Blood Play (Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan)

by Pendleton, Don

  “Try anything and the first slug goes through your spine,” he warned Shiraldi.

  “I’m not going to try anything!”

  Shiraldi was as furious as he was despondent. He’d already assured Combs that he hadn’t divulged any information to Helms, but the cop refused to believe him, having already concluded that the private eye wouldn’t have come nosing around the reservation unless Shiraldi had at least aroused her suspicions. Shiraldi had insisted that Helms was working for someone else, but Combs wasn’t buying that explanation either. Shiraldi had no idea how things would play out once the others arrived, but he felt trapped in a no-win situation. One way or another, it seemed as if the scandal he’d hoped to put behind him had come back, not just to haunt him, but ruin the new life he’d made for himself. Or worse…

  “THERE’S ONE OF HIS balloons,” Leslie Helms said, guiding her rental Lexus up a winding mountain road leading to the Pueblo de Cochiti Golf Course. She and Kissinger had already passed a handful of signs touting the New Mexico Invitational along with another of Shiraldi’s sandwich-board advertisements for his Aerial Grand Adventures.

  “Let’s hope you’re right about him coming clean,” Kissinger said.

  “If he made a deal under the table to keep quiet about how he was framed he might be looking for some kind of immunity,” Helms forewarned.

  “I’m sure that’s negotiable.”

  Shiraldi’s temporary accommodations were located a mile from the golf course just off the main road on an undeveloped patch of land surrounded by piñon pines. As they drew closer, Kissinger could read AGA’s Full of Hot Air motto stenciled on the side of the balloon, a traditional inverted teardrop with multicolored nylon panels. The two semis and Shiraldi’s motor home blocked their view of the balloon’s gondola and it wasn’t until they’d parked and circled around that they realized Shiraldi wasn’t alone. The proprietor had just gotten into the rattan riding carriage and was reaching for the propane controls while a man in a brown suit stood nearby, one hand in his pocket, the other on one of the balloon’s tether lines. Even before the man turned around, Helms recognized him and uttered her all-purpose mantra. “Holy shit!”

  AS MUCH AS HELMS was taken aback to find herself facing the man who’d tailed her after she’d left Captain Brown’s press conference, Combs was equally startled to see that the woman hadn’t come alone. When the man with her reached inside his coat, the tribal officer acted on instinct and yanked out his gun.

  “Freeze!” he shouted.

  Combs had the drop on Kissinger, and the Stony Man operative knew it. His hand was clenched around a 9 mm Browning similar to the loaner Mack Bolan had been given to replace the Beretta lost in Tijeras Arroyo, but Combs’s SIG pointed at Helms, and Kissinger wasn’t about to risk having the woman shot.

  He was releasing his grip on the weapon and pulling his hand when a car pulled around the rear of the nearest semi and braked to a halt.

  “You heard him!” Captain Brown shouted as she bounded from her Nissan Altima, drawing her service pistol. “Hands in the air! Both of you!”

  “This isn’t what I had in mind,” Helms murmured to Kissinger as they obeyed the captain’s command. “Sorry about that.”

  “I guess this’ll teach me not to pass out my number on cocktail napkins.”

  Brown moved forward, her gun still trained on Kissinger. Once she was close enough, she reached inside his coat and helped herself to the Browning. Combs, meanwhile, warned Shiraldi to stay put and advanced on Helms, quickly frisking her and then going through her purse, where he unearthed the woman’s Kimber Ultra Carry .45.

  “Nice piece,” he told her.

  “Don’t get fresh, asshole,” Helms told him. With a smirk she added, “Trailed any good Wranglers lately?”

  “That was pretty clever of you,” Combs conceded. “Too bad I can’t take a joke.”

  ONCE IT WAS CLEAR to him that Combs’s attention was divided, Shiraldi decided this was as close as he was apt to get to escaping his nightmare. He slowly lowered his hand from the propane controls, leaving the valves open, and reached for the closer of the two tether ropes anchoring the gondola. The man with Helms had apparently seen what he was up to, and he subtly shifted position as he began to argue with the two cops. Back turned to the balloon, Kissinger moved until he’d partially blocked both Combs’s and Brown’s view of Shiraldi.

