Stand Down

by Don Pendleton

  The warrior crawled toward the timer, one torturous foot at a time, hand out in front, then a leg, then another hand, then another leg. His head pounded from the repeated stunning, and there was a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth, but he kept going. He reached the mechanism as the timer counted below one minute. Rearing back on his haunches, Bolan studied the timer attached to the nozzle, tracing the wires, then shrugged. Grabbing them all in one hand, he tore them out with a hard yank. The timer kept counting down, but with no way to send the signal to open the nozzle, he figured he was safe. Just to be sure, he disabled the timer on the burner by smashing it with the butt of his pistol.

  The crisis averted, Bolan turned his attention to figuring out how to get out of the room. A quick pace of the perimeter revealed that the air lock was the only way in or out. The vents were too small, and also blocked by fans. Bolan only had his Beretta, which would be useless against the thick, wire-embedded glass, and the oxygen mask and tank. He considered fashioning some kind of explosive device out of the tank, but quickly rejected the idea, as the concussion in such an enclosed space would probably knock him unconscious, or do even worse damage. He turned to a long lab table covered with beakers, test tubes and pipettes that stood opposite the vats.

  Examining the various chemicals, he spotted a large glass beaker with a heavy rubber stopper at one end, filled with a clear liquid. On it was the simple label Hcl. Grabbing it, Bolan walked back to the air lock and examined the seal between the glass and the metal frame. When he was satisfied, he shoved a stool over and carefully climbed on, holding the beaker with both hands. He set it on top of the air lock, then climbed atop the platform. Once there, he made sure his mask was secure, then drew his Beretta and put five shots into the glass near the corner. As he’d hoped, the entire pane starred, but didn’t break due to the wire holding the layers together.

  Removing the stopper, he poured the liquid on the seam between the glass and the metal. The steel began to smoke as the concentrated hydrochloric acid ate through it. Bolan didn’t know if he had enough to weaken the entire plate, so he concentrated the acid on two adjoining sides, hoping that would be enough for him to be able to break a hole through the weakened glass large enough to get out.

  The fumes rose up as the acid continued corroding the metal, and Bolan felt the heat from the chemical exchange waft over him. He held the mask firmly in place, knowing that breathing in the fumes could cause illness, and long-term exposure would result in death.

  A red light flashed on, and a siren blared in the laboratory. Bolan took this as a good sign, figuring he’d most likely breached the air lock. Then he stepped carefully on the edge of the structure, and stomped hard on the corner where he’d poured most of the acid. It buckled, but still held. He stomped on it again, aware that the sole of his boot was smoking from the residual acid on the glass. The corner buckled, and he kept stomping on it until it bent, creating a hole large enough for him to drop through. The only problem was the leftover acid on the glass and metal. Bolan looked around for a lab coat or something to protect himself, but there was nothing immediately available. Tearing the sleeves off his shirt, he wrapped them around his hands, then grabbed the edges of the frame and dropped into the air lock. The next thing he did was to get rid of the cloth, which was already reacting to the acid it had absorbed.

  Although the keypad to the outer door was glowing red, indicating the door was locked down, Bolan had encountered enough of them that he knew how to jury-rig a bypass as long as the pad was complete. The hard part was removing the keypad, which he managed to do with his dagger. Running the bypass took another two minutes before Bolan could step out into the empty hallway.

  The entire corridor was bathed in red emergency lights, and a recorded woman’s voice warned that all personnel should evacuate due to a possible chemical leak. Bolan ran to the large room, where he spotted Everado’s motionless body still lying on the floor amid the rubble of the desk. Heartless bastard didn’t even check on his own son, he thought as he ran for the main doors and out into the bright morning light. Spotting De Cavallos in the extended Escalade leaving through the front gate, he sprinted around the corner, hoping to find a vehicle in which to give chase.

  The only vehicle was a small semi used to move trailers throughout the compound. Bolan glanced around, ran to the corner of the building and spotted a white Mercedes-Benz AMG coupe with a license plate that read DECAV1. He raced toward it.

  Busting out the driver’s side window with one shot, he was in, and had disabled the alarm and hotwired the car in less than two minutes. Peeling out, he took off after the Escalade.

  The sport sedan caught up with the SUV in less than a mile. However, now that Bolan was near him, he had to figure out a way to stop De Cavallos. The car wasn’t nearly heavy enough to run the Cadillac off the road, and Bolan had no weapons that would penetrate the armor. He only had the car….

