Killing Trade

by Don Pendleton

  The Executioner made a complete search of the safe house. There were two bedrooms upstairs. One contained duffel bags full of the El Cráneo members’ clothing. Bolan found a clean black T-shirt and put it on. He also found his Liger belt and threaded it back through the loops of his blacksuit pants. His combat boots had been tossed aside in a corner of the kitchen, it turned out, while his war bag with most of his spare magazines was with the duffel bags upstairs. The Beretta 92-F he’d carried as a backup was missing, but the little minirevolver he’d taken from the Blackjack mercenary was still in the bag. He counted himself lucky.

  Bolan left the bloody knife behind after wiping it for prints. The sheath was missing and he could not find a reasonable replacement, so toting it was more of a liability than an asset. He recovered his folding knife from the pocket of one of the dead men, however, and clipped it back in his own pants. It would fill the necessary role of combat knife.

  His Beretta 93-R and the battle-scarred Desert Eagle .44 Magnum were in the war bag with their holsters. He strapped these back on after checking their loads and actions. Most importantly, his secure phone was in the war bag. Neither de la Rocha nor his men had thought it anything but a cell phone, apparently, though it was also password protected to prevent tampering. He switched it on, checked it and—with no other options—simply dialed Burnett’s number.

  The phone rang several times before someone answered.

  “Burnett,” the detective said.

  “This is the ghost of Christmas past,” Bolan said. “I’m glad you’re not a ghost, yourself.”

  “Cooper? Holy shit! Where are you?”

  “Hang on,” Bolan told him. He went to the living room, opened the front door and took a quick look outside. Nobody was moving on the street, at least not that he could see. He could barely make out the street sign at the end of the block. He noted the numbers on the front of the house and read Burnett the address. “Offhand,” he said, “I imagine that’s a street address in Swedesboro or a neighboring town. I can’t guarantee anything, and I won’t know for sure until I’ve had a chance to look around.”

  “I’ll send a car for you,” Burnett said. “Hell, I’ll pick you up myself if I have to check every town in the state.”

  “I’ll wait, then,” Bolan said. “What happened to you? How did you get away? How did they get you in the first place?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” Burnett asked. “When the Blackjack shooters came out of the woodwork, I admit it, I ran. I figured I’d get the car and bring us some mobile cover. I got there just as Taveras and his crew rolled up. They aren’t stupid—they fingered me for a cop and figured I’d make a good distraction. Hell, Taveras ought to know me by now. I’ve been making his life difficult for quite a while. They recognized me as me, or they just knew what I was. Either way, they stuck a gun in my ribs and told me to cooperate.”

  “Why didn’t they kill you?”

  “I told you,” Burnett said with a chuckle, “they’re not stupid. Taveras doesn’t have a lot of compunctions about killing cops, but he didn’t need to kill me and make a bad situation worse for himself. He’s got enough problems. After they took you down, they kicked me out of the car and drove away. I figured you were dead, man.”

  “More dangerous men have tried,” Bolan said.

  “I don’t want to know,” Burnett said. “Sit tight. I’m on my way.”

  Bolan snapped the phone shut and looked around him at a house full of dead men.

  It was a start.

  15

  “Striker?” Barbara Price sounded worried. “Are you all right?”

  “Don’t worry, Barb,” Bolan said, standing in his hotel room after a hot shower. “It was nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  “That’s good to hear,” Price said, though she didn’t sound very relieved. She listened as Bolan updated her, transmitting more photos and notes he’d taken and made with his phone.

  “Manhattan is still battened down,” Bolan concluded. “I’m sure things haven’t gotten any less interesting for Hal.”

  “No,” Price confirmed, “he’s been in rare form.”

  “I don’t doubt it. I have two loose ends here—Taveras, and whatever’s left of his people, are one. The other is Donald Stevens and what Percival Leister told me is his munitions factory. The links to NLI and Blackjack are solid. Is there any chance Hal can move on them?”

