Tanya, or whatever her real name was, died without realizing Bolan had yielded to his gut suspicions and had removed the bullets from her gun in her apartment during those moments when she had left him alone with her purse in the kitchen while she had fetched her coat before the drive to Balashika.
The blonde toppled backward under the impact of the projectiles as if yanked from her feet by a tremendous tug of an invisible wire. The bullets wiped the beauty from her face in a swirl of spurting blood and brains, and other slugs dotted her high-fashion tweed ensemble, bullet holes spewing globs of red gore against the wall behind her before she slammed into it, then pitched forward unceremoniously in a crumpled heap.
Bolan looked away, unleathering his Beretta, the poison gas not affecting him because of specially designed miniature nostril plugs that had also been in the attaché case — the first clue for Bolan of what Niktov had given him.
He peered up over the conference table, not ready to believe Strakhov was dead until he saw it with his own eyes, in time to see the door across from the hallway entrance slam shut behind running footsteps pounding up the stairway passage on the other side.
The cloud of poison gas dissipated, and fifteen deceased KGB savages, the best brains the enemy had in the espionage and world terror department, were nothing now but dead meat.
Strakhov had either been wearing the same type of nose plugs as Bolan — very possible, Bolan realized, considering how much Strakhov knew about the "Sergei Fedorin" deception — or the boss savage had been too fast for the gas to reach him. He had not been in range of bullets fired from the attaché case; there had probably been damn good reason why Strakhov had not left his standing position close to the door during the showdown.
Bolan darted toward the doorway through which Strakhov had disappeared.
The bodyguards in the hall made no effort to enter the room. Bolan had locked the door on his way in, confirming that this conference room would be ultrasound-proofed in addition to being free of bugging devices and the like. The top dogs of Group Nord would have had it no other way.
He charged around the end of the table to the doorway in pursuit of the real top dog, the evilest of the evil, hitting the door with a kick of rage and fury that punched it inward off its hinges. The Executioner leaped to the side, the Beretta in firing position, but no gunfire stabbed at him from the narrow stairway.
He heard the rapid footsteps of the Soviet spymaster's escape up beyond where the stairs curved around out of sight. Bolan dashed into the passageway without hesitation after the fleeing footfalls.
He had spent enough time hunting Strakhov down in their global cat-and-mouse dance of death to be able to read his enemy like a book. Strakhov was heading up to the roof to get his hands on the flare gun he must have secreted up there sometime before.
The boss savage had said it himself: the master plan called for more than simply terminating a CIA spy who had called himself Anton Petrovsky and an Executioner named Bolan.
Strakhov's plot also entailed the full-scale closing down of Moscow's already shaky dissident underground. Strakhov had men stationed all over Moscow, all over Russia; he had to know he could not trust any standard means of communication for something this big, with a CIA mole planted right in his own office. It had probably worried hell out of him when Petrovsky had walked in early that morning to see the major general receiving the flare pistol.
And it had come to this — Strakhov making his way to the roof to get his hands on the flare gun, to fire a colored flare into the sky above Moscow before Bolan could reach him. The flare would not only be a death sentence for untold Russian dissidents but would also summon reinforcements to the roof where Bolan would be trapped.
Bolan poured on the steam.
The stairway curved up and up, past closed doors, as Bolan gained on the escaping footfalls that sounded frantic now.
He heard a metal door bank open up there and knew Strakhov had made it to the roof.
And the flare pistol.
He burst through the doorway onto the flat roof of the building as Strakhov gained a low ledge fifty feet away and reached down under some bricks stacked there. Strakhov straightened, gripping the flare pistol. He whirled to see Bolan appear and tracked the flare pistol up, not at Bolan, but skyward.
Bolan leaped across the distance separating them, almost losing his balance on the slickness of melted snow coating the roof. A cruel grin of triumph curled Strakhov's fleshy lips when he saw Bolan lower the Beretta.
The Executioner charged forward.
Strakhov bent his finger around the trigger of the flare gun, his arm fully extending to fire the flare into the sky.
"You lose, Executioner."
Bolan did not fire the Beretta. He did not want a spastic death twitch from Strakhov to trigger the flare gun, sending a colored flare into the sky that would seal the fate of all those freedom fighters waging what good fight they could against the slave masters. He reached Strakhov before the KGB boss could pull the flare gun's trigger.
Strakhov's sneer turned into surprise and panic.
Bolan reached up to yank Strakhov's gun arm down, his grip on the Beretta making it difficult.
The Russian swung at Bolan, who started twisting Strakhov's arm once he had lowered it, forcing the flare gun around toward Strakhov's body.
Strakhov fought with every ounce of his strength to keep his aim from being turned in upon himself. He slipped his index finger away from the flare gun's trigger.
