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“Remember Kaya?” Alexandronin asked. “She’s still with the government. Russian Intelligence.”
Bolan winced. “Do you really want to risk her life?”
“She risks it keeping in covert contact with me, Mikhail,” Alexandronin explained.
“Three heads are better than two. Stick with me.”
Alexandronin’s eyes narrowed, his lips turning up into a smile. “You have done more with much less, Mikhail.”
“Focus,” Bolan warned.
Alexandronin nodded. “I am.”
Bolan stubbed out his cigarette, burying it with the other stubby butts in the pile flowing over the top of the ashtray. The soldier palmed his shot glass and got out of the booth. The two black-clad Slavs eyed Bolan suspiciously, confirming to the Executioner that the men were professionals. They focused on him like antiradiation missiles launched at a radar installation. The pair wore their jackets loosely in contrast to Bolan’s snugly fitted wool long coat. The custom-tailoring of Bolan’s coat hid his two Berettas completely, but the lumpy loose jackets worn by the two Russians indicated that the pair were armed with more than flat, sleek auto pistols. Their eyes locked on the glass in Bolan’s hand.
Bolan passed between the pair, shoving them rudely aside. His elbow connected with something big and heavy hidden under the lapels of one jacket. Bolan cursed the pair in Russian. “Move aside, you sons of whores. I need more vodka!”
“Fucking bastard,” one of the professionals snarled, returning his response in Georgian-accented Russian. “Who do you think you are?”
Bolan met his gaze. “A thirsty man in front of two jackbooted thugs. Two pathetic leftovers of a dead regime if my eyes serve me right!”
“You don’t look Russian,” the other hardman said in English. His accent was flawless, further proof that these men weren’t just pulled off the street. “What relation are you to Alexandronin?”
“Brothers in blood,” Bolan returned. “What is your interest?”
“That man is a traitor,” the Georgian gritted in Russian. “And if you consider him your brother—”
“Shut your mouth!” the English speaker said to his companion. He glared at Bolan. “Walk away from this if you value your life, ‘brother.’”
Bolan smirked. “I was just about to suggest the same thing to you.”
Behind him, Bolan could tell that Alexandronin was moving because the Georgian’s interest was suddenly locked on to the booth.
“Trying to distract us?” the Georgian asked.
Bolan snapped his arm straight, the palmed shot glass shattering against the Georgian’s cheekbone. Broken glass slashed ragged wounds through his eyeball and cheek. The other hardman stepped back, driving his hand into his jacket for the heavy chatterbox concealed beneath. Bolan kicked out, catching the English speaker in the side of his knee, folding the man’s leg with the crack and pop of dislocating cartilage and unsprung tendons.
The background drone of the bar suddenly went silent as the millisecond of explosive action brought a spray of blood and the ugly crunch of a shattered knee joint to the patrons’ awareness. The Georgian screamed, half blind from the broken splinters sticking out of his punctured eyeball. Alexandronin slipped up behind him, grabbed a handful of collar and twisted. The tightened neck of his shirt smothered the Georgian hit man’s agony as fabric garroted across his windpipe.
The blunt, short barrel of Alexandronin’s P7 jammed into the Georgian’s kidney. “You reach for the weapon under your coat, and your kidney will end up decorating the floor.”
Bolan helped his broken-kneed opponent to both feet, reaching under the man’s jacket to use the grip of the harnessed machine pistol he wore as a handle to maneuver him. From feel, Bolan recognized it as an Uzi of some form. A good tug let his captive know that Bolan had command of the situation.
The bartender looked under the counter at some form of fight-pacifying weaponry, but the sheer speed and violence of action dissuaded him reaching for it. Whoever the barkeep thought Bolan was, he had the reflexes to counteract anything that he kept under the bar. “Please, guv’nuh, take it outside.”
“That was my plan,” Bolan told him.
Alexandronin tossed some folded pound notes in front of the bartender. “Another bottle of potato juice for the road.”
The Georgian gurgled as the bartender put a bottle on the counter. Alexandronin leaned in toward his captive, smiling. “Grab my vodka for me, friend.”
The Georgian picked up the bottle and the four people left the confines of the bar. Both Bolan and Alexandronin held their prisoners directly in front of them as human shields. By the time they were outside, Bolan had his man’s Uzi well in hand and down by his thigh, safety selector clicked to full automatic.