  By the time Combs realized Kissinger was running interference, Shiraldi had yanked on the slip knots of both tether lines. Instantly the balloon began to ascend.

  “No way!” Combs roared, lunging to one side and shoving Kissinger away from him so he could have a clear shot at Shiraldi. Brown had seen the balloon lift off, as well, and she fired in unison with her colleague.

  Shiraldi had ducked from view and flattened himself against the base of the gondola, but as the incoming rounds chewed through the rattan, two of them caught up with him. One grazed his skull; another plowed through his shirt just below the right armpit. Shiraldi groaned and rolled over, his vision already clouding. He tried to get up, but his body refused to cooperate. Collapsing back onto the rattan, he passed out. His blood seeped through the coarsely woven material and began to fall like droplets of crimson rain to the ground below.

  WHEN COMBS AND BROWN turned from Kissinger to fire at the ascending balloon, he fell back on instinct with a vengeance. The moment he regained his balance after Combs shoved him, Kissinger crouched slightly and dived back toward the cop, driving his shoulder into Combs’s side and clawing at the cop’s gun as if it were a football he was trying to force into a fumble.

  Kissinger had two inches and fifty pounds on Combs and the other man buckled under the tackle, losing hold of not only his gun but Helms’s. The Stony Man armorer ignored the weapons for the moment and stayed on Combs, pounding him at close quarters with a combination of fist jabs and judo chops. He brought his right knee into play, as well, slamming it into the cop’s abdomen. Combs cursed and fought back as best he could, but he was outmatched from the onset and his wild punches did little to counter Kissinger’s throttling.

  A few yards away, Helms had taken the offensive, as well, twisting to one side and paying off six years of weekly karate lessons with a sweeping kick that caught Tina Brown squarely behind her left knee, throwing the police captain off balance. The round she’d intended to put through the private eye instead zinged wildly off-target and vanished into the neighboring piñons.

  “Close but no cigar.” Helms seized the shorter woman by the wrist and torqued herself yet again, this time slamming her hip into Brown’s right thigh and then throwing the captain over her shoulder. Disarmed, Brown did an involuntary half somersault before landing on the ground. Before she could scramble to any of the fallen weapons, Helms let loose with another kick that clipped her opponent beneath the chin. Dazed, Brown slumped backward, the fight gone out of her. Helms quickly retrieved her pistol as well as the other guns, handing Kissinger the Browning once the man rose to his feet alongside his immobile counterpart.

  In all, it had taken fewer than twenty seconds for Kissinger and Helms to turn the tables on their would-be captors.

  “That was almost too easy,” Helms panted, still trying to catch her breath.

  “Let’s save the gloating for later.” Kissinger turned to Brown and Combs, who were both still on the ground, sullen about their sudden reversal of fortune. “My guess is you’re both lawyering up, so I won’t bother asking you to explain yourselves.”

  “I have my share of clout off the reservation,” Brown retorted, rubbing her jaw where she’d been kicked. “This isn’t over.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “We’ve got one major loose end,” Helms reminded Kissinger as she glanced skyward.

  Kissinger looked up. The errant balloon was continuing to rise as it drifted past the piñons toward the nearby golf course. Shiraldi had yet to reappear inside the gondola.

  “Keep an eye on them,” Cowboy said, stuffin
g Brown’s pistol in his waistband so he could have a hand free for his cell phone. “Hopefully my guys are close enough to go into the search-and-rescue business.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “We see it,” Bolan told Kissinger, cell phone pressed to his ear as he stared out the JetRanger’s windshield at the distant balloon. He was riding up front in the chopper alongside Jack Grimaldi. From Algodones they’d followed a course along the Rio Grande, passing over Pueblo Santo Domingo and Plena Blanca as far as the dam at Cochiti Lake before veering northwest in response to Kissinger’s distress call. “We’re probably at least a mile away.”

