Prairie Fire

by Don Pendleton

  Cautiously, Bolan raised an eyelid. Beyond the tinted glass, fields of the dusty gold and pale green of corn and wheat alternated in a checkerboard effect. In front of him loomed the driver's head and shoulders.

  The Caddy crew wagon held a steady pace across the Kansas-flat terrain, its radials devouring the two-lane blacktop. In a flash the Executioner remembered where he was, the images rolling across his memory. For an instant, he was back inside the factory and fighting for his life.

  Only hours before, Bolan had learned of a plot by subversive offshore forces to sabotage a facility that supplied the U.S. government with "special" computer chips. The word was that the invaders wanted to get their hands on the plans of a secret manufacturing technique that enabled the plant to produce chips from commonplace material. Then they would blow up the lab.

  It was supposed to be a soft probe — reconnaissance and nothing more. But no amount of planning could have anticipated that the infiltrators' sentry would surprise Bolan in the laboratory. No amount of speed or accuracy with his silenced automatic could have prevented the lookout's .38 from discharging and bringing the intruders' army on the run.

  And Bolan's soft probe had become a hard withdrawal, one determined man against the odds. He had discovered the proof he sought inside the lab. But evidence was useless if he never got a chance to pass it on.

  The enemy had been skilled. Initial scrutiny had not revealed the full extent of their defensive preparations, and the Executioner had found himself surrounded inside the plant. Riflemen had cut him off at every turn and while the soldier reduced the odds, they deprived him of the combat stretch he needed to survive. Another moment and the hostile guns would have had him boxed in completely.

  The stun grenade had taken him entirely by surprise — a nearly fatal error — and it had left the warrior with a narrow range of choices. He could move or die and in the circumstances, that boiled down to no alternative at all.

  He had moved with all the speed and skill derived from years of living on the edge.

  He had almost made it.

  The explosion, when it came, had been like a thunderclap. Concussion had lifted him, propelled him forward like a human cannonball in some demented circus act. He had cleared a metal catwalk railing, plummeted fifteen feet and struck the concrete floor below with crushing force. Suddenly deprived of oxygen, he had fought to breathe, to rise, and then the troops were on him, boots and rifle butts descending, drumming him into unconsciousness.

  They could have killed him, should have killed him then and there. It had been a tactical mistake to let him live, unless...

  It clicked for Bolan, and he slowly opened his other eye. But the knowledge made his blood run cold. Unless they had some use for him alive.

  No time to ponder motives now, and any way it went for him the end result would be the same. Alive and free, he was a deadly liability. When they were finished with him — in an hour, in a week — they would liquidate him instantly.

  If he gave them the opportunity.

  He started checking out the damage slowly, unobtrusively, attempting to discover how severely he was injured. Bruises everywhere, alive and throbbing with a score of different aches that merged together into one — but they were concentrated on his shoulders and along his spine. He tensed the muscles there, shifting slightly with the motion of the Caddy, careful not to let his captors know he was awake. No pain from broken bones, and he began to flex manacled arms and each leg in turn, found everything in working order. The handcuffs were a problem, granted, but nothing insurmountable.

  A gravel voice beside him interrupted the silence of the car's interior. The words were directed to the driver.

  "How much longer?"

  "Twenty minutes. Thirty, tops."

  "Hell."

  "Relax. It's easy duty."

  "Easy, my ass."

  He could have sprung the door latch and plunged headlong onto the pavement, but he dismissed the thought. At this speed, if the fall didn't finish him, the gunners would reverse their track and plow him under long before he could recover.

  No, he had to neutralize the hostile guns before he made his break. And if it turned out right he might even end up with wheels.

  Bolan made his move, leaning hard into the door and pivoting on one hip, bringing both knees up against his chest with agonizing swiftness, heels together. To his right, the startled gunner was reacting, but he did not have the time for an effective countermove.