  Juking left, the Executioner mashed the gas pedal to the floor, and when De Cavallos swerved to try to cut him off, Bolan cut right and sped past the lumbering SUV to the open road ahead. Shots rang out behind him, but the soldier concentrated on putting as much distance between him and the Escalade as possible. The flat ribbon of highway stretched into the distance, vanishing into the horizon. When Bolan could no longer see the SUV in his rearview mirror, he stomped on the brakes and spun the wheel hard right, sending the luxury automobile into a bootlegger’s turn. The car spun 180 degrees and stopped when facing the direction he had just come from. Buckling his seat belt, Bolan drove into the center of the highway, stopped the car and waited.

  A few seconds later, the Escalade appeared in the distance. De Cavallos braked when he saw the car idling in the middle of the empty highway. Seconds passed.

  Bolan just stared at the motionless Escalade, one hand on the steering wheel, one hand on the gearshift. He imagined he could see the other man behind the wheel of the SUV wondering if Bolan was serious, wondering if he could survive the next few minutes. Wondering if his vehicle would survive the contest—and knowing there was no way out except through the other car.

  Bolan simply wondered if the other man had finally figured out that he hardly ever bluffed.

  With a squeal of tires and roar of the engine, the Escalade leaped forward, its run-flat tires slapping at the pavement as it gathered speed.

  Bolan popped the clutch and laid black rubber on the road as the Mercedes-Benz surged forward, the acceleration pressing him back in his seat.

  The two vehicles closed the distance between them rapidly, the tall Escalade quickly filling the sedan’s windshield. Bolan set his arms and hung on grimly, aware that he’d have no time to turn in the next two seconds—and not planning to anyway.

  The space between them shrank to nothing in a few seconds. Bolan was close enough to see the whites of De Cavallos’s eyes, see his hands clutching the steering wheel of the SUV with iron-hard determination. But at the last second—he blinked.

  The drug runner hauled the wheel of his truck hard right when the vehicles were less than twenty yards apart. The heavy Escalade started to turn, but Bolan steered with him, sending the sedan into the side of the SUV. With its forward momentum redirected by the collision, the nose of the speeding car plowed into the passenger door of the Escalade hard enough to flip the SUV.

  Its front end destroyed, the Mercedes-Benz spun off at its own crazy angle, rising up on its two driver’s-side wheels before crashing back down to the ground. The car continuing its spin out until it hit the ditch on the other side of the road, finally coming to a jarring stop half in and half out of the ditch, its crumpled, smoking hood pointing toward the sky.

  Surrounded by several rapidly deflating air bags, Bolan shook his head and checked himself over. As he’d expected, the solid German engineering had enabled him to walk away from the accident with sore muscles, but no permanent or life-threatening injuries.

  Pushing open the door, he got out, drew his Beretta and walked over to the Escal
ade, which had ended up on its roof, the cab crushed under the weight of the vehicle, its rear wheels spinning uselessly. De Cavallos had been thrown from the vehicle during its wild crash, and he lay pinned underneath the bulk of the SUV, his face and arms flushed from the blood forced out of his crushed limbs. Bolan aimed his pistol at the man, but lowered it just as quickly when he realized there was no need for a bullet.

  De Cavallos gasped for breath when he saw his tormentor approach. “I couldn’t…believe…my eyes…when I saw you…in my car…I never thought…you’d get out…of the lab….”

  “I thought you’d have figured out by now I don’t give up easily.” Bolan knelt by the man. “I wanted to tell you that your son is still alive.”

  “Everado’s…alive?”

  “Yeah, and I’m taking him in to testify about everything that’s happened here. Between that and what the Bittermans’ daughter can tell the police, Cristobal will be shut down faster than you were.”

  De Cavallos had no answer for that, he just sucked in a weak breath, then let it out again—the last one he’d ever have. Bolan reached down and closed his eyes, then stood and pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number.

  “Rollins…yeah, it’s done…have someone come pick me up, would you? I’m about five miles out of town. Yeah, they’ll find me…I’ll be the beat-up guy walking on the side of the road.”

  He disconnected, then dialed another number. “Bear? Yeah, it’s me. It’s all over.”

  Epilogue

  “If you’d told me you were answering my call on a hospital gurney, I’d have found another way back to town.”

  That afternoon, Bolan stood by Rollins’s hospital bed. The restaurant owner had his arm in a sling, and a bandage covered the top of his head where he’d taken a nasty cut from a piece of flying shrapnel. The doctor had assured Bolan that the man was going to come out of the battle on Main Street, as the survivors were already calling it, with no permanent injuries.

  Rollins reached out his uninjured hand, which Bolan took and pumped firmly. “It was worth it to get our town back. Hell, it would have been worth it if I hadn’t made it out of there alive, just knowing that I’d done everything I could for my home and the people I care about.”