  “I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do other than ride alongside it,” Kissinger said.

  “We’ll figure out something,” Bolan said.

  “If there’s anything we can do to help, give a holler,” the Stony Man armorer said.

  “Will do,” the Executioner replied. “And keep an eye on Brown. We ran into some of her goons while we were tracking Cherkow, and one of them fingered Brown as being in league with the Russians.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” Kissinger said. “How’d it play out with Cherkow?”

  “He’s dead along with a cohort and one of the tribal cops,” Bolan reported. “I’ll give you the details later.”

  “Fair en— Hey, I just spotted you,” Kissinger said. “Check down to your right, around four o’clock. Two semis and a motor home.”

  Bolan shifted his view from the runaway balloon and spotted Shiraldi’s makeshift launch site. Kissinger waved to him. He was standing alongside Leslie Helms, who’d just finished using Combs’s and Brown’s own handcuffs to secure the rogue cops to one of the steep hoop rings Shiraldi used for his tether lines. The lengths of rope lay sprawled across the ground nearby like long white snakes. Staring at them, Bolan saw a way to possibly rescue Shiraldi.

  “Take us down for a second,” he told Grimaldi.

  “No problem.”

  Bolan went back to his phone and told Kissinger, “Look, do me a favor and gather up the tether ropes and tie them end to end, then see if there are any gloves lying around, the sturdier the better. A parachute and first-aid kit, too, if you can find them.”

  There was a pause, then Kissinger looked up at the descending chopper and shook his head.

  “I know what you’re thinking and you’re crazy,” he told Bolan. “It’ll never work. Not in a million years.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “No,” Kissinger replied, “but you can sure as hell bet I’m going to try to think of one.”

  CHRISTOPHER SHIRALDI STIRRED at the base of the gondola, his face slathered with blood, the rattan weavework imprinted on his right cheek. He groaned, wincing not only from his wounds but from the throbbing pain inside his skull, made worse by the roar of propane jets continuing to feed hot air into the balloon hauling him deeper into the New Mexico morning sky. With monumental effort he shifted onto his side and drew a hand to his side. In seconds his trembling fingers were red.

  Get up, he told himself.

  Shiraldi struggled to raise one arm, elevating it as far as the twin propane tanks feeding the burners. He held on to one of the tank’s carrier rings a moment while he gathered more strength, then reached a little higher and cupped his fingers over the gondola’s upper rim. When he tried to pull himself up, he felt himself faint again and let go, falling back onto the thin pad slick with his blood. As darkness began to once more sweep over him, he tried to take comfort in the thought that if he was going to die, there was no way he’d rather go out than airborne in one of his own balloons.

  I’ve got a head start to heaven, he thought to himself.

  “LOOKS LIKE HE’S STILL ALIVE,” Grimaldi said, holding the JetRanger on a steady course fifty yards from the balloon.

  “That settles it, then.” Bolan donned the thick flame-resistance gloves Kissinger had handed him along with a first-aid kit when Grimaldi had brought the chopper down to the launch site. The Executioner had also picked up the knotted lengths of tether rope and fashioned a loop at one end. The other end was tied around one of the Ranger’s skids. He’d already tucked the first-aid kit inside his shirt.

  “I still say there’s got to be a better way to do this,” Grimaldi said.

  “If there is, we didn’t come up with it.” Bolan put one hand through the loop and opened his door. “Ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  Bolan crawled out of the chopper and planted his feet on the skid. They were more than a thousand feet in the air, and from his perspective the sprawling golf course below looked like a board game. Taking in the view, Bolan found himself wishing Kissinger had been able to track down a parachute.

  STANDING WITH HER PARENTS as part of the crowded gallery watching the board leader tee off at the fifth hole, four-year-old Darlene Crews glanced skyward and pointed. “Lookie!”

  Darlene’s mother and father looked up and saw Bolan crouched on the skid of the JetRanger, hovering near the seemingly unattended balloon.

  “What the hell?”

  “Matthew, please,” Darlene’s mother scolded her husband. “Watch your language.”