  Bolan's heels impacted squarely onto target, smearing the hoodlum's nose across his face and taking a flap of cheek along with it. The man's head snapped back from the blow, cracking his skull against the window. Bolan locked his wrists around the unprotected throat, his manacles a tight garrote biting into yielding flesh.

  The wheelman brought both hands up, struggling to break the stranglehold, and at once the tank began to drift, weaving back and forth across the center stripe at seventy miles an hour. The Caddy must have been on cruise control because the wheelman's legs were thrashing wildly.

  Bolan hauled him backward, up and out of his seat, keeping the relentless pressure on. One of those flailing feet found purchase on the steering wheel and then slid through, twisting it hard to the right as he tried to struggle out of Bolan's death grip.

  Responding to the sudden turning of the wheel, the Caddy swerved, screaming into a broadside skid. The steering locked from the weight of the man's leg on the spoke, and the car began to capsize. Everything was upside down and spinning, the landscape blurring in a mad kaleidoscope. Bolan and his captors were thrown together, then apart, like dummies in a highway-safety test.

  Somewhere in the tumbling confusion, the driver slithered free — but not before his neck snapped audibly, the limp head twisting right around to glare at Bolan with accusatory eyes.

  With a crunching jolt of twisted metal on stone the Caddy came to rest on its side. Battered worse than ever and wedged into a fetal ball, Bolan smelled the pungent fumes of gasoline — and something else. The scorched-rubber smell of smoldering electrical wires.

  There was no time to lose.

  He scrambled up and shackled hands found the jagged outline of a shattered window. He quickly cleared it, disregarding pain and the sudden bloody slickness of his fingers. Bracing a boot heel against the leather-padded headrest of the driver's seat, Bolan pushed up and out of there, jackknifing across the crumpled door. He kicked free, sprawling onto the gravel, the oily undercarriage of the Caddy only inches from his face.

  A thread of smoke curled upward and away, at once supplanted by another, growing swiftly. Bolan struggled up and started to run, awkward and unsteady, weaving like a drunkard but putting precious ground between himself and the time bomb ticking at his back.

  A pistol cracked behind him, and the bullet kicked up dust a few yards to his right. Incredibly, the second gunner had regained his senses well enough to find his weapon and open fire on the fleeing man. Another round sizzled through the air inches from Bolan's ear.

  Dodging to his left, the runner risked a backward glance and caught a fleeting glimpse of the gunman. He was standing upright in the capsized Cadillac with both arms braced across the door, his bloody face a blur above the automatic pistol.

  Bolan tried to veer away — and took the next bullet in his side. It opened fabric and flesh, plowing along the curve of his rib cage in a flash of blinding pain.

  He staggered, nearly falling, and another slug traced fire along his thigh before the Caddy's fuel tank detonated into heavy metal thunder, swallowing the gunner's scream and everything in roaring flames.

  Bolan wasted no time looking back. He was all the way across the road now, into the field. With a dozen loping strides he left the highway, wheat closing in behind him like a soundproof curtain being drawn together.

  And his run became an endless nightmare marathon. He ran against the clock, against the odds. Death itself was breathing down his neck. At any moment now the fingers, pale and skeletal, would
reach for him and close around his heart.

  How long would it take for the hunters to find him, overtake him in the fields? He had a lead, the slim advantage of surprise, but it was more than counterbalanced by the vehicles at their disposal. He could dodge them temporarily by hiding in the wheat and corn, but if they brought a chopper into it, began to seek him from the air...

  Preoccupied, he lost his footing, stumbled and fell headlong between the rows. At once the soldier's intuition told him he was not alone, that he was being followed through the fields.

  A sound, the rustle of a footfall in the grain. It was elusive, and he froze, afraid to rise and give himself away. The enemy was closer than he had imagined possible.

  The sound of footsteps was repeated, closer now, and he could almost hear them breathing just beyond the nearest row of silent stalks. Bolan held his breath, aware that any sound would bring them down upon him like a flock of vultures.

