Читать книгу Mission: Apocalypse - Don Pendleton - Страница 11

Varjo Amilcar spilled everything and Bolan recorded it. Names, routes, contacts—everything. Dominico grew increasingly agitated as Amilcar gave up the entire King Solomon machine from Sinaloa to Baja. It was Dominico’s former machine, but he had taken pains to protect the people he had left behind when he had turned over his new leaf. He thought he had buried his past. Someone had handed Amilcar King Solomon’s criminal gold mine, and Amilcar had gleefully dug up everything and everyone. Many of Dominico’s old accomplices had been forced back to work, sold out or killed. Dominico’s voice dropped to an ugly hiss. “How the fuck did you get all this!”

Amilcar cringed.

Dominico beseeched the ceiling. “How the fuck did I forget to bring tongs!”

Bolan’s blue eyes burned down upon Amilcar and they were pitiless. “The man asked you a question. Make him ask again and I take that walk.”

Amilcar babbled. “I…I…I…”

Busto whispered urgently. “Someone’s coming!”

Bolan raised his pistols. “How many?”

“Two!”

Bolan rose from Amilcar’s side. “Memo, watch him.”

Amilcar suddenly shrieked. “Rudi! Tucho! Aquí! Aquí—!”

Dominico drove the steel strut of the Uzi’s folding stock between Amilcar’s eyes. The drug dealer flopped to the floor like he’d been shot. Dominico smiled happily at Bolan.

“You’re right! The stock! It works!”

Busto slammed the door shut. “Here they come!”

Bolan wasn’t in the mood for a blind exchange of fire through the door with Busto and an intelligence asset in the room. Fists pounded on the door and the men outside were shouting. “Varjo! Varjo!”

Bolan charged the door. Busto’s eyes flew wide. “What are you—!” Busto shrieked and threw herself aside as Bolan hit the door like a fullback going up the middle. The door shattered off its hinges and Rudi and Tucho were smashed back with it. Bolan hurdled the fallen men and spun about, pistols in hand. Tucho had taken the brunt of the blow and was flat on his back. Rudi popped back up with a revolver in his hand. Bolan leveled the front sight of the Desert Eagle on Rudi’s chest and fired. The report of the big fifty in the confines of the hall sounded like a cannon. Rudi flapped his arms like a broken bird as he flew backward. Tucho struggled to sit up and draw his pistol. Busto had stepped into the hallway. She kicked Tucho in the chest to put him back down and shot him in the face.

Amilcar roared behind them. “Prick! I’ll—” Bolan glanced back. The drug dealer had bounced up and the ex-boxer had taken a swing at Dominico. The ex-wrestler held Amilcar’s arm out straight with his elbow and wrist locked. His adversary howled as Dominico held him in a standing arm bar. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill everyone who ever worked for you! I’ll shank Najelli’s little—” Amilcar gasped as Dominico scissored his arms savagely and Amilcar’s elbow and wrist snapped. Dominico let go of his foe’s arm and the man sagged to his knees, mewling and cradling his shattered limb. Dominico gave him a thunderous slap to the back of the head that pitched him forward. “What did you say?”

Bolan looked at his ally warningly. “Memo…”

“He can still talk!” Dominico spit.

Bolan sighed inwardly. This was what happened when you took amateurs for allies. With a broken arm there was no way to get Amilcar down from the balcony except to throw him. Renewed shouting was echoing up the stairs. This was a nice neighborhood and private security would be responding soon and the federales wouldn’t be far behind them. “You cripple him, you carry him. I still need him and we’re out of here!”

“Don’t wait on me!” Dominico reached down and Amilcar screamed as he was yanked to his feet. Dominico chicken-winged Amilcar’s remaining arm into a come-along grip and pushed the muzzle of his Uzi into the back of his head. “Ándale!” Dominico marched him toward the shattered door. Bolan moved down the hallway. Someone had trained Busto right. She stayed back on Bolan’s six with her pistol held in both hands. Bolan moved to the banister and the twin detonations of a double-barrel shotgun printed a moonscape of craters across his shadow on the wall. Bolan leaned out over the landing and his pistols rolled in his hands. The killer took a .50-caliber slug and a 9 mm triburst simultaneously and the chest of his tracksuit exploded in red. Bolan leaned back out of the line of fire as an automatic rifle cracked and tore splinters from the top of the railing. Bolan rolled down three stairs and shoved his machine pistol out between two of the railing spindles. His triburst tore off the top of the rifleman’s head. The man behind him screamed as he was sprayed with brains and blood. Bolan rose and the big fifty ended the man’s hysterics with a single boom.

