Don Pendleton - Cold War Reprise

The other two Russian hitters whipped their MAC-10s up in response to the Desert Eagle’s roar, but the Executioner had already slithered through the narrowly opened doorway, dropping prone to the floor. He was behind the cover of a countertop and cabinets where coroners would store their surgical supplies and wash up in the sink. The heavy countertop and the strong wood needed to support it gave the interloper considerable protection from the lightweight machine pistols that the team had brought with them.

“Get the woman!” Belkin shouted. “We need a hostage!”

The Russian operative winced as he crawled behind an overturned autopsy table. Being struck in the chest with a .44 Magnum slug, even while wearing body armor, was not one of the things that Belkin had ever wanted to experience. He was fairly certain that the bullet had broken a rib or two. He looked to see where his compatriots were and what they were doing. The unconscious morgue attendant laying on the floor stirred, but the two cleaners were cut off from her as the man behind the counter pinned them down with blazing fire from his entrenched position.

“I have a clean shot at the woman!” Belkin announced loudly. “Desist and pull back, or I’ll kill her!”

A smoking hole punched in the steel of the autopsy table, the bullet having penetrated mere inches from Belkin’s head.

“You try making that shot, your body won’t have to be taken very far,” Bolan returned. “Your choice!”

Belkin snarled. It was a standoff, and the timers on his bombs were counting down.

Only two minutes remained before the morgue would disintegrate in a fireball.

Mack Bolan reloaded his Desert Eagle, fitting a carefully calibrated stack of antiarmor loads. His initial shot against the leader of the cleanup squad had been with his conventional 240-grain hollowpoint rounds. They had been enough to tear through the fire door or the relatively slender metal of the autopsy table, but against Kevlar and trauma plates, the Executioner needed something with a lot more punch. This magazine was filled with 350-grain, tungsten-cored .429-inch slugs that Bolan kept on hand for when he had to take on criminals in an armored personnel carrier or corrupt thugs hiding behind the protection of million-dollar, tank-skinned limousines. The copper skin wrapped around the hardened cores would protect the gun from the steel-mauling tungsten centers, and the powder charge was balanced to cycle the action of the big Israeli autoloader. Once he caught a glimpse of one of the coverall-clad foes, they would be dead, no matter what they wore.

During the reload, Bolan spotted a munition placed on the floor off to the side of the autopsy room. He recognized it as a fuel-air mine, designed for destroying enemy forces or stockpiles of ammunition and arms inside cave complexes. The FAE mines would also work with deadly efficiency to turn every ounce of organic material inside the morgue into charred ash. From the look of the one he saw, it was on a countdown timer, hence Belkin’s urgency to get a hostage. Bolan didn’t know how much time he had left, but considering the speed and precision of the Russian crew, it couldn’t be much longer than a minute.

The enemy gunmen were reloading their machine pistols, contemplating their options as the doomsday numbers ticked down. One of the shooters swung into view, his MAC-10 blazing. Another raced into the open, rushing toward the stunned woman they had pegged as their hostage.

Bolan dived out onto the tile floor, 9 mm rounds plucking at his sleeve and pant leg as the enemy gunner sprayed to keep him contained. Sheer quickness had taken him outside the shooter’s line of fire, and he hit the ground in a slide. The second gunman was in full charge toward the fallen morgue attendant, not noticing the Executioner until a .44 Magnum armor-piercing slug smashed through his vest, coring deep into his heart as if he were clad only in tissue, not trauma plate.

“Son of a bitch!” Belkin snapped, watching the spray of arterial blood gush out from both sides of his dying comrade’s perforated torso. The man’s forward momentum gave him two remaining steps on his final run before he crashed face-first to the floor in a boneless heap.

“Bastard!” the other Russian gunman shouted, swinging out into the open to get a better angle on Bolan.

The Executioner’s next shot tore through the vengeful Russian’s shoulder, blasting the muscle, bone and cartilage of the joint in an explosive detonation. Blood sprayed from the horrendous injury, and the limb sagged on the few remaining ligaments of sinew that hadn’t been destroyed by the Desert Eagle’s rocketing talon of copper and tungsten. The shooter folded in pain, his gun hand pinning the dangling arm in place. Bolan ended his suffering with a third shot that caught the Russian at the bridge of his nose. It was as if someone had taken a hatchet to a melon, the top of the man’s skull flying backward in a spraying volcano of brains and gore.

Two down, one to go, but there was also the threat of the thermal charges. Bolan charged toward the overturned autopsy table that the team leader had taken cover behind. On the run, he spotted a second of the mines in the far corner of the morgue floor. Given their size and the number of toolboxes that had been brought in by the “maintenance men,” he estimated that there was a third atmosphere-destroying bomb that had been brought in by the cleanup crew. As one part of the brilliant combat computer that was the Executioner’s brain contemplated minimizing the damage, the rest of his consciousness was focused on bringing down the last of the lethal conspirators. With a vault, Bolan leaped over the upturned table. He spotted his opponent in midair and, using the edge of the table as a fulcrum, he steered himself feet-first down into the cleaner’s gut. The air exploded from the Russian’s lungs and his head slammed back against the steel tabletop.

Bolan kicked the machine pistol out of the stunned man’s hand, skittering the weapon wildly across the tile floor. Belkin reached up and grabbed Bolan’s belt. The soldier responded with the heavy trapezoidal wedge of the Desert Eagle’s muzzle, lashing it across the man’s jaw. Having incapacitated the last of the conspiratorial gunmen, Bolan holstered the Desert Eagle and rushed to the closest mine.

The Executioner had hoped for a control lever that would allow him to disarm the explosive, but the enemy had sabotaged the mines’ control panels. The disengage mechanism had been destroyed.

Plan two, Bolan thought. The destructive power of the mines wasn’t a factor of the amount of explosives in them, but a mechanism of the fact that their concentrated fuel was dispersed through the atmosphere in an aerosol suspension that made the oxygen in the air into additional reactant for the secondary spark. By denying a large area of combustible air to the devices, they could be significantly defanged. It would require an airtight, heavy steel container to minimize the blasts.

Luckily, the refrigerated, hermetically sealed body-storage drawers in the morgue were exactly what Bolan needed. He shoved the mine into one shelf and swung the heavy steel door shut, snapping down the locking bolt. There was a brief sigh from the metal panel as the cabinet sealed itself, the airtight closure sucking into place.

“What…what’s hap…” the woman said, finally able to speak and move after her ordeal. Bolan scooped up a second mine from the tile floor.

“You need to get out of here,” Bolan ordered. “These are bombs.”

The morgue worker’s eyes widened. “Those drawers are under negative air pressure.”

Bolan paused for a half step. “Can you kill the ventilation?”

He continued his quick rush to stow the bombs away, parking the second mine into another empty storage drawer. Again, the door slammed shut, the locking bolt snapping into place just before the hiss of the air seal slurped the door tightly closed.