Читать книгу Hell Night - Don Pendleton - Страница 6

The huge windowpane closest to the bank’s front doors shattered, the tiny shards glistening like snowflakes as they fell through the bright sunlight. But before they had hit the ground, the bank robber in green coveralls and navy blue ski mask dropped the 9 mm Uzi and toppled to the pavement, dead.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, crouched behind the Kia he was using as cover. Up and down the row of cars parked outside the bank in Kansas City, Missouri, SWAT operatives in dark blue BDU blouses and matching pants had their own rifles pointed toward the building.

Bolan had used up most of his 30-round magazine from the M-16 A-2 in taking out the window and the would-be bank robber, and now he shoved a fresh box mag into the rifle. The robbers still inside the bank and the cops behind the cars exchanged gunfire. If the gunfire continued long enough, Bolan knew it would accomplish nothing except getting the hostages inside the building killed.

Turning to the ruddy-complexioned SWAT captain next to him, the Executioner yelled, “Tell your men to cease-fire, Tom! If we don’t establish some kind of dialogue fast, the good guys still inside are going to get killed.”

“Cease-fire!” the captain screamed. Leaning his chin toward the microphone clipped to the epaulet on his left shoulder, he flipped a switch on his nylon utility belt and repeated the order. “Cease-fire!”

As the roar of the gunshots died down, Bolan thought about the strange situation in which he now found himself. He had been at Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorist command post and training grounds. In addition to fielding top-notch assault teams like Able Team and Phoenix Force, Stony Man handpicked exceptional soldiers and police officers from the U.S. and friendly nations for advanced combat training. These men were flown to the Farm blindfolded, then left the same way—never knowing exactly where they’d been or who had trained them. What they did know was that they’d never received such pragmatic or intense instruction anywhere else in the world.

Tom Glasser, the sturdily built Kansas City captain next to the Executioner, had just completed a Stony Man session. When a local snitch informed the Kansas City PD of the upcoming bank robbery planned by the Rough Riders—a faction of the American Nazi Party—Glasser and Bolan had been flown straight from Stony Man Farm.

Bolan let the bolt on his M-16 slide home, chambering a round. The air seemed eerily quiet now. He watched quietly as a uniformed officer, hunkered low beneath the vehicles, approached Glasser’s other side. When he was near enough, the uniform whisper-shouted a phone number.

Glasser wasted no time pulling a cell phone from a nylon carrier on his belt and tapping in the number. A second later, he had one of the bank robbers on the line.

“All right,” he said into the instrument. “Let’s cut the formalities. What do you want in exchange for the hostages?” He thumbed another button and activated the speakerphone so Bolan could hear the other end of the conversation, too.

The raspy cough of a heavy cigarette smoker sounded over the speakerphone. “Every damn penny we’ll be hauling out of this bank,” the bank robber declared. “And five million more for the inconvenience you’ve caused us.” The voice paused and took in a hacking breath. “After that, the usual. A chopper big enough to take thirty people—that’ll include some of the hostages—to the airport, a plane full of fuel ready to take off and a pilot who isn’t a disguised cop.” The man coughed again. “We find a weapon of any kind on him, or anything else that makes us think the flyboy’s a pig, and we’ll blow his head off.”

Glasser looked toward Bolan. Even though he was technically in charge of this operation, the SWAT commander had just spent a month enduring the most rigorous cutting-edge training he’d had in his career, and Bolan had taught several of those classes. Hostage negotiation had been one of them.

Bolan answered the unasked question by silently mouthing the words, “You know what to do. Stall.”

“I don’t have the authority to meet your demands,” Glasser said into the cell phone. “It can be done. But it’s going to take time.”

“You’ve got time,” the man across the street rasped. “Twenty minutes.”

“I can’t even get clearance for the chopper and plane in that length of time,” Glasser said. “Let alone raise five million bucks for you.”

“Well, you’d better try,” the gravelly voice snapped. “Because each minute you’re late means another dead hostage.” There was a pause, then a low, phlegm-sounding chuckle. “I’ll just shoot them, then toss them out the front window you guys blew out so you can see them.” He finished with, “You’ve now got nineteen minutes.” The line clicked dead.

Glasser cut the call at his end and turned once again toward the Executioner. He had known Bolan as Matt Cooper while training at the Farm, and still did. “Any suggestions, Cooper?” he said.

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Get on the phone and start trying to get clearance for the chopper and plane. And check with the local Secret Service field office. See how much counterfeit money they’ve got on hand.” He looked the burly man in the eye. “These guys aren’t going to have the time or the equipment to check out good fakes, and it’ll be a lot easier than trying to talk any other bank or rich individual into gambling with five million real dollars.”

Glasser nodded and began tapping numbers into his phone.

