Terror Ballot

by Don Pendleton

  “Yes, sir,” Graybeard said.

  Levesque turned to leave. “Farewell, Agent Cooper,” he said, sounding almost mournful. “I regret that the life of a noble warrior such as yourself should end this way. But I imagine you have never thought your death would be otherwise. Nor do your superiors in the CIA, I should think.” He walked out of the room.

  “I’ll find you, Levesque,” Bolan said to his back.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Graybeard disappeared for a moment. When he returned he was holding a large butcher knife, clearly taken from Tessier’s kitchen. He was also eating a sandwich, also likely taken from Tessier’s kitchen. Skinhead looked askance at his partner.

  “What?” Graybeard asked, his mouth half full. He closed the door to the rear room, cutting off the sounds of other ES terrorists moving about the house.

  “Give me the knife,” Skinhead said. “Let’s see how brave he is when he’s missing a few fingers.”

  “We should try the water some more.”

  “All right.” Skinhead dropped the knife and picked up the bucket. “Put the cloth on him.”

  Bolan drew in air and held his breath. The foul, wet T-shirt was again draped over his face. He waited, counting off in his head, while the bucket’s contents were emptied over his face. He had read, long ago, about a concentration camp prisoner who had built an elaborate clock in his mind during the long months of his imprisonment. When he was released, that prisoner set about constructing the clock he had imagined. It was an inspirational story, and the kind of thing that could take a man’s mind off the torture he was experiencing—

  “Look at him!” Skinhead shouted, ripping the T-shirt free and throwing it on the floor. The wet smack of cloth against tiles was reminiscent of a gunshot. “He does not care. We could waterboard him all night, and he would continue to lie there. It is time to make him fear for his pieces.”

  Graybeard smiled. The expression did his face no favors. “Very well. If he will not talk, let us see if we can make him scream.”

  Bolan, meanwhile, was running the numbers in his head.

  He was alone with Skinhead and Graybeard, but in the outer rooms of Tessier’s home, there were multiple hostiles. He had no way to know how many, other than the assumption that it was probably a number greater than two and less than a platoon.

  There were no assault rifles or submachine guns in evidence. Possibly any weapons of this sort carried by the two men now standing over him had been left in the outer room. He tried to imagine where he would leave his Kalashnikov or MAT-49, were he one of the pair. Such speculation was idle at best. The guns could be leaning on the wall outside the door, or they could be in the trunk of a car outside, or strapped to a motorcycle, or anywhere in the world that might as well be on the moon for all the good it did him.

  Graybeard had a pistol in a holster on his belt. It looked like a Makarov. There were enough of those floating around this part of the world, part of a flood of surplus small arms issuing from the former Soviet Union in the wake of its collapse. It wasn’t much, especially given the number of enemies he would need to eliminate. But it would have to do.

  Time to go back to work.

  Bolan drew in a deep breath. Feeling his limbs, his body, his muscles, he concentrated. He could feel every part of himself go tense. To the two ES torturers it had to have looked as if their prey had suddenly gone stiff as a board.

  “Look at him now,” Graybeard said. “Not so brave now that we’re going to carve some pieces off him.”

  The bench beneath Bolan began to creak and wobble under the strain.

  “That’s more like it,” Skinhead said. He turned to his temporary partner in crime. “Have you ever done this before?”

  The weight bench creaked.

  “How hard can it be?” Graybeard asked, shrugging. “We start hurting him until it is permanent. When we take out his eyes, when we carve out his tongue, when we chop off his fingers, then maybe he will feel like telling us something useful.”

  “I want to carve out his eye,” Skinhead said. He picked up the butcher knife. “That’s a good place to start. He has two.”

  “And five fingers,” Graybeard stated. “Perhaps we start on those next. There is a children’s rhyme for fingers, isn’t there?”

  A piece of the bench beneath Bolan cracked, loudly.

  “I do not know it,” Skinhead admitted. He turned to the bench. “He is so afraid the bench is shaking apart.”

  “We’ll make it up as we go,” Graybeard said. “Why don’t you take that knife and—”

  The weight bench snapped so loudly that Graybeard started and backed up. Bolan performed what was essentially a sit-up, rearing up at the waist, dragging the pieces of the upper legs where they were taped to his arms. His legs he pulled in at the knees, as if performing a leg press, but so violently that the entire H-frame of the lower legs came with them, tape and all. Graybeard bent, trying to make a grab for Bolan’s legs, doing the first thing that came to mind in a situation he clearly had not anticipated.

  Bolan smashed Graybeard in the face with the H-frame.

  Teeth flew. There was very little blood. Some part of Bolan’s mind realized that Graybeard actually wore dentures, and the strike with the weight-bench frame had smashed them while probably dislocating the man’s jaw. Graybeard had time to raise one hand above his head as Bolan lifted his legs and brought the H-frame back down. The scream that left the gray-haired man’s lips was horrible and brief. His fingers were crushed by the heavy piece of weight bench.

  Skinhead cursed loudly. From his position on the bench, Bolan could only swivel and thrust his legs, complete with their H-frame battering ram, at the younger man. The blade of the butcher knife made contact directly in the bundle of tape. Skinhead made the opening bigger when he tried to wrench the knife free, but Bolan swiveled away, taking the weapon with him.

