Don Pendleton: Interception

“Cut yourself free,” he ordered.

She took the knife automatically but when she looked up, the night fighter was gone, swallowed by shadows. The door to the room was kicked inward, the frame splintering along one hinge, and a handful of men armed with utilitarian machine pistols burst into the room. They wore dirty jeans and expensive shirts with gold gleaming in the form of watches and bracelets on their wrists, in their teeth, at their ears and across their knuckles. They looked every bit the part of modern-age pirates.

The leader’s eyes had grown wide in surprise at the bloody corpses, his jaw dropping to his chest in a reaction so exaggerated it was nearly comical. His head jerked left then right as he tried to peer into the thick shadows filling the edges of the long room. He saw the bloody knife in the American girl’s hands but saw also that she was still bound to the chair at the neck, waist, knees and ankles. She looked at him, her expression blank in her fear. Behind him the rest of the crew tried to press forward.

The man, a lieutenant named Kis, barked something in his own language and waved the stubby barrel of his machine pistol. Karen Rasmussen just looked at him. He switched to a broken, almost pidgin English.

“What happened!” he demanded. “You kill boss?”

The girl tried to shake her head, her mouth locked into an “O” shape by the red rubber ball of her gag. She could barely turn her head against the stylized wrappings of the knots. But she held a dripping knife in her hand.

Cursing, Kis charged forward.

Growling, the crew of triad hitters surged after him. There was a heavy thud on the old floorboards as something metal struck the camcorder and knocked it over. Every head turned in that direction. Kis blinked as it looked as if a pale green can of soda pop was rolling across the floor toward them.

A white light like a sun going nova flashed, followed by a sharp, overwhelming bang that filled his ears with disorienting pain. From behind the milling, confused gang of rapists and kidnappers a black figure detached itself from the shadows and moved among them.

The silenced pistol fired from near point-blank range, putting 3-round bursts into the skulls of confused men. Hot blood and chunks of brain splashed terrified, uncomprehending faces, and bodies started to hit the floor.

In her chair Karen Rasmussen watched the Executioner at work.

He moved like a supranatural force coldly dispatching the slavers from the very middle of their milling cluster. He spun and twisted, and his gun hand pointed, lifted and pressed and his trigger finger worked repeatedly. The weapon’s slide kicked back, spilling gleaming, smoking brass cartridges out of the oversize ejection port.

Her head whirled and spun from the flash-bang grenade concussion, and her vision was obstructed by blurred spots. She blinked, catching disjointed images like still pictures clipped from a movie reel. She blinked again, seeing those shells tumbling with surrealistic clarity but still seeing the faces of the falling men as blurs. She blinked again, and her vision snapped into focus. There was only the night fighter, his gun still raised, in the middle of a pile of leaking corpses.

The man turned toward her, and she could see smoke curling out the end of the weapon in dark gray ribbons. The stench of cordite cut through her nostrils, burning like smelling salts, and snapping her back into the sharp reality of the moment.

“There’s more downstairs,” Bolan said. “I’ve got to take them out if we’re going to get out of here. Hurry! Cut yourself free and get a weapon.” He indicated the black metal machine pistols scattered around the floor at his feet. Rasmussen looked down. It seemed like the weapons were floating in a lake of blood.

“Get under the table and watch the door,” Bolan continued. “Do not shoot me when I come back in. Hurry!”

Then he turned and made for the door to the triad snuff film studio. Karen Rasmussen began to free herself.

CHIN HO MEDINA stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up, a Kalashnikov assault in his sweating hands. He called again, confused by the commotion and then the lack of commotion as the first team of bodyguards had rushed up the stairs that ran like scaffolding to the second-story office space. How much trouble could a teenage girl be? Then a black apparition appeared quickly in the doorway and he barked out a single word before opening fire.

He saw a black-clad, balaclava-wearing man and screamed, “BSD!” referring to the Croatian commando group, part hostage rescue team, part death squad that served as a special operations force.

The triad gunmen’s assault rifle blazed in his hands as behind him the rest of the criminal cell, already poised and on edge, exploded into action. Bolan pulled back from the edge of the doorway as he saw him level his weapon and the child pornographer began to blast away, the muzzle-flash obscuring the gunmen’s own vision as he poured lead into the shadows above him.

He didn’t see the deadly black sphere as it dropped toward him.

It arched in a gentle lob over his head and struck the hard, oil-stained concrete floor. The impact detonation grenade immediately exploded. Shrapnel fanned out, riding the edge of the concussive blast, and tore into Chin’s flesh seconds before the explosion sent him spinning like a rag doll over the safety railing of the stairs, his weapon spinning away.

Behind the mutilated corpse, razor-sharp shards of metal buzzed into unprotected flesh and a ball of billowing fire mushroomed out behind it. Men were screaming as they were thrown or swept aside. Clothes burst into flame and blood ran in rivers across the filthy floor.

Bolan stepped out of the doorway and rushed down the stairs, his pistol up and ready. He caught a flash of motion and pivoted smoothly at the waist, putting a 3-round burst into one stumbling kidnapper, then a second into another man fighting to stand.

A screaming man staggered about, clutching at a torn and bleeding stump where his arm had been: no threat. Bolan turned away, racing down four more steps, and saw a child-rapist crawling along the ground, his guts strung out behind him, and screaming in agonizing pain. The man was reaching for the blood-smeared grip of a machine pistol: threat. The Executioner used a Parabellum burst to hollow the man’s skull.

He thundered down another half flight of stairs and saw movement beyond the edge of the blast radius. He vaulted the smoking railing as heavy-caliber slugs chewed into the wood steps where he’d been standing. He landed in the middle of his grenade kills. He tried to spin and drop but his foot came down in a puddled smear of intestines and he slipped.

The gunner who had fired on him rushed out from behind a stack of fifty-five-gallon industrial barrels, weapon blazing. Bolan shot him with a burst low in the stomach and the man doubled over, firing a second burst into the ground, causing ricochets to whistle and whine madly around the room.

Riding out the recoil of the last burst, Bolan pushed himself up. His blacksuit was soaked with blood along the right side and his ribs felt bruised from the tumble but his adrenaline was running through him in currents of electricity.

He sensed movement and turned his head, the muzzle of his pistol shifting in tandem and steel-steady in his grip. His finger lay welded on the smooth metal curve of the trigger taking up the slack. He saw a shape crouched under an old metal office desk and his arm straightened, his finger tightening on the trigger.

The girl’s lips quivered with fear, and her thin cheeks were smeared with dirt. Her lower lip was split and swollen so that a trickle of blood had run down her chin and dried like a string of chocolate syrup.