Rising to his feet, the Executioner stayed low, bending over to whisper into Glasser’s ear. “You’re never going to make the twenty-minute deadline,” he said.

Glasser had just hung up the phone. “I know,” he said.

“And if the guys inside are from the Rough Riders, they aren’t bluffing,” Bolan said just as quietly. He remembered a recent intelligence report that Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman—Stony Man Farm’s chief computer expert—had put together about this militant faction of the American Nazi Party. The Rough Riders were suspected in several murders and—like so many homegrown American terrorist groups—relied on bank robbery as their primary means of support.

“Do we know how many hostages are inside?” the Executioner asked.

Glasser shook his head as he touched the cell phone to his ear for the next call. “Not exactly,” he said. “There’ll be twenty to thirty employees, plus however many customers happened to be there at the wrong time.”

Bolan nodded and started to move past the man.

Glasser reached out and grabbed Bolan’s arm. “Where are you going?” he asked.

The Executioner squatted again. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “And if you don’t know it, you can’t accidentally give it away to the enemy.” He paused for a deep breath, then went on. “Just conduct this operation as if I wasn’t here. But when you hear shots fired inside the bank again, move your men in as fast as possible. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“And give me one of those two-ways so I can keep track of you,” the Executioner said.

Glasser waved at one of his SWAT men, a slender sergeant with dark brown hair. “Give Cooper here your radio and mike,” he said. “Then go back to the van and get another one for yourself.”

The sergeant didn’t even bother to ask who Cooper was. Jerking the radio from his belt and the microphone from his shoulder, he handed them over.

The Executioner snapped the radio onto his belt, checked the earpiece connection, then shoved the tiny plastic receiver into one ear. He clipped the microphone to the shoulder of his blacksuit. He looked at his watch.

Not quite ninety seconds had passed since the raspy voice inside the bank had given them their twenty-minute deadline.

The innocents inside had roughly eighteen and a half minutes.

Police cars completely surrounded the bank. Three of the building’s four sides faced streets, and here the vehicles were lined up practically bumper to bumper. To the rear of the bank—beyond the drive-through windows—was a housing complex. Here, the police cars had pulled directly onto the grounds beyond the windows, doing their best to provide a buffer zone between the innocent residents in their houses and the miscreants in the bank. Behind the circle of cars knelt uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives and the rest of Glasser’s SWAT crew, each of the men training a weapon on the bank.

Moving to the rear of the bank, Bolan sprinted for one of the marked units separating the bank from the residential area. But no shots followed him.

Dropping down behind the black-and-white patrol car, Bolan found himself next to a portly patrolman resting his Glock 21 across the hood and aiming it toward the drive-through window into the bank. The man’s uniform cap had been discarded and lay next to him on the ground. Coarse but sparse red-and-gray hair stuck up from his receding hairline and balding pate.

The patrolman glanced at Bolan, then back to the bank.

“You seen any activity through that teller’s window since you’ve been here?” Bolan asked.

The patrolman nodded. “Some. There’s a guy with a ski mask just out of sight below the glass. He pops his head up every few seconds and—” The blue head suddenly appeared as the officer spoke. “There! You see him?”

Bolan nodded. “You see anyone else?”

The balding man shook his head. “Just him.”

The Executioner drew back slightly, taking in the rear of the bank as a whole. The First Fidelity Bank was a one-story building. Awnings covered the three drive-up windows with brick columns supporting what looked like shake-shingle roofs. He wondered whether they would support his two-hundred-plus pounds.

He suspected he was about to find out.

“What’s your name?” Bolan asked the cop next to him.

“Coleman,” said the man. “Call me Ron.”

“You might want to hold back on that familiarity until you hear the rest of what I’m about to say,” Bolan told him.

“Huh?”

“You wearing a vest, Coleman?” Bolan asked.

“You better believe it,” said the man with the sparse red-and-gray hair. “I’ve got a wife and kids I like to go home and see every night.”

“Shock plate inserted?” Bolan asked.

“Right over the old ticker. Thickest steel they make ’em in.” The KCPD officer’s voice was starting to sound suspicious now. “Why?”

“Because I need to use you as a decoy,” the Executioner said. “I’m going up on the roof. And if that blue ski mask happens to pop up at the wrong time and see me, it’ll ruin what I have in mind.”

Now the patrolman’s voice took on a true tone of trepidation. “What is it you expect me to do?”

“Just get up and start walking toward the window. If Mr. Ski Mask shows his head or a weapon or both, take cover behind one of those brick columns. I just need his attention on you and not me.”

“In other words, if someone has to get shot you’d rather it be me than you?”

