Moscow Massacre

by Don Pendleton

  He stepped away from the building and twirled the lightweight rope with the metal three-pronged mountain climbing hook attached to it. He judged the distance to a dark, unbarred fourth-floor window ledge, then let the hook fly. The erratic gusts of wind higher up along the building's face threw off the rope and its grapnel.

  He tried a second time, senses constantly alert. The snow muffled and distorted the sounds of his activity, and this time the mountain climbing prongs caught on the window ledge. Bolan got a firm grip on the rope, lifted one booted foot at a time to brace himself against the stone wall, then began climbing hand over hand up the face of the building.

  He stopped before reaching even the second-story window, his peripheral vision detecting three forms emerging from the snow — three prison guards armed with shoulder-strapped AK-47 assault rifles. The trio was either a scheduled patrol or simply three guys ducking out back for a smoke, possibly a hashish break, currently a big favorite in Russia's government services.

  The only thing that mattered to Bolan was that the soldiers not see him. He thought of what could be happening to Katrina at this moment and hated like hell having to hold his position suspended there against the building a few feet above the soldiers' heads.

  It looked as if they would stroll by below without noticing him, heading in the direction of the mess hall. Then one of the soldiers happened to glance upward as if at the elements. He saw Bolan.

  The soldier's eyes and mouth flew open to sound a surprised alarm when he saw the figure in black suspended against the building. The man started to say something to his comrades who had already started to look up in Bolan's direction from the startled look on their companion's face.

  Bolan propelled himself into a leap down at them, feet first, before any of the three could utter a sound or track their weapons around and up at the black-clad blur powerhousing down upon them.

  The soldiers on either side of the guy who had seen Bolan broke the Executioner's fall when the heels of Bolan's boots caught each man in the forehead hard enough to smash skull bone backward into brain matter, killing both prison guards instantly.

  The momentum of Bolan's fall carried him through into a somersault. He came out of it in a smooth roll in time to see the third guard swing his rifle around on him, the man's features wild with panic at the sight of his two fallen comrades.

  Bolan moved in at full speed, arcing his foot up in a high martial arts kick that knocked the AK-47 from the soldier's grip. Then he twisted around in a smooth recovery to spear his stiffened right hand straight at the guard's throat, feeling the blow crush the guard's larynx. To finish him off, Bolan chopped his left hand down sharply to break the man's neck and send him collapsing down to fall upon the bodies of the first two.

  He considered for an instant what to do about the three corpses, but there seemed nothing he could do except leave them where they had fallen. The unloading of the delivery truck meant he couldn't hide the stiffs between the two buildings. The back of this building was as sheer as the front and the other structures. There wasn't even a doorway where Bolan could stash the bodies. Besides, he told himself, this hit would get hot within the next minute or two. He would just have to hope the bodies weren't discovered during that time.

  He regripped the dangling rope with both hands, then braced himself again against the wall and started climbing. It was a difficult climb because his feet kept sliding on the snowy brick, but he made it to the unbarred window within a few seconds and saw that the other windows on this level were also unbarred. That made this an administration building, which meant workers would be showing up in their offices at any second.

  He held tight to the rope looped around one wrist. With the other gloved hand, he worked for a few moments in an attempt to ease the window up, finding that it was locked from the inside. He made a fist and delivered a short punch to one of the windowpanes, striking the glass only with the force necessary to shatter the one pane. The sound of the glass tinkling to the carpeted floor inside was entirely lost to Bolan's own ears as the wind howled between the buildings and the nearby wall. He hoped the sound would be equally muffled to anyone inside the building.

  Maintaining his left-handed grip on the rope, he reached in through the smashed windowpane and felt around a bit before he located the window latch. He twisted the latch, pulled his arm out and, pressing his fingers against one of the remaining panes of glass, pushed up at the same time. The window rolled upward on its runners.

  He returned both hands to grip the rope and tug himself up and over the window ledge, easing himself inside the building. He pulled the rope up after him and pulled down the window. He looped the rope back on his belt and swung the silenced Uzi around into firing position, making a quick scan of the large office of several desks and typewriters and file cabinets.

  He started toward the office door to let himself out.

  At that precise moment a key turned in the lock of the office door.

  Bolan hurried to the wall next to the door, pressing his back against it, bringing up the Uzi.

  The door opened, and a middle-aged woman stepped in. She reached for the light switch, the first of the civilian office workers showing up. She didn't see Bolan, who had positioned himself behind the door.

  He watched her feeling for the light switch, knowing the instant she turned it on she would see the shards of glass strewn on the carpet beneath the window, whereupon she would surely raise an alarm. He could not allow that.

  He moved in before the woman knew it, delivering a crisp punch with the Uzi to the base of her neck, this time not a killing blow but with enough strength to render her unconscious.

  The woman emitted a soft sigh, and her knees buckled. She started to fall. Bolan closed in, catching her hefty bulk before she could collapse. He slipped his arms beneath hers and positioned her behind a desk. He stretched her out on the floor, then hurried out of the office, knowing the time spent dealing with the woman would only buy him a few minutes at most.

