The Executioner charged from the car, a gun in each hand

To survive against such overwhelming odds required movement—he would have to run the risk of seeking higher ground.

Holstering the Desert Eagle but keeping hold of his Beretta, Bolan grabbed the mirror extending from the rear corner of the van and pulled himself to the roof of the vehicle, flattening himself against it.

The gunmen would have his range in seconds. He drew his Desert Eagle once more, extended his arms out to each side, and began shooting from the roof of the van. The fusillade pinned the gunmen nearest to the van, striking and wounding some of them, killing still others. But there were more assassins than the soldier had realized.

The cargo van shook beneath him. Men were climbing inside. They would no doubt try to shoot him through the roof.

Bolan beat them to it. Holstering the Beretta and swapping magazines in the Desert Eagle, he aimed at the roof of the van and started pulling the trigger, walking the shots in an ever-widening pattern. Men screamed below him as bodies hit the floor of the vehicle.

He flattened himself again and spun around, shooting left and right, taking running gunmen this way and that.

It was time to move.

Fatal Combat

The Executioner®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade, / He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.

—William Shakespeare

1564–1616

There are those who think that killing is a game. There are men who believe the weapons in their hands make them the predators. But the sharpest weapon is the human mind…and the game, when hunting predators, has no rules.

—Mack Bolan

THE

MACK BOLAN

LEGEND

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

1

The morning air held a tang of moisture that beaded on the windshield as the sun hit it, chasing the crisp October dawn as a pollution-laden haze took its place. Three truant high school kids paused on the sidewalk not far from the parked car, craning their necks for a better look. A uniformed Detroit police officer shooed them away, muttering something about getting to school, and the teens shot back cheerful profanities as they made themselves scarce. The cop, shaking his head, turned back to the chalk outline visible among the milling crime scene team.

There was blood everywhere.

The dried blood, thicker and darker than most civilians would or could imagine, had washed across the crags of the asphalt in an impossibly wide bloom that partially obscured the chalk outline. Solemn figures were loading the zippered body bag in the back of the medical examiner’s van. They had seen many corpses; they would be hardened to all but the most brutal of deaths.

Their grim expressions confirmed what the crimson lake of human blood had already told the man behind the wheel.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, dropped the window on the driver’s side of the rented Dodge Charger. He put his left hand on the steering wheel and leaned forward for a better look. In his right hand, resting on his leg, was a custom-tuned Beretta 93-R machine pistol.

Satisfied with what he could see from his vantage point, Bolan turned his attention to the weapon. He ejected the well-traveled pistol’s 20-round magazine and racked the slide, catching the loose round in his palm. Then he reloaded the round, seated it and racked the slide again, nudging the weapon’s selector switch and replacing it in the leather shoulder holster he wore under his three-quarter-length black leather coat. The coat concealed both the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle he wore inside his waistband in a Kydex holster and the double-edged Sting knife he carried in a matching sheath, also in his waistband, behind his left hip, angled for a draw with either hand.

On the seat next to Bolan was an olive-drab canvas war bag. The bag contained a variety of items and gear, including spare magazines and ammunition, grenades, other explosives, and various sundry combat essentials. The Executioner had spent too many years fighting his war, often with very little backup, to walk into the field underprepared. He had pared down his standard mission load-out over that time to make sure he had anticipated every need that could be foreseen. In combat, of course, not all scenarios could be predicted. Still, he was as prepared before fact as was realistic for a soldier to be. The rest was adaptability, flexibility and will.

Even as his mind turned these thoughts over in his head, the Executioner examined the problem before him. The clinical part of his brain filed the data of his senses—the inordinate quantity of blood, the bodily damage needed to produce it, and the public location of the body. These were indicators of the predator who had taken this kill. Another man might call them clues. Bolan was no detective, but he was an expert in predators. He was a soldier and a hunter.

One of the locals, who wore an ill-fitting blazer rather than a uniform, detached himself from the crowd working the crime scene. He jogged across the blocked street with a manila folder in one hand. Bolan resisted the urge to shake his head. His contact at Stony Man Farm had told him the locals would, on orders through channels, assign to him a liaison within the Detroit PD. That liaison turned out to be one Adam Davis, newly minted detective. The young man wasn’t a rookie, but according to his files he hadn’t had the time to put much distance between himself and that tag before earning his way out of his uniform.

Davis got into the passenger seat at Bolan’s gesture, closing the door behind him and thrusting a file folder at Bolan.

“Agent Cooper,” he said. “This is everything so far. They’re still working up some of the details.”

Matt Cooper was the name on Bolan’s Justice Department credentials. He had used the alias often enough that the Cooper cover identity had an impressive history and dossier of its own. Any curious local poking through law-enforcement files would find sufficient detail to compel cooperation with the mysterious agent, whose precise responsibilities in this matter had purposely been left vague.

Bolan took the folder from Davis’s hand, watching the man flinch as if he expected the agent to take a few fingers with him. Bolan quashed the urge to shake his head and chuckle. It wouldn’t do to antagonize Davis, whose only crime so far was being intimidated by implied authority. Davis was the most junior detective in a department known for its graft and corruption. Faced with a mysterious governmental operative to whom Davis’s own superiors were required to give cooperation, what else could he think? He’d find his way readily enough. He had that eager, adaptable air to him. Bolan had encountered the type enough times to recognize it.

The folder contained a preliminary field report. It also held a series of slightly smudged color photos, obviously printed on a portable ink-jet unit and handled with haste. Bolan was accustomed to meeting with resistance from local law enforcement, if only because the usual petty jurisdictional squabbles annoyed those through whose territory the Executioner marched. It was refreshing actually to get some cooperation. He wondered for a moment if Hal Brognola had rattled cages on this end of the situation perhaps a bit more loudly than usual.

Certainly the big Fed had sounded more stressed than was normal even for him, when he placed the scrambled phone call to Bolan’s secure satellite phone from Brognola’s Justice Department office near the Potomac. The soldier could picture the man chewing an unlit cigar and sitting in front of the window in his chair deep in Wonderland, a fighting bureaucrat waging wars of intrigue, intimidation and political manipulation that even Bolan could not win alone. Brognola was the director of the Sensitive Operations Group, a counterterrorist unit based at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, and on the other end of his phone was the Man himself, the President of the United States.

“Striker,” Brognola had said, using the soldier’s code name. “Somebody’s cutting up civilians in Detroit.”

Bolan had said nothing for a moment. “I’m listening,” he finally answered.

The big Fed wasted no time. “It’s been going on for a while, now. So far the press has been kept out of it, but that hasn’t been easy, nor can the powers that be contain it any longer. The murders are increasing in frequency and in their public nature. Whoever’s doing it has stopped being careful—it’s as if he or she wants the bodies found.”

“A serial killer?”

“Possibly,” Brognola said. “Officially there are no leads. Unofficially, and very strictly off the record at this point, the Man is concerned that this isn’t a domestic crime at all, but rather a new kind of terrorism.”

“Low budget,” Bolan said. “Low-tech. Inspire fear by making the populace believe no one is safe.”