“Let your rifleman know that he’d better hold his fire,” Bolan warned as they stood under the bar’s overhang. “Unless you wouldn’t mind having a new orifice torn in you.”
The limping, agonized Slav spoke into a collar microphone, speaking quickly. The hardman was straightforward, as Bolan had proven his fluency in Russian, making it clear that any deception would be futile. Bolan couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation because his prisoner wore an earphone, but the hostage explained that he had been compromised.
“Where’s your shooter?” Bolan asked.
“There are two of them,” the hobbled prisoner replied.
“The bar’s quiet again,” Alexandronin noted. He pocketed the bottle of vodka, no longer needing a chokehold on his prisoner as the man was busy holding the tattered remnants of his glass-shredded face together. “The backdoor team is likely moving up.”
“Point the way,” Bolan ordered. “Vitaly, stay sharp.”
“Da,” Alexandronin said.
A distant rifle cracked instantly, and the black-clad human shield jerked violently against Bolan. The prisoner’s blood gushed out of a hole torn into his breastbone, arterial spray spurting through the centralized chest wound like a fountain. Now a deadweight in Bolan’s arms, the corpse still provided some use as a protective barrier, and the Executioner pushed out into the street. Alexandronin forced his prisoner ahead of him, as well, but the riflemen focused on Bolan, their bullets crashing into the unfeeling form of the dead man.
Bolan spotted a muzzle flash, lined up his Uzi and fired the submachine gun. The chatterbox had a range of 200 yards in trained hands, and no living man was more familiar with the stubby Israeli machine pistol than the Executioner. The distant gunmen stopped shooting, but Bolan didn’t feel as if he had scored a hit. Suppressive fire, however, still was worth the spent ammunition, and Bolan looked for the second rifleman. Alexandronin stumbled, the Georgian bending backward as the Russian’s P7 discharged. Alexandronin’s claim of spraying the hit man’s kidney across the bar floor didn’t quite come true as the 9 mm round missed the organ completely. The deadly slug, however, still tore through Alexandronin’s opponent, slashing a stretch of aorta apart.
“Vitaly!” Bolan called.
“Their round went through my thigh,” Alexandronin said, limping to cover.
Bolan began snatching items from the dead man’s pockets, spare magazines and a radio specifically. He let the body tumble lifelessly to the ground as he rushed to scoop up his ally. Together they ducked between a couple of buildings. The leg injury was a shallow furrow along the outside of Alexandronin’s thigh. The bullet had struck far from the femur or the femoral artery, meaning that the man could still walk, though his leg was drenched. Bolan recognized the smell of the rotten vodka they had been drinking. A bone injury would have been crippling, but had the blood vessel been nicked, Alexandronin’s life would be measured in seconds. Bolan looked his friend in the eye. “Bad news. You lost the vodka.”
Alexandronin grinned. “A tragedy, Mikhail. I can still walk.”
Bolan dumped the spent magazine from his Uzi, feeding it a full one he’d plucked from its former owner. The savvy warrior also took a moment to secure the earpiece and the body of his hostage’s radio to his harness. Being able to listen in on the conversation of his enemies would be a force multiplier.
The bar front opened and Bolan caught a glimpse of four men bursting through the doors, scrambling to cover. Bolan fired off a short burst that sent the dark-clad assassins deeper behind their cover.
“Get to a safer position,” Bolan ordered Alexandronin. “I’ll cover you.”
The Russian shook his head. “This is my fight, too, Mikhail.”
“You’re hurt and slowed down,” Bolan argued.
“I can turret,” Alexandronin replied. “You can still move quickly. Together we can surround them.”
Bolan didn’t have time to argue about tactics, especially since Alexandronin was right. He handed his friend the Uzi and the remaining spare magazine. “Don’t die.”
The Russian smiled. “I have men to kill before I rest, Mikhail.”
“Remember that,” the soldier said, drawing his Beretta.
The Executioner raced across the street, covered by a spray of rapid shots from Alexandronin.
Once more, London was a host to Bolan’s cleansing flame.
CHAPTER TWO
Alexandronin’s first burst of Uzi fire kept the assassins’ heads down as the Executioner charged around their flank, Beretta Storm leading the way. Bolan held his fire, his Russian ally leaning on the trigger to keep the enemy focused away from him.
