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FOUR HOURS HAD ELAPSED since Bolan’s touchdown at Prague Ruzyn
International Airport, traveling from Paris on Czech Airlines for the last leg of his twelve-hour trip from D.C., counting time spent in various terminals. Before he left the States, he’d put a Volvo S80 on hold with Europcar in Prague and found it waiting for him on arrival, waiting for delivery to Matthew Cooper. That name appeared on Bolan’s primary passport, Virginia driver’s license and the fully paid-up Visa Platinum card that covered any damage to the car while he was using it. He traveled light, a simple carry-on to dodge the extra baggage fees most airlines charged these days, but Bolan also needed tools to do the job at hand.
His first priority, therefore—like that of many other visitors to Prague—was shopping.
Bolan came prepared with a short list of names for suppliers gleaned from Stony Man Farm. He never knew exactly who compiled the lists, nor did he care, as long as there was inventory standing by when Bolan needed it. The list, three names in all, came with specific passwords that should open doors for Bolan as required.
His first stop was a bust, the shop in question vacant, with a placard in the window that directed him to Zorka Geislerová Ltd., presumably some kind of rental agent. Moving on, he found the second vendor just about to lock up for the night, but Bolan’s coded phrase—ryba je
ervená, translated as “the fish is red” for reasons that he didn’t bother pondering—bought him the time required to make his purchases.
He went for one-stop shopping, stocking up on everything he thought that he might need to do the job in Prague. The ALFA pistol was an easy choice, dependable and widely circulated in the Czech Republic, guaranteeing that its ammunition would be readily available. Next up, he chose a Vz. 58V assault rifle chambered in 7.62×39 mm, a folding-stock version of the country’s standard-issue infantry weapon. It resembled the venerable AK-47, but internally it operated on a short-stroke gas piston the Czechs had designed for themselves, providing a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute and a maximum effective range exceeding four hundred yards, depending on the sights available.
In practice, though, the Vz. 58V was a close-range weapon. Thinking that he might have to reach out and touch someone at longer ranges, Bolan chose a Dragunov SVD-S sniper’s rifle with a folding stock and standard PSO-1 telescopic sight. The piece was chambered in 7.62×54 R—the R standing for Russian—and in Bolan’s expert hands it could bag targets out to fourteen hundred yards.
For heavy hitting when it counted, Bolan also bought a dozen URG-86 “universal” grenades, another Czech model combining both timed- and impact-fuse functions. Both were activated two seconds after release of the grenade’s safety lever. From that point onward, any impact would produce a detonation—or the lethal egg would go off on its own in 4.6 seconds. Each URG contained forty-two grams of high explosive, with a pre-fragmented casing to ensure distribution of death on the fly.
The rest came down to odds and ends. Spare magazines and extra ammunition, a suppressor for the ALFA’s threaded muzzle and a black steel reproduction of the famous Mark I trench knife widely issued in the First World War. Bolan paid for the mobile arsenal and duffel bags to hold the varied items using cash donated by a pimp in Baltimore who had no further use for money, velvet suits or the vintage purple Caddy Coupe de Ville he’d driven until very recently.
Under the circumstances, Bolan thought his contribution was appropriate.
And he would put it to good use.
BOXING HAD BEEN ASSOCIATED with the underworld for generations in America, and Bolan guessed it must have been the same in Europe. Violent men engaged in blood sport, managed—if not owned outright—by men whose penchant for mayhem made anything done in the ring seem G-rated and tame. Farther east, it was the same for wrestlers in Bulgaria, as Bolan understood it—and, in fact, the term wrestler had come to denote mobster. Then again, so had businessman, proving that no field of human endeavor was safe.
At one time or another, Bolan had been called upon to cleanse them all.
Approaching Oskar’s gym, he saw a light burning upstairs, third floor, behind a pane of frosted glass. No view inside from where he stood. He found the metal staircase bolted to the back wall, accessed from an alley lined with trash cans, strewn with rubbish that had never made it to a bin.
Bolan had a choice. He could go in through the back door, which he found locked, or climb the fire escape and pick a window, maybe hope for entry from the roof as an alternative. He’d never seen an urban tenement that didn’t have some kind of rooftop access from inside. The question was: What kind of access, and how well secured would it turn out to be?
The back door Bolan faced was steel and double-locked, a dead bolt and a keyhole in the doorknob. He could likely pick the latter with no problem, but the dead bolt would take longer, if his picks could open it at all. If there were other locks or bolts inside that Bolan couldn’t see, it would be wasted time and effort, leaving him exposed and perhaps attracting someone from the inside who’d object to uninvited visitors.
