Читать книгу Grave Mercy - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

Any doubt that Mack Bolan possessed that the machete-wielding Latino was reduced to an animalistic state disappeared when he released an unholy howl that split the air, turning the heads of a half dozen kids lounging and listening to music on the sand. Running through water and in wet sand felt like trying to pull his feet out of the tendrils of a hungry octopus, but his long legs gave him enough of a stride to reach the edge of the water.

The attacker’s maniacal eyes flitted toward the prone children who weren’t aware of their danger. Bolan knew he only had a few moments to stop him.

“Over here!” he called, the boom of his voice pinning the drugged man’s dead, cold eyes to him.

Another bestial hiss erupted from him and he swung his machete toward Bolan. In any confrontation between human and terrain chopper, the foot-and-a-half-long blade won every time, so Bolan didn’t bother with blocking. He sidestepped, avoiding the swing that started from above the attacker’s head and ended up slicing only air.

Bolan considered drawing the Atomic dive knife, but he could see that his opponent was young and despite his scratches and blank gaze, it was possible that he was an American. It didn’t take much more than a gauge of his age to realize that this could be one of the kidnap victims, and as such, one of the many innocent lives that he’d sworn to protect.

In the Executioner’s world, there was no such thing as an acceptable loss. Once the machete reached the nadir of its arc, Bolan lunged, putting both hands around his opponent’s forearm. With a hard yank, Bolan pulled the man’s face into his left shoulder, letting the uninjured joint take the brunt of the collision. Jaws snapped shut with a sickening crunch and the drugged maniac’s eyes rolled in their sockets.

Such chemically enhanced foes were mostly immune to the pain of conventional punches, bullets and blades, but the Executioner was a master of all manner of combat. As such, he knew the weak points of the human body, and the trunk line of nerves just under the ear and behind the jaw was one such place that even in a haze of painkilling amphetamines would stop a person with one blow. The would-be killer jarred into submission, Bolan turned his attention toward disarming him.

A shriek from behind—the spine-chilling wail of a terrified child—turned him away from his attempt to render his attacker harmless. Two more figures rushed into view, blades held over their heads. Suddenly the Executioner found himself outnumbered, and his concern for the suffering of his opponent disappeared. With both hands holding the man’s forearm still, he knifed his knee into it. With a snapped ulna and humerus, the man’s grip on the machete disappeared.

That accomplished, Bolan released the limb and brought his left elbow up hard, another crashing blow across the man’s jaw that threw him into the sand, senseless and barely mobile.

He turned to see a growling young woman with ratty black hair rushing in pursuit of a ten-year-old boy, her intent to bury her blade in the kid’s back. Her rage was so focused on the youth that the Executioner was able to catch her by surprise, hammering his right forearm across her throat in a clothesline maneuver. The healed stab wound released a spike of complaint, and it felt as if the young woman had run headfirst into his ribs, but at the end of the collision, she was flat on her back and Bolan still stood.

She screeched in frustration, her blank, feral gaze locked on the man who’d stopped her. She still held on to her machete, but Bolan hopped over her and landed one heel hard into the inside of her elbow. The joint popped loudly, and she, too, was disarmed, but clawing, jagged fingernails sliced into the warrior’s right thigh, planing off ribbons of dermis.

Bolan cracked his heel against the young woman’s jaw, feeling it dislocate under the force of his back kick, and while it cut off her animalistic growls, she was still reaching up with her left arm to hook her gnarled fingers into his crotch. He sidestepped her effort to geld him and gave her another kick, this time to her temple. Even as he did so, he caught sight of his male attacker in his peripheral vision, bursting up from the sand in a rampaging rush.

The Executioner turned and met the man’s charge with his right elbow striking him in the collarbone. Through his arm, Bolan could feel the snap of his opponent’s clavicle, and the drug-crazed killer stopped as if he’d struck a brick wall. Even stunned from Bolan’s countermeasure, the man lashed out blindly with his left hand, fingers reaching for Bolan’s face where they could tear skin and burst one of his eyeballs. The soldier straightened his right arm, a palm strike deflecting those blinding fingernails as he hit the man’s other forearm hard.

A wail of frustration all but split open Bolan’s right eardrum, leaving the soldier wide open for his attacker’s next tactic. The Executioner grimaced as teeth tore into the skin of his right shoulder, splitting flesh and releasing a torrent of blood down his biceps.

With a grimace, Bolan brought up his left palm, jamming the heel of his hand between the eyes of the attacker. It took every ounce of precision not to strike the man in the nose and drive splinters of bone into his brain, but even so, the young Hispanic was going to feel the effects of his concussion for a long time. The blow literally lifted his attacker off Bolan’s shoulder and sent him crashing into the sand.