  There was still a chance, of course. It sounded like a single hunter, probably the pointman for their killer team. If he could silently take out the scout and snatch his weapon...

  The hand upon his shoulder startled Bolan. He struggled out of sleep to instant, groggy consciousness. Seizing a slender wrist, he put his weight behind the move, abruptly dragging his assailant to the floor. A knee impacted on his side, igniting flares of pain, but he ignored the sudden agony, boring in desperately to neutralize the hunter's weapon.

  And his opposition was surprisingly small, yet I sinewy and strong. In his weakened state the soldier had his hands full with the flailing figure beneath him. He would have to strike a telling blow while he had the chance.

  His arms were raised, the fingers of his two hands interlaced and ready to deliver a death-blow to the larynx when he hesitated. Something in the high-pitched voice, the supple body, stayed his hand. The warrior realized at once that his assailant was unarmed; in a heartbeat he experienced the second jarring revelation.

  His attacker was a woman.

  3

  The Cowboy lit a thin cheroot and filled the Lincoln with its pungent smoke. He chose the rank cigars deliberately — as he had the Stetson, mirrored aviator's glasses and the hand-tooled boots — to cultivate an image.

  The image was important to his business. It set him apart, made the Cowboy stand out in a field of drab competitors. And the Cowboy got results. In a dozen years of stalking human targets he had never left a contract unfulfilled. His reputation as a death machine was almost legendary, and for his crew he had selected others like himself. None of them had ever let a client down.

  Until this time.

  They never should have lost the prisoner, dammit. There were no such things as accidents, and no mistake was unavoidable if all security precautions were observed. His soldiers had been negligent somehow, and they had paid the price for carelessness. So it was the Cowboy's job to salvage something from the mess.

  He was a skilled professional and he had put his reputation on the line. The record did not mean a thing this time. If he lost this one, he lost everything.

  But he was not going to let any half-assed hit-and-run guerrilla ruin everything that he had spent a lifetime working for.

  It was a long way from Jersey City where a scrawny, battered child had run the streets, surviving through an overdose of wits and nerve. He learned to fight, steal, eventually kill with the efficiency of a survivor. And in between the lessons, there were endless hours spent in darkened movie theaters, the boy in a trance as giants acted out his fantasies upon the screen.

  He liked the Westerns best, with independent loners as the heroes, their law erupting from the barrel of a gun. He watched them, memorized their movements and began to emulate them, learning how to make it work for him through trial and error. As he grew older he changed, chameleonlike, and was reborn.

  He had become the Cowboy.

  And he headed west.

  Detroit. Chicago. Phoenix. San Francisco. Anywhere that death could be translated into dollars. He selected targets like a bounty hunter tracking outlaws through the badlands, and it mattered not at all that his employers were the heavies of the piece. Technique counted even more than cash, and he had earned a reputation for his sense of style.

  He was an artist, justly proud of his achievements.

  This new assignment had bothered him at first. In his fashion he had always been a loyal American, but circumstances altered cases. For the kind of money he was making now, the Cowboy did not care who paid him.

  The Cowboy had a duty to himself and Uncle Sam had never raised a finger to assist him. Any claim his country had on him had long ago been paid in full.

  The gunman cherished no illusions as to who and what his current employers represented. Foreign money, probably the Eastern bloc. Quite possibly the, Soviets themselves.

  And he had hesitated — long enough to count the zeros on his first retainer check — before he made the deal. Money was what mattered. Money and a sense of style.

  Recently, his jobs had been undemanding. Three hits in nineteen months, and none of them provided any sort of challenge.

  As the Cowboy understood it — and he never made a practice of examining a client's motives — the targets had been low-ranking corporate employees who had stumbled onto classified material by accident. When they decided to go public or put a price tag on their silence, someone dropped a dime and called the Cowboy.

  He had made the first one look like suicide, the other two like accidents. There had been no problems.

  Until now.

