Читать книгу Terror Descending - Don Pendleton - Страница 13

Columbus, Ohio

Ghosting out of the darkness, a large black Hummer rolled along the cracked asphalt of the city street. The windows were darkly tinted, the license plate splattered with dried mud, and the VIN plate on the dashboard innocently covered with a folded map. To a casual glance, this was just an expensive car. But a trained observer would have noticed that the car was riding too low and there was no manufacturer’s name on the tires. The Hummer was illegally armored, and riding on bulletproof military tires. For all intents and purposes, the vehicle was a private tank.

Lounging on a street corner near a closed gas station, a group of older teenagers were industriously doing nothing, drinking beer from oversize cans and smoking an assortment of cigarettes and joints.

Listening to the rock music coming from down the street, their casual conversation stopped instantly at the appearance of the Hummer as it cruised around a burned-down grocery store. Immediately drawing weapons, mostly cheap pistols and old revolvers, they eased back into a nearby alleyway merging with the blackness. A car like that, in this neighborhood, could only mean customers for Delacort, and they wanted no part of his business. Some hardass enforcers from the Cincinnati mob had tried to hijack one of his shipments, and the next day the men were found dead, stripped naked, castrated and nailed to a billboard sign along Route 465. The crazy gunrunner had crucified them and left the bodies in public view! After that, even the cops were hesitant to bother Armando “Crazy Mondo” Delacort.

Passing a bar, the music from inside rattling the windows, the Hummer took the next corner and left the paved road to start along a ragged pathway of busted concrete and weeds. The streetlights were soon left behind, and the armored car moved through the darkness, accompanied by the soft purr of its engine and the crunch of the tires over the loose gravel and shards of old glass beer bottles.

Concrete pylons appeared in the gloom, the thick pillars rising to reach the beltway high overhead. Fifty feet above the ground, Route 270 encircled the entire city of Columbus.

Past the beltway, the Hummer turned on halogen headlights, the brilliant beams helping the driver to maneuver through a maze of railroad ties, K-rails and mounds of refuse that probably would have been unnamable in broad daylight.

Beyond the wall of garbage, the people in the Hummer saw the dark outline of the old canning factory dominating a flat empty field. Weeds ruled the landscape, with huge rusting machines of some sort standing about and gradually decaying back into the soil from which they had been originally mined.

Reaching the sagging remains of an electrical substation, the Hummer’s driver parked the vehicle and killed the lights before sounding the horn twice, then twice more. Moments later a light answered from the murky factory, the beam blinking the same pattern in reply.

Turning off the engine, Carl Lyons stepped down from the Hummer and straightened the collar of his Hugo Boss suit. “Keep control of your fucking temper, Knuckles,” he growled, looking sideways at Schwarz. “We’re here for business. Savvy?”

“Yeah, yeah, stop stepping on my dick, will ya,” Schwarz replied with a snort, lifting an M-16/M-203 assault rifle combo from inside the Hummer. Working the arming bolt on the 5.56 mm rifle, he checked the load in the 40 mm grenade launcher, then rested the dire weapon on a shoulder. Ready for instant use, but not pointing in anybody’s direction.

“We shoulda left the ape behind,” Blancanales rasped in displeasure, drawing his Colt .380 automatic pistol and clicking off the safety before holstering the weapon again. “Somebody might offer him a banana, and he’ll go all postal on us.”

“Blow it out your ass, clotheshorse,” Schwarz retorted, not even looking in the direction of the man. “Gotta have one real man along to do any heavy lifting.”

“Which would be me,” Blancanales said loftily. “So what are you here for again, landfill?”

“Shaddup, the both of ya,” Lyons ordered, smoothing down his hair with both hands before starting forward at an easy walk. His .357 Magnum Colt Python was resting in a belly holster, but the former cop felt oddly vulnerable without easy access to his Atchisson autoshotgun. But that didn’t fit into this role for this night. Instead he was carrying a soft leather briefcase, the kind that a lawyer would use to tote mounds of paperwork. The contents bulged slightly and felt heavy.