That left the fire escape.
He jumped to grab its lowest section, seven feet above ground level, pulled it down and grimaced at the squeal of rusty metal. Bolan waited one full minute for the racket to evoke a curious reaction, then began to climb when no one showed. It didn’t mean the noise had gone unnoticed, but at least security for Oskar’s gym did not include a swift-response team for the alley.
On the second floor—which Europeans call the first, distinguished from the ground floor—Bolan found the windows painted over on the inside. Also locked, which made him wish he’d brought a glass cutter along. Too late to worry over that, and he moved on to find the same precautions against spying on the next two floors. He listened at the topmost windows, on the floor where he had seen light from the building’s street side, but heard nothing to betray human inhabitants.
So, they were quiet at the moment. Or they’d moved the hostage, possibly disposed of him by this time. There was a slim chance, Bolan calculated, that the address he’d been given had been wrong from the beginning, though he doubted it. The only thing to do was to proceed and find a way inside. See who—if anyone—was home and what they had to tell him if he asked persuasively.
A Bolan specialty.
The roof was flat, with two old-fashioned television aerials protruding from the northeast and the southwest corners. Roughly in the middle stood a boxy structure resembling an outhouse, which he knew would grant him access to a flight of stairs descending to the tenement’s top floor. That door was locked as well, of course, but Bolan jimmied it with his knife blade and seconds later breathed the pent-up atmosphere of Oskar’s gym.
It smelled like sweat, leather and canvas, mildew and some kind of astringent.
Maybe just a whiff of blood.
And then, a sound. It was a man’s voice, distant in relation to the place where Bolan stood, growling what could have been a question. Seconds later, in the place of a response, there came a gasping cry of pain.
Drawing his pistol, Bolan started down the stairs.
EMIL REISZ WAS TIRED. His fists ached, even though he’d worn a pair of lightweight boxing gloves while hammering the prisoner. His punches had been interspersed with questions that—so far—had gone unanswered but for curses. It was time to pass the gloves, he thought. Let Alois or Ladislav try their hands with the sphinx who would say nothing.
Or, perhaps they ought to try some other tools.
There’d be a mess to clean up afterward, but Oskar’s gym had seen its share of blood over the years. A bit more wouldn’t change the ambience significantly. Truth be told, it might help some of Oskar’s fighters find their courage for a change.
In fact, they didn’t need much information from the prisoner. Reisz knew his name and where he’d come from, not to mention why he’d come. No secret there. But orders had come down to find out whether anyone had helped the fool in transit, fed him any inside details of their operation to support his hopeless quest. If there was someone else behind him, sponsoring the effort, measures would be taken to eliminate that threat.
But only if they could obtain the names.
And so far, nothing.
He was fluent in profanity, this one. During the ordeal of interrogation he had cursed them up and down in English, German, Russian, not forgetting to include their mothers, grandmothers and all the smallest branches on their family trees. It was inspiring to a point, his tolerance for pain, the grim defiance even when he must have known he was as good as dead.
But then, beyond that point, it just became a tiresome exercise. Reisz thought he might as well be pounding steak for dinner. That way, at the very least, his efforts would produce a meal instead of aching knuckles.
Time for pliers, possibly. Or a truck battery with alligator clips.
Reisz checked his watch after he had removed the boxing gloves. Another fifteen minutes until change of shift, but their replacements could arrive any second. Let them pick up where he’d failed, and if some criticism fell upon him, then so be it. Three days, and no one else had managed to wring answers from the stubborn pi
a they had duct-taped to a straight-backed wooden chair between the third floor’s pair of fighting rings.
If Reisz was criticized, there would be plenty of blame to go around.
“Enough for me,” he told his two companions standing by. “Somebody want to have another go at him before we leave?”
“Forget it,” Alois Perina said. “Let Ji
í and his men finish the job.”
“And mop up when they’re done,” Ladislav Seldon said.
“Suits me,” Reisz answered as he tossed the bloodied gloves aside. “I think he’s nearly finished, anyway.”
“If there was someone else behind him, he’d have said by now,” Perina opined.
“Probably,” Reisz said, still not convinced. “I doubt we’ll see this one again, regardless.”
“And good riddance,” Seldon said.
“All right, who wants a drink?” Reisz asked.
“What are we celebrating?” Perina asked.
“Who needs an excuse?” Seldon chimed in. “Make mine a double.”
