

Bathrooms meant hot water. They could let it run till it was scalding, fill the little cups, and somehow lure one or both of the gorillas into range before the water cooled. A dash of liquid fire across the eyes, and if they weren't all shot to death immediately, there was just a chance that one of them could seize a weapon, turn it on their captors...

She shook her head, disgusted with the fantasy that had attempted to seduce her. It was ludicrous, attacking armed professionals with little cups of water. They would all be killed at once unless the gunners were delayed by laughter, forced to catch their breath before they opened fire. It was a foolish plan. Worse yet, the thought of running water had awakened stirrings in her bladder, forcing Helen's full attention from the problem of the moment into confrontation with the routine problems of biology.

The plastic seat was cold, and Helen warmed it with herself, examining the stark surroundings for potential weapons, noting that the shower curtain had been left in place, its plastic curtain hooks completely useless to her now. Assuming she could get the curtain off its rod... She froze, humiliated by the knowledge that the answer had been there before her all the time. The rod. A hollow shaft of lightweight metal held in place by tension, it could be dismantled by a child. It would not weigh enough to make a decent fighting staff, but if they flattened one end, mashed it down and twisted it somehow, they might produce a clumsy sort of lance. If it was driven into unsuspecting, unprotected flesh with adequate velocity and force... There was another rod inside the closet, Helen realized, and that one was a hefty wooden cudgel mounted into brackets that facilitated its removal in the interests of space. No tools would be required, and in a few more moments they would have a staff, a spear — the makings of a mini-arsenal.

She flushed the toilet and tugged up her slacks — immediately conscious of another weapon close at hand. Before the tank refilled itself, she found the shutoff valve and closed it tight. She raised the heavy lid, aware that it could do some damage if the slab of porcelain was smashed against a human skull, and laid it carefully across the sink. She studied the assembly of tubes and floats and wires that had released mankind from midnight rambles to a reeking privy in the yard, and knew that it could serve her now in other ways.

She broke three fingernails and cut her fingers twice before she finished disassembling the mechanism, salvaging the slender float arm and an eight-inch metal slat that had been previously connected to the flush handle. Either one was stiff and sharp enough to savage unprotected eyes and throats at need, assuming she got close enough to try. Without a wrench to loosen pipes beneath the sink and give herself a bludgeon worthy of the name, it was the best she could do.

But she could not do everything alone.

They had four weapons now, albeit primitive and flimsy in the face of submachine guns. She would need the full cooperation of her children if they were to have a chance at all.

The risks were staggering, but there was finally no alternative. Inaction was a form of suicide, she realized, and once their deaths were finally decreed, the end would come in seconds for herself, for Jeff. But not, perhaps, for young Eileen. The leader might not have the interest or the energy to finally restrain Gino and Carmine once the killing started. When it came right down to it, the leader might enjoy a little stolen sex himself.

If there had been a chance, however slight, of their survival, Helen might have counseled Eileen to submit, to save herself by any means and confront the ordeal another day, when she was safe and sound and out of there. But they were doomed; she knew that much with numbing certainty. And knowing that, she saw no need to make it easy for their would-be murderers.

It went against the grain to simply watch her life, the lives of both her children slip away. A fighter as long as she could remember, the lady knew that she would go down fighting. Before she let the gunners take Eileen and foul her with their touch, she was prepared to die, prepared to kill.

Soon now. At midnight or a little after. When the gunners got their orders on the telephone.

She called the children and showed them what she had already done, and set about dismantling the shower rod. The closet would be next, and they would take it one thing at a time, while time remained.

A maximum of sixty minutes now, and Helen felt a tightness in her chest as she began to count her life, her children's lives, in measured heartbeats. They had one chance in a hundred thousand of surviving, but she could not let that single opportunity slip by without attempting to secure it. By midnight she would know if she was capable of killing physically; the mental qualms had long since disappeared.

And she would need the grim resolve that had already settled on her shoulders, worming deep into her heart and mind with tentacles of ice. She was relying on the threat against her children to provide her with the killer instinct she would need to do the job.

By midnight.

By the witching hour.

Sixty minutes minimum, and counting down.

A lifetime.

"Time to go."

Brognola checked his watch and nodded, startled by the hour. Saturday was damn near gone, and Sunday morning promised little in the way of respite from the empty ache he felt inside.

"Okay."

He finished wiping down the Smith & Wesson .38 and stowed it in a holster riding on his hip. The Bulldog .44 from Charter Arms was snug beneath his arm in horizontal rigging that would shave a heartbeat off his draw, and both were loaded with the lethal Glaser "safety slugs" designed for heavy stopping power. Copper-jacketed projectiles filled with Number 12 shot suspended in liquid Teflon, the bullets were designed to exit from the muzzle at terrific speeds, exploding savagely on impact with a human target. And if impact from the Glasers failed to drop your man, there was the grim fringe benefit of creeping poison, Teflon working through the veins until it reached the heart, occluding vital passages and valves, arresting life.