“Exactly,” Brognola said. “If it is a terrorist group, they’re destabilizing the greater Detroit area by making its citizens believe the general public, individually, is being targeted. It wouldn’t be the first time an international terror ring has used knives to make its bloody business known. The Detroit PD and the FBI have been working to keep this from going off the rails, but they’re out of their depth. There are too many rules, too many bureaucratic hurdles, and no way to find or target the enemy. They simply aren’t equipped to fight this kind of war.”

“But I am,” Bolan said. It was not a question.

“The Man wants you to do what you do, Striker,” Brognola said. “If Detroit is a test case for some new, insidious campaign, you will root it out and destroy it before it goes any further. You’re also working against the clock.”

“How so?”

“The Detroit papers are ready to break the story,” Brognola said, frustration clear in his voice. “The locals, the FBI, and even Justice have been sitting on them over the last two days…but they’re screaming freedom of the press, and honestly, Striker, I can’t blame them. We have it on good authority that they’re breaking the story the night of October 31, in prime time, which means you’re going to have a full-blown panic on your hands before nightfall.”

“Which will make it harder to bring my targets to ground,” Bolan said.

“Yes,” Brognola said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“I’ll deal with it,” Bolan said.

“Hell of a way to kick off Halloween,” Brognola said. “You’ll have backup among the Detroit PD. I’ll lean on the Feds that way, too, and pull as many strings as I have to if you ruffle any feathers.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors, Hal.”

“Whatever,” Brognola said. “Striker, I know every mission is important. But this is…different. These are innocent people. Ordinary American citizens. They’re being killed for no reason.”

A muscle in Bolan’s jaw worked. “I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “I’ll get them, Hal.”

“Good hunting, Striker.”

“On it. Striker out.”

With those words, Bolan had stowed his phone and made arrangements to travel to Detroit, where his customary gear had already been prepared and was waiting for him with a Stony Man courier. Now, only a few hours after that conversation, he was here, and he was ready.

It was time to begin.

He was no stranger to Detroit, but he did not know the city like a local. He had been assured that Detective Davis was born and bred here. The Farm had transmitted the man’s full dossier to Bolan’s phone while he was in transit. He had reviewed it early that morning.

Bolan turned to give the detective a long, hard look. Davis looked up from the manila folder. He reddened. “Uh…sir? Mister, I mean, Agent Cooper, sir? Is there a problem?”

“There might be,” Bolan said. “Time for a decision, kid.”

“Sir?”

“The department has been instructed to cooperate with me,” Bolan said. “There’s going to come a moment, not very long from now, when you’ll be tempted not to do that.”

“I don’t understand, Agent Cooper.”

Bolan didn’t have time for a lengthy argument. He drew the Beretta 93-R from his shoulder holster and placed it in his lap. Davis glanced at it and then did an almost comical double-take. What he had taken for a simple Beretta 92-F pistol was instead a select-fire automatic weapon, and he recognized it as such.

Bolan gave Davis mental points for that.

Next he produced the Desert Eagle, watched Davis’s eyes widen at the massive weapon and replaced it. He reholstered the Beretta.

“Sir?”

“Many officers, especially those in smaller cities, go their entire lives without firing their weapons,” Bolan said. “In a big, violent city like Detroit, those chances are lower, but still good. Before we’re through, there’s a very good chance you’ll see me fire both of these. And you will fire your own weapon. Show me.”

Davis hesitated only the barest fraction of a second. He reached into his jacket and then, carefully, withdrew his pistol. He ejected the magazine of the Glock 19 and racked the slide, dropping the ejected round. He hit his head on the dash diving for it, but he got it.

“Spare magazines?” Bolan asked.

“Two, Agent Cooper.”

“Well, swing by the station and pick up some spares. That’s issue?”

“Department approved list,” Davis said.

“All right,” Bolan said. “Now. Are you in or out, Davis?”

“Uh… Well, in, of course, sir. I mean, the department assigned.”

“No, Davis. You. You personally. We’re about to walk down a dark hallway. If you’re going to do it, you need to know that it’s coming. That it might get bad. That it almost certainly will. Think carefully. I don’t want a quick answer. I want to know if you’ll stick this out.”

Davis looked away. Bolan watched him swallow, hard. He was thinking about it. The subtle change to the set of the younger man’s shoulders told the soldier what Davis’s answer would be…and that he meant it.

Davis turned to meet Bolan’s gaze. “I’m in.”

“Good,” Bolan said.

“So who are you, Cooper? Really?”

“Like the card says,” Bolan said. He reached into his pocket and produced a business card. The front of the card was blank except for the engraved words, Matt Cooper, Justice Department.

Davis turned the card over and ran a hand through his thick, close-cropped hair. “These contact numbers?”

“They’ll forward to my wireless,” Bolan said. “If we get separated, call any of them. You’ll reach me no matter what.”

Davis nodded. He reached into his jacket. “I have the list your supervisor said you wanted.”

Bolan almost smiled at that. The idea of Brognola as anyone’s mere “supervisor,” perhaps fighting with the photocopier or drinking coffee in a break room, struck him as laughable. He knew precisely what Davis was talking about, however. He had sent the request to the Farm by text message while reviewing the files transmitted to his phone. He needed a place to start, and the murder victims were it.

Innocent people had died, their blood on the knife of some psycho killer…or killers. Government profilers would look for patterns in victims in order to find serial killers. If this was a serial killer, a group of them—it was rare, but it had happened before—the common thread among the victims would tell Bolan where to look next. If there truly was no thread, and the victims were chosen merely for convenience, then looking deeper into the circumstances of their murders would likewise give him something to go on.

Bolan was no detective; he was a battle-hardened, experience-trained soldier. But he understood predators. After witnessing the aftermath of the latest killing, he had no doubt that he was dealing with at least one truly deadly bipedal monster.

The Executioner was going hunting.

“Every victim so far,” Davis said, handing over the list, “as tabulated by the folks at the department. You’ll find current addresses and, where possible, some notes from the files that seemed relevant. You realize, though, sir, that the killings are apparently random. It’s not likely we’ll find anything.”

“These notes are handwritten,” Bolan said, ignoring Davis’s other remarks.

“The notes? Yes, sir, Agent Cooper.” Davis nodded. “I made them.”

Bolan nodded. Initiative even though he thought Agent Cooper was barking up the wrong tree. That was good. It meant Davis wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.

He would, however, have to be careful. Brognola hadn’t said it out loud; it hadn’t been necessary. A group of killers operating for this long, under these conditions, the killings until recently covered up—it reeked of police corruption. Brognola wasn’t normally so down on local law enforcement. The fact that he’d spoken so harshly of the men and women on the ground here was a coded message to Bolan, just in case Brognola’s words ever went beyond the walls of his office. The man was smart, and he hadn’t stayed where he was in the Justice Department for so long without having a few tricks up his sleeves. Assuming the walls had ears was one of these.

“So where do we start, Agent Cooper?”

“At the beginning,” Bolan said. “First name on the list. We’ll shake the tree and sees what falls loose.” There was, of course, the possibility that going back over the territory trod by the killers would make them nervous, bring them out. Depending on how professional they were—a well-financed and trained terrorist cell, for example—this might make little difference. But it might cause something to break. Bolan could feel it; he could see it in the pavement; he could smell it in the air. Things were going to get bloody before it was over.

