Don Pendleton - Death Gamble

Autofire burned the air around her legs and torso and tore into the ground in front of her. Slugs passed inches from her right hip. She cut left, fear constricting her breath. Raising the Uzi, she opened up with the weapon. The chances of hitting her hidden attacker, while trying to dodge gunfire and run, were nearly nonexistent. But if she could get close enough to make the shooter dive for cover, it might buy her the seconds she needed to get behind the pile of stones.

The weapon went silent in her hands.

Empty.

She cursed herself for making another amateur mistake. Adrenaline coursing through her, heart slamming against her rib cage, she surged ahead.

Cover lay just a few feet ahead. She knew it’d take too damn long to reload the Uzi. Switching the machine pistol to her left hand, she began clawing for her side arm with her right hand. Only five feet to go.

The first bullet hit her square in the kidneys, spun her and knocked the breath from her lungs.

She tried to unleather her pistol and figure out why her back suddenly felt as though someone had crashed a truck into it. Two more shots pummeled her abdomen, her chest. She gasped for breath. Pain seemed to sear every cell of her body.

The beautiful Russian staggered forward, surrendering her overloaded body to sweet nothingness.

THRUSTING FORWARD with powerful leg muscles, Bolan vaulted for the door and set himself on a collision course with the guard blocking it. As he sliced through the air, the MP-5 churned through the contents of its magazine. Parabellum rounds pounded into the guard’s abdomen like punches from a prize fighter, hurling him back into the building.

Bolan passed through the doorway and hit the floor hard. Breath whooshed from his lungs as he skidded across the rotted wood planks. Splinters lanced into his forearms, shredding his sleeves, opening a dozen trails of wet crimson that dribbled down his skin.

Even as Bolan struck the floor, the grenade outside the house exploded. The warrior pulled himself into a ball, shielded his face with his bloodied forearms and rode out the blast. A mass of flame, debris and smoke forced its way through the door, and thunder threatened to split Bolan’s eardrums. Bits of mortar blew from between the concrete blocks making up the building. Outside, dirt and debris rained on the corrugated metal roof. When his breath returned to him, Bolan took in deep pulls of air and found it choked with grit. He hacked a few times, trying to clear the filth from his lungs.

The soldier had dropped the MP-5 during his tumble. As the explosion’s reverberations died and his senses returned, Bolan fisted the Desert Eagle and came to his feet. Staring down the pistol’s snout, he saw two doors to the right and one to the left. The end of the hallway opened into what appeared to be a large kitchen.

Glass shards from broken beer bottles, spent shell casings and smears of mud and dried blood littered the floor. A gas-powered generator rumbled somewhere in the distance, and the air reeked of stale beer and vomit.

Bolan processed the sounds like a human computer, his mind catching and identifying bits of information, looking for the one that might mean the difference between life and death.

Then it hit.

A grunt of exertion. The whisper of steel slicing through air.

Bolan folded at the knees, plummeting as though a trapdoor had opened beneath him. Metal sparked against concrete as an ax cut through the airspace above Bolan and then collided with a wall.

The Executioner spun and brought up the Desert Eagle. The big-bore pistol unleashed twin peals of thunder and a pair of .44 manglers tunneled at an upward angle into Bolan’s opponent, boring through his torso before exploding from his back in a bloody spray. The ax slid from the man’s grasp as he crumpled in a heap at Bolan’s feet.

Footsteps sounded behind him. Grabbing the ax as he hauled himself to his feet, the warrior turned and spotted a pair of gunners bearing down on him. Cocking his left arm, he thrust the ax forward in an overhead toss. Spiraling end over end as it flew through air, the weapon buried itself into the chest of one of the gunners. A blast from the Desert Eagle finished off the second attacker.

Retrieving the MP-5, Bolan slung the subgun and kept the Desert Eagle locked in his grip. He cleared the room to his left, found it filled with ragged furniture, plates of half-eaten rice and chicken, pornographic magazines and a few stray rounds of ammunition.

No Trevor Dade.

No Talisman.

He continued toward the kitchen, again encountering no resistance. Clearing another room, he began to wonder whether he’d been duped. As he returned to the hallway, a big shadow crossed his path and drove the butt of an AK-47 against his temple. Bolan jerked his head to the side, rolled with the impact and let the force push him back into the room he’d just exited. A vague impression of Talisman’s enraged face registered in Bolan’s mind as he found himself out of harm’s way.

A direct hit from the rifle butt would have been deadly, but even the glancing blow had caused his head and neck to hurt like hell. He felt as though his brain had been disconnected from his body, and he’d lost all sense of time and place. Gathering his senses, Bolan checked to make sure his assailant had retreated and took a moment to collect himself.

Multiple footsteps sounded in the hallway. With the Desert Eagle leading the way, Bolan moved into the main corridor, starting for the front door. A gunner stepped into the doorway as Bolan beat a path to it. The Desert Eagle exploded, hurling a pair of .44 slugs into the man. The soldier ejected the mostly spent clip and cracked a fresh one home as he ran.

Bolan crossed the killing field outside the house. Weaving his way through the mangled human remains littering the yard, he heard an engine roar to life and found himself bathed in the white glare of headlights. Engine growling, tires chewing through dirt and rocks, the vehicle bore straight down on Bolan.

The Desert Eagle cracked twice as the Executioner snapped off rounds at the charging vehicle’s front end. As he’d suspected during his initial recon, the vehicle—a Mercedes sedan—was armored and the shots ricocheted off the hood.

With lightning-fast reflexes, the soldier threw himself from the vehicle’s path, rolling and coming back up in a crouch. Staccato bursts of machine-gun fire flared from the passing vehicle’s gun ports as it raced past. Bolan watched ruby taillights shrink and eventually fade completely in the darkness.

Looking around, Bolan weighed his options. If Talisman had fled, he likely would have taken Dade with him. Dade was the only bargaining chip that the Sierra Leone tough guy had—if he had Dade at all. Bolan sensed there had been more than one person in the corridor when he’d been struck. But whether the scientist was among them remained to be seen.

Bolan took a quick inventory of the vehicles around him. He tried the doors on two of them and found them locked. On the third try, he hit a red Jeep Cherokee with the driver’s door unlocked and a key hanging in the ignition. Climbing in, he turned over the engine, slammed the vehicle into reverse and maneuvered it out from between its neighbors. Cutting the wheel left, he gunned the engine and the Jeep lurched forward.

Flipping on the headlights as he went, Bolan saw a silhouette stumble into view. The slender shadow stopped in the middle of the dirt path leading from the compound and shouted, “Stop.”

Walled in by trees and buildings, Bolan had two choices: comply or mow them down.

He had a moment to decide.

If it was one of Talisman’s men and he struck them, so be it. Such were the fortunes of war.

But if it was an innocent person…