  “Not on the basis of Leister’s testimony, no,” Price said. “It won’t constitute evidence, especially if NLI pulls in the drawbridge and calls out the lawyers. You’ll need to find something more substantial before we can go after the companies themselves.”

  “I’ll get to work on that, then,” Bolan said.

  “We can help with the next step,” Price said. “Akira turned up a fragment from the hard drive you recovered. It turned out to be a shipping invoice for some chemicals and other equipment. We’ve traced the address. It’s a waterfront location in Camden, New Jersey. I’m transmitting a map and details now.”

  “New Jersey,” Bolan repeated. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ll get on it.”

  “I’ll mobilize the appropriate teams,” Price said. “I’d rather get them on-site and have them unneeded than wait. If Stevens’s factory is truly there, it has to be locked down.”

  “Excellent. I’ll call you when the op’s done.”

  “Striker?”

  “Yeah, Barb?”

  “Try to be more careful this time.”

  “I will.” Bolan closed the phone.

  IT TOOK AN HOUR to finish preparing, cleaning and checking his weapons and loading the pockets of his fresh blacksuit. Burnett showed up, the bandage off his bloodshot eye, and the two of them conferred briefly over the material Bolan had—though the Executioner didn’t tell the detective where he got his information or how. They spent an uneventful ride back to New Jersey yet again. After surveying the waterfront area, Bolan directed Burnett to park a few blocks away. They’d walk in, staying together to maximize their chances and see what defenses Stevens had to offer. Bolan did not kid himself. The warehouse would be heavily defended, if not by human opponents, then by whatever devices an arms designer like Stevens was capable of creating.

  As Bolan and Burnett walked, the Executioner pondered the decrepit facades and boarded-up buildings they passed. Camden, New Jersey, was, according to some measures, the poorest city in the United States. It was also one of the most dangerous, rife with crime and violence.

  The waterfront was a high point in Camden’s bleak hit parade, featuring a popular aquarium and the battleship-museum USS New Jersey. Bolan and Burnett were not in town for sightseeing, however. The warehouse where Stevens was located occupied a particularly decrepit stretch of the waterfront district, far from anything of interest to even the most ardent tourist.

  The warehouse occupied a block that was in turn enclosed by a tall fence topped by barbed wire. Bolan, his canvas messenger bag slung across his body, removed the light windbreaker he wore over his weapons and gear. There was no more need for concealment. It would be impossible to hide what he was about to do.

  “Here’s where we part company,” he told the detective. “You know what to do?”

  “It’s not a complicated plan.” Burnett shrugged. “You go in, shoot everyone. I wait out here to catch any stragglers and run interference when the cops show up. If they show.”

  “They’ll show,” Bolan said.

  “Just follow the enormous explosions and clouds of black smoke, right?” Burnett said. He stuck out his hand. “You’re all right, Cooper. Try not to get yourself killed in there.”

  Bolan returned the handshake firmly. “I’ll do what I can.”

  The fence, the building’s first line of defense, was not much of an obstacle. Bolan, windbreaker in hand, scaled it easily. At the top he folded the windbreaker on itself and placed it over the barbed-wire strands. Then he scrambled over the top and landed heavily on the other side.

  “Find
something to take cover behind,” he told Burnett. Drawing the Beretta 93-R, he pulled the slide back far enough to verify that a round was chambered. Before him, the cracked and weed-dotted asphalt of a long-abandoned parking lot separated him from the warehouse.

  As he walked, crouching slightly and scanning the building’s boarded windows for some sign of danger, he half expected to take a sniper’s bullet. It would not have been difficult for Stevens to station riflemen at strategic points throughout the building. He was mildly surprised when he encountered no resistance. After a quiet journey from the fence to the building, he moved along the warehouse perimeter. He passed a couple of doors that were sealed tight from the inside, possibly permanently secured. Finally, he found a metal access door that, while locked, rattled in its frame when he tried the handle.

  Transferring the Beretta to his left hand, Bolan drew the Desert Eagle and backed off a few paces. The crack of the .44 Magnum shell echoed across the parking lot as the lock exploded. Bolan waited for a moment to see if the shot would draw Stevens’s forces—if he had them—out of hiding, but nothing happened.

