Don Pendleton: Serpent's Lair

“One was the most we could get your boss to accept,” Bolan replied. “He trusts you.”

Hogan lowered his head, smiling even more widely, not looking at Bolan. “That’s pretty sad, considering.”

Bolan didn’t make a sound, except for the noise of his palm striking the grip of his pistol.

The mercenary and his men turned on Bolan, fists and rifle butts swinging out at him.

Bolan whipped up his windbreaker and slashed it out like a whip, blinding the men on the right of him in a wave of black, snapping fabric. The movement managed to deflect a blow with one deft movement, pushing it down to snarl other attacks aimed at him.

Hogan cursed the fluid reactions of the FBI agent. While his jacket was tangling up the clubbing weapons of the men to his right, he was shouldering hard into the man on his left, his foot meeting Hogan himself in the breastbone and driving him back into his seat.

While there was strength in numbers, in the confined space of the van, there were only so many avenues of approach to attack. Bolan was shielded by the bodies of the very men who were attempting to pile on him. He swung his borrowed Glock free, but the slash of a rifle barrel forced him to aim low at Hogan’s belly. He pulled the trigger on the pistol.

Nothing happened.

“Oh, by the way, the round we put in the pipe didn’t have a primer. Not something you’d be able to see if you were doing a press check,” Hogan said, taunting. He threw his big frame at Bolan, but again, the jumble of striking arms and weapons stopped him. Hogan’s gun slammed into the Executioner’s Kevlar vest and drove the wind from his lungs. With a surge, Bolan snapped his elbow into the face of the man to his left, rolling the head with the impact. He kicked at the head of the man to Hogan’s right, bouncing him off the back door of the van with such ferocity that he landed in the security chief’s lap.

Hands grabbed at Bolan from his right, but he had wrapped his hand around the frame of an MP-5 and he used it like an ax, chopping down on wrists and forearms. Men grunted and recoiled, hissing in pain from the slashing impacts. Hogan reached out and grasped the frame of the machine pistol, trying to twist it out of Bolan’s clutches, but the Executioner brought his knee up and caught Hogan in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. A hard shove sent the steel frame of the gun cracking into Hogan’s cheek and jawline, a dizzying blow that made him see stars for a moment.

Diving low, Bolan slipped between two of Hogan’s burly mercs. They had recovered from his initial attack on them, but were still slow. The warrior gave them both pause with punches to their sides, striking them in the kidneys. Choking noises exploded from their mouths and they folded to form a barrier between Hogan and his quarry.

“Stop him!” Hogan called. His beefy hand wrapped around Bolan’s ankle, squeezing tight. It was like holding on to two hundred pounds of bucking bronco as the muscular form tried to rip its way to freedom. The security chief stopped the Executioner’s exit from the back of the van for a moment, but the back doors had flown open during the melee, revealing the empty road behind them. Dust kicked up from the rear tires displacing gravel.

The driver called out to complain about the commotion and the sudden flapping of the rear doors in his mirrors. Bolan twisted and shoved one of the mercs hard against Hogan, their heads bouncing as the van jostled violently on the road.

With the impact of skulls, Hogan let go of Bolan’s ankle, and he quickly slithered out of the back of the van.

Mack Bolan hadn’t counted on Rhode Hogan to have set him up for a snatch and burn, but his skill and prowess had carried the day. When he came to a rolling halt in the middle of the road, he realized that there were still two more carloads of Hogan’s mercenaries plowing up the hillside. The grille of the first chase car was only yards away from him and closing fast.

“HOW MUCH ENGLISH DO you speak?” the girl asked.

Hideaki Machida squeezed his eyes shut and fished a bottle of painkillers out of his suit’s breast pocket. He shook six into his palm and popped them into his mouth, relishing the bitter chalkiness of them as he ground them with his teeth. He opened his eyes and looked at Rebecca Anthony, wishing to hell that her father’s men would get here already and take her off his hands.

She was dressed all in black, including the horrendous, overdone makeup she wore around her eyes and on her lips. Machida had heard about the so-called Goth look, but he’d never read a Gothic romance novel, and doubted the heroine wore a black cable-knit sweater torn at the neck, fishnets with intentional runs in them, or piercings in one nostril, and two in the center of her lower lip.

“I asked you a question, or don’t you—”

“I speak fluent English,” Machida snapped. He flipped open his sunglasses and slipped them over his aching eyes before opening the rear door of the white stretch limousine and stepping out into the daylight.

“Are they—” the girl began to speak, but Machida cut her off, slamming the door and shutting out her voice.

Daimyo Botan Okudaira said the annoying girl was a part of the grand new future of their clan. The money they were getting from snatching this girl was only the beginning. Her father was a man of means, means that would give them a chance to change the entire face of Asia.

Machida shook his head. He put two and two together. Daimyo Okudaira expected to turn the kidnapping into a gateway to link the Silver Tengu Clan and Colin Anthony’s Ironcorp—a Yakuza clan with a formidable contraband distribution network hooked up to a major arms manufacturer.

Machida figured that Okudaira wanted to compete with the triads on a level they hadn’t dreamed of. Machida didn’t know exactly what Ironcorp produced, but it had to be important to attract Okudaira’s attention in spreading his already formidable international reach.

Machida saw one of the men had out a stainless-steel Magnum revolver and was rolling the cylinder of the long, silver beast along his bronzed forearm. Unno smirked at Machida, twirled the gun and slipped it into its holster under his black vest. He shrugged his bare shoulders. His long black hair was tied off into a ponytail that swung down to midback, and when he smiled, a gold tooth glinted in the reflected sunlight. He was trying so hard to be hip and dangerous, he hurt Machida’s eyes.

“Everything okay, old man?” Unno asked with that gold-toothed grin.

“Yeah. I just needed some fresh air,” Machida answered, taking a few steps away from the limousine.

He looked at his team with disdain—the younger, hipper, harder Yakuza. Machida knew he was part of the old guard. The almost fifty-year old enforcer felt like he was babysitting a crew of prima-donna kids who thought they were the cutting edge.

Machida sighed, then looked at his watch.

Only a few more minutes, and he’d be done with this and back to watching his career stagnate as the head of security in Nagoya.

He looked down the road, missing the shadow of the suspended Ise Bay Highway. He was a man of the city, not the woods, but there was a quiet calm and dignity here. Machida frowned.

Thoughts of dying far from home haunted him.

MACK BOLAN HAD ESCAPED from the van with a relatively soft landing. His back hurt, but his shirt had protected him from most of the slashing, stabbing chunks of gravel in the road, and the thick, heavily toned muscles surrounding his shoulders and spine kept his bones from shattering as he somersaulted. It was not the most graceful of landings, but any one that you could walk away from, as his friend Jack Grimaldi once told him, was a great one.

The Executioner had only just come out of his roll, when he was looking at the front grille of a car bearing down on him. He had a gun with a dud round under the striker, was trying to recover his balance and heard the sound of brakes being applied behind him. Angry shouts from Rhode Hogan filled his ears.