The two men's faces were inches apart, features distorted now with the effort of the struggle.
Then Strakhov realized what was about to happen, and his eyes widened in fear. He started to scream a plea at Bolan, but by this time Bolan already had the snout of the flare gun within two inches of Strakhov's abdominal region.
Bolan curved his own finger around the flare gun's trigger. He squeezed the trigger and released his hold of the flare gun, stepping back as he did so.
A thunderous roar blasted Strakhov away from Bolan, and his whole midsection appeared to explode from within.
A loud hissing sound almost drowned out the Russian's dreadful scream of agony as he backpedaled a couple of steps, the murderous hissing noise of white-hot magnesium buried deep in his intestines burning brightly.
The ledge of the roof stopped his backward progress, bending him back at the knees. Screaming his lungs out, clouded in the hissing stench of his own roasting flesh from the flare burning within his guts, Strakhov toppled, the screams following him all the way down. Then the cries ceased abruptly.
Bolan invested a few seconds in stepping forward to peer over the ledge. He saw Strakhov's body seven stories below, facedown, sizzling, melting snow that extinguished the live flare burning out his belly.
Bolan spared only a rapid look at the man he had come to kill, then he whirled, retracing his course back across the roof and into the raised shelter that led to the stairwell passage up which he had pursued Strakhov. He hustled down the stairs two at a time.
He had already seen, from the roof, immediate response to the grotesque sight of the red-colored, flare-enveloped body hurtling to its doom. He had glimpsed startled reactions from those who witnessed the fall, and at that moment he knew Strakhov's corpse would be surrounded by sentries and officers trying to make sense of what had happened.
A braying siren pierced the air from the complex outside the building as Bolan counted off the third floor on his way down, the stairs obviously reserved for the use of Strakhov and his top-echelon personnel.
The activity would be concentrated in the main hallways of the building, and if he did run into anyone he would either kill them or use the Sixteenth Directorate cover to exploit the confusion, whichever would seem handiest.
No one intercepted him on the stairs.
He reached the ground floor and the narrow doorway marking the end of Strakhov's secret stairway. He paused at the door, turning the handle with his free hand, and opened the door just eno
ugh to eyeball the scene outside separating him from the helicopter pad.
Three crewmen stood beside one of the choppers, which had been revved up to a low idle while Bolan had been busy inside the building. The crewmen, like almost everyone else he could see on the base, had their attention on the direction where Major General Strakhov had fallen.
He saw no one else across the yardage between the building and the landing pad with the three Hind gunships. Personnel scurried from different directions around the complex, the crowd growing in the less than sixty seconds since the man with the burning magnesium flare in his stomach had fallen from the roof. The flare's colored plumes of smoke rose no higher than the roof of the First Chief Directorate Building.
Bolan quit the stairwell doorway, advancing toward the chopper landing pad in the opposite direction as the personnel across the way running toward the bizarre occurrence at the other side of the building.
No one took notice of him.
In all the excitement throbbing through the research center at that moment, "Sergei Fedorin" could have been anyone racing to attend to some matter related to the KGB major general's fall.
He angled his rapid advance on the gunships in from the blind side of the crewmen. The first inkling they had that something was wrong was when the Executioner cut them down with withering auto fire from the silenced 93-R. Nine-millimeter zingers hosed the three crewmen into oblivion, their bodies flying to the ground, blocked from sight of all the activity as response to the occurrence near the building intensified.
For all Bolan knew, the bodyguards in the third-floor corridor may well have discovered the corpses of the other directorate bosses in the conference room by now, spreading the alert about that, too.
He jumped in through the side hatch door of the idling chopper and leaped toward the cockpit.
He revved the big bird to life, the rotor throb humming louder, drawing some attention from those around or rushing toward the headquarters building.
He worked the stick.
The helicopter rose from the pad.
He banked the chopper around, holding it in low hover.
He triggered two missiles that turned the other two gunships into mushrooming detonations of orange-red destruction.
That changed everything on the base, pulling every eye skyward.
Rifles, too.
Bolan piloted the gunship higher, banking her around again from a strafing run over the motor pool and parking lot.
He could hear bullets from below spanging off the Hind.
The chopper swept in fast and low, its rockets leaving twin paths of destruction below him, picking up vehicles left and right, demolishing the cars into unrecognizable hunks of smoldering metal, tearing human bodies as scattering KGB troopers were eaten up by the hammering, deafening concussions.
Bolan knew he had to get out of there on the double.
Planes, choppers and troops of every description would be receiving alert orders to deploy immediately to this base at this very instant; a hijacked Hind gunship would be easy enough to spot and shoot down before he could fly the Mi-24 more than a few klicks in any direction.
But he could not leave without a final farewell to the headshed of an enemy now without bosses to guide it because the Executioner had killed every one of them that mattered.