  He rolled off the bench.

  The floor came up to hit him painfully in the ribs. Curling into a ball, he brought his knees up to his chest and his arms down. The knife was still sticking in the wad of gray duct tape. He brought his hands over it and pulled, ripping free, separating the tape from his wrists. He had just enough time to get his fingers around the butcher knife when Skinhead landed on him.

  He saw spots as the air was driven out of his lungs. Skinhead yelled obscenities at him. Bolan, gripping the kitchen knife, brought it up in a tight, vicious arc.

  He planted the triangular blade in the terrorist’s eye socket.

  The death rattle was unmistakable, as was the twitching of Skinhead’s foot against the floor. Bolan wrenched the knife free of the dead man’s skull and cut the tape around his legs. He moved as quickly as he could. When the door of the rear room was wrenched open by another of the terrorists just beyond, he was already diving for the Makarov holstered on the late Graybeard’s belt.

  The man in the doorway had time to look surprised. His jaw dropped, and he inhaled sharply to cry out.

  Bolan put a round through his open mouth.

  The recoil told him the round he was firing was the 9 mm Makarov, which was a little sharper than the .380 ACP or 9 mm Kurz that was another common chambering in this model. He also knew that he likely had only half a dozen rounds left, possibly less, depending on how full the weapon’s magazine had been kept. He would just need to make them all count.

  Bolan stepped into the adjoining room, which was one of the home’s bedrooms. This one had apparently been the master; it boasted a large bed and a big-screen television, on which some lurid movie was still playing with the sound off. One of the terrorists—lying on the bed, naked to the waist—had apparently been napping when his partner breached the rear room and died in the doorway.

  The shirtless man, very much awake now, was scrambling for a Kalashnikov at the foot of the bed. Bol
an beat him to it, clouting him with the heavy steel Makarov. The terrorist rolled off the bed, unconscious, and landed in a heap on the hardwood floor.

  Gunfire raked the floor at Bolan’s feet. He was forced back, the Kalashnikov just out of reach, and took cover behind the bed. Bullets punched through the mattress but, fortunately for Bolan, Tessier had preferred the modern foam kind, not something made of springs and empty air that would have proven no protection from bullets. The soldier laid flat as the occasional round made its way through to score the plaster wall above and behind him. He was mostly protected.

  “I’m hit!” he shouted in French. “I need help.” Then he waited.

  He hadn’t expected them to fall for it. It was an old trick, a stupid trick, one that he would never allow to be used against him. But one of the shooters beyond the opposite door of the bedroom was dumb enough to poke his head in for a look around.

  Bolan popped up and put a bullet through his nose.

  There were now corpses in both doorways of the master bedroom. Bolan wished he had Bayard’s war bag, but unfortunately he had no idea where it or his borrowed pistol might be. These had been taken from him while he was unconscious. His smartphone was also missing. This hindered his communications with the Farm considerably. The phone itself was proof against most intrusions and would destroy itself and any data it carried if tampered with...but it would be a little too much like the bad old days if he had to hunt up a pay phone just to contact Stony Man.

  Rolling over the bed, Bolan landed on the opposite side just as yet another ES gunner made the doorway. The man was holding a MAT-49 and, as Bolan turned to bring up the Makarov, the would-be-killer pulled the trigger.

  Bolan was showered with plaster and tufts of foam. The submachine gun loosed its volley in a ragged full-auto stream that traveled above his head, through the mattress and into the ceiling. The soldier pointed the Makarov and pulled the trigger, shooting the gunner through the forehead once, twice, pulling the trigger a third time, snapping the man’s head and body back, making sure the rise of the weapon continued into the ceiling.

  He had felt it on the last trigger pull: the Makarov was empty. He left it on the floor and scooped up the Kalashnikov. The rifle, as familiar to him as breathing, was found on battlefields throughout the world, nearly identical in every incarnation he had encountered. He pulled the bolt back just enough to verify that a round was chambered, set the weapon—which, he had no doubt, was utterly illegal for a civilian to own here in France—to single shot and brought it to his shoulder.

  Using the doorway for cover, he peered into the next room, exposing only his eye. He barely pulled back fast enough. Rifle bullets, fired from other assault rifles, began perforating the wall. Again he hit the floor, and again he was pelted with plaster dust and debris as the 7.62 mm rounds wreaked havoc in Tessier’s bedroom.

  The big-screen television was shot in several places, resulting in crazy whorls on the still-powered plasma screen. A lamp was shattered. A series of shelves bolted to the wall had been brought down, causing a terrible clatter when the various bric-a-brac broke on the floor. Tessier had been something of a hoarder and a slob. There were a million different small personal items piled up in the bedroom, and they were soon in millions more pieces as the ES shooters blazed away.

  The violent action was sure to draw law enforcement, too. An isolated shot here or there was one thing. Mysterious comings and goings to Tessier’s home could probably be overlooked, even among uniformed men on motorcycles, occasionally wearing masks. Any neighbors in the vicinity would be inclined to look the other way, as men and women all over the world generally tried not to get involved if they could help it.