The young woman he’d clotheslined took the brief moments of scuffle as an opportunity to rise into a crouch. Her hand was nearly around the haft of her machete. Bolan regretted the need to cripple her, but she was determined to carve up a fellow human being. He kicked her in the wrist, snapping it like a twig and knocking her into the sand. Her howl was not of pain, it was too forceful, and her bared teeth were poised to rip open Bolan’s calf. He pivoted and snapped his heel into her forehead with the same force he’d use to kick open a locked door.

If she survived, she’d need plenty of physical therapy to use both of her hands again, and Bolan wasn’t certain he’d restrained himself enough to avoid giving her brain damage. She was still, for now, and that was all that mattered because there was a third killer on the loose, a fourth and a fifth now in view.

It was as if someone had released a pack of velociraptors onto the beach, bestial shrieks filling the air. Bolan was already bleeding, though no arteries had been bitten, and he’d only dealt with a young man and an even smaller woman. He watched Spaulding wrestling with one of the attackers, a screeching little woman with dirty blond hair and thick legs that had wrapped around his torso.

The surf camp owner’s face was a crimson mask, and his wobbly legs betrayed severe blood loss or head trauma—perhaps both. As it was, Spaulding was still fighting, holding one at bay while the other two, both young men, were on the rampage. A fourteen-year-old boy stood his ground between one of the assailants and two eight-year-olds. His courage was admirable, but the machete severed his right hand as he held it up to the drug-crazed berserker.

Bolan didn’t have time to make choices, he charged the would-be killer who was about to take more body parts away from the teen. Three long strides turned into a leap, and Bolan hooked his arm around the head and neck of the machete swinger. Two hundred twenty pounds of lean muscle and hard-forged combat skill combined to make the flying tackle into an impact that hammered both men into the ground. Sand flew as the drugged assassin broke Bolan’s fall, and perhaps more than a few ribs.

The crash was hard enough to spin the machete out of his hand, but that only meant that he had a meth-fueled wrestler on the other side of this fight. Bolan didn’t see the looping left that whipped around and struck him in the back of his head. It was an eye-crossing blow, and because he hadn’t loosened up to roll with the punch, it felt as if his brains were sloshing around inside his skull.

Despite the recent impediment, Bolan could see the berserker’s right fist heading straight to his face. He lowered his head swiftly, swinging it into the onrushing knuckles like a wrecking ball. Fingers cracked as they struck the hard curve of bone at his hairline. That was why the Executioner had used the heel of his hand and his foot on the foreheads of his prior two opponents—the head was a tough mass of bone while knuckles were relatively fragile. Even though his foe’s right fist was now a useless jumble of bent fingers, Bolan felt the clawing fingers tearing at his nape and the back of his head. The short wisps of black hair back there were drenched with blood as nails tore skin.

“Enough,” Bolan grunted as he brought up his knee and twisted his opponent down so that he took the kick between his shoulder blades. The heavy vertebrae around his spinal cord was more than enough to prevent the man from ending up crippled, but not by much. Breath escaped his lungs in a fetid explosion.

Bolan took that brief second to slam his elbow into the attacker’s sternal notch. He tried not to let his anger over a crippled boy color his response, but the elbow chop struck the former machete marauder in his xyphoid process, another juncture of nerves and muscle that when struck properly could render a man helpless and breathless until he passed out. Too hard, and the target would die. Too soft, and with lungs full of air, it would just hurt.

The man bent backward over Bolan’s knee froze, his mouth stretched like a landed fish’s as it tried to suck in air, but foiled by unresponsive nerves and muscles. The soldier shoved the marauder off his knee and dropped him in the sand. His first instinct was to tend to the fourteen-year-old whose agonized screams echoed in his conscience, but there was another maniac on the loose with a wicked blade. He moved away from the Jamaican boy reluctantly. He had to locate the fifth of the attackers.

The Executioner turned when a strangled death cry escaped Spaulding’s throat. The dirty-blond psychotic was fighting to rip her chopper out of Spaulding’s skull where it had gotten stuck. Bolan charged toward her, knocking her off the latest addition to his collection of the friendly dead. She couldn’t have been half of Bolan’s weight, so when he shoulder-blocked her in the upper chest, it was like a freight train flattening a compact car. She flew off Spaulding, landing ten feet away, not in much condition to do anything more than gasp for breath.

He took a half of a second to evaluate her condition. Her hands were folded up into the air, twitching at the end of her forearms. Any movement now consisted of involuntary spasms as he’d knocked her completely senseless.

That would do, for now. Bolan had one more menace to stop.

A strange pop filled the air, and the Executioner turned to see Rudd holding his surfboard up, the fifth attacker’s bloody machete lodged in its body.