“Which of those two idiots lost control of his Uzi?” one killer snarled in Russian.
“Probably both,” another answered his comrade. “They were both human shields, remember?”
“Longbow to Tomahawk, be alert! One operator moved around to your side of the street,” another, presumably a sniper, informed the hit crew. Bolan was glad that he’d taken the time to relieve his former prisoner of his comm link. Aware that the enemy was on to him, Bolan sidestepped into the open and fired four quick shots at the squad in front of the bar. Two of his shots struck one gunman center mass, but the impacts had no affect on the would-be murderer.
Bolan snaked back behind cover as the Russians’ Uzis crackled, ripping the air he’d stood in moments before. The assassins were wearing body armor, good stuff, too, as Bolan had Dutch-loaded his Beretta with high-velocity hollowpoints and full-power NATO ball ammunition. The high-pressure ball rounds were effective against a good deal of ballistic vests, meaning that the killers had expected heavy opposition. The corner that Bolan had ducked behind was chewed up as a trio of submachine guns tracked to keep the big American pinned.
Bolan ran a mental countdown to the moment when a “Flying Squad”—Scotland Yard’s version of SWAT—showed up to the scene of a raging gun battle on the bank of the Thames. The Executioner knew that he had minutes, but with the skill and professionalism of the assassination cadre, he’d need every second of that Doomsday countdown to put the killers away. Now, Bolan not only had Alexandronin’s life to worry about, but also the British policemen who would be caught in the cross fire.
Three weapons in the front meant that the rest of the team was swinging around the back to strike at the Executioner from behind. Bolan charged to the back alley, Beretta leading the way. His suspicions were confirmed when he heard the whispered announcement of “in position” from a new speaker on the communications hookup.
Bolan whipped around the corner, his Beretta’s muzzle jammed into an assassin’s face, breaking his nose. The soldier’s off hand slapped the gunner’s Uzi against the wall and though the hitter triggered his subgun, the rounds spit through empty air. Bolan triggered his Storm, the solitary 9 mm round blowing off the back of the killer’s skull, disgorging a cone of spongy brain matter and blood into the face of the second man with them. The remains of the dead man’s skull contents turned the assassin’s shooting glasses into a blood-sprayed mess he couldn’t see through.
The Executioner tossed the corpse of the point man aside and pivoted the gun in his hand to strike the surviving killer in the head. The Slavic gunman stepped back, tearing his glasses off, the motion helping him to avoid the weight of the handgun as Bolan’s swing jammed it up against the wall. Now able to see, the Russian killer lunged forward, forearm trapping Bolan’s gun hand against the wall.
The close-quarters gunfight suddenly turned into a brawl as the assassin chopped at Bolan’s neck, but the soldier deflected most of the lethal precision with his shoulder. The neck-breaking blow degraded to a clumsy slap that cuffed Bolan’s head above his ear. The gunman tried to bring his Uzi to bear, but the Executioner had trapped the subgun between his hip and the wall. The frustrated hitter tried to nail his opponent between the eyes with a backhand stroke, but Bolan took the blow on the crown of his head. The curved surface of his skull denied the murderer a solid hit, sparing Bolan anything worse than scalp abrasions.
The soldier snaked his foot behind his enemy’s ankle and with a surge of strength, barreled the gunman backward and off balance. The assassin stumbled onto his buttocks, the Uzi wrenched out of his grasp. No longer restrained, Bolan had both arms free to tackle the killer prisoner. He dropped on the gunman, knees slamming into the hardman’s shoulders with jarring force, pinning the man to the ground under his 200-plus-pound frame. Bolan fired off a hard punch to the prone assassin’s jaw, a knockout blow that jammed the mandible into a heavy juncture of nerves at the side of his neck. The Slav wasn’t rendered unconscious, but neural overload left his eyes glazed over, staring glassily into the murky, starless night sky.
“Kroz! Report!” a voice over Bolan’s radio demanded. The stunned Russian groaned incoherently as if to answer the broadcast order. Bolan took a moment to pull his Combat PDA, activating its 8 megapixel digital camera to record the gunman’s face, just in case this particular prisoner had as short a shelf life as his last one. Bolan punched the assassin once more, and the stunned, glassy eyes closed with unconsciousness.
