Don Pendleton - Patriot Play

And then the rattle of autofire came from the direction of the 4x4 and Lyons.

From inside the house raised voices reached Bolan. There was muttered conversation; the sound of boots on a wood floor, coming in the direction of the door next to Bolan.

The door was yanked open and an armed figure came into view, a raised MP-5 in his hands.

The gunner came through the door without checking his perimeter. Bolan hit him full in the face with the Beretta. Flesh split and blood welled up immediately. The guy slumped against the door frame, his weapon forgotten in the world of pain that engulfed him. Bolan hit again, harder this time, and the groaning man went to his knees, then flat to the porch as the Executioner caught him around the neck, applied pressure and a hard twist that snapped his spine. Bending over the prone form, Bolan snatched up the MP-5, pushed his Beretta back into its holster, then checked the load for the weapon he had acquired.

Turning, he kicked open the door and stormed into the house, his weapon tracking in on the men standing over the battered and bloodied form of Jerome Gantz. They swung around at his noisy entrance, realizing he wasn’t one of their own, and went for their holstered weapons. One of them also raised a handset he was holding and began to yell into it. His commands were drowned by the harsh crackle of the SMG in Bolan’s hands. He drove hard bursts into the guy with the handset, then swept the muzzle around and took down another hardman. That left one standing, and he had his handgun clear and opened fire the moment he spotted Bolan. The Executioner, ducking low and breaking to the left, had already moved, forcing the guy to track in again. Down on one knee, Bolan swept the guy aside with a sustained burst that blew the life from his body and slammed him to the floor in a mist of blood.

From outside the house Bolan heard the stutter of an autoweapon. Then a brief pause was followed by the unmistakable boom of Carl Lyons’s Colt Python. Two shots rang out before silence fell.

“On the boat. There are more on that boat,” someone whispered, the words slurred and spoken by a person in terrible pain. Bolan turned and met the pain-filled eyes of Jerome Gantz. His captors had stripped him to his shorts and tethered him to a wooden kitchen chair using fine wire around his wrists and ankles. Blood was seeping from where the wire had cut deep into his flesh, and the wooden floor around the chair was spattered with blood. Gantz’s face and body had been beaten to a bloody wreck. Blood dripped from a baseball bat on the floor close by. The white bone from his shattered left cheek gleamed through the split flesh. His lips were pulped, and bloody teeth hung by shreds from his gums. A bleeding gash lay open on his exposed skull. Livid red marks showed over his ribs and around his knees the flesh looked swollen and pulpy.

“The Brethren?”

All Bolan got was a tired nod from Gantz before the man’s head lolled forward against his bloody chest.

A sweep of the open-concept room, which extended from living area to the kitchen, showed that someone had thoroughly trashed the place. Broken items littered the floor; every drawer and cupboard hung open; the furniture in the living area had been overturned. The TV had been tipped to the floor and smashed, and so had a CD player.

Lyons appeared in the doorway, taking a look around the interior before stepping inside. His Colt Python was back in its holster, and he carried an MP-5 he had taken from the outside guard.

“Somebody is really pissed at him,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact and holding no trace of pity for Jerome Gantz’s condition.

“The Brethren,” Bolan said.

“Coop, tell me why we’re bothering to save this dirtbag’s life.”

Bolan was about to reply when he heard a distant raised voice. It came from the beach side of the house.

Gantz’s warning: On the boat. There are more on that boat.

Bolan jabbed a finger in the general direction of the rear entrance. “We need to clean house first.”

It was enough for Lyons. He followed Bolan toward the door that exited onto the rear porch. The soldier paused for a heartbeat, reached for the handle and jerked the door open. He ducked low, went through and to the right. Lyons was on his heels, moving left away from the lighted rectangle of the open door.

Their exit was accompanied by wild bursts of autofire. The rear porch was hit by heavy fire, wood splintering and shredding under the salvos. A window shattered, glass blowing into the house.

The sea breeze that had pushed the fog inland had dispersed a greater part of it on the beach. Both Bolan and Lyons were able to pick out the moving silhouettes of the men behind the guns from where they now lay prone on the sandy beach. Bolan raised himself to a semicrouch and turned his MP-5 on the shooters, his calmly delivered volley cutting a bloody swathe through them, while Lyons’s SMG added its own deadly noise. Men went down yelling and screaming until there was none left standing except the single guy tending the inflatable raft that had brought the killing crew to shore. He witnessed the deaths of his partners and decided enough was enough. Turning, he shoved the inflatable through the incoming surf and threw himself on board, struggling to use the single oar. He might have made it if he hadn’t pulled the pistol holstered on his hip and fired warning shots in the direction of the beach.

Lyons snapped in a fresh magazine from his confiscated weapon and returned fire. The MP-5’s 9 mm slugs shredded the rubber of the inflatable and cored into the shooter’s body. He fell back into the deflating folds of the boat and went down with it.

Bolan made his way across the beach. He could just make out the dark bulk of the waiting boat riding the soft Atlantic swell. It showed running lights at bow and stern. He reached for the night-vision monocular and took it from the pouch slung across his back. When he peered into the lens he could see a clearer picture of the cruiser. The dark shape of men moved back and forth.

And the dull gleam of misty light running the length of a gun barrel—a .50-caliber machine gun, was aimed in their direction. Bolan didn’t hesitate. He turned and ran in Lyons’s direction, hit him side-on and they thumped to the sand an instant before the boat-mounted machine gun opened up. The solid sound of the autofire, slightly dulled by the enveloping fog, hammered at the air. The intermittent flash of tracers told Bolan they were being fired at by professionals. The slugs pounded the sand, showering the men as they crawled away from the line of fire. Then the trajectory rose and the fire was hitting the house, pounding its way through the wooden structure, a long and incessant blast of fire that had no other intention than that of rendering the house into a wreck. The bloodied image of Jerome Gantz flashed through Bolan’s mind. Whatever had happened to the man before Bolan arrived would now be completed. He had no illusions—the directed gunfire was intended to make sure Gantz was dead.

Someone was determined to kill the man.

The question was, why?

With everything that had happened it appeared more than likely that Jerome Gantz had been the man behind the design and construction of the massive bombs used in the devastating public attacks.

For some currently inexplicable reason Gantz had been singled out for some kind of reprisal action. Torture? A savage beating? For something the Brethren wanted and now that they had failed, the death of Gantz was the final act. The seemingly overt act of destroying his home knowing Gantz was inside and helpless proved that thought.

The hellish beat of the .50-caliber machine gun ceased abruptly. As Bolan raised his head, he heard the rumble of a powerful engine, the throbbing pulse of the screws as they pushed the cruiser away from the shore. He shoved to his feet and grabbed for the monocular, taking a hurried scan of the departing boat. He saw its stern as it disappeared into the fog, and picked out the shape of a man leaning against the stern rail. He was tall, the pale oval of his face indistinct. Bolan did see the cap of white-blond hair above the face. Short cut, almost spiky. It was an image he wasn’t about to forget.