The Mi-24 was not taking hits, the fire down below too far out of range for them, but not for the ice-eyed man behind the chopper's controls.
He steadied the war bird and unleashed a couple of missiles at the seven-story structure that housed the First Chief Directorate.
It would be years before the terror network recovered from what the Executioner had wrought there today. He hovered around long enough to bear witness and feel good when missile after missile zeroed into different points of that modern temple of depravity; a fire burst here and another there the full length of the glass-and-aluminum structure, turning it into a raging inferno.
A funeral pyre for those trapped inside.
He pulled the chopper around for withdrawal, knowing he would have to set the Mi-24 down real fast.
They would have this area sectored off already, closing in.
He was not sure he would be able to make it.
Then he spotted the panel truck parked alongside the road, a half klick away from the base toward Moscow and the route he and Tanya Yesilov had driven here less than thirty minutes ago.
He lowered the chopper to treetop level and buzzed the truck. The three people who stood around it waved up at him.
He recognized the behemoth forms of Igor and Boris, the two black market undergrounders he had last seen bodyguarding Zara at the after-hours club in Moscow, before he had met Niktov.
Katrina Mozzhechkov stood between the Gypsy giants, waving with both arms at the chopper and sending worried looks down the road in the direction of the base. But Bolan saw no traffic in sight yet, military or civilian, except for the parked truck.
He set the chopper down behind a stretch of trees where the gunship could be easily spotted from the air but not from ground forces if they arrived first.
He left the armored pilot seat of the Hind, debarking at a run while the rotors were still whirling.
He jogged toward the truck and the trio around it. He grabbed the top of the latex mask at the base of the neck and yanked it from his head, throwing the crumpled mask to the ground.
He reached Igor, Boris and Katrina.
The Russian lovely ran into his arms for one hell of a hug and kiss that did not take long but said plenty.
He set her down with a grin. "Glad to see you, too," he told the three of them.
Igor looked up the road in the direction of the base. "Here they come!" he snarled. "A jeepful of the bastards!"|
They hurried toward the truck.
Bolan and Katrina ran holding hands.
"My prayers have been answered," she told Bolan breathlessly as they reached the truck. "I thought I would never see you again!"
He took the truck's steering wheel. "Thanks for the pickup," he told Katrina as she flopped into the seat alongside him.
"I told my friends what you did for me, what you did for all of us," she said as he cranked the ignition to life. "I told the different cell leaders that we must combine forces to get you out. We are stronger now. Niktov's people told us what the objective was, and we came here to help."
Igor and Boris rushed to the back of the truck. They opened the rear doors and hopped in.
Bolan slammed the truck into forward motion.
The military vehicle full of KGB pursuers was closing in fast, less than a tenth of a kilometer behind them.
Bolan had tried to demolish all of the Balashika vehicles with his strafing run back at the base but obviously had missed this one. Now it was filled with eight savages, almost upon them.
He fed the truck all it had, upshifting, gaining some speed, but not enough. He looked at the rearview mirror.
He saw Igor holding open the rear doors of the truck for Boris, who aimed and fired a rifle grenade launcher, which resounded loudly within the confines of the truck. An instant later the pursuing vehicle exploded into a twisting, turning, rolling ball of fire and airborne bodies, the sound of the blast lost to Bolan beneath the whine of the truck's engine.
They hurtled down the highway toward the suburbs of Moscow where they could lose themselves in heavy traffic.
Bolan, steering the truck with a good woman named Katrina sitting beside him, felt a mixture of sensations. He felt satisfaction at a mission that was now smoldering evidence of a job well done. A worldwide terror machine without the powers that had ruled it for so long would be replaced by the chaos such a vacuum always brings. And a dissident movement within Russia would be made stronger than ever before as Katrina herself had told Bolan.
A blood debt had been settled.
There could be no doubt this time. Strakhov had slipped through Bolan's fingers, but he would never again lift a finger to order atroc
ities and horror.
A woman named April Rose could rest easy; a largeliving soul set free now that those who had masterminded her death had been taken care of. And an Executioner named Bolan could maybe afford himself a short respite from hell.
Another large-living soul named Katrina had already touched him where it counted. Where a man needs to be touched, in the heart and mind and spirit, to remind him that he is a man; that the miles through hell on earth mean something, are worth the sacrifice.
He needed this woman. He could see in her eyes that she needed him in that same way. Those "better circumstances" he had mentioned to her two hours ago were finally at hand and those moments to come, shared with Katrina, stolen from everything else, would mean something, too.
Maybe he would forget a two-timing bitch named Tanya.
The bottom line was that the mission objective had been achieved.
The KGB high command was in ruins.
Strakhov was dead.
April Rose would rest in peace...
Moscow Massacre Page 19