“I know that neighborhood,” Davis said. “It’s not exactly one of Detroit’s more affluent ones.”

“Good thing I’ve got a cop to go with me,” Bolan said. He put the car into gear and looked up to check the rearview mirror.

He heard the gunshot just as the mirror exploded, pelting him with sharp fragments of plastic and glass.

2

“Down!” Bolan shouted. He stomped the accelerator to the floor, whipping the steering wheel hard over. The powerful engine growled in response, and the Charger burned rubber as it heeled around, pushing Bolan and Davis back in their seats. The detective crouched behind the dash and Bolan did his best to slide, fractionally, into his bucket seat as he urged the car forward, toward the danger. Bullet holes starred the windshield, joining the one that had taken the mirror with it. Bolan ignored them, his right hand clenching the wheel, his left hand snaking into his jacket to reverse-draw the Beretta.

There were at least half a dozen shooters fanned out and moving up the street as if a small army of cops weren’t barely within earshot. They wore street clothes and carried themselves with a practiced, almost casual menace that Bolan immediately recognized. These were hired guns, street muscle, and they would have had to be paid well to mount the brazen assault they pushed.

The shooters had automatic rifles, a motley collection of Kalashnikovs, ARs, and other assault weapons. Bullets ripped a path up the hood of the Charger as Bolan crushed the pedal under his boot. He went straight for the lead gunner, a man in a leather jacket who held an AK to his shoulder. He shouted something as Bolan bore down on him.

“Holy—” Davis started to say.

The Charger slammed into the gunman with bone-crushing force. The collision flattened the car’s nose, driving its hood under the target’s suddenly airborne body. The windshield took the impact after that, turning to glass spiderwebs and blood tracings, jarring Bolan and Davis in their seats. The soldier slammed the Charger into Reverse and burned rubber again, whipping around, the car taking broadsides from the other gunmen. The shooters had been scattered by the Executioner’s automotive missile, but they had recovered quickly and were once again pouring on the fire.

Answering shots came from the officers on the scene, as the uniformed contingent recovered from the shock of the attack and began to get into the action. Bolan was grateful but wasn’t about to let the Detroit Police Department fight his battle for him. And there was no doubt in his mind that it was his battle, for the attack had been just too coincidental, too seemingly without motive, to be anything other than a hit directed at him personally. Unless Davis had some serious gambling debts Bolan didn’t know about, these were killers whose mission was to eliminate Agent Cooper.

As the bullet-riddled Charger spun about, Davis was up in his seat, his Glock in his hand, firing at targets of opportunity. The gunmen weren’t hard to spot, bold as they were, standing in full view of God, the Detroit PD and anybody, emptying illegal full-automatic weaponry on a public street. Distant screams told Bolan that the gunfight had caught the attention of the neighbors. But there were no innocents in the line of fire…yet. Bolan knew he would have to end this engagement as quickly as possible to prevent that from changing.

He fired out his window, the Beretta 93-R set for 3-round bursts, punching his enemies in the head whenever possible and going for center-of-mass shots when the angle was poor. The hollowpoint 9 mm bullets did their deadly work as Davis punctuated Bolan’s machine pistol blasts with single shots of his own.

Bolan pushed the Charger up onto the narrow sidewalk and between a building and a light pole, drawing sparks and the shrieking of metal on metal from the flank of the tortured rental car. One of the gunmen wasn’t fast enough; he fell under the crumpled bumper of the Dodge, causing the vehicle to bounce upward over the speed bump of his sudden corpse. Bolan dug in, accelerating again, causing Davis to grimace as the Charger burned sideways on squealing tires. Davis dropped one more shooter and Bolan punched yet another in the head and neck.

“Who are they?” Davis shouted over the din.

“Hired help,” Bolan said, dropping a nearly empty 20-round magazine and swapping it for a fresh one from the pouches in his custom leather shoulder holster. “And they didn’t just come from nowhere. Look for a vehicle with passenger capacity, or a cluster of cars.”

The Charger’s engine was starting to spew black, oily smoke, spraying the wrecked windshield with spurts of oil. Bolan urged it on, shooting across the street, charting a course directly for a man with a MAC-10 submachine gun dressed in dark pants and shirt with a stained trench coat over these. Something about this one, in particular, struck Bolan as familiar—just as the Charger struck its target. A spray of heavy .45-caliber slugs almost chewed through the roof as Davis and Bolan threw themselves to either side. The bullets ripped up the interior of the car and smashed out what was left of the rear window.

Bolan cut short, sharp circles with the car, his jaw set, his eyes roving the crowd and the players running among it, gauging targets of opportunity and screening friendlies from his mental computations. He gripped the wheel with one hand and fired with the other, the Beretta barking a deadly rhythm. He stroked triple bursts of 9 mm hollowpoint rounds from the snout of the machine pistol, cutting down another, and another, and another gunman. Bodies were beginning to pile up two deep, or so it seemed.

That was an illusion brought on by the adrenaline, the tunnel vision, the tachypsychia of mortal combat. Bolan, while not immune to the physiological effects of life-and-death battle, was certainly no stranger to these sensations. He was as comfortable operating with and through them as it was possible for a human being to be. Still, that did not mean a great deal. Bolan understood, as so many veteran operators did, that much of combat efficacy was simply learning to function efficiently and accurately despite the psychological effects of the fight itself.

Combat was as natural to Bolan as breathing. And he did not think these things, did not subvocalize them, did not consider them as he swapped out another empty 20-round magazine in the Beretta, leaning on the steering wheel with his left knee as he racked the Beretta’s slide and chambered the first round.

“Cooper!” Davis yelled. Again Bolan did not think; he did not need to ask. He flattened himself against his headrest and squeezed his eyes shut, tucking his chin, as Davis’s Glock came up in his direction.

The shots were deafening in the enclosed space of the Charger’s front seats. Davis had seen the man in the leather jacket before Bolan and had responded, as he was trained to do. The gunner held a drum-fed semiautomatic shotgun and managed to scrape the driver’s-side fender of Bolan’s vehicle with double-00 Buck pellets as he went down. Davis’s shots took the shooter in the neck and under the jaw, folding him in a heap like dirty laundry. Bolan’s ears were ringing, but he nodded once in acknowledgment to Davis nonetheless. The kid was good.

Bolan urged the Dodge back toward the Detroit police, who were using their vehicles as cover and firing straggler shots into what little resistance remained. As quickly as it had begun, the worst of it seemed to be over. Bolan hit the brakes suddenly, jerking the car to a stop, and leaned out his window, tagging a running gunman who was trying to break for a nearby alleyway. The man went down yelling, with a bullet in his leg, and Bolan was out of the rolling car with his Beretta in his fist.

Behind him, Davis scrambled into the driver’s seat and stepped on the brake again before shifting the battle-torn Dodge into Park.

Bolan was on his quarry like a hawk on a mouse. The shooter rolled onto his back, his leg spraying blood from a bad wound, his face already pale as he brought up his TEC-9. The Executioner slapped the ungainly weapon aside as he landed on the wounded man’s chest with one knee, driving the air out of the gunner’s chest.

“Junk,” Bolan said, snatching the TEC-9 from the man’s hand. He shoved the black muzzle of the Beretta into his face. “Always were a jam waiting to happen.”

