Don Pendleton - Road Of Bones

And as a tool of torture, she recognized that it could prove effective. As to whether it was worse than electricity…well, she’d simply have to wait and see.

If she withstood the ghoul’s next round of questions, how would he proceed? With scalpels or a blowtorch? Acid? Could she hope for shock to spare her from the worst of it, or was he skilled enough to revive her with drugs?

Holding her breath accomplished nothing, as she’d quickly learned. Innate survival mechanisms wouldn’t let her suffocate herself. If her hands were free—

The gunshots startled Anuchin from her fantasy of suicide. Her eyes snapped open, saw her captors facing toward the darkness of the cavernous warehouse. The ghoul was shifting nervously from foot to foot, as one of those who’d snatched her from the airport shouted to the long rows of machinery.

“Mikhail? Mikhail!”

No answer from the shadows.

The thought of rescue never entered her mind. Who was there left to help her? No one from the Ministry of Justice that she served. They wished her dead, silenced forever, buried with the secrets she’d uncovered.

As for private parties, Anuchin couldn’t think of one who had the means to find her coupled with an interest in helping her survive. Certainly, she had no friends within the Russian Mafia, denizens of the thieves world that infested every level of Russian society from top to bottom.

With Sergey dead, she had no one.

A quarrel between murderers, then, with Anuchin caught in the middle. Better that than more torture. She could always hope for a stray bullet to release her from her world of pain.

Was that so much to ask?

Helpless and totally exposed, she closed her eyes again and mouthed another silent prayer.

* * *

WHILE ONE OF BOLAN’S targets shouted for Mikhail, others were fanning out to sweep the warehouse, homing in on the echoes of his first gunshots. He saw one man breaking to his left, another to his right, their mouthpiece fading back to crouch behind a bulky gravity wagon.

That left two figures visible beneath the warehouse lights. A naked woman was fastened to a chair with duct tape at her wrists and ankles, plus a loop around her ribs, slumped with her chin on her chest. Beside her, to her left, a tall man in a raincoat stood and goggled at the shadows with protruding eyes. A glint of stainless steel told Bolan that he held a knife.

Completely useless in a gunfight.

From the tall man’s look and his reaction to the shots, Bolan knew he was the inquisitor. Without a second thought, he raised the AKS and stitched the gawker with a rising burst from clavicle to forehead, shattering his face. The guy went down as if someone had cut his strings, and Bolan saw the woman in the chair turn toward him, blink, then look around to find out where the shots had come from.

Wondering if she was next?

The shooter behind the gravity wagon was playing it safe. His cohorts, flanking Bolan, did their best to keep it stealthy, but their style was obviously more attuned to smash-and-grab than creep-and-sneak. They telegraphed their moves with scuffling feet, letting their target track them in the dark.

Bolan fell back from the bright lights and climbed aboard a midsize Caterpillar tractor, crouching with his back against its open cab. He’d let the hunters come to him—the first of them, at least—and see what happened next.

The gunman coming from his left was faster, shuffling toward Bolan from behind a bale wrapper. He didn’t check the high ground, though, intent on peering under things, where shadows pooled. When he had closed the gap to twenty feet, a burst from Bolan’s SMG ripped into him and dropped him, twitching, on his back.

The dead guy’s backup took advantage of the muzzle-flash and banged away at Bolan with a pistol, but the Executioner was already in motion, airborne, dropping to a crouch behind the tractor as incoming rounds cracked through its cab.

The soldier broke to his left, keeping the bulk of the machine and its big engine block between his adversary and himself. When he was near the tractor’s nose, he knelt, then stretched prone and crawled around beneath the radiator grille, careful to keep his weapon’s magazine from scraping concrete as he went.

He caught the second shooter scrambling toward the tractor, pistol out in front of him and ready for a hasty shot if he was challenged. What he wasn’t ready for was half a dozen full-metal-jacket rounds slashing through his thighs and pelvis, spinning him into the line of fire and ending it with head shots.

Which left one.

Bolan emerged to find the last man standing with a pistol pressed against the naked woman’s head, half-crouched to use her as a human shield.

The soldier found a vantage point beyond the ring of light and stopped there, took a second to unfold his submachine gun’s stock and raise it to his shoulder. As stubby as it was, the little room-broom hadn’t been designed for sniping, but at forty feet he thought the shot was doable.

His weapon had a flip-up rear sight with a front cylindrical post. Its eight-inch barrel produced a muzzle velocity of 2400 feet per second, slower than the full-size AK-74, but an insignificant difference at what amounted to point-blank range.

While his target shouted, sounding more agitated by the moment, Bolan found his mark and held it—just above the guy’s left eyebrow, with the SMG’s selector set for semiauto fire. One shot, and if he missed it…

Crack!

A crimson halo wreathed the gunman’s head as he slumped over backward. Bolan thought the naked woman gasped but wasn’t sure. He crossed the open floor to reach her, opening a knife in transit. Keeping his eyes averted as he slit the duct tape at her wrists and ankles, he reached around to cut one side along her rib cage.

Finally, he met her eyes and saw the fear behind them. When she asked him something, Bolan couldn’t understand it.

“Slow down or speak English,” he suggested.

“Da. Yes. Who are you?”

“A friend, sent to get you.”

“Friend?” She didn’t seem to recognize the term.

He nodded. “We need to go. Do you have any clothes?”

“Shredded,” she told him, covering herself belatedly as best she could with slender arms. “They thought I wouldn’t need them…after.”

Bolan scanned the killing ground and saw a sport coat draped across a second chair, almost outside the ring of light. He collected it and passed it to the woman while he thought about the rest.

The man who’d used her as a shield was several inches taller than the woman, but he had a narrow waist. She’d have to roll the cuffs up on his slacks, but it could work if she cinched up his belt.

“You mind a pair of hand-me-downs?” he asked, his back turned as he began to strip the corpse.

“What do you…oh. No, those will do for now. My shoes are over here somewhere,” she told him, moving gingerly toward the rim of shadow. “With my bag, I think.”

Bolan kept his head turned as she came to get the slacks. When she was covered, buckling the dead man’s belt, she told him, “Don’t forget their guns.”

CHAPTER TWO

Japan, seven hours earlier

Bolan was in the middle of another operation when the call came. He’d been wreaking havoc on a drug pipeline, tracking the flow of heroin from Yakuza controllers through the Philippines, on to Hawaii, where it spilled into the veins of addicts.

He was up against the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s most prosperous Yakuza Family and one of the world’s largest criminal organizations, with an estimated forty-five thousand oath-bound members and countless other close associates. Aside from heroin, the syndicate made billions annually from gambling, human trafficking and prostitution, internet pornography, extortion, gunrunning, stock fraud and labor racketeering.