  Bolan just nodded, swallowing around the lump in his throat. After all, the same couldn’t be said for everyone who’d been involved in the firefight. Although they’d won the battle, they had taken severe casualties. Eighteen townspeople had been killed, with another thirty-five injured, nine severely. Bolan had spent a good deal of time in the morgue, viewing every body and getting as much data as he could on them so he could get Hal Bronola to arrange for government benefits for their families. While everyone involved had volunteered, it shouldn’t have gone down the way it had, and Bolan would carry that scar on his soul for the rest of his life, added to the ones that had already been placed there during his endless war.

  “I suppose you’ll be heading out, back to wherever you were going before you stumbled on our little town in the middle of nowhere, huh?”

  “Yeah, but I’m going to make sure you’re able to rebuild, and that everyone involved in the battle and their families are taken care of. Too many of you made the ultimate sacrifice, and I’m not going to forget that.”

  Rollins nodded. “Thanks, Matt. By the way, just how is this going to be spun to the press, anyway?”

  Bolan smiled wearily. “Your intrepid newspaper editor is busy as we speak writing the story that’s going to make her career, about a group of heroic townspeople who stood up for what they believed in and took back their town from a large group of Mexican drug runners who had set up a giant meth lab nearby. Faced with the townspeople’s demand that they get out of town, the drug runners decided to take their revenge and shoot up the town, leading to a terrible shootout on Main Street.”

  “But no mention of a lone federal agent who tipped them off to the fact that a drug cartel was camping out in their backyard? If not, I’d expect that a bunch of us are going to face a lot of charges for assault with a deadly weapon, and the like.”

  Bolan shook his head. “That doesn’t make interesting reading. You leave the law to me. Just tell your story, and there’s no way the government will come down on a group of townspeople trying to defend their homes against invading criminals. Our country needs homegrown heroes, and I think there are plenty right here. Besides, you just make sure to point those agents to the factory. I think they’ll find everything they need for a massive case against the rest of the Cristobal company. That should keep them busy enough so they won’t look at what happened here too closely. Also, I’d expect a media storm to descend on Quincyville in the next few days, so you might want to make sure those in the know have their story straight.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll make sure anyone involved will tell it just like it happened.”

  “That’s the spirit. You folks will do just fine. And the next time I’m in the area, I’ll be sure to stop by.”

  “You be sure and come by the diner when you do. Dinner’ll be on me.”

  Bolan smiled, a real one this time. “You’re on.” He shook Rollins’s hand once more and walked out of the room.

  “Surely you weren’t planning on leaving without saying goodbye?”

  He’d heard those words before, but the voice saying them was off somehow. Turning, Bolan saw Kelly Bitterman sitting in a chair near the wall. She’d cleaned up, and looked so much like an All-American teenager it was hard to think about what she’d been through over the past two days.

  He walked over and squatted next to her. “Not a chance. Are you going to be all right?”

  Kelly shrugged, staring at the floor. “I don’t know. So much has happened. I guess I’m still trying to deal with everything. It’s like it hasn’t hit me yet—my parents dead, killers coming after me, the town nearly destroyed… Looking back on all of it, it’s almost like it happened to someone else, and I was only watching.” She glanced at him. “But it all really happened, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, unfortunately it did. What are you planning on doing now?”

  “My grandmother lives in the Pacific Northwest. I’m going to go there, put some distance between myself and here until they call me back to testify.” She stared at him. “What about you?”

  “I’ve got to head out before the government folks show up and start asking a whole bunch of questions.” He scribbled a phone number on the back of a card and handed it to her. “If you ever need to talk about what happened here, day or night, just call this number, okay?”

  “Will you pick up if I do?”

  “Maybe. If I can’t, I’ll get in touch as soon as I get your message.” He stood up, and Kelly stood as well, then surprised him by throwing her arms around him and hugging him tightly.

  “Thank you, Mr. Cooper.”

  Bolan hesitated, then put his arms around her.

  After a minute, he gently disengaged from her. “You’re going to be all right, Kelly—I can tell. You take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Bolan turned and walked to the elevator. He felt the girl’s stare on him as he went, but he didn’t look back.

  Outside, he walked through the hospital parking lot until he found his rental SUV, got in and pulled out, navigating the town’s streets. He avoided Main Street, although he could still catch a whiff of smoke from the battle every so often, and he could see light plumes drifting up from the remains of the fires that were put out earlier that day.

  Bolan drove out of town, not pausing until he reached the intersection to the highway. There he stopped, lowered his window and looked at the sign that had brought him to the little town in the first place:

  Visit Quincyville

  The Best Little Town in the Midwest!

  “Maybe it finally can be,” he said to himself, raising the window again and turning east onto the highway, driving toward the horizon.

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-0964-0

  Special than
ks and acknowledgment to Travis Morgan for his contribution to this work.

  STAND DOWN

  Copyright © 2011 by Worldwide Library

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