  Soon half the gallery was staring up at the strange aerial tableau. There was ample murmuring among the spectators, some wondering why nobody’d announced that there’d be an air show, others questioning why the people running the invitational had scheduled a performance that would obviously distract golfers competing for the million-dollar purse. Much of the chattering gave way to gasps when Bolan suddenly leaped clear of the skid and began to free-fall, clutching the tether rope. Once the line had drawn taut, the Executioner’s momentum brought him swinging beneath the chopper toward the balloon.

  “It’s Tarzan!” Darlene marveled.

  “Tarzan sticks a little closer to the ground, sweetie,” Matthew Crews told his daughter.

  Matthew’s wife stared spellbound as Bolan closed in on the balloon, but a sense of dread led her to reach down and cover Darlene’s eyes, not wanting the child to see what a part of her feared was about to happen.

  “I don’t think this is a stunt,” she whispered to her husband.

  BOLAN WAS COMING IN high of his mark.

  Instead of swinging within range of the gondola, he found himself bound instead for the balloon’s skirt, a band of fire-resistant fabric thicker than the inflated nylon panels of the balloon itself. With only a split second to deal with the miscalculation, the Executioner decided against deflecting off the skirt and making another attempt. Instead, the moment he made contact, Bolan released the tether rope. Most of the impact was absorbed by his sore shoulder, which he’d already reinjured when the line had gone taut shortly after his leap and briefly jerked him upward. The skirt gave a little under his weight, drawing him briefly into its embrace before gravity began to drag him downward.

  As he slid past the open collar, Bolan ignored the sudden heat of the propane burners. His full focus was on the nearest suspension line linking the balloon with the gondola. He grabbed at the line and closed his fingers around it. Even with the heavy gloves he could feel the friction heat as his hand slid down the line. When his palm slammed against the gondola’s upper rim, Bolan’s fall was brought to a sudden halt. His body swung to one side and he went with the momentum, kicking upward and grabbing at the rim with his other hand. When his leg cleared, he immediately hooked it and shifted his weight so that he was partially straddling the gondola. Straining, he pulled himself farther up until he was able to pivot his other leg into the basket. Finally he reached a point where he was seated on the rim able to peer down at Shiraldi, who’d come to and stared up at him in bleary-eyed amazement.

  “I thought the next person I’d see would be an angel,” he said weakly.

  “You’ll have to make do with me.”

  As he caught his breath, Bolan glanced over his shoulder and gave an equally incredulous Grimaldi a thumbs-up. Th
en he turned back to the balloonist and carefully stepped down into the basket, withdrawing the first-aid kit from inside his shirt.

  “Hang in there,” Bolan told Shiraldi as he crouched beside the man and cracked open the kit. “I’m going need a few pointers on how to bring this thing in for a landing.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Airspace above Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico

  Bolan may not have been able to get his hands on a parachute, but there were a handful of them in Vishnevsky’s Citation X. The Russian was the only one with plans to use one, however.

  “Still no sign we’re being followed?” he asked the pilot as he secured the pack and adjusted its straps to accommodate his bulky frame.

  “There’s nothing on the radar,” the pilot assured him. “There was nothing on that runway fast enough to catch up with us.”

  “No, but if they called down to Santa Fe someone could be coming at us from the west.”

  “They’d show up on the radar,” the pilot said. “Don’t worry, you’ll be out and on the ground before anyone gets to us.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Vishnevsky said. “When we close in, bring it down to a few thousand feet. I’m not interested in taking time to enjoy the scenery.”

  “Understood,” the pilot responded. “I’m already close to that.”

  With nothing left to do but wait, Vishnevsky paced the passenger cabin, ignoring Vanya, who stood before the galley, apparently fortifying herself with a drink after her ordeal back in Taos. They’d been back in the air only a short while but were already halfway across the mountainous greenery of Santa Fe National Forest. Vishnevsky didn’t have precise coordinates for the javelina farm but he’d gone over maps of the area enough times to know that if they overshot their mark, once they cleared the forest they could follow either the train line or interstate to Glorieta.