Reisz was moving toward the liquor cupboard, something that had always struck him as incongruous for a gymnasium, when he was suddenly distracted by a shadow in the doorway to his left. Ji
í arriving early for a change, he thought, instead of twenty minutes late as usual. But when he turned to face the door, Reisz did not recognize the man who occupied the space.
He was tall and well-proportioned, dressed in dark clothes, with a solemn face that Reisz was sure he’d never seen before. Vaguely Italian in its aspect, but that could mean anything or nothing. More important was the pistol in his hand.
“What’s wrong with you, Emil?” Perina asked, then tracked his gaze to spot the stranger watching them. Reisz didn’t have to issue any orders. All three reached for guns at once, Reisz hoping he could draw his own before the grim-faced prowler fired.
BOLAN HAD NOT ATTACHED the ALFA’s silencer before he left his hired car for the trek to Oskar’s gym. It didn’t matter at this late hour, on the top floor of a gym surrounded by commercial buildings that had shut down for the night.
He shot the seeming leader of the three men first, drilling his chest an inch or so off-center from a range of twenty feet. The guy went down without a whimper, slack and boneless when he hit the concrete floor. It seemed to take his backup by surprise, but neither faltered in attempts to pull their weapons.
Bolan ducked and tagged the shooter on his right, who seemed to be the faster of the two remaining on their feet. Not quite a perfect shot, but Bolan saw him lurch and stagger from the impact, then lose his footing, tumbling. If he managed to recover, it would cost him precious time, and Bolan used that breather to take care of number three.
The last man had his weapon drawn, some kind of automatic with a shiny stainless frame and blue-steel slide, maybe a Czech CZ 75. The piece was moving into target acquisition when the third round out of Bolan’s ALFA struck its owner just below his left eye socket, snapping back his head and ruining his aim forever. Even then, the dead man got a shot off as he toppled over backward, setting free a rain of plaster dust from overhead.
Bolan rose from his crouch, surveyed the fallen and discovered that the second man he’d shot was still alive. Crossing the room to reach him, Bolan kicked his gun away and made a quick assessment of his wound. It would be fatal without treatment, but he couldn’t pin it to a deadline. Rather than take chances, Bolan put another .40 S&W round between the shooter’s eyes and finished it.
That done, he moved to stand before the bloody figure of a man dressed in only a pair of boxer shorts, secured to a wooden chair by strips of silver duct tape wrapped around his torso, wrists and ankles. He was conscious, barely, using some reserve of energy to hold his head up, watching Bolan through the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. Mouth-breathing since his nose was flattened from repeated blows.
Bolan knelt on concrete, outside the ring of blood spatters, and peered into the mottled face, which at present was barely recognizable from photographs he’d seen before he left the States. Playing it safe, he leaned in closer and addressed the human punching bag.
“Andrew Murton?”
The head bobbed once, then sank onto the captive’s chest. Bolan worked quickly with his knife, slitting the duct tape, peeling it away. There was no way to spare the prisoner that ripping pain, but Murton barely seemed to feel it.
“Clothes?” Bolan asked.
Murton nodded vaguely to his left and answered, “Ober dere.”
Bolan recovered shirt, slacks, socks and loafers from a corner of the gym and brought them back to Murton, helped him dress himself, acutely conscious of the fact that they were wasting precious time. Whether his gunshots had been noted in the seedy neighborhood or not, there was a chance that reinforcements might arrive at any moment. If that happened…
Murton wobbled on his feet as Bolan held him upright, then took baby steps in the direction of the exit. “Godda go,” he said. “Somebud comin’.”
Bolan didn’t question that, assuming there’d been some form of communication with his captors during Murton’s ordeal, or that Murton had a rough idea of when new torturers arrived to spell the old. Whatever, it was time for them to hit the street.
The prisoner would need a medic, then they’d need to talk about the other prisoner whom Bolan had been sent to rescue, if that still was possible. In either case, his job was half-done, more or less.
If they could only make it back to Bolan’s car alive.
He helped Murton limp down three flights of stairs to the ground floor, led him to the main street exit and unlocked it from inside. The cool night air seemed to refresh Murton a little, helped him to pick up his lagging pace. They’d covered half a block when headlights washed across them, from behind. Doors slammed, and Murton turned back toward the sound.
“Shid!” he exclaimed. “Run now!”
Bolan glanced back in time to see four new arrivals on the sidewalk, staring after them and jabbering together, one of them already reaching underneath his jacket for a weapon.
Murton had it right.
Run now!
