скачать книгу бесплатно
“Do we know how many hostages are inside?” the Executioner asked.
Glasser shook his head as he touched the cell phone to his ear for the next call. “Not exactly,” he said. “There’ll be twenty to thirty employees, plus however many customers happened to be there at the wrong time.”
Bolan nodded and started to move past the man.
Glasser reached out and grabbed Bolan’s arm. “Where are you going?” he asked.
The Executioner squatted again. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “And if you don’t know it, you can’t accidentally give it away to the enemy.” He paused for a deep breath, then went on. “Just conduct this operation as if I wasn’t here. But when you hear shots fired inside the bank again, move your men in as fast as possible. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“And give me one of those two-ways so I can keep track of you,” the Executioner said.
Glasser waved at one of his SWAT men, a slender sergeant with dark brown hair. “Give Cooper here your radio and mike,” he said. “Then go back to the van and get another one for yourself.”
The sergeant didn’t even bother to ask who Cooper was. Jerking the radio from his belt and the microphone from his shoulder, he handed them over.
The Executioner snapped the radio onto his belt, checked the earpiece connection, then shoved the tiny plastic receiver into one ear. He clipped the microphone to the shoulder of his blacksuit. He looked at his watch.
Not quite ninety seconds had passed since the raspy voice inside the bank had given them their twenty-minute deadline.
The innocents inside had roughly eighteen and a half minutes.
Police cars completely surrounded the bank. Three of the building’s four sides faced streets, and here the vehicles were lined up practically bumper to bumper. To the rear of the bank—beyond the drive-through windows—was a housing complex. Here, the police cars had pulled directly onto the grounds beyond the windows, doing their best to provide a buffer zone between the innocent residents in their houses and the miscreants in the bank. Behind the circle of cars knelt uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives and the rest of Glasser’s SWAT crew, each of the men training a weapon on the bank.
Moving to the rear of the bank, Bolan sprinted for one of the marked units separating the bank from the residential area. But no shots followed him.
Dropping down behind the black-and-white patrol car, Bolan found himself next to a portly patrolman resting his Glock 21 across the hood and aiming it toward the drive-through window into the bank. The man’s uniform cap had been discarded and lay next to him on the ground. Coarse but sparse red-and-gray hair stuck up from his receding hairline and balding pate.
The patrolman glanced at Bolan, then back to the bank.
“You seen any activity through that teller’s window since you’ve been here?” Bolan asked.
The patrolman nodded. “Some. There’s a guy with a ski mask just out of sight below the glass. He pops his head up every few seconds and—” The blue head suddenly appeared as the officer spoke. “There! You see him?”
Bolan nodded. “You see anyone else?”
The balding man shook his head. “Just him.”
The Executioner drew back slightly, taking in the rear of the bank as a whole. The First Fidelity Bank was a one-story building. Awnings covered the three drive-up windows with brick columns supporting what looked like shake-shingle roofs. He wondered whether they would support his two-hundred-plus pounds.
He suspected he was about to find out.
“What’s your name?” Bolan asked the cop next to him.
“Coleman,” said the man. “Call me Ron.”
“You might want to hold back on that familiarity until you hear the rest of what I’m about to say,” Bolan told him.
“Huh?”
“You wearing a vest, Coleman?” Bolan asked.
“You better believe it,” said the man with the sparse red-and-gray hair. “I’ve got a wife and kids I like to go home and see every night.”
“Shock plate inserted?” Bolan asked.
“Right over the old ticker. Thickest steel they make ’em in.” The KCPD officer’s voice was starting to sound suspicious now. “Why?”
“Because I need to use you as a decoy,” the Executioner said. “I’m going up on the roof. And if that blue ski mask happens to pop up at the wrong time and see me, it’ll ruin what I have in mind.”
Now the patrolman’s voice took on a true tone of trepidation. “What is it you expect me to do?”
“Just get up and start walking toward the window. If Mr. Ski Mask shows his head or a weapon or both, take cover behind one of those brick columns. I just need his attention on you and not me.”
“In other words, if someone has to get shot you’d rather it be me than you?”
“No,” Bolan said. “It’s just the way this thing has to go down, that’s all. If you don’t want to do it, say so now. I’ll try to think of something else.” He glanced at his watch. “But I’ve only got eleven minutes to come up with it and pull it off.” He paused, then finished with, “So, Coleman. What’ll it be?”
Bolan could see the concern on the man’s face as he weighed his responsibilities to the job versus those to his family.
“All right,” Coleman finally said. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do.” He paused, then added, “And you can still call me Ron.”
The Executioner smiled. It was a brave man he was working with.
“When I give you the word, just stand up and start walking directly toward the window. If you see the ski mask, make tracks for the brick column. After that, just stay where you are.”
“What are you going to be doing?” Coleman asked.
“Scaling the wall. But don’t look my way under any circumstances. I need that lookout’s attention focused on you, or the inside of the bank’s going to look like a Chicago slaughterhouse.”
Coleman reached up and adjusted his vest, making sure the steel plate was in place. “Makes me wish I’d sprung for the steel-plated jockstrap you can get with these things,” he said. “But what the hell. I’ve already got three kids and the wife and I were talking about a vasectomy anyway.” He turned to face the Executioner. “Say when.”