“I want a lawyer!” the disarmed shooter squealed. “I got rights!”

“Give me a name,” Bolan said. “Or all you’ll get will be a bullet in the brain when I’m finished with you.”

The dialogue sounded corny even to Bolan, but it was the kind of language spoken by punks-for-hire. Bolan could hear Davis coming up behind him and hoped the young detective wouldn’t overreact to the soldier’s bluff.

“A name,” Bolan said. Sirens were erupting from the lot across the street as the police, having cleared their part of the gun battle, moved to seal off the area. It would be only moments before some of them blundered into this little scene. Bolan didn’t have time for that. He heard Davis behind him, running interference as the first of the Detroit PD closed in and started asking questions. He gave Davis mental points for that. The kid was doing well during his trial by fire. The noise and activity behind them increased as emergency response personnel started to arrive. More Detroit PD were showing up by the carload, too. The sudden war on this already tainted city block had brought half the department out in a bid to clamp down on the chaos.

In the noise and confusion, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Bolan’s prisoner tried to make play. The knife came out with surprising speed. Bolan heard the snick of the blade opening just as he caught the movement; he was ready for it. He grabbed the would-be killer’s knife hand and wrist in a crushing grip. Behind him, Davis gasped, probably because he was watching Bolan’s knuckles go white. Something cracked in the wounded man’s hand and he yelped. The folding combat knife fell to the pavement.

“Give me a name,” Bolan repeated. “Or I’ll break the other one.”

“Don’t know,” the man blurted, shaking his head as his pride gave way to pain. “Contract job. Never saw a face.”

“Contract on who?” Bolan demanded.

“Jacket…” the man said, gritting his teeth. “Jacket pocket.”

Bolan carefully reached into the man’s jacket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. The sheet was a photocopy of a photograph. The photograph showed Bolan meeting with Adam Davis outside the station house to which Davis was assigned. It was grainy and had obviously been taken with long-distance equipment. Bolan’s face was circled in a whorl of yellow highlighter.

Bolan signaled to the police officers nearby, who closed in to take custody of the wounded shooter. The Executioner led the confused Davis several paces away from the main knot of uniforms and support personnel before showing him the paper.

“But this…” Davis looked at it. “What does it mean?”

“It means somebody knew to watch,” Bolan said.

“Watch for what?”

“Outside interference.” Bolan folded the paper and pocketed it. Turning, he watched the wounded gunman being ushered, under guard, to an ambulance that was just rolling up. Several men in suits, badges displayed prominently on their belts, clustered around Bolan and Davis, giving them the hairy eyeball; these would be Detroit detectives eager to ask this representative from Washington just what the hell was going on, and what Bolan thought he was doing. The soldier could almost write this dialogue himself; he had heard it often enough.

Bolan took out his secure smartphone and began moving deliberately from corpse to corpse, kneeling over his fallen enemies with the phone so he could snap their pictures. Davis followed him, looking as if he was ready to draw the Glock he had only just reholstered. Bolan couldn’t blame the kid. The abrupt battle had the Executioner’s own system working against the fight-or-flight dump of adrenaline that lingered even though the gunfight itself was over.

“What did you mean by ‘outside interference,’ Agent Cooper?” Davis spoke up.

“Somebody knows that a Justice Department agent was assigned to poke around this case,” Bolan said. “Seeing you with me was all it took for our man with the telephoto lens, or whoever hired him, to finger me as that agent.”

“You’re talking about somebody inside the Department.”

“I am,” Bolan said.

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“I’m not.” Bolan continued his grisly work, photographing all of the dead men. Then he walked to the bullet-riddled Charger and put his back to the car’s pocked flank. “Keep an eye out for me while I do this,” he said.

Davis nodded. He watched nervously, looking this way and that, hand near his gun, as Bolan transmitted the photographs and a terse report of what had produced them. The Farm would collect the data and run the images through advanced facial recognition software, comparing the dead men to profiles in meta-databases across the globe. There was no law enforcement or government agency whose files Stony Man Farm could not access. At least, if there was, it was hard even for Bolan to imagine what those might be.

No, if these men had criminal records, Barbara Price and her people would dig them up. Bolan had no doubt that most if not all of the shooters would have long rap sheets. Things would get really interesting, however, when Bolan had the chance to see just where these gunners’ backgrounds pointed.

In the meantime, he would just have to keep shaking the tree, despite the target painted on his back. Davis, as his liaison, was no safer.

“You think I’m a dirty cop?” Davis asked bluntly. The steel in the man’s tone was mildly surprising. Again Bolan raised his estimation of the younger man.

Bolan looked at Davis. “If I thought that, I wouldn’t have asked you what I did.”

Davis looked away. Bolan could see him thinking about it. Finally, the set of Davis’s shoulders relaxed. “You’re right,” he said. “Everyone knows it, and nobody wants to say it out loud. Everyone knows the walls have ears. Nobody wants to say who’s on the take and who isn’t.”

Bolan nodded. He didn’t say so, but he liked that Davis was still idealistic enough to be offended when he thought his integrity was being challenged. There wasn’t enough of that in the world, as far as Bolan was concerned.

“Is the CIA analyzing your pictures?” Davis ventured.

“Not exactly,” Bolan said.

“But somebody is,” Davis pressed. “You’re running identifications on the gunmen.”

“Which reminds me,” Bolan said. “Make sure we get a full run-up on the guy they’re taking in.”

“I’ll check back with the station and make sure. Unless someone suicides our boy in Holding.”

Bolan looked at Davis sharply. The detective managed not to grin for only a moment.

Bolan shook his head. “Let’s hope not.” Davis laughed.

The pair surveyed the damage to the Dodge Charger, but it was clear the car was critically wounded. Bolan paused just long enough to grab the rental car agreement from the glove compartment and pocket it.

“I don’t think you’re going to get your security deposit back,” Davis said mildly.

“I almost never do,” Bolan said.

Davis managed to beg, borrow, or steal an unmarked Crown Victoria from among the police personnel on the scene. He did not explain and Bolan did not ask. The silver-gray sedan was among three other vehicles parked along the increasingly crowded, chaotic street.

Bolan climbed in as Davis brought up the car, transferring his war bag from the Dodge to the Ford. As he did so, Davis pointed past him to the cordon being set up. There were a pair of television vans and a crowd of reporters gathering, shouting questions at the officers keeping them at bay.

“That’s going to be trouble, isn’t it?” Davis said.

“Yeah,” Bolan told him. “Nothing we can do about that now. Let’s get started.” He looked through the list Davis had provided and read the first address aloud. “You know this place?”

“There isn’t a cop in the city who doesn’t,” Davis said. “It’s not exactly one of our more affluent neighborhoods. A real hellhole, to be honest, Agent Cooper.”

Bolan said nothing at first. He opened his war bag and removed several loaded 20-round magazines for the Beretta. Davis looked over, wide-eyed, as he caught a glimpse of the hardware and ordnance inside.

“You don’t exactly travel light, do you, Agent Cooper?”

“If I could carry more, I would,” Bolan said. He began replacing magazines in the pouches of his shoulder holster. “Welcome to the war, kid.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. “Yeah.”