Bolan broke into a hard run, his long legs pistoning against the sand. Blood rushed, a torrent of thunder rolling through his brain at the same breakneck speed he charged the man attacking Rudd. It was a battle of wills between the two. The machete had been rammed into the surfboard’s fiberglass frame, and the drugged killer was trying to rip it free. It would be only instants before the assassin decided that the struggle wasn’t worth it, and he’d go at the surfer with teeth and nails.

Bolan had been on the receiving end of those savage attacks. He didn’t doubt that Rudd would end up with his throat chewed out or his eyes burst.

At the last moment, the soldier lowered his head and shoulder-blocked the drugged berserker in the small of the back, the force of his impact hurling the brainwashing victim ten feet past Rudd, landing him in the surf. The splash of water over his body didn’t do anything to clarify the killer’s mind as he leaped back to his feet with unnatural speed and strength. Bolan knew that a tackle like he’d given this man would have left anyone else writhing in pain. Even Bolan’s shoulder ached from that contact.

“Well, come on!” Bolan shouted at the blank-eyed man. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, but he appeared to have been on a football team. The youth in front of him was as big as the Executioner, and had a thicker musculature, making the soldier think of a linebacker. Tanned and blond, he was undoubtedly an American, and this one would be strong enough to twist Bolan’s head off his shoulders thanks to the chemical cocktail that had reduced him to a feral, froth-mouthed berserker.

Bolan had tried muscle, and ended up slamming into a brick wall, jarred himself by the very impact that had saved Rudd. Pure strength wasn’t going to be enough to end this conflict because if he struck any harder, he’d kill the young man. It was time to outfight, using his intellect. He summoned up his best “drill sergeant” voice and taunted the berserker again. “Kill me!”

That order spurred the linebacker-size attacker to charge, blind rage spurring him on. Bolan threw himself at the charging drug-crazed assassin, but he aimed low, striking the man across the thighs and flipping him head over heels. The berserker tumbled into the sand, throwing up a cloud, and the thud that resounded from his fall was a powerful drumbeat. The big killer’s eyes were now unfocused, dazed from the crash, and Bolan didn’t waste a single moment, scissoring his legs around his neck.

With all the leverage and strength of his calves and ankles pressing on either side of the marauder’s neck, Bolan had him locked in a true sleeper hold, not pinching the windpipe shut but pressing the knots of bone around his ankles against blood vessels that fed the brain. Deprived of fresh oxygen, the killer’s fevered brain faltered, losing consciousness even as the berserker clawed at Bolan’s shins.

The soldier grimaced, but with a proper sleeper hold applied, the would-be murderer was slumped, out cold in the sand.

“What the hell is going on?” Rudd asked, his voice shaky.

“Check on Antoine. One of these crazies chopped off his hand,” Bolan ordered.

Rudd paused, blinking at the bloodied and battered Executioner in front of him.

“Move it!”

Rudd’s senses returned to him and he rushed to the badly wounded teen’s side. Bolan knew that he’d have to find some form of cord to apply a tourniquet to the stump; direct pressure wasn’t going to work.

Luckily, the maniacal assassin had a belt on. Bolan whipped it out of the unconscious brute’s belt loops and started to stagger to Antoine’s side.

The only warning that the Executioner had of an attack were the grunts and pants of the attacking woman. For Bolan and his finely tuned reflexes, that was more than enough. The young woman had murdered Spaulding, so a gentle response wasn’t in the cards. She was within a few feet when her throat released the shrill beginning notes of an animalistic howl, but Bolan cut it off with a raised elbow that exploded her nose and tore her cheek open.

She hit the ground, and Bolan sighed. He’d let his emotions get the better of him, and now a brainwashed young woman was disfigured, bleeding and unconscious in the sand. He tore himself away from his self-reproach.

A boy needed medical attention, and Bolan’s battlefield first aid was going to keep him from bleeding to death.

BEFORE BOLAN returned his attention to the flattened, defeated machete-wielding marauders, he’d already encountered a terrible death toll in this attack. Spaulding was one of course, but there was a mother and two children slain in the violent rampage. The woman, named Anna, and her eight-year-old son were hacked apart, Anna’s life given as she provided a living shield against the rising and falling edge of the murderer’s blade. Her courage and sacrifice were in vain, sadly, as the machete’s merciless steel severed her left arm as it shielded her son’s head, taking off the limb and crushing a cruel crease in the boy’s face.

Bolan looked at the horrific carnage, his gut filled with bitter defeat. He didn’t look too hard, but he realized that he couldn’t tell where mother ended and son began, their dark, crimson-stained skin torn apart, muscle and bone so pulped and splintered that it was as if a demonic elephant had stomped a puddle into their bodies. Dread and loss were crippling emotions, but the Executioner was far too human, too humane, to be able to bottle up and dispose of those feelings. Instead, he buried them, making them the spurs that stuck into his soul that would be there to prod him along should his strength begin to fail.