  Secretaries and other clerical help who worked the desks in the office would no doubt show up for work anytime now. They would see the glass, they would find their unconscious co-worker and they would sound the alarm. But Bolan saw no alternative to the way he had dealt with the woman. He did not want to kill a Russian civilian who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He did not want innocent blood on his hands.

  He left the office and looked up and down a corridor that ran the length of the building, a hallway lined with the closed doors of other offices. An elevator at the opposite end of the hall would be the means by which the employees came up, since a metal door, closer to Bolan at his end of the corridor, bore a stenciled Emergency Exit Only in Cyrillic script.

  He moved to the metal door, pushed it and found the door locked as he had half expected. He stepped back and triggered off a short burst at the lock.

  Nine-millimeter slugs destroyed the lock, the noise of the silenced burst sounding like little more than an impolite burp, drowned out as Bolan followed through with a mighty kick that sent the metal door slapping inward.

  He came through the doorway in a forward dive that sent him belly flat onto the cement of the fourth-floor landing, fire stairs zigzagging up and down the shaft.

  Three uniformed prison guards positioned on the next landing down whirled as one, eyes and mouths widening in surprise.

  They pushed away from one another, starting to swing weapons up at an attacker they could not see in the dim lighting of the stairwell.

  The Executioner's Uzi unleashed an extended burst down the stairs, spraying brick walls with modern art designs of splattering blood, a withering hail of projectiles shredding the guards.

  Bolan raced down the stairs toward a door that matched the one he had just come through except that this door led to the third floor where he hoped he would find Katrina Mozzhechkov before the savages did anything to her...

  11

  Bolan knew his only chances were th
e element of surprise and the fact that the beefed-up security around Building D was for the most part on the outside. They obviously did not expect a soft probe and had certainly not expected the prober to actually get inside the building.

  He inched open the stairwell door to the third-floor corridor and peered out. Down the hallway two prison sentries stood guard on either side of the third door. Behind that door was where Tanya had told Bolan he would find Katrina.

  These guards would be standard, but in that moment he wondered again about the tripled manpower below, outside the building, as if they were ready and waiting for the Executioner to strike...

  He kneed the stairwell door open and flew into the corridor, hitting the floor on his stomach. He tracked up the Uzi on the two sentries, hoping he would be able to take them out as soundlessly as he had those in the stairwell and outside, keeping his presence undetected by any except the dead and one unconscious secretary.

  The startled guards jerked away from the wall to a side-by-side position, trying to track their rifles in Bolan's direction.

  He coaxed a burst from the Uzi, and it riddled the guy on the right. The impact of the slugs mule-kicked the man backward into the wall. His knees folded and he fell.

  Bolan tracked the Uzi on sentry number two, and the Uzi jammed.

  The guard, who had fully expected to die in that second, saw his chance and fell forward to a prone position, triggering off a booming round from his AK-47 that thundered in the confines of the hallway, sending a heavy projectile singing too close for comfort past Bolan's ear.

  Bolan rolled over once to his left, unholstering the .44 AutoMag, putting himself out of the guard's line of fire.

  The man hammered off another round that pulverized a portion of the wall behind where Bolan had been an eye blink before, then the prison guard became headless as Big Thunder roared, the slug pitching the guy into an almost physically impossible flip-flop onto his back.

  Bolan bolted off the floor, pausing in a crouch as the door the guards had been watching opened.

  A mountainous hulk in a police uniform stuck his head and an arm out of the door in Bolan's direction.

  Kulik.

  Bolan triggered another round from the AutoMag, the bullet taking of the sadist's gun hand, spinning juicy pulp and Kulik's pistol across the hall.

  The cop screamed and stumbled into the hallway, falling to his knees, squeezing the pulsating stump with his good hand, blindly shrieking at the top of his lungs.

  Bolan drew this guy's head away, too, then rushed the open doorway, knowing the numbers were all used up on this hit. The gunfire would bring an immediate reaction from the forces outside and those in the building.

  He came through the doorway into the "interrogation room" just as Captain Zuyenko managed to dart behind a chair, the only piece of furniture in the room. The Soviet cop grabbed for a shoulder-holstered pistol with his right hand and wrapped his left arm around the throat of Katrina Mozzhechkov; both Zuyenko and Katrina looking very surprised at Bolan's presence here.

  Bolan came in, his right arm extended, the stainless-steel barrel of Big Thunder an extension of the steady arm and eye behind it.

  At that same moment the police officer yanked Katrina back flush against him, raising the barrel of his gun toward her temple.

  Katrina was held too tightly in Zuyenko's grip for her to struggle. Her face appeared bruised where she had been slapped repeatedly prior to Bolan's appearance, but she wore her prison uniform in place; they had not graduated to the serious interrogation yet.

  Zuyenko's face was bright with nervous sweat. "Drop your weapon or I kill her," he snarled at the figure in black in the doorway.

  Bolan squeezed off a round from the AutoMag, and 240 grains of destruction shattered the hand holding the pistol at Katrina's head, peppering the cop's face with bone and gristle. The boattail slug continued on its relentless path of destruction, drilling Zuyenko's throat and most of the back of his skull, the impact tossing his corpse away from Katrina as the bullet's exit wound erupted in a fountain of spewing gore.