2
Half carrying the man he’d rescued moments earlier—one-ninety if he weighed an ounce—Bolan reached the nearest corner, ducked around it and stopped there. Propped Murton up against the rough brick wall and peered back toward the place they’d come from, gun in hand.
“Why stoppen?” Murton asked him, slurring.
“To see if I can end it here,” Bolan replied, his index finger on the ALFA’s trigger.
But it wasn’t meant to play that way, apparently. Instead of giving chase, the four goons from the car—it could have been a Citroën, maybe something manufactured locally—were piling back into their vehicle. It bought Bolan a little time, but precious little. And none to waste on conversation with a man who was barely conscious.
Bolan made his choice. He half crouched and drove his shoulder into Murton’s gut, already bruised and aching. With a whoof! the battered man slumped over Bolan’s shoulder, perfectly positioned for a fireman’s carry. Bolan flexed his legs and bore the weight, turned toward the nearby darkened side street where he’d left his Volvo S80 and broke into the fastest run that he could manage under the circumstances.
It reminded him of combat on another battlefield, retrieving wounded comrades under fire. He’d always done his best to keep faith with the Special Forces credo that no soldier stays behind. That wasn’t always possible, of course—sometimes you had to make the choice of dying with a corpse or moving on to fight another day—but his record was better than average.
And leaving Murton alive with the men who’d abducted him wasn’t an option.
Bolan heard an engine growling as he reached the Volvo, used its tab to pop the door locks from a distance, and upon reaching the vehicle he began the chore of putting Murton in a seat. He chose the rear, where Murton could lie down and be out of sight, though not entirely safe from any bullets slicing through the Volvo’s coachwork. At the very least, a backseat ride would keep him out of Bolan’s lap and clear from Bolan’s line of fire.
Murton cooperated to the best of his ability, huffing and groaning as he rolled onto the Volvo’s rear bench seat and drawing in his legs as Bolan slammed the door. A quick dash to the driver’s side, key twist, ignore the chime that warned him of a shoulder harness left unfastened, and they pulled out from the curb just as the other car found them with its headlights, closing in.
The Volvo’s five-speed automatic transmission left both of Bolan’s hands free for driving—or for fighting, if it came to that. The duffel bags containing most of his new weapons were concealed in the sedan’s trunk, out of reach for the moment, but he still had the ALFA autoloader with nine rounds remaining and four extra magazines secured in pockets. If he couldn’t stop the chase car and its occupants with fifty-three live rounds…well, then, what good was he?
But Bolan’s first choice was evasion and escape.
He’d killed three men already, in their lair at Oskar’s gym, but that was vastly different than a running firefight through the streets of Prague. Even at night, the city never really slept. A fair share of its approximately 1.2 million inhabitants had work to do at any hour of the day or night, including a municipal police department with fifteen district headquarters spotted around the 192-square-mile metro area. He could meet one of their silver Škoda Octavia prowl cars at any turn, and since his private code barred any use of deadly force against police, most of his options would be lost in that event.
He drove without a plan so far, aware that he was winding toward Old Town, the ancient heart of Prague where early settlers had put down roots nearly twelve hundred years ago. It was the last place where he wanted to be trapped, surrounded by the landmarks that drew tourists, with a greater likelihood of meeting the police, and so he scrolled a street map of the city that he’d memorized while he was airborne, seeking options.
If he had it right, they were about to exit Prague 5—one of Prague’s twenty-two administrative districts—and enter Prague 4, specifically a suburb known as Kunratice. If he could lose the Citroën in its winding streets, so much the better. And if not…
It would be time for drastic action.
JI
Í KOSTKA CLUTCHED his pistol tight enough to make his knuckles ache, bracing his free hand on the Citroën’s dashboard as they swerved around another corner, entering a residential street. The Volvo they were chasing showed no signs of slowing down, so Kostka snapped an order at his driver, Ivan Durych.
“Overtake them, will you? If you can’t do that, pull over now and let me drive!”
“This is a DS4,” Durych reminded him, keeping his eyes locked on the target. “Not a goddamned Maserati.”
“Can you get us within shooting distance, or is that too much to ask?” Kostka demanded.
“Don’t you think I’m trying?”
“Well, stop trying, then, and do it!”
Kostka realized his anger was misplaced, but he was known for his explosive temper, one of several qualities that had resulted in his elevation to the post of squad leader within the Werich syndicate. Unlike some blowhards he had met, Kostka’s bite was worse than his bark, a fact well recognized by everyone who knew him. He would strike without a second thought and kill without remorse.
So why, in God’s name, had he let the runners slip away from him outside Oskar’s gym?