Dread and loss were abstract, unfocused ideas that he couldn’t use. Pain and righteous anger, however, were the flint and steel that would ignite Bolan to go one more step, endure one more injury, throw one more punch. The horrors of this morning turned from peace to panic were the kindling, the firewood that would fuel his hunt for justice.

The last victim, a little girl whose age he couldn’t even guess, had been so violently assaulted that blood has sprayed along the sand for twenty-five feet. From the churned, bloody sand, he could tell that it had been four of the maniacs, not the one who had cut through the trees to the beach, who had grabbed her up. Her screams had disappeared into the mix of those of other children.

Bolan saw a small, rag-stuffed doll splattered with blood and he stooped to pick it up. All the while, he reproached himself for being to gentle with his attacker as the doll’s owner was being attacked.

He cast the reproach aside after a moment. He had been on alert, but his senses had only so much acuity. He couldn’t see through walls or hear the sound of the vehicle that had dropped off five armed people in the grip of chemical fury. It was a basic law of physics—the intervening strip of trees was too thick, too much of a barrier to keep him from noticing that, and even if he did know, Bolan had only his knife.

There were wounded besides Antoine, the young man who’d surrendered a hand in defense of others. Bolan and Rudd had tended to cuts and bruises after ensuring that the boy wouldn’t bleed to death, but now Rudd stumbled around, shell-shocked by the horrors he’d experienced. A call through to the police and for an ambulance received an answer that the small surf camp would have to wait as a beach resort two miles up the road had been the victim of similar violence.

Bolan knew that the carnage on the scene at a more crowded pleasure spot would have been horrendous.

“Rudd,” Bolan called, “help me check on the attackers.”

“The girl is dead,” Rudd said, his words coming out of his mouth in a slurred mush.

“The one who attacked you?” Bolan asked. He winced as he realized that he’d applied far too much force to her, but in the wake of Spaulding’s brutal murder, he’d let slip his kid gloves. Still, she’d been a victim of chemical reprogramming, a drug-fueled rage that had been inflicted upon her and the other four, turning them into marauders who barely felt pain and had required skeletal fractures to stop them.

Bolan stopped at another body, a killer who had gone down with a twisted arm and a kick to the head. He was a local, a young man who was all lean muscle and long limbs. The soldier checked for broken bones in the neck, but the only signs of what had killed him were dried crystals flaking at the corners of his mouth, leftovers from the froth and foam that had burbled up when his body succumbed to a hormonal overload.

The big American wasn’t a coroner, but he’d seen people killed by overdoses of drugs and it would be a good guess that the machete-armed invaders of this beach haven had all succumbed to massive heart attacks brought on by the chemicals pumped into their veins.

Five corpses, each of them brought down by the Executioner’s hands in such a way that they would live, snuffed out by the same strange fuel that had driven them to attack.

“Are they all dead?” Rudd asked, cringing at the sight of them as Bolan stacked their limp forms together.

Bolan nodded. As an afterthought, he picked up a pair of empty water bottles from a nearby recycling bin and cut open the veins on two of the bodies. He’d have to collect blood samples and hope that Stony Man Farm could supply him with someone who’d run toxicology screens. He wanted to know what kind of chemical cocktail had been utilized to turn humans into weapons, and with that bit of knowledge, he’d be able to narrow the focus of his search for the perpetrators.

“That’s grisly,” Rudd said, looking at Bolan draining blood into a bottle.

“No more than what they did,” Bolan said.

“Who were they?” Rudd asked.

“Pawns of someone. Most likely they were kidnapped tourists,” Bolan answered.

Rudd’s brow wrinkled. “Tourists?”

“Harmless people sparked to insanity by a biochemist of some sort,” Bolan added. “I tried not to cause them too much pain, but they were too violent. Even so, the measures I took against them should have left them with long-term injuries, not dead. Their hearts gave out after I rendered them unconscious.”

“Who’d do such a thing?” Rudd asked. “And who’d let them loose here, where it’s just kids?”

“That’s what the bottles are for,” Bolan told him solemnly. “If there’s a clue in the blood, then I’ll use it.”

“You’re going after them yourself?” Rudd inquired.

Bolan nodded. “Alone. With an army. It won’t matter. I’m going to find the people behind this.”

Rudd nodded.

Bolan took a deep breath. “It’s not a job I want. But I have a feeling that this was a test run. More people are going to be released on wild rampages. More innocents are going to die. I intend to end it as fast as possible.”

Bolan stalked off to get his satellite phone to contact Stony Man Farm.

Rest and recuperation was over. The chase was on.