Bolan brought the microphone to his lips. “Kroz can’t come to the phone right now. However if you leave a message at the beep…”
“Shit! Shit!” the Russian on the other end swore. “Switch frequencies! Channel B!”
The alternate frequency plan might have worked, had not Bolan captured not one but two different radios. Bolan checked Kroz’s unit for indications of the secondary communications frequency and found that Kroz had scratched his dial to mark the next channel. The soldier plugged his earphone into Kroz’s unit and clicked over to the frequency.
“…fucking guy?” one of the conversants complained in Russian.
“Maintain radio discipline,” the leader of the death squad ordered.
Sowing panic among his enemies was a good weapon for evening the odds against superior numbers and firepower. As it was, the assassination team was down four shooters in the space of a few minutes. With two sharpshooters and three gunmen on hand, that was nearly half of the Russian force.
“Central says to abort!” another voice cut in. “The mission has been compromised.”
So, the assassins have a coordination and operations center, Bolan thought. If they’re going to cut and run, there’s a chance that they could give me a better look at who ran this op.
Bolan scurried back to the front of the bar, listening to the Russians as he did so.
“Principal target still breathing. Cannot disengage anyhow,” the hit team’s commander returned.
“Scorch the earth,” the coordinator snapped. “Principal is no longer an issue. Avoiding his partner is!”
“Confirm command scorch,” the leader said.
“Burn it all down!” the commander bellowed.
Bolan snapped open the stock of his Uzi. He wasn’t certain of the extent of the firepower the death force had on hand, but the people in the dive were at risk. He used the Uzi’s butt to punch out a window into the bar.
Inside, patrons huddled close to the floor, terrified of the rattle of full-auto weaponry ripping and roaring outside. Though there was a likelihood of the presence of murderers and other scum being among this crowd, Bolan had little proof of their collective guilt, let alone knowledge of actions warranting death by high explosives. He fired a burst into the ceiling and the crowd rose as one, a human tide breaking for the back door, shoving out into the alley. No one wanted to go out the front, which would take them right into the middle of the current firefight. It was better than giving away that Bolan was listening in on the Russians’ party line by shouting a warning to the bar bums.
The first thunderbolt impact blew the doors off the dive, tearing them off of their hinges. Splinters and shrapnel forced the Executioner to duck out the window to avoid being sliced by the rocketing wave of debris. He popped back up and saw that the panicked patrons had managed to evacuate long before the interior of the bar was turned into a blast crater. The force of the explosion informed Bolan that the enemy had resorted to RPGs, rocket-propelled grenades that could be reloaded quickly and were devastating to a range of 300 yards.
Bolan snaked through the broken window with whiplash speed, dropping to the shattered floor as the next 77 mm warhead impacted at the corner he had been hiding behind earlier. The concussive fury of the thermobaric warhead was so violent, Bolan could feel it through the brick wall. Had he delayed in leaving the causeway beside the bar, he would have been pulverized by the fuel-air explosive’s radius of ignited atmosphere. As it was, Bolan had to shake the cobwebs from his head.
He hoped that Alexandronin had retreated to more solid cover when the death squad broke out their heavy weapons. Bolan rushed across the explosion-ravaged bar and vaulted over the counter. He look around swiftly to see what kind of crowd-calming firepower the bartender had. Crouching behind the bar, he was at eye level with the shelves beneath the counter and saw a bolt-action Enfield sitting on a shelf. A box of .303 stripper clips sat next to it. It was an unusual combination for bar-room defense, but the SMLE had been sawn down to a fourteen-inch barrel for faster handling in the bartender’s area. The sawed-off Smelly was a better option than a cut-down shotgun, and even at fourteen inches, the .303 rounds would cut through body armor and put a man down like a sledgehammer. It would also be more than sufficient to counter the enhanced reach of the Russians’ snipers.
Bolan stuffed the stripper clips into his pocket, then chambered the first round on the rifle. He couldn’t expect razor-fine precision with an untested set of iron sights, and an unregulated load of ammunition, but the soldier’s years of marksmanship gave him enough experience to be able to hit a man-size target at three hundred yards with bone-smashing authority.
The Enfield’s stock took out a window behind the bar, and Bolan slithered out into the next causeway. The handy little bolt action was short enough for the soldier to maneuver through the narrow passage and he poked around the corner. He was barely visible at the range the enemy rocketeers were firing from. The smoky trails of the RPG-7 shells cut across the dock front, pinpointing the enemy’s position about two hundred yards downrange.