The house was suddenly very quiet.

Bolan spoke low. “That’s five. How many more do you have, Varjo?”

The man blubbered something unintelligible and then squealed as Dominico cranked the chicken-wing. “Two! Gal and H!”

Gal and H were conspicuously absent. No one downstairs was shooting or screaming. If they had run outside, the motion sensors would have come on and it was still dark outside. Bolan suddenly had a very unpleasant suspicion. “Who owns the houses on either side of you?”

Amilcar’s voice went from terrified squeak to suicide-run ugly. “I do, motherfucker, and they’re full of my men. So is the house across the street.”

“Shit,” Busto cursed.

Despite having a broken arm and no pants Amilcar laughed. “Shit is right, and I own the cops around here. You better rethink your situation. You better think about your family. I’ll make you a deal. Memo? Kill the yanqui. You can take Najelli and disappear again.”

The hallway got even quieter.

Busto’s gun wasn’t quite pointed at Bolan, but she was looking back at Dominico.

Amilcar’s voice was sick with twisted triumph. “I got at least five guys who want to take over the operation. We go outside? You can’t use me as a shield. They’ll cut us all down. So I tell you what. You call me King Amilcar and kill the yanqui? You can fuck off, Memo, and take the bitch with you. But you better decide real quick.”

Bolan considered the shot. Dominico had cover behind Amilcar. He’d have to cross pistols and blast through Amilcar with the fifty and burn down Busto with the Beretta.

Amilcar’s smile was sickening. “You don’t love me, Memo, but you know I never break my word. You know I’ll—”

Dominico squeezed his Uzi’s trigger.

Varjo Amilcar’s cranium came apart like a water balloon under the onslaught.

Dominico dropped the half-decapitated drug dealer and reloaded with a shrug. “Fuck him. I never liked him anyway.”

Busto sagged against the wall with visible relief. “So what now?”

Bolan had really wanted to ask Amilcar a few more questions, but there was no point in crying over split skulls. “The river. We take his speedboat and go.”

Busto nodded. “Nice.”

Bolan advanced down the stairs. No bullets came. Gal and H had drawn back into either side of the house. They probably had the bottom of the stairs in a cross fire and were prudently waiting for reinforcements. Bolan took the second flight of stairs four at a time and threw himself into a diving roll across the foyer. Pistols barked in his wake and Gal and H shouted back and forth at each other. Bolan came up and saw muzzle-flash at shoulder height in the next room. Gal or H quickly jumped back around the corner. Bolan leveled the big .50 at the interior wall and it jumped three times in his hand as he let loose the thunder. Three silver-dollar-sized craters impacted and behind the wall a man screamed. A track-shoed foot suddenly slid out from cover as the man fell.

“Gal!” The man on the other side of the foyer was screaming. “Gal!”

Bolan used the foot as an index. He lowered his aim, tracked sideways and fired three more times where he thought Gal’s head and upper torso should be. The foot jumped with all three shots and flopped twitching to the tiles.

“Gal!”

Bolan fired his last shot the other way to keep H down and reloaded. “Najelli! Covering fire.”

Busto swung just enough of her body around the landing to aim and began to fire, her Ruger discharging rounds methodically. Bolan marched across the foyer and down the short hall as the woman’s shots made little sonic booms in passing. She stopped as Bolan stepped into the line of fire. He took up the slack and touched off tribursts from the Beretta as he entered the vaultlike living room.

The best cover that had line of sight on the stairs was the wet bar. Bolan shot out the mirror behind it and was rewarded as H screamed. H’s pistol snaked over the top of the bar and popped off several blind shots. The Executioner took a heartbeat to steady his aim and squeezed off a burst that sent the pistol and several fingers spinning away across the bar. H shrieked and what remained of his hand disappeared. Bolan fired off two more bursts at the top of the bar, and his Beretta racked open on a smoking empty chamber with a conspicuous clack!

“I heard that!” H lurched up. He was big and bald and had a machete in his good hand. “You’re dead, motherfucker! You’re…” H’s rant tapered off as he stared down the loaded .50 in Bolan’s other hand.

Bolan idly wondered what kind of people kept machetes behind the bar, but the obvious answer was that drug dealers did. A smart drug dealer would have stocked his bar with shotguns. “Yo, H.” Bolan motioned with the Beretta while he kept the Desert Eagle on the man. “Come on out. We need to talk.”