Bolan slung his M-16 A-2 over his shoulder and waited until the blue ski mask made another quick appearance, then disappeared. “Now!” he said under his breath and rose to his feet at the same time Coleman stood up. Coleman rounded the trunk, and the Executioner cut in front of the front bumper as both men made their way toward the building.
Bolan was running, Coleman walking—as he’d been instructed. So the Executioner reached the brick column supporting the carport several steps in front of the man. Sprinting at full speed, he lifted his right knee almost to his chin as his leather-and-nylon combat boot hit the bricks. His momentum carried him upward, and he got one more step with his left boot before he felt gravity beginning to overcome his own velocity.
Reaching skyward, the Executioner got his fingertips just over the edge of the shake-shingle roofing.
A second later, he had pulled himself up and out of sight on top of the carport.
No sooner had he risen to his knees than he heard several shots fired below him. Looking down, he saw Coleman driven back a step as the rounds clanged off the steel plate in his vest. But the balding cop he didn’t let that stop him. Before the man inside the window could fire again, he dived behind the brick column.
Bolan leaned over the side and looked down. He could see Coleman sitting with his back against the bricks, the sparse and spiky reddish-gray hair pointing straight up at the top of the carport. The Executioner whispered downward, “Ron, you okay?”
The KCPD patrolman was savvy enough not to look upward when he answered. “If you call feeling like you just took three straight hooks to the chest from Buster Douglas okay, then yeah—I’m just peachy.”
The Executioner chuckled. At least the man was out of danger now. He could sit out the rest of this encounter. “Okay,” he said. “Stay where you are.”
Bolan looked down at his wrist. He had a little under ten minutes before the hostages started dying. Switching on the microphone mounted to his shoulder, Bolan realized he had no call letters or numbers of his own, and he didn’t know what Tom Glasser’s were, either. So he said simply, “Cooper to Glasser. Cooper to Glasser. Come in, Glasser.”
“SWAT 1,” Glasser’s voice came back. “This is Glasser, Cooper. You got a call name?”
The Executioner lowered his voice until he suspected it could barely be heard on the other end of the line. “I go by Striker, SWAT 1. And I’m on the roof,” he whispered. “Have you had any more contact with the subjects inside?”
“Negative, Striker,” Glasser came back. He was whispering, too. “But we’ve got the funny money on the way here, compliments of the Secret Service.”
“How about the chopper?” Bolan asked.
“We’re trying to find one big enough. And that’s not easy if you don’t go to the military.”
Bolan immediately understood the reason behind the SWAT captain’s words. The regular military was forbidden from taking action in police matters inside the U.S., and most of the time that was a good thing—it ensured that America would not become a military state ruled by its armed forces. But there were exceptions to that rule, when the use of the armed forces seemed like the only logical answer.
This was one of them.
“See if you can go through the state’s National Guard,” the Executioner said. “If they don’t have a chopper big enough on hand, they ought to be able to get one from the regular army.” He paused and felt his eyebrows furrow as he thought further. “And use this as an excuse to stall some more. Call into the bank on your cell phone and explain the problem with the chopper. See if you can buy some more time.”
“Affirmative, Striker,” Glasser said. “May I ask what you’re doing?”
“Negative, SWAT 1,” Bolan said as he made his way carefully across the shingled roof one shaky step at a time. “And the fact that I’m up top is for your ears only. We can’t expect fifty men—no matter how good they are—to keep from glancing up and being seen by the bad guys.”
“Roger, Striker,” Glasser said. “That intel stays in-house.”
Bolan finally made it off the carport roofs and onto the flat tar roof of the bank proper. His eyes skirted the building, seeing ventilation shafts, heat and air-conditioning equipment, and a variety of other pipes and housings sticking up out of the dirty black surface. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the building, staying just far enough from the edge that his head couldn’t be seen by the police officers on the ground.
He had meant what he’d told Glasser. All it would take would be for one of the Rough Riders below him to see one cop straining his eyes toward the roof to know someone was above them. Then the element of surprise would be gone.
The Executioner had hoped to find a return air shaft or some similar means to enter the building below, but he had no such luck. Banks were built with the hope of keeping people out after business hours, and the rough roof of First Fidelity was no exception. There were holes leading down into the building, all right. But the Executioner would have had to have been the size of a house cat to get through them.
With one exception.
Near the street side of the building, above what Bolan assumed would be the bank’s front lobby, was a large skylight. Slowly, he crept toward it, formulating his plan of attack as he went. If the skylight was plastic, he’d be out of luck here, too. He’d have to shoot enough holes through the plastic with the M-16 A-2 to create an opening large enough to drop through. And by the time that had been accomplished, the Rough Riders would have had time to kill the bank employees and other hostages several times over.
But if it was glass…
When he’d drawn near enough that he feared he might be seen be someone looking upward, Bolan dropped to his belly and used his elbows to pull himself the rest of the way to the skylight. Then, slowly—almost ceremoniously—he reached out with his left hand and tapped the clear surface in front of him.