  But a gun battle, an out-and-out indoor war, would prompt someone to panic and call for help. That was a good thing for residents of the neighborhood, provided whichever department responded to the call was not overwhelmed by the violent paramilitary force of ES goons.

  But even if the French authorities were equal to the task before them, their presence was bad news for Bolan. They would want to detain him, and when world got back through channels that one Matthew Cooper was in custody, those higher up the chain would want to have him brought in.

  Once he was in custody, it was anyone’s guess whether Brognola’s considerable influence, not to mention the President’s, would be sufficient to get Bolan shipped back to U.S. soil.

  Given how abruptly uncooperative the French had become—and Bolan would be the first to admit they had plenty of provocation to feel that way—Bolan wasn’t looking to put money on that call either way. To say nothing of the headaches it would cause an already harried and stressed Brognola.

  Truly the big Fed paid often for his association with Bolan, the currency being in antacid tablets and late-night phone calls with the world’s power brokers. The soldier did not envy his longtime friend that responsibility.

  Bolan waited for a lull in the gunfire. When it came, he poked his rifle up above the level of the mattress and cut loose several times through the doorway, not knowing or caring if his shots came close to his prey. He just needed to put them back behind cover for a moment. He was already on his feet and moving again.

  He reached the doorway, rolled and was almost hit by a burst of submachine-gun fire.

  The rounds tore a furrow in the floor at his right. The gunner, another ES man in camouflage fatigues but without his mask, was doing his best to empty a MAT-49 into Bolan. The soldier sidestepped and pumped three shots from the AK into the man’s gut, doubling him over. For good measure he punched another round through the top of the enemy’s skull.

  “Go! Go!” he heard someone shout in the outer room. With the AK at his shoulder he rushed after the voices. No doubt the man hiding behind the couch in the living area was hoping Bolan would miss him as he went through.

  The soldier saw the movement and turned as the ES man behind the sofa popped up holding a MAT-49. Bolan fired at him, driving him back behind the dubious cover of the couch, and then flipped his AK’s selector switch to full-auto. The clack of the switch seemed loud in the living area.

  Bolan hosed the sofa.

  The scream from behind it and, moments later, a spreading pool of blood told Bolan everything he needed to know. The soldier snapped the magazine out of his rifle, checked it and noted that only two rounds remained.

  He snapped the magazine back into the weapon with a practiced movement and hurried through the kitchen to the side door, which still hung open. His jacket—the one Bayard had appropriated for him—was there, hanging on a hook, almost as if he’d put it there himself. He shrugged it on.

  There was a chance the enemy was waiting to ambush him outside, but he took that chance, charging through the opening and dropping to one knee when he got outside. When he saw no one, he gambled and ran for the back of the house.

  He spotted them then. Two men in camouflage ran from the house through a field adjacent to another property. It was a very long field, close to one hundred yards, he judged. This was the French countryside people talked about.

  Trees screened the neighboring home from where Bolan stood. He checked the area, scanning for witnesses and innocents who might get caught in the cross fire. He saw no one. There was nothing moving, for the moment, except the two fleeing terrorists.

  He took a step forward, settling into his stance from a standing position, with the AK against his shoulder and the stock pressing against his cheek. Then took a deep breath, let out half and held the rest.

  The Kalashnikov was a durable weapon that had generous tolerances and a simple design. The weapon could be kept in working order under conditions that would render a more modern, more ergonomic battle rifle useless. It was not a sniper’s weapon.

  But any weapon Mack Bolan held became a sniper’s weapon.

  He could feel the wind against his left cheek and made a calcu
lation.

  The rifle barked once. A fraction of a moment later, the first of the two men dropped, a ragged exit hole where the center of his head had once been. The Executioner took aim once more, sighted along the second man’s lower leg and fired again.

  The fleeing terrorist toppled.

  Bolan closed the ground between himself and the fallen man at a rough jog. He was hoping to find more magazines for his acquired Kalashnikov, but when he reached the first corpse, he found nothing he could use. There wasn’t so much as a folding knife.

  Standing, he walked over to where the second man was crawling along the grass. His left calf was soaked in blood, the leg clearly useless to him. The soldier paused long enough to open the back of the Kalashnikov, pull its bolt and throw it as far from him as he could. He dumped the now useless rifle.

  The soldier toed the crawling man over onto his back. The man screamed as the movement jarred his leg. Looking up at Bolan, he rattled off a string of invectives in French.

  Bolan stared down at him. He bent, patted the man down and found nothing except a square container the size of a sandwich and wrapped in pink antistatic plastic. The fallen terrorist grabbed for it when Bolan took it away from him.

  “This,” Bolan said in French, “is what you came for, isn’t it? What Lemaire’s men came to get before you intercepted them. It’s Tessier’s hard drive.”

  “Yes,” the man replied.

  “I’m willing to bet,” Bolan said, “that if the evidence implicating Deparmond was manufactured by Tessier, then it’s on this drive. That means another expert in the field can verify that Deparmond was framed. That will point the finger of blame to Gaston. And all that will ruin Gaston’s plans.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the terrorist said. He shook his head and looked away.