3

The squalid tenements on either side of the narrow street were crawling with people and sagging with furniture, garbage and other debris. A tangled maze of clotheslines linked facing buildings across the channel dividing them. As the unmarked Crown Victoria threaded its way around a series of abandoned, stripped vehicles, some of them bearing the scorch marks of past fires, children and adults scattered. Davis drove while Bolan watched from the passenger seat, his eyes scanning the rooftops and tracking the figures that ducked in and out of the shadows. The Executioner was no stranger to house-to-house close-quarters battle in urban environments. This neighborhood looked like yet another battleground awaiting the first shot to be fired.

“I hate coming down here,” Davis said. “It’s like a war zone sometimes.”

Bolan nodded. He checked the list Davis had given him. “According to this,” he said, “we want 1021, third floor, apartment C. A Ms. Kendall Brown. It looks like her son Mikyl was the first documented victim of these ritualized blade murders.”

“Kendall Brown,” Davis repeated. “Got it.”

It took them a while to find the right building, as most of the designations were either worn, missing completely, or covered by piles of junk or even cardboard signs. In a few cases, the numbers on the buildings had been spray-painted over or even switched. Bolan raised an eyebrow at one of the more obvious examples; the street signs at that intersection were also missing on one side.

“Trying to hide,” Davis explained. “Could be a lot of things. Enemy gangs. Rival dealers. Creditors, tax collectors, any of countless state agencies, like Child Protective under the Department of Human Services. Most of the veteran agency folks know where they need to go, so these games don’t fool anybody. But I bet it’s hell trying to get a pizza delivered.”

The dark humor in Davis’s comment, which seemed otherwise unlike what Bolan had seen of the man so far, bespoke bitter experience, perhaps as a uniformed cop on the streets. Bolan let it go. He had seen enough ghettos and poverty-stricken crime zones like this one the world over to know it for what it was. It didn’t matter if a place like this existed among the shantytowns of a third world banana republic, or in some of the worst overrun cesspools in Europe, or anywhere in the industrialized West. Poverty and desperation were feeding and breeding grounds for predators, who made those very problems worse, as they incestuously preyed on the communities that spawned them.

Bolan’s jaw tightened. As many times as he saw this, it always moved something in him. There were innocents here, among the predators. They would be vulnerable to the creatures that hunted among them, terrorized them, bullied and brutalized and subjugated them. It turned the soldier’s stomach.

Davis parked the car as close to the building as he could, wedging it between a derelict pickup truck—the rusted bed was full of trash—and a garbage bin overflowing with neglected refuse. The two men could hear children playing in the bin. When the detective leaned on the horn, the kids took the hint and climbed out, scampering off while shooting glares of mistrust and disappointment back at Bolan and Davis.

“One of them’s going to get picked up and thrown into the back of a garbage truck one of these days,” he said.

“No time soon, from the look of it.” Bolan shook his head. “You’d better wait here.”

“I was worried you were going to argue with me about that,” Davis said. “I’ll keep the motor running.”

“Good idea.” Bolan nodded. He reached into his war bag and removed a pair of translucent plastic cases. Inside each case was an earpiece that resembled a wireless telephone earbud. Bolan fitted one of the small devices behind his left ear, where it all but disappeared. He offered the second case to Davis.

“What’s this?” Davis asked, accepting the earbud.

“These are short-range transceivers,” Bolan said. “They’re smart. They filter gunfire but provide good, audible communication between them. Speak in a normal tone of voice. You’ll be able to listen in on everything I’m doing, and I’ll be able to hear you if you speak or if anything goes down.”

“Standard issue at the Justice Department, Agent Cooper?” Davis said. He tucked the earpiece in his own ear.

“Something like that,” Bolan said. The devices had been developed, in fact, with the help of Stony Man Farm electronics genius Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz. Bolan had used them in the field many times.

“The useful range varies,” he told Davis. “If we get too far away to hear each other, there’s a problem.” He paused, double-checked and stowed his Beretta, and then checked the massive .44 Magnum Desert Eagle before replacing the handcannon in the Kydex holster behind his hip.

“Cooper,” Davis said.

Bolan stopped with his hand on the door handle, shouldering his canvas war bag with his free arm. “Yeah?”

“You’re not a cop.” It was not a question.

“No,” Bolan said. “I’m not.”

“Look, Cooper,” Davis said. “I am a cop, and I like to think I’m a good one. I know this place. It’s very unlikely anybody’s going to talk to you up there. You’ll be lucky even to find this Brown woman at home, and if you do, she probably won’t open the door for you. Nobody sees anything here, Cooper. They don’t call the police if they can help it, which means if they do call, all hell is breaking loose down here. They don’t talk to anybody if they don’t have to. It’s like this isn’t even the United States down here, Cooper. It’s bad. I know you’re some kind of government superhero or something, but it could be that all you’ll accomplish in there is burning the place down around your ears.”

“Understood,” Bolan said. “Keep your eyes open, Detective.”

Davis nodded. He watched, looking anxious, as Bolan made his way through the scattered garbage at ground level to enter the tenement.

The smell hit Bolan as soon as he cleared the outer doorway. The stairwell reeked of refuse, human waste and mold. There was a mound of trash blocking the inner entrance; he stepped over it, hands ready to go for the Beretta under his jacket.

The floor was covered in carpet so stained its original color was impossible to determine. It creaked under Bolan’s combat boots. Through the thin walls, he could hear and smell the usual signs of living at close quarters in an environment like this. Televisions blared. Repellant food odors hung heavy in the air. A domestic altercation of some kind simmered in one of the apartments he passed; there were angry screams in both Spanish and English. Bolan paused, hand drifting nearer the Beretta, wondering if intervention was required, until the voices grew more calm and quieted.

He moved on.

“Cooper,” Davis’s voice sounded in his ear. “Do you work alone?”

“What?” Bolan asked.

“There’s an old blue Chevy Caprice full of guys down here,” Davis said. “They’ve circled the block twice now, but I can’t read the plate from where I’m watching. They’re a little out of place in this neighborhood, and I don’t recognize them. I was kind of hoping you were going to say you had called in reinforcements.”

“No such luck,” Bolan said. “Watch yourself down there, Davis. Keep me informed if anything changes.”

“Will do.”

Bolan picked up his pace. He traversed the next stairwells with less caution; he could feel the numbers working against him and Davis. When he reached the third floor, he found apartment C and stepped well to the side of the doorway. He flattened himself against the wall, reached out and rapped on the edge of the hollow-core door.

It took several tries before he got a response from within. Finally, a woman’s voice answered, “What do you want?”

“Kendall Brown?” Bolan asked, as he came to the front of the door.

The door opened to the length of its chain revealing a middle-aged black woman wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and bracing a toddler on her hip with one thick arm. The little girl, who was chewing on a pacifier, looked up at Bolan with wide eyes.

The woman nodded slowly. “What do you want?” she said again.

“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, smiling briefly at the child. She continued to regard Bolan with amazement. “I need to talk to you about Mikyl Brown, your son.”

The woman wanted to shut the door; Bolan could see her knuckles turn white. To her credit, she held her ground.

“Cooper,” Davis said over their wireless connection. “I think that car I saw is parked behind the building. I saw it nose out and then reverse.”