  Bolan lowered Big Thunder.

  "That guy saw too many movies," he said as he came in to lend Katrina a hand.

  She didn't look too bad despite her ordeal. Shaken mostly, discernible in a tremulous lower lip, but she also looked capable of holding herself together in this or any other crisis. Some woman.

  He extended an arm.

  Katrina came to him.

  "Do you know who I am?" Bolan asked her.

  The life mask did not fool her.

  "I may not know your face, but I certainly recognize your methods. Besides, no one has eyes like yours, Mack Bolan." She leaned against him as they moved to the door away from the remains of Zuyenko. "Thank God," she shuddered into his shoulder. "I wanted to die. In another minute they said they were going to..."

  Her words tapered off raggedly.

  They reached the door.

  "Can you make it?" Bolan asked. "Do you want me to carry you?"

  "N-no, I can make it."

  He drew the Beretta from its shoulder holster and handed it to her. "Take this."

  She took it. He rapidly showed her how to switch the 93-R from single fire to 3-shot mode.

  "I understand," she said. "What now?"

  "Stay with me."

  He moved out from the doorway.

  Katrina stayed close.

  He hurried to one of the dead sentries in the hallway, holstered Big Thunder and grabbed the dead man's AK, the Soviet counterpart of the M-16, and some spare ammo clips that he stuck in his belt.

  Katrina positioned herself just behind him while he did this, her back to him, covering his blind side, aiming the Beretta in a two-handed shooter's stance down the opposite end of the hallway, her legs firmly planted, bent slightly, every sign of shakiness gone.

  Then time ran out.

  The stairwell doorways at both ends of the corridor flew open, disgorging half a dozen rifle-toting prison guards who charged blindly from where they had been positioned outside around the building, responding to the gunfire from up here.

  Bolan and Katrina opened fire in either direction.

  Katrina's Beretta stuttered a 3-round burst.

  Two of the guards at her end of the hallway crumpled amid torrents of blood. Four other men coming close on their heels immediately reversed themselves at first sight of the dying. They dived back into the safety of the stairwell.

  Bolan kept his trigger finger squeezing out nearly half a clip of death that sliced apart five Russians at his end of the corridor before any of them could bring up their rifles into firing position.

  "This way," Bolan instructed Katrina.

  He led the way down the hall in the opposite direction from which he had come, his mind focusing on what would be happening outside at this minute.

  The Executioner had been cruising the hellgrounds long enough to know that the force he had seen clustered around each of this building's entrances would be dispersing by now. He was betting that half of the guards would be ordered to remain at each of those entrances while the officers in charge sent the rest to encircle the building. And others would be dispatched to where Zuyenko and Kulik had been interrogating Katrina.

  Those circling the building outside would find three dead men, bringing concentration of activity. So for this reason Bolan headed for the opposite end of the building, formulating strategy as he went.

  He and the woman reached the end of the hallway where the five Soviets lay dead.

  He kicked open an office door and nodded Katrina on through.

  She hustled into the dark office.

  The metal door to the stairwell at the other end of the hall disgorged the remaining guards who now thought they had a chance.

  Bolan braced himself for the recoil and emptied the rest of the AK-47's clip down the length of the hallway before any of the jerks could trigger a shot. The assault rifle's blast shook plaster from the ceiling and walls. The four men dan
ced around under the impact, uniforms rippling as the slugs drilled on through, stitching the guards like a giant sewing machine until Bolan released the AK's trigger and the four perforated bodies collapsed on top of one another.

  He stepped into the office after Katrina, kicking the door shut behind him and locking it.

  That wouldn't hold the security off the scent for very long. The stairwells and elevator would already be full of men pounding up in the direction of the third floor, but the closed office door, matching all the other closed doors lining this hallway, this slaughterhouse full of corpses, would slow them down for a minute or so at least.

  Bolan glanced at Katrina.

  She caught the glance and smiled back bravely. She held the Beretta like a master.

  He slammed a fresh clip into the AK-47 and rushed across to the single window of the office. He reached the window and stood alongside it to look out and down.

  The window was directly above the side doorway. Bolan nodded to no one in particular. He had read their security response correctly.

  Three soldiers with Kalashnikovs stood in a tight half circle around the entrance, rifles fanning the blowing snow, which had whipped up heavier during the time that Bolan had been inside the building.

  The prison compound, or what Bolan could see of it from the window, crackled with activity. A klaxon siren moaned eerily in the half-light, and the first gray of dawn cut through the eddying clouds of snow. Most of the activity came from in front of the building.

  He smashed out the window glass with the barrel of the AK-47 and began squeezing the trigger before the sound of shattering glass could warn the three below. Blazing lead pitched them onto their faces. The snow beneath them began to turn into spreading crimson designs that rapidly disappeared as new snow covered the stains and the bodies.

  Bolan unhitched the climbing rope he had used to enter Building D. He slung the AK over his shoulder and unholstered Big Thunder. He crawled out on the window ledge and looked back at Katrina, who joined him at the window.