  The mark this time was a wild card. The killer did not know or care where this maverick had come from, who he was. The problems of identity and motivation were beyond his province, something to concern his clients in their lavish offices. For now the Cowboy only needed to know his target's general whereabouts, his avenue of flight. With that in mind, a careful hunter could project his track and intercept him.

  Cut him off at the pass.

  Just like in the movies.

  Granted, this was no ordinary pigeon. Two of the Cowboy's men had learned that the hard way, and there were others at the plant, from what he understood. The guy was hell on wheels — but he was human, too.

  Human and hurting.

  He could dodge them in the fields, but only temporarily. The Cowboy had men and mobility. His troops controlled the roads. His prey would be obliged to take a chance, venture out into the open in order to escape. He would need a car, a telephone, a weapon — any sort of human contact. It would take a miracle to even out the odds, but he would be compelled to try.

  And when he did, the Cowboy would be ready, waiting for him. Waiting to snap up the bastard.

  The Cowboy sucked thoughtfully on his cheroot. He had no illusion that it would be easy pickings. He had lost the target once, and two men in the bargain. He had been at this game long enough to know that wounded animals could be more dangerous when cornered.

  No, it would not be easy. But he would pull it off. The messages delivered via mobile phone had made it clear to him that nothing but death would be acceptable. Someone at the top was sweating bullets, and the Cowboy's life was riding on the outcome of his hunt. If he blew it...

  He put his mind in neutral, letting the tension slide away. There was nothing to worry about, no cause for alarm. He had every angle covered and sooner or later the target would show himself, provide an opportunity to finish it. The Cowboy had a hunter's patience and he would resist any pressure from above, refuse to let it rush him into careless error. There had been enough mistakes already. He could not afford another.

  Mentally he started ticking off the odds against his prey — as much to reassure himself as anything. The mark had been running for two days now, exposed to heat and cold and without shelter. Food would be another problem. And in his weakened state, the prey would be intent on nourishment, a place to hide. When he was weak enough from hunger and exposure, then he would become careless.

  Relaxing in the air-conditioned
Continental the tracker watched the fields of green and gold slide by at fifty miles an hour. He settled down to wait. Forty-eight hours and counting. It would be soon now. He was sure of it, and he needed that certainty to keep himself together.

  His troops were running quadrants to the north and east, exploring narrow side roads and checking in by radio every fifteen minutes.

  So far there was nothing to report, but they were narrowing the arena and pinning down potential cover. Up to now, the hiding places had been few and far between. A culvert here, an old, abandoned shanty there. The obligatory two-bit farmhouse every dozen miles or so.

  Shifting on the custom leather seat, he ground out the thin cigar and eased a hand inside his Western jacket, feeling for the stainless Smith & Wesson .44 beneath his left arm. You could drop a grizzly with that piece, probably an elephant — and for goddamned sure a wild-assed warrior who had tangled with the wrong folks this time. Drop him dead and deep, and get him off the Cowboy's back forever.

  All they had to do was find the bastard.

  Nothing to it.

  Like hell.

  He snared the walkie-talkie from the seat beside him, raised it to his face and keyed the red transmitter button. Momentary static crackled at him, quickly died away.

  "Hunter One calling Hunter Two. Report."

  A tinny voice broke the momentary silence.

  "Hunter Two."

  "What have you got for me?"

  "We're coming up empty."

  The Cowboy snapped his fingers at the gunner in the nearest jump seat, waited briefly while a county map was handed over. It had been divided into sectors, each approximately square and outlined on the map in yellow marker. He studied it for several moments, finally raised the radio again.

  "I want another sweep on sector nine before you pack it in. You finish there, regroup on me at, ah, coordinates Victor Charlie seven."

  "That's affirmative, Hunter One."

  "Hunter Three, come in."

  "We're reading you."

  "Talk to me."

  "Just about to put the wraps on sector five. We've got another farm to check, and then we're done."