Don Pendleton: Black Death Reprise

In addition to stitching a straight line through the sapling causing its trunk to crack and split, her steel-jacketed triplets sliced through the gunman’s neck, all but decapitating him as he dropped the shotgun and fell three feet into the bushes, arms windmilling in a final release of nervous energy.

Outside, all was suddenly silent.

Dr. Zagorski slung the FNH P-90 submachine gun the way her female colleagues might carry a handbag. By securing the stock under her right arm, she could direct the gun’s barrel across a space with the sweep of her forearm as if the rifle was an extension of her hand. This one-armed technique freed her other hand to enable a descent while ensuring she’d retain the ability to fire her weapon on the way down.

As Zagorski stepped to the opening where the window had been and grabbed on to the thin cord with her free hand while wrapping her legs around the line, Bolan pulled two M-18 smoke canisters from his web belt, released their safety latches and tossed the canisters out the window. Within seconds, the area was immersed in thick clouds of billowing smoke as dense and concealing as the worst ocean fogs that occasionally drove ships off course in the North Atlantic.

“Northwest corner of the vineyard!” Bolan shouted into Zagorski’s ear a second before she disappeared into the thick smoke that clung in an impervious cloud along the side of the building.

Bolan stood with one foot on the windowsill, about to follow the doctor to the ground forty feet below. With the smoke from the M-18s providing adequate cover, and Zagorski’s demonstrated ability with the submachine gun, the soldier was confident that the odds for survival had shifted in their favor.

The damaged workbench, weakened by the riddling absorbed from hundreds of rounds that had shredded the door, suddenly burst ten feet into the laboratory with the force of a runaway locomotive. Guards with automatic weapons spitting death were close behind, using the workbench and door they were forcing forward into the room in much the same way infantry troops use an armored tank to lead the way into an area entrenched by the enemy.

In the back of his mind, Bolan could hear the intermittent staccato bursts of Zagorski’s P-90 and realized she was capitalizing on her downward movement through the smoke. Having been in that situation many times himself, he knew Zagorski could use the ground troops’ muzzle-flashes, made visible by the thick smoke, as targets. As long as she engaged them with short bursts and continued her downward rappel, her own position would not be betrayed. Bolan also knew that inches above her head, rounds would be sparking and ricocheting against the stone wall where moments earlier, she had been.

Straddling the windowsill with the arm holding his Beretta wrapped around the thin grappling cord, Bolan directed his Desert Eagle at the imploding door and workbench and began pulling the trigger. The combat inexperience of the three guards who were pushing forward behind the workbench was evidenced by the way they aimed their fire directly to their front rather than in wide-sweeping arcs, as if their task was to clear a walking path through dense foliage. Their guns chattered without pause, spraying a steady stream of 5.7 mm rounds, demolishing glassware and work stations, filling the space inside the lab with flying debris.

From his position slightly to the left of the attackers, Bolan fired a rapid quartet from his Desert Eagle, the throaty retort of the .44 Magnum pistol roaring like an angry beast, its heavy bass voice overpowering the lighter pops of the P-90s with tympanic explosions that pulsed against Bolan’s eardrums.

The Desert Eagle’s steel-jacketed slugs stopped the initial guards cold, tossing the leading two backward as violently as if they had been stuntmen with hydraulic ropes attached to their backs. Bolan’s third shot hit a charging gunman square in the chin, the bullet shattering his jawbones like cheap crystal before smashing into the man’s chest. The slug exited through his lower back, leaving a fist-size hole that spurted a crimson stream of blood as he fell to the floor.

Bolan leaned out the window, continuing to engage his enemies as they charged into the lab. Bullets snapped the air a finger’s width from his face as he prepared to drop to the ground. A guard with his gun on full-auto appeared beyond the shattered door, swinging his weapon’s muzzle toward Bolan. The soldier shot him in the upper torso a split second before the FNH rounds hit home. As the dead guard fell backward, he continued firing, sewing a parabolic pattern of 5.7 mm stitches up the wall and across half the ceiling.

Bolan had stemmed the initial attack, but he fully expected another assault to come as soon as the door fortifications completely collapsed. While continuing to fire his Desert Eagle into the laboratory until the bolt clicked open onto an empty chamber, he swung himself outside into the smoky cloud. Without reloading, the combat veteran shoved the oversize handgun into his hip holster while plucking one of the concussion grenades from the suspenders on his web belt.

Aware that the lab was about to fill when his enemies mounted their next counterattack, he set the fuse on the grenade to a 6-second delay before tossing the explosive into the glass-filled room. As he watched the apple-size orb bounce across the white linoleum tiles toward the back wall with its floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with laboratory glassware, his peripheral vision registered five or six men pushing through the clutter surrounding the door opening. Their muzzle-flashes were visible through the smoke that had drifted from the window opening into the lab to mix with the already copious supply of gun smoke that choked the air. Moments before releasing himself into the night for his slide to earth, Bolan grabbed his Beretta 93-R and sent a delaying burst into the fray, adding a final contribution to the overpowering stench of burning cordite and flesh.

During the entire two and a half seconds he free fell, with hot lead whizzing by his face making the time seem like an eternity, Bolan instinctively knew at every moment exactly how far above the ground he was. At the last possible instant, he snapped the hand holding the grappling cord, causing his descent to come to an immediate halt. As he released the thin line and stepped onto the ground, he drew his Desert Eagle and rammed a fresh magazine into its ammo port.

Fifty feet above, the concussion grenade detonated with an air-expanding blast followed a nanosecond later by a deadly blizzard of shredded glass that spewed out the window with the force of a Gulf Coast hurricane. A horrific medley of angry cries and painful shrieks erupted as a black cloud of toxic smoke poured from the building.

With handguns drawn, Bolan struck off on a course through the woods that would get him to the road in two or three minutes. From there, he’d have a short run to the corner of the vineyard where he hoped Dr. Zagorski would be waiting by the all-terrain vehicles. The foliage was sparse, with none of the clinging vines or heavy vegetation he had encountered on so many other hellfire trails around the world, and he reached the edge of the woods without incident.

When he came to the road, Bolan paused for a second to gauge the degree of his enemies’ resistance. Occasional bursts of sporadic automatic fire could be heard coming from below, but the pattern of gunshots was not indicative of an organized assault or defense. Hal Brognola had thought there were fewer than two dozen armed guards at the monastery. A quick calculation told Bolan that he and Zagorski had already dispatched approximately half that number.

Most of the smoke from the M-18 canisters had dissipated, but the residual tendrils, in combination with the inky black night, severely limited visibility as the soldier ran down the curvy road. Pulling his goggles over his eyes and switching into IR mode, he was able to quickly pick out Dr. Zagorski as she zigzagged like a running back sprinting toward the goal line.