Both the sound, and the feel, brought a smile to his face.
The skylight was made of glass. It would shatter just as quickly, and as surely, as the picture window next to the front door had.
Crawling back a few yards, the Executioner rose to his feet again and activated the mike on his shoulder. “Striker to SWAT 1,” he said. “Come in, SWAT 1.”
“I hear you Striker,” came back into his ear.
Bolan looked at his watch. He had a little over a minute before the twenty-minute deadline. “You buy us any extra time with the National Guard story?” he asked Glasser.
“Negative,” said the SWAT commander. “The guy just laughed, told me he knew a stall job when he heard one, then repeated his threat to start killing one hostage for each minute we were late.”
“Okay,” Bolan said. “Then it’s Plan B time.” He glanced at his watch once more.
Forty-five seconds remained.
He was about to speak to Glasser again when he saw another man in green coveralls and a blue ski mask shove a middle-aged woman directly under the skylight. The late-afternoon sun was at an angle that gave him an almost perfect view through the glass and, he suspected, would block or at least distort what could be seen by anyone looking up through the skylight.
But at this stage of the game he was taking no chances. Bolan took another step back until only the tops of the man’s and woman’s heads were visible. He had already seen all he needed to see.
The man in the coveralls had wrapped his left forearm around the woman’s throat. The short, stubby muzzle of an Ingram MAC-11 submachine gun was pressed against her nape. The watch on his wrist was clearly visible, and Bolan could see the Rough Rider staring at it, counting off the final seconds just as the Executioner was doing above, on the roof.
Bolan glanced at the MAC-11 again. Those submachine guns cycled at a phenomenally fast rate of fire. Unless the man firing the weapon was extremely experienced with it, he could empty the entire 30-round magazine before he let up on the trigger. All of which made the Ingrams less suitable for combat than for assassinations.
But an outright murder was exactly what was going to happen in less than thirty seconds unless the Executioner acted swiftly. The woman’s head would be almost completely gone before the Rough Rider even had time to let up on the trigger.
Bolan looked at his wrist. Twenty-eight seconds.
“Listen and listen fast, SWAT 1,” he whispered into the mike. “Fifteen seconds from the time I stop talking I’m coming down through the skylight. You should hear a few shots from me up top here, then glass breaking. Tell your men that’s their cue—when they hear the gunfire and then the crash it’s time to charge the building.”
“You’ve got it,” Glasser said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Make sure that your men know that once they’re inside the bank, they’re to take orders from me.”
“I’ll make sure they understand it,” Glasser said. “When do we begin the countdown?”
“Fifteen seconds from…now,” Bolan said.
He took a deep breath and squinted through the glass. From where he stood, he had a good angle at the head of the man in the green coveralls. He switched the M-16 to 3-round burst mode, then lined up the sights on the back of the man’s head. The holes he was about to drill through the glass would weaken it and make it shatter even easier.
The Executioner took a final glance at his watch, then returned his eyes to the sights. Slowly, he squeezed the trigger and watched the back of the Rough Rider’s head blow off as three tiny holes appeared in the skylight.
A second after that, he leaped onto the glass in a sitting position and crashed through the skylight into the First Fidelity Bank.
THE EXECUTIONER STRAIGHTENED his legs as he fell through the glass, thankful that the blacksuit was made out of cut-resistant material. Still, he felt a few shreds of glass scrape his hands and face, and by the time his feet hit the floor of the bank’s lobby he could feel tiny drops of blood running down his cheeks.
They mattered little in the grand scheme of things.
The Executioner landed on his feet, right behind the screaming woman and the dead Rough Rider who had fallen to her rear. To his right was a popcorn machine designed and built to look like the type found in old-fashioned movie theaters. Such fake antique popcorn machines seemed, for some reason, to be standard fare in modern banks. They were made out of thin metal and glass, and offered concealment but not cover.
Bolan pivoted on the balls of his feet, turning toward the cashiers’ windows. The first thing he saw were the hostages. Roughly a dozen people who looked like customers lay on their faces on the floor, their hands clasped behind their heads. Next to them, at least twice as many bank employees—both males and females wearing tan slacks and maroon polo shirts sporting the bank’s logo—lay in the same position.
The Executioner’s sudden descent through the skylight had come as a complete surprise to the bank robbers. Like the pair he had already encountered, they also wore green coveralls and blue ski masks. But Bolan noted one major difference.
The masks of these men had been rolled up into simple blue stocking caps. This aided their vision, but it told the Executioner something else, as well.
These Rough Riders weren’t worried about the customers or bank employees seeing their faces, which meant they intended to kill all the hostages.
A Rough Rider with a wide handlebar mustache was the first to recover from the shock of Bolan’s aerial entry. He lifted the Uzi in his hands toward the Executioner.
But Bolan was a fraction of a second faster. The Executioner’s first 3-round burst hit the mustachioed Rough Rider squarely in the chest. Above the explosions of the rounds Bolan heard a high-pitched ringing sound. He immediately realized that Coleman, the uniformed cop outside, wasn’t the only one wearing a Kevlar vest with a steel insert. At least some of the Rough Riders had them, too.