Bolan could see Alexandronin’s former hiding spot had been hit by a rocket grenade, but there was no sign of his Russian ally. The soldier hoped that his friend’s leg injury hadn’t slowed him so much that he hadn’t reached safety before the 77 mm warhead impacted. Suddenly an Uzi crackled close to the Russians’ position. Bolan saw the stocky outline of Alexandronin leap back behind cover. While Bolan had engaged the other team of gunmen, Alexandronin had to have scrambled to flank the death squad.
Bolan shouldered his Enfield and fired, his first .303 shot missing the head of an Uzi-wielding gunman by inches. However, the powerful rifle round tore into the upper chest of a Russian holding one of the rocket launchers. The sharp-nosed slug excavated a gory tunnel through muscle, organs and bone, dropping the rocketeer in a messy pile of dead, twisted limbs.
That caught the attention of the death squad survivors. The shooters turned their Uzis and remaining sniper rifle toward him and fired where Bolan’s last muzzle flash had flared. A hail of bullets tore into his old position, but the Executioner had gone back into the bar via the broken window and crouched in the smoky wreckage of the building’s rocket-shattered doors. Focusing on the distant muzzle flashes and adjusting his hold for his last known miss, Bolan fired, working the bolt with lightning quickness. The Enfield had more than enough power to kill a man at two hundred yards, and over the radio set, he heard two agonized grunts, one of which dissolved into a death rattle.
Bolan stuffed the stripper clip into the top of the Enfield and shoved its ten trapped rounds into the deep reservoirs of the rifle’s magazine.
“Get that RPG on the bar again!” the field leader growled.
“Arkady’s dead! The fucker killed Arkady!” another hitter snapped.
“Shut up and stay focused!” the commander ordered, frustration in his voice.
Alexandronin’s Uzi snarled again in the distance, and Bolan’s ally had to have hit the man who’d picked up the RPG. The 77 mm shell speared up into the night sky on top of a column of rocket exhaust. It peaked at three hundred meters before gravity overpowered the exhausted, sputtering rocket engine. The grenade spiraled as it descended, smoke spilling out of its tail and etching the warhead’s course back to ground level. The heavy explosive load detonated on impact with a bright flash. The fireball’s brilliance flashed into a smoky cloud that obscured Bolan’s view of the enemy kill force. Since visibility was a two-way street, the Executioner charged toward the opposition’s last known position, trading his Enfield back to the fully charged Uzi.
“Report! Report!” the field commander bellowed.
“I’ve got movement on the walkway!” one Russian answered. “Gregori’s down!”
“Stop the gunman!” the commander urged. “Fire!”
There was a grunt over the radio, the sound of a fist striking flesh. Somewhere in the foggy haze, Alexandronin had hurled himself into hand-to-hand combat with the last of the enemy assassin’s hit men.
T HE RPG BLAST LANDED so close to Vitaly Alexandronin that it shocked the Russian expatriate to the core. Shrapnel had opened several lacerations on his head, arm and torso. Pain burned through his stocky body, but it was only a background ache, adrenaline numbing him to his body’s protestations. His fist throbbed from where he had punched the reporting gunman in the ear, carpal bones cracking against hard skull. It was a clumsy attack, but the hard-liner thug had been knocked off his feet. Blood poured from the hit man’s ear where the ruptured eardrum drained out.
The man’s head hadn’t flexed like a jaw would have, and the result was broken knuckles and fractured hand bones. Alexandronin dismissed the self-diagnosis. Catherine, the love of his life, had been shattered far worse by scum such as the one he had struck.
Alexandronin speared his fist under the sternum of his stunned opponent, driving the breath out of the assassin’s lungs. As the gunman folded up in pain, he dropped his Uzi. Alexandronin chopped down hard on his downed foe’s throat. The killer’s trachea collapsed, accompanied by the sickening crunch of his larynx. Blood poured over the dead man’s lips, his eyes bulged out by the force of the blow.
“Two bastards I give in your memory, my love,” Alexandronin rasped. As he spoke, he tasted blood in his mouth. A cough pushed up a mouthful of sticky crimson. He was so high on adrenaline, he had ignored the pain of a piece of shrapnel that had cut between his ribs and penetrated deep into one lung.
