Don Pendleton - Edge Of Hell

The front desk was abandoned, and she thanked a God she wasn’t sure she believed in. Some bit of vanity made her not want to know what she looked like, at that moment. Nauseous, limping, wishing she was dead, she opened the door and a cool breeze hit her face. She closed the door tightly behind her and leaned back against it, gulping lungs full of air.

It wasn’t much, but the sweat soaking her skin had been whisked away, or at least nullified by the misty fog resting at street level. She looked both ways and tried to remember where she was.

Houses were packed tightly together, roads twisting at angles to each other. She could walk for a whole night before finding a path out of this maze. She shook the thought from her mind.

People lived here. All she had to do was pick a street, start walking and keep going. She had to keep an arm out to stay upright.

The road was quiet and empty, and for that she was thankful. If there were any potential customers still out…

I’m not a bloody whore. The thought came to her in a disjointed jumble.

She tugged her jacket tighter around her.

She heard footsteps behind her and turned, seeing a tall man, dressed in a long flowing coat and what looked like a top hat. She knew she had to be seeing things.

He was upon her in an instant, his hand reaching up for her throat, catching and closing around it in a viselike grip. She tried to squeak a cry for help past her constricted windpipe, but she was shoved down a causeway between buildings, her heels skidding as she tried to resist the strength of his pull. Her hands slapped at his forearm, but he wasn’t letting go.

That’s when she saw the flash of a knife.

Then she remembered why she was sick, why she couldn’t focus, and who this man was.

But by then, the Ripper was already beginning his grisly work.

Mack Bolan was nearing the end of the night’s grisly work. The iron grip of his hand clenched tight around the sentry’s throat, his Hell’s Belle Bowie knife plunging deep into the viscera of the mobster, all eleven inches of razor-sharp steel perforating and carving organs with ease. The man gurgled as the Executioner twisted and pulled the knife through his aorta, blood bubbling through half-dead lips before he was lowered, still twitching, to the ground.

There was never anything pretty about the work the Executioner did, but when it came to using a knife, that was some of the ugliest work of all. Even with the opened chest and belly of the guard facing away from him, Bolan could smell the hot, coppery scent of blood mixed with the stench of opened bowels. He concentrated on wiping the blood from his knife to prevent rust and stink sticking to the war blade, ruining its cutting strength and stealth fighting ability.

Sonny Westerbridge had mobbed up hard. The Bolan Effect was going according to plan—a series of skirmishes that raised the heat, forcing the enemy to draw all his resources together to protect himself. It was an old tactic, so tried and true that the Executioner could have plotted the maneuvers in his sleep.

“Hell!” came an angered cry off to his left, an unnecessary reminder to the soldier that while he could run a strategy like clockwork, all it took was one wrong glance at the wrong time to send things awry.

Stealth flew away on the wings of the guard’s cry, but Bolan’s sound-suppressed Colt spoke anyway. The lack of muzzle-flash from the weapon, and the muffled sounds would at least make the man in black that much harder to spot. A triburst of 9 mm slugs tore open the British gangster’s chest and throat in a straight line going up his breastbone. An unfired pistol clattered from the corpse’s unfeeling fingers just before he tumbled facefirst into the ground.

“They’re coming in from the west! Move in!” Westerbridge’s voice crackled from the dead sentry’s radio.

Bolan was caught between cursing the big London gangster and giving him a greater helping of respect. The soldier always respected that his enemies could kill him at any time. He never thought of himself as immortal or bulletproof. And Westerbridge had been prepared for him, springing a trap.

Bolan grabbed the radio off the dead man and stole into the darkness behind a couple of cargo containers as men moved with precision, covering one another as they began to swarm the lot. Crouching, the Executioner disappeared into the shadows, checking the odds against him.

“It’s just one man,” someone spoke up over the radio, and Bolan spun, diving from his hiding spot. Bullets sparked on the steel of the container he’d crouched against moments before. Leveling the 9 mm submachine gun with one hand, he triggered a burst from hip level, driving the two mobsters back behind their own cover.

Around him, gunners cut loose, their weapons speaking in the dark. He counted muzzle flashes, getting up to fifteen.

“Is that positive?” Westerbridge asked.

“Just one man,” came the answer.

Just one man, Bolan thought. Keep thinking that and lose your advantage.

“I don’t care, keep up the pressure,” the mobster said. “He’s done enough damage for a small army.”

Bolan decided to punctuate that statement with a special delivery from an attachment under the barrel of the submachine gun. Bolan had chosen the 9 mm Colt for two reasons—one was his familiarity with the line the Colt was descended from—the other was the weapon’s forearm was identical to the short-barrel M-16s favored by Special Forces. This made mounting the M-203 grenade launcher easy.

He triggered the first 40 mm shell at a point where a heavy concentration of muzzle-flashes originated. Six ounces of explosive core burst a shell of notched razor wire with terrifying effect. Once the thunderclap faded, screams of agony could be heard from wounded men.

Confusion coursed over the radio’s speaker, and the Executioner burst from the shadows, racing to the cover of another cargo container. Gunfire lapped at his heels, sparks rebounding off steel and concrete as he made a final, desperate dive for the protection of the huge trailer.

Two more gangsters swung around the area where Bolan had been moments before, but instead of finding their prey pinned down, they realized they had exposed themselves too soon. The Colt burped again, two salvos of slugs smashed into Westerbridge’s men, sending them into the next life.

“Everyone, switch to the alternate channel!” Westerbridge called desperately. The radio suddenly went dead.

Bolan knew Westerbridge was smart and he was scared. Most of the time, the Executioner could count on scared being more powerful than smart, mistakes giving him an easier path to victory. That was in an ideal situation, though.

Gunfire hammered the container he was behind, keeping him from popping out on either side to fire off another grenade. It was obvious that the gangsters didn’t really like the idea of being blown to shreds.

The Executioner slung the Colt, braced himself, then sprung for the top of the container. He gripped the edge and hauled himself up, looking for signs of other shooters who took to elevated fields of fire. There were two, at separate corners of the warehouse roof. Swinging the Colt around, he targeted one through his Aimpoint sight. Holding high against bullet drop, he stroked the trigger and planted a burst into the head of one gangster. Considering he was holding for center of mass, he was glad for any kind of hits. He swung toward the other gunner, who jolted at the sight of his partner going down.

Bolan’s night-black penetration clothing had made him nothing more than a dark smear against the roof of the container, one more shadow against other shadows. Westerbridge had radios and automatic weapons, communications and coordination, but he lacked night vision for his men.