“Mikyl is dead,” Brown said. “Murdered. Police already been here. Can’t say they much cared about him, if you ask me. But they were here. They asked their questions. They left. Mikyl is still dead. What the hell you think you’re gonna do now?”

“I understand,” Bolan said. “I really do, Ms. Brown. I’m hoping that if I can better understand the circumstances of Mikyl’s death, I can bring his killer to justice. I’m part of a special task force.”

“Cooper,” Davis’s voice sounded in Bolan’s ear again. “Cooper, I think you’d better hurry.”

Kendall Brown closed the door, removed the chain and opened it again, after putting the child on the ground and giving the girl a gentle pat to send her toddling in the opposite direction. She lowered her voice. “I don’t know who you are, mister,” she said, “but it’s damned cruel what you’re doing. Mikyl was murdered in a gang fight. Stabbed to death. The boy who done it, not even a year older than my son, is in prison. Probably get out sooner than he should, too. Just how things go.”

Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “Mikyl’s murderer was convicted?”

“Cooper.” Davis’s voice was growing more urgent.

“Who the hell are you, mister?” Brown said. “I don’t need you coming up in here and reminding me of my boy.” She slammed the door in his face with considerable force. Bolan looked up and down the corridor; nothing moved.

“I’m coming out,” Bolan said. “Something’s not right, here. Keep the front covered.”

“Understood,” Davis answered.

Bolan paused at the stairwell. Beneath the noise of the apartments, both in and outside the building, he could hear something else.

Shuffling. There were men in the stairwell.

Bolan reached into the canvas war bag. He removed a flashbang grenade, popped the pin and watched the spoon spring free.

Below him, someone moved in response to the noise.

The soldier leaned over the stairwell railing and let the grenade fall.

He turned away, shielding his ears with his palms, squeezing his eyes shut. The actinic flash of the grenade was bright enough that he could see it through his eyelids. The thunder-clap of the less-lethal bomb made his teeth vibrate. He heard a scream.

No sooner had the flash faded than Bolan hoisted himself up over the railing. He dropped, colliding heavily on the landing below, absorbing the impact with his legs. Rising from his crouch, he drew the double-edged combat-survival dagger in his waistband. The trio of men in whose midst he had landed, either held or were reaching for automatic weapons. They were dressed in what Bolan recognized as expensive suits, probably tailored to hide their shoulder holsters and submachine-gun harnesses. All three continued rubbing at their eyes or holding their ears.

The nearest of the gunmen managed to fix Bolan with bloodshot eyes, fighting the involuntary tears streaming down his face. His gun came up, but Bolan stabbed him in the neck and ripped the knife forward and away. The dying man spun, spraying the wall crimson.

Bolan kicked out the knee of the second man, dropping him to the floor. The third was on his hands and knees, trying to find the micro-Uzi he had dropped. The Executioner fired a kick to his ribs and was rewarded with an audible crack as the gunman rolled over. He threw his knife arm backward, sensing the second man surging back to his feet, and rammed the double-edged blade into the hollow of the gunner’s throat. Yanking the knife out in a circular motion as he wrenched the man’s head around, the soldier levered him down to die on the stairs.

Bolan checked left, right, and then up and down the stairwell, very quickly. Then he threw himself to the floor, landing with his knee in the back of the man he had rib-kicked. Air gasped from the gunman’s lungs and he lost his grip on the Uzi again. Bolan kicked the gun away and moved to secure the man; he had plastic zip-tie cuffs in his pocket. He rolled his prisoner over so the man’s back was on the floor.

The would-be killer wasn’t down for the count. His hand snaked into his jacket and came out with a backup pistol, a tiny chromed .25ACP. He fired a single round. Bolan swatted the gun aside and plunged the blade of his knife into the most quickly lethal target. The blade penetrated the gunner’s eye and turned him off as if a switch had been thrown.

Bolan drew a breath.

He followed the path of the bullet, but it had lodged in the railing of the stairwell, taking chips from the paint. The small-caliber slug would not have been much of a threat, but the whole point of Bolan’s maneuver had been to neutralize these attackers before they started firing at close quarters. Most pistol and machine-gun rounds would pass right through an interior wall of a dwelling. They would penetrate most exterior walls, for that matter. In slums like these, gunfire would scythe through the residents as if the walls weren’t there. Bolan could not permit that to happen, which meant he had to keep moving, and quickly, to get clear of the tenement.

“Davis,” Bolan said quietly, wiping his knife clean on one of the dead men’s jackets. He sheathed the blade. “I have engaged multiple hostiles. Well dressed and heavily armed.” He began methodically stripping the gunmen’s weapons, separating slides and bolts from receivers and tossing the results in opposite directions. “See if you can get some uniforms in here, including the medical examiner. Tell them to sweep the building,” he suggested. “I don’t want to leave a lot of firearms in component parts for the neighborhood kids to play with.” He took a moment to snap pictures of the dead men and transmit them to Stony Man Farm.

Bolan took the stairs two and three at a time as he made his way back down, counting on speed and initiative to save him should there be any more shooters positioned as backup somewhere below. When he hit ground level, he made his way for the rear of the building, stepping over a homeless man sleeping in the alcove. The street person shouted curses after the soldier, who ignored them.

Bolan spotted the gunman’s car, parked exactly where Davis said it would be. There were two thugs sitting in it, one on the passenger side and one behind the wheel.

Bolan drew the Beretta 93-R and flicked the selector switch to 3-round burst.

They noticed him coming before he got more than a few steps. Bolan saw the driver bring a small handheld two-way radio to his face. He was lining up the men in the car for a shot when the first bullet hit the pavement at his feet.

There were more gunmen, hidden behind the building—a lot more. There had to be at least one other vehicle Davis hadn’t seen. The gunmen were grouped on the fire escape of the adjacent position, covering the rear entrance from elevation. No doubt they thought this afforded them the tactical advantage.

Against any man but the Executioner, it would have.

Bolan rolled into a tight ball and threw himself forward and right, behind the concrete abutment supporting the metal posts of the roof over the rear entrance. Bullets kicked up cement dust as automatic gunfire ripped through the space between the tenements. Beyond that, Bolan could hear the shouts of men and women reacting to the sudden warfare in their midst. In a neighborhood as bad as this, they would be accustomed to the occasional shot, even a short exchange among gangs or rival drug dealers. A prolonged firefight like this would be something else entirely, and cause for real concern among even the most hardened denizens of this Detroit ghetto.

Bolan was pinned down. He could not retreat through the building at his back; that would invite the gunmen into the tenement, too, which was the problem he had just worked to avoid. He could not break right or left; that would give the shooters a clear shot. They would pick him off easily before he got the chance to shoot them all.

His only way out was directly across the alley, into the space beneath the shooters, where the fire escape itself would foul their aim. He braced himself, coiling his body like a spring, and prepared to make a dash for it.

Breaking for it, Bolan threw himself into the alleyway.

The parked car wasn’t parked anymore. It was moving at speed—and coming right for him.