  He pushed the door open.

  The hallway within was dark and narrow, with a low ceiling. Bare two-by-fours supported plywood sheets that composed the walls and ceiling. Bolan secured the Desert Eagle and adopted his familiar supported grip with his combat light illuminating the gloom.

  Bolan’s boots made the floorboards squeak beneath him. He started down the hallway.

  He almost stepped on the first of the mines.

  The bright, white beam of the flashlight saved him. He was sweeping the floors, walls and ceiling in a methodical pattern as he moved slowly down the corridor, listening intently for any hint of enemy activity. As he played the beam across the floor in front of his feet, he caught the glint of metal about two feet in front of his left toe. Carefully, he crouched, resting his hands on his thighs as he peered at the object blocking his path.

  The object was, in fact, one of twenty or thirty he could count in the beam of his flashlight, once he started looking for them. Arrayed on the rough wood floor before him, spread out in a hexagonal pattern, were countless small metal cylinders, about one inch high and two inches in diameter, each tipped with an inset metal disk that might have been a pressure switch—or might have been something else. Bolan backed off a few paces and removed the compact night-vision monocular from his war bag.

  The Executioner preferred to sweep darkened areas with a portable light, rather than relying on light-gathering technology like the monocular. With a firefight likely there was too much chance of being blinded, even if only temporarily, by a bright flash through the night scope. He also did not like to constrict his peripheral vision in a combat scenario, preferring instead to keep his wits about him and his vision unobstructed. The night scope did have one advantage, however. Through it, he could easily make out light beams that would otherwise be invisible to the eye.

  He swept the corridor through the scope. He’d suspected some kind of high-tech laser grid was tied to whatever the devices on the floor might be, but there was nothing. At least, there was nothing he could see with the equipment available to him. There was a high degree of risk in penetrating the fortified lair of a man like Stevens, but it was a risk the Executioner was willing to take. Someone had to stop Stevens before the war he’d touched off went any further—and before he could spread the cancer of his weapons to other cities, touching off the flames of similar conflagrations.

  As he considered what to do, he dismissed the idea of trying to remain unobserved. He assumed Stevens had passive security and surveillance equipment in place and most likely knew the warehouse had been invaded. Even if he did not, Bolan did not intend to come and go quietly. He was there to stop Stevens and demolish his factory. There was no way to maintain stealth. This was not a soft probe, but the hardest of hard charges.

  Bolan stowed the monocular and once again adopted a supported flashlight grip, this time with his Beretta 93-R. He switched the machine pistol to single shot and backed up as far as he could while keeping the objects in view. Then he aimed carefully at the closest of them and fired.

  The 9 mm hollowpoint bullet struck the top of the mine and set it off. Instead of exploding, however, it erupted. A jet of bright-orange molten metal shot up from the metal cylinder in a shower of sparks. A wave of heat hit Bolan’s face. He squinted against the flare of light as the burning metal started to chew its way through the wood of the floor. Small tongues of flame licked at the edges of the hole created by the mine as it consumed itself. The jet had reached high enough to touch the ceiling and had left it scorched.

  Bolan removed a bandanna from his war bag, took a small plastic squeeze bottle of water and sprayed the contents over the bandanna. He tied the moist cloth over his mouth and nose to act as a filter, screening out the worst of the smoke. The fumes weren’t actually too bad, because the fires were rapidly putting themselves out.

  The soldier moved forward cautiously, playing the beam of his light over the crater in the wood floor. By rights, the flaming booby trap should have set the entire hallway ablaze, taking the building with it. Clearly the wood of the walls, floor and ceiling had been treated with some sort of flame-retardant substance. That made perfect sense. Mines that took down an entire building wouldn’t be of much use to those counting on them for perimeter security.

  No audible alarms were initiated by the destruction, but it seemed likely Stevens would have the facility wired to inform him of a perimeter breach. That was fine. The Executioner was about to roll right over Donald Stevens and whoever might be there to protect him. It was inevitable.