H stumbled out from behind the bar.

“Leave the machete,” Bolan advised.

The machete clanged to the tiles.

“You want to live?” Bolan asked.

“Yes.”

“Where are the keys to the speedboat?”

“What?”

“The speedboat, at the dock. Where are the keys?”

Fists began pounding on the front door. Busto whispered, “We have company!”

Bolan put the front sight between H’s eyes. “Keys.”

“In the kitchen! By the door!”

Bolan jerked his head. “Najelli! Go!”

Busto ran for the kitchen. The fist blows turned into the thuds of men hurling themselves against the heavy oaken door. Dominico leaned against the foyer with his Uzi pointed at the front door. “It won’t hold!”

Busto skidded back into the room waving a key attached to a little yellow float. “Got it!”

“Memo! Najelli! Run for the docks.” Bolan nodded at H as they ran past. “You did good.” Bolan pistol-whipped him to his knees as the front door failed. He reloaded the Beretta and roared at the top of his lungs in Spanish, “Upstairs! They’re upstairs! They have the boss!”

Bolan hightailed it as more than a dozen men flooded in through the foyer. It was time to break contact. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a white-phosphorous grenade. The cotter lever pinged away as he reached the kitchen and Bolan tossed the grenade onto the kitchen island as he went out the door. Dominico and Busto had tripped the motion sensors as they made their escape, and Bolan ran out into the lunar glare. He holstered the Desert Eagle and slid the Beretta’s folding stock from its shoulder sheath. The Willie Pete detonated behind him, and the kitchen window blew out in streams of white smoke and burning phosphorus element. Bolan extended the stock with a snap of his wrist and clicked it onto the butt of the machine pistol as he ran. At the dock two 500-horsepower diesels roared like dinosaurs arising from their ancient sleep. Busto waved at him frantically. Bolan had closed the door behind them but men were coming over the walls. Busto banged off return fire, but the range was long for the woman and her handgun.

Bolan had transformed his machine pistol into a carbine.

He dropped to one knee and flicked the selector switch to semiauto. Two men were straddling the western wall and trying to bring Mexican Army rifles to bear. Bolan shouldered the Beretta and put the glowing dot of the front sight on the closer man’s chest. He squeezed the trigger and the rifleman jerked, dropped his rifle and pulled a Humpty Dumpty as Bolan’s bullet opened his throat. The Executioner tracked his sights as the second man on the wall exchanged fire with Busto. The throttles on the cigarette boat suddenly cut back ominously. Bolan ignored the dock and aimed. He squeezed the Beretta’s trigger, and the man on the wall dropped back like a shooting gallery target. Busto was running down the dock shouting Dominico’s name.

Bolan rose and ran.

The men at the western wall had ceased their siege.

The guys at the eastern one were just getting into gear. A bullet cracked past Bolan’s head as he ran. He cleared the back lawn, and boards thudded beneath his boots as he ran down the dock. Dominico was sprawled backward in the cigarette boat. Blood painted the white leather of the driver’s seat and fiberglass of the cockpit. Busto was bent over him.

“Go! Go! Go!” Bolan boomed.

Busto looked back over her shoulder desperately. “I don’t know how to drive a boat!”

Bolan took three more running steps and jumped as bullets whined and whipped past him. The cigarette boat lurched and the fiberglass floor made an ugly crackling noise as Bolan hit. He hauled Dominico out of the driver’s seat and rammed the throttles forward. The cigarette boat shot ahead like an arrow and screamed down the river. “Get down!”

Bolan dropped down and negotiated the next hundred yards of the river from snap memory. He had discouraged the men in the western house from attempting the wall. Now the cigarette boat took a broadside of lead in passing. Bullets walked across the prow, shot out the windscreen and tore into the stern. One of the diesels shrieked as something big enough to tear into the engine block gutted it. Bolan rose up as gunfire crackled, but the hull no longer shuddered with bullet strikes. He rose up just in time to violently swerve the boat away from the bank and aim it westward. The port diesel clanked and howled and died as Bolan throttled it back. The starboard engine still had five hundred horses, and Bolan kept the hammer down. Gunfire still crackled and sirens wailed along the river. Bolan could see the blue-and-red flashes of police lights strobing through the trees, but they were all heading east toward Amilcar’s house.

Bolan burned westward for the sea.