4

The Crown Victoria barreled down the narrow alleyway from the opposite direction. The gunmen in the Chevy saw it coming and tried to swerve, only to sheer bricks from the tenement on the driver’s side. Davis pushed the car’s engine to the red line. The vehicles collided with a scream of metal on metal and roaring 8-cylinder power plants. With his foot apparently still pushed all the way to the floor, Davis leaned out of his open window, extended his Glock and pumped its entire magazine into the windshield of the gunmen’s car.

Bolan couldn’t afford to admire Davis’s handiwork. The shooters on the fire escape did their best to track him and gun him down, but he was moving too fast, his rush under their guns had been just unexpected enough to work. When he was directly below them, he flattened himself against the building, raised the Beretta skyward in a two-handed grip and started firing.

To the men on the fire escape, the world erupted in flying, burning metal. Bolan’s rounds punched through from below, ricocheting from the metal grates of the upper landing, turning the metal basket in which they stood into a blood-soaked nightmare. One of the men above managed to trigger a blast that went wide, digging a furrow near Bolan’s heels, before he went down.

Footsteps sounded at one end of the alley mouth.

“Cooper!” Davis yelled as he reloaded his Glock. “More coming!”

Bolan ran for the passenger side of the car, ripped open the door and jumped in, pulling the door shut against damaged hinges. Davis slammed the gearshift into Reverse and stepped on it, sending the car skidding back the way it had come.

“Where to?” Davis asked.

“Get us back onto the street,” Bolan said, reloading the Beretta. He racked the slide. “You know this area. Where can we go where there are fewer people?”

“Two blocks over,” Davis said without hesitation. “There’s a strip of old commercial and residential structures targeted for urban renewal. Most of it’s boarded up. There are some homeless camped there, but not too many during the day. It’s more or less deserted right now.”

“Perfect. Don’t spare the gas.”

Davis pushed them through sparse traffic. A vehicle appeared to be following them—Bolan assumed it was the car Davis hadn’t seen, the one that had to have been nearby to transport the assassins—and where there was one, there might be more. Despite Davis’s skilled driving, the pursuit car began to gain on them.

Bolan drew the Desert Eagle from its Kydex holster.

“How did they find us?” Davis asked.

“They had to know where we would be,” Bolan said.

“Somebody in the department,” Davis said, frowning. “Somebody with access to my files. The list of addresses.”

Bolan said nothing for a moment. He was watching the hostiles’ car come up on their passenger-side flank. “Give us a burst of speed and then put us into a side street,” he said. “Get ready to bail out. Follow my lead.”

“Right,” Davis said.

The chase car drew alongside their vehicle, and the Executioner was waiting. The armed men inside the car, dressed in cheap suits like they were refugees from a business meeting, began to shift into place, going for weapons held below the level of their windows.

Bolan rolled down his own window and thrust the triangular snout of the Desert Eagle into the wind. He triggered a single shot. The .44 Magnum hollowpoint round blew apart the driver’s-side front tire.

Davis was no slouch behind the wheel. He jammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel hard to the right, ramming the nose of their vehicle into the rear flank of the chase car. The gunmen spun out, the maneuver that much more violent thanks to the wreckage of the front tire. Spikes flew in a tight arc as the rim cut through what was left of the steel-belted radial.

Davis continued his push and shot past the rear end of the chase car. He cut over again, pacing the front of the row of boarded buildings, until he found an enclosure that might have been a carport or an abandoned loading dock. Plywood splintered and flew apart as the grille of the Crown Victoria rammed past makeshift barriers.

“Out, out, out,” Bolan ordered. Davis bailed out of the car with him. Bolan pointed. “Take the back. I’ll take the front.” The other side of the narrow, crumbling city block was only a few sheets of plywood or molding drywall away; if Davis could not find an exit ready-made on the other side, he could easily make one. Bolan drew the Beretta 93-R left-handed and, with a weapon in each hand, headed for the ragged, gaping hole the car had made with its passing.

An almost eerie sense of déjà vu hit him as his enemies converged. The gunmen, looking for all the world like stereotypical mafiosi, were armed with a mismatched assortment of handguns, shotguns and automatic small arms. They were coming around both sides of the crippled chase car when one of them spotted Bolan emerging from the carport.

The soldier was a combat shooter borne of both training and long experience. He knew the mistakes men made in armed battle, and he knew how to exploit these mistakes. In a half crouch, walking smoothly and quickly with a gliding, heel-to-toe gait, he came at them, his weapons extended, his wrists canted at very slight angles to bolster the stability of each shooting wrist and maximize the visibility of his sights. The Executioner bore down on them, irresistible force and immovable object in one battle-ready vessel.

He fired.

The Desert Eagle bucked in his fist, its gas-operated action, tuned by Stony Man Farm armorer John “Cowboy” Kissinger, cycling smoothly and lethally in Bolan’s grip. The Beretta sang in deadly harmony, tapping out a staccato rhythm with each squeeze of the trigger. Bolan’s 3-shot bursts found their mark, stitching first one, then another, blasting the gunmen center of mass. The Desert Eagle’s heavier rounds took two more targets as Bolan angled for precise head shots. The hollowpoint slugs dug wide holes through their targets. Bolan’s mercy, for mercy it was, lay in a quick end to enemy lives lived cruelly and violently.

Bolan never stopped moving, never stopped closing in. As he got to contact distance he fired a triburst through the throat of one man, emptying the Beretta’s 20-round magazine. He fired the last shot in the Desert Eagle, too, but that did not slow him. Instead he savagely pistol-whipped the nearest gunman, bringing the butt of the Desert Eagle down across the bridge of the man’s nose. He drove a follow-up knee strike into the man’s abdomen and then slammed the empty pistol onto the back of the man’s neck as the gunman doubled over.

His foes were all neutralized.

Still moving, seeking cover behind the chase car, he reloaded and checked every direction around him. Rarely was a professional killed by the enemy he could see; the deadliest bullets came from guns fired by unseen hands. Bolan, once in combat, maintained vigilant awareness of his battlefield throughout the engagement.

He heard the steady cracks of Davis’s Glock from the other side of the abandoned structure he faced. The pistol’s bark was punctuated by long, withering blasts from an automatic weapon. It was a Kalashnikov rifle, judging from the distinctly hollow metallic sound Bolan knew only too well. Davis was outgunned, for certain—but not for long.

Bolan holstered the Beretta and held the Desert Eagle before him in a two-handed grip. He ran for the gap separating two almost contiguous buildings, turning sideways and pushing the weapon forward in his right as he sidestepped. He cleared the far side, looking for Davis—

A tire iron missed his head by inches.

The soldier’s habitual combat half-crouch saved him. The enemy, a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit whose head was as bald as an egg, swung the tire iron again, trying to bring it down on his adversary’s shoulder, perhaps to break his clavicle. Bolan snapped out a low side kick and broke the man’s ankle.

There was a revolver in the thug’s belt, but Bolan took quick note of the long, empty casings on the ground. They were .357 Magnum shells, at a glance. Bolan and his attacker stood in the lee of an abandoned, burned-out station wagon that had to be more than thirty-years-old. Beyond that, Davis, taking shelter behind a makeshift battlement consisting of a stack of rusted and stripped appliances dumped in front of the building, was holding his own. He was firing from cover at a knot of gunmen crouched behind a concrete barrier. The barrier was apparently something installed to prevent through traffic.