  Bolan started firing. He shot out several more of the floor mines in a loose pattern reaching to the far end of the corridor. Each one erupted, a few of them spraying enough molten metal to trigger adjacent mines. Bolan continued shooting until he had activated every mine he could see with the beam of his flashlight. The corridor blazed with light and became an oven. Sweating, the soldier waited for the fires to burn themselves out. Then he reloaded the Beretta and proceeded carefully down the hallway, stepping over the holes and checking every inch of the floor ahead with his flashlight. Each mine had created a pit in the wood roughly eight inches deep. The cross-section of each hole revealed that the wood planks forming the floor were reinforced with some sort of flame-resistant insulation beneath. Below that was steel plate.

  At the end of the corridor, the path made a sharp right turn. Bolan cut it wide, stepping cautiously and carefully. The floor space before him stretched ahead into the darkness. He paused to use his monocular again to check for invisible beams, again finding nothing. The flashlight, however, picked out the slender silver thread of a trip wire at ankle level.

  He considered cutting the wire but rejected the idea. Suddenly releasing the tension might trigger whatever device was connected to the wire. He used his flashlight to check the floor beyond, as well as the walls and ceiling, then stepped very carefully over the wire.

  His combat boot came to rest on the floor beyond the wire. A square of flooring beneath his foot dropped half an inch as he put his weight on it.

  Bolan threw himself down and forward without hesitation. He felt a blast of air on his neck as several projectiles flew over him. The heavy smacks of metal against wood sounded like a hydraulic log splitter.

  The soldier waited, immobile, his Beretta held before him along the floor with his flashlight, but nothing else happened. Very carefully he got to his knees and then on his feet, stepping over the wire again and noting the camouflage pressure plate in the floor. The wood was the same material as the boards of the rest of the corridor floor, but it was obviously only a shell under which the trigger switch was hidden. He stepped lightly as he moved back to the corner he’d rounded earlier, playing his light over the wall that faced the trip wired hallway.

  Half buried in the plywood of the wall were half a dozen metal disks the size of drink coasters. He pried one of them free and
examined it. It resembled a circular saw blade, its edges cut with notches that turned its perimeter into a series of aerodynamic teeth. Images of ninja and shuriken flashed through his head. Stevens was either drawing his inspiration from the same, or he had reinvented this particularly sharp wheel. Regardless, it was likely the wall at the opposite end of the hallway concealed a launcher or launchers designed to hurl the saws when the switch was triggered. He pocketed the saw blade and turned back to the task at hand.

  Bolan was not about to try to sneak through a darkened killing chute dotted with triggers for the blades. Instead, he simply took cover behind the corner of the hallway, aimed the Beretta 93-R around it and started shooting single shots. He spread his fire down the hall, sparing a few double-and triple-taps as he peered around the corner with one eye, targeting the trip wire closest to him.

  It took a while and Bolan was forced to burn through several of his magazines. He was rewarded, however, with periodic bursts of saw blades as the bullets punched the triggers in the floor or severed trip wires farther down the hallway. Some of the blades nicked others already stuck in the wall, raising sparks as they ricocheted. Bolan was forced to dodge one that came winging his way after bouncing off another blade. The saw missed him.

  It took him some more time to creep down the cleared corridor, careful to step on the triggered pressure plates whenever possible. Twice he thought he could see seams in the floor under the beam of his flashlight, triggers that his gunfire had not tripped. He avoided these and the two trip wires he’d also failed to snap.

  At the end of the hallway, the corridor took a sharp right turn again. It was not lost on Bolan that the path he was following was falling back on itself again. There were a series of slits in the wall that were obviously the mouths of the launchers—spring-powered, air-powered or however they propelled their projectiles—that had fired the saw blades. There was no way to tell if he’d triggered them all, so he was extremely careful to avoid their lines of fire. At the opening of the third corridor, he checked once again for beams. This time his monocular picked up several of them crossing the available space. A series of small projectors was mounted on the walls, in the corners at the ceiling.