The bald man was howling in pain. He clutched at his ankle and made no attempt to go for the gun in his belt. Bolan surmised that this was why he’d been wielding a tire iron in the first place. Evidently he had run out of ammunition and had withdrawn to a backup position, perhaps even lying in wait for Bolan specifically. If that was true, and odds were good that it was, the opposition was even more organized than the soldier had suspected. This implied not just professional, paid hitters, but gunners of at least moderate experience.

Bolan paused long enough to secure the injured man with two sets of plastic zip-tie cuffs, binding the prisoner’s hands and then securing his good leg to his wrists. That would hold him for the moment, anyway; there was no time to do more.

The Executioner took a two-handed grip on the Desert Eagle and braced himself against the roof of the derelict station wagon. As he did so, one of the gunners tracking Davis saw him and jumped up. He swung his Kalashnikov in a wide arc, trying to track Bolan while holding the trigger down and spraying on full-auto.

The bullets went wide. The shots ripped across the torso of the fallen hitter, ripping open his chest and killing him. Bolan took careful aim and put a single .44 Magnum slug through the left eye of the man who had done it. The gunman fell instantly, firing out the remainder of his magazine harmlessly into the littered asphalt. Bolan ducked briefly to avoid a bees’ nest of ricochets.

He fired once, then again. Twice his bullets found their marks, snapping back the skulls of gunmen who did not realize they were vulnerable. The distance was long for a pistol, but there was no finer long-distance marksman than Bolan. The soldier waited to see if another enemy would be careless enough to move into the kill zone. There was more gunfire from the opposite side of the barrier, which drove Davis back to cover as he tried to join in the fray.

The angle was bad. Bolan shifted his position to the other end of the station wagon, but this presented a new problem. Davis was between him and the rest of the shooters.

Bolan carefully surveyed the situation. He watched for a rhythm, if any, as the gunmen broke cover to shoot at Davis and in Bolan’s general direction. A few bullets struck the old station wagon. They were nowhere near him.

He spoke aloud for the benefit of his earbud transceiver.

“Davis,” he said. “Duck.”

The detective dropped immediately. Bolan fired once, taking one of the remaining gunmen between the eyes. The others reacted to that, crouching down more carefully behind their concrete shield. Bolan simply waited.

Somewhere in the distance, police sirens could be heard. The firefight had finally drawn the attention of law enforcement. Davis hadn’t had a chance to call for backup, at least not while within the range that Bolan could overhear. No doubt the gunfire itself had generated frantic calls from citizens near this abandoned zone.

“Stay down,” Bolan said.

Bolan retrieved a fragmentation grenade from his war bag. He pulled the pin, let the spoon pop free and waited, counting in his head. Davis caught the movement and eyed him curiously from his vantage point, covering the top of his head with his folded arms as he lay on his stomach. Bolan nodded once and then tossed the grenade.

The bomb exploded just as it hit the lip of the concrete barrier. The men not caught by shrapnel from the grenade absorbed the spray of concrete fragments the explosion kicked up. Guns clattered to the pavement. As the boom echoed from the nearby brick buildings, nothing else moved.

Davis pushed himself to his feet.

Bolan moved from cover. He walked over, weapon ready, listening and watching to see if another ambush would be forthcoming. They had been attacked too many times already for him not to expect it at any moment. The sirens continued to close, but they were still some distance off.

“They’re going to take a few minutes to find us,” Davis said.

“Do I look that excited?” Bolan asked.

“You’re a one-man war, Cooper,” Davis said. “And I’m willing to bet this won’t be the first time you catch hell for walking into someone’s jurisdiction and setting the place on fire.”

“You catch on fast, Detective,” Bolan said. In his pocket, his secure satellite phone began to vibrate. He snapped it open.

“Cooper,” he said. Using his cover identity would inform the Farm that there were others present.

“Striker,” Barbara Price said. “I hear police.”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “You do. I’ve just engaged targets comprising a hit team. Armed professionals, mixed kit. Civilian clothing on the formal side. You caught me before I could send you pictures. I’d actually like to take those before company gets here.”

“Do so,” the Farm’s mission controller told him. “We have a database pulled up. I’ll explain when you’re ready.”

Bolan made a fast circuit of the dead men closest to him and Davis. The ones on the other side of the abandoned building would have to wait. He said as much to Price when he reestablished the connection.

“You may not need to,” Price said. “We’re working on a theory, and Bear has some preliminary, rough matches pulled up. It looks like we’re right.” Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman was Stony Man Farm’s resident computer genius.

“Why?” Bolan said. “What’s the theory?”

“Your gunmen,” Price told him, “are old school Mafia. Hit men for the Mob.”

Bolan took that in for a moment. He had, over the course of his war, been on the receiving end of Mob guns before, even had a price on his head. It was among the Mafia that the Executioner had first become known, then famous, then infamous.

“I thought something seemed familiar about all this,” he said, deadpan.

He could sense the smile in Price’s voice. “I’ll bet,” she said. She went on more seriously. “We’ve checked the pictures you sent first, and checked them thoroughly. Each one of those men has a rap sheet. Most of them are career criminals. A few are young enough that they haven’t quite reached the majors, but they were headed that way before you got to them. Each and every one has ties, directly or indirectly, to Detroit-area underworld figures.”

Davis, unable to hear Price’s side of the conversation, shot Bolan a quizzical look.

“But that doesn’t scan at all,” Bolan said, considering her report. “Unless…”

“Unless your cover has been breached and the whole of the Michigan Mafia wants your head?” Price said. “We thought of that. Your cover is secure. There’s been no chatter from the usual sources that we would see if word about you got out. There’s no reason to believe anyone’s targeting you for any reason other than the obvious—you’re an interloping federal agent looking into these serial killings.”

“Something’s not right where that’s concerned, either,” Bolan said. “But I need to see where that takes me before I offer any theories of my own. So why would Detroit’s Mob be involved?”

“The most obvious reason is that they’re the prime employee pool for a job like this.”

“Guns for hire,” Bolan supplied. “You need a hit man or a lot of them in Detroit, a city notorious for its corruption, then you go see the Mob. Something like that?”

“Exactly,” Price said. “Somebody with serious money, a lot of clout, or both is behind this. Somebody with enough resources to throw that many Mafia gunners at one man.”

“Or two,” Bolan said, looking at Davis, who continued to watch him curiously.

“There’s one good thing about all this,” Price said.

“And that is?”

“You’ve made a serious dent in the local crime syndicates,” Price said. “We’ll continue to work up the other identifications you sent. I’ll let you know if anything pops up.”

“I’ll stay after it on this end,” Bolan said.

“Striker?” Price said. “Be careful. And good hunting.”

“Thanks,” Bolan said. “Cooper out.” The sirens of the approaching police cars had become louder. Cruisers were pulling up around the abandoned buildings and closing on both sides. Bolan frowned. He shut his phone and looked at Davis. “Our boys—” he jerked his head at the dead men “—were all Mafia hit men. Hired to kill me, or to kill both of us.”

“Cooper,” Davis said, his face lurid in the red and blue lights of the approaching cruisers, “what’s really going on here?”

“Murder, and covering up murder. It isn’t the what that concerns me most,” Bolan said. “It’s the who.”

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