“No,” Bolan said. “It’s just the way this thing has to go down, that’s all. If you don’t want to do it, say so now. I’ll try to think of something else.” He glanced at his watch. “But I’ve only got eleven minutes to come up with it and pull it off.” He paused, then finished with, “So, Coleman. What’ll it be?”

Bolan could see the concern on the man’s face as he weighed his responsibilities to the job versus those to his family.

“All right,” Coleman finally said. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do.” He paused, then added, “And you can still call me Ron.”

The Executioner smiled. It was a brave man he was working with.

“When I give you the word, just stand up and start walking directly toward the window. If you see the ski mask, make tracks for the brick column. After that, just stay where you are.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Coleman asked.

“Scaling the wall. But don’t look my way under any circumstances. I need that lookout’s attention focused on you, or the inside of the bank’s going to look like a Chicago slaughterhouse.”

Coleman reached up and adjusted his vest, making sure the steel plate was in place. “Makes me wish I’d sprung for the steel-plated jockstrap you can get with these things,” he said. “But what the hell. I’ve already got three kids and the wife and I were talking about a vasectomy anyway.” He turned to face the Executioner. “Say when.”

Bolan slung his M-16 A-2 over his shoulder and waited until the blue ski mask made another quick appearance, then disappeared. “Now!” he said under his breath and rose to his feet at the same time Coleman stood up. Coleman rounded the trunk, and the Executioner cut in front of the front bumper as both men made their way toward the building.

Bolan was running, Coleman walking—as he’d been instructed. So the Executioner reached the brick column supporting the carport several steps in front of the man. Sprinting at full speed, he lifted his right knee almost to his chin as his leather-and-nylon combat boot hit the bricks. His momentum carried him upward, and he got one more step with his left boot before he felt gravity beginning to overcome his own velocity.

Reaching skyward, the Executioner got his fingertips just over the edge of the shake-shingle roofing.

A second later, he had pulled himself up and out of sight on top of the carport.

No sooner had he risen to his knees than he heard several shots fired below him. Looking down, he saw Coleman driven back a step as the rounds clanged off the steel plate in his vest. But the balding cop he didn’t let that stop him. Before the man inside the window could fire again, he dived behind the brick column.

Bolan leaned over the side and looked down. He could see Coleman sitting with his back against the bricks, the sparse and spiky reddish-gray hair pointing straight up at the top of the carport. The Executioner whispered downward, “Ron, you okay?”

The KCPD patrolman was savvy enough not to look upward when he answered. “If you call feeling like you just took three straight hooks to the chest from Buster Douglas okay, then yeah—I’m just peachy.”

The Executioner chuckled. At least the man was out of danger now. He could sit out the rest of this encounter. “Okay,” he said. “Stay where you are.”

Bolan looked down at his wrist. He had a little under ten minutes before the hostages started dying. Switching on the microphone mounted to his shoulder, Bolan realized he had no call letters or numbers of his own, and he didn’t know what Tom Glasser’s were, either. So he said simply, “Cooper to Glasser. Cooper to Glasser. Come in, Glasser.”

“SWAT 1,” Glasser’s voice came back. “This is Glasser, Cooper. You got a call name?”

The Executioner lowered his voice until he suspected it could barely be heard on the other end of the line. “I go by Striker, SWAT 1. And I’m on the roof,” he whispered. “Have you had any more contact with the subjects inside?”

“Negative, Striker,” Glasser came back. He was whispering, too. “But we’ve got the funny money on the way here, compliments of the Secret Service.”

“How about the chopper?” Bolan asked.

“We’re trying to find one big enough. And that’s not easy if you don’t go to the military.”

Bolan immediately understood the reason behind the SWAT captain’s words. The regular military was forbidden from taking action in police matters inside the U.S., and most of the time that was a good thing—it ensured that America would not become a military state ruled by its armed forces. But there were exceptions to that rule, when the use of the armed forces seemed like the only logical answer.

This was one of them.

“See if you can go through the state’s National Guard,” the Executioner said. “If they don’t have a chopper big enough on hand, they ought to be able to get one from the regular army.” He paused and felt his eyebrows furrow as he thought further. “And use this as an excuse to stall some more. Call into the bank on your cell phone and explain the problem with the chopper. See if you can buy some more time.”

“Affirmative, Striker,” Glasser said. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Negative, SWAT 1,” Bolan said as he made his way carefully across the shingled roof one shaky step at a time. “And the fact that I’m up top is for your ears only. We can’t expect fifty men—no matter how good they are—to keep from glancing up and being seen by the bad guys.”

“Roger, Striker,” Glasser said. “That intel stays in-house.”

Bolan finally made it off the carport roofs and onto the flat tar roof of the bank proper. His eyes skirted the building, seeing ventilation shafts, heat and air-conditioning equipment, and a variety of other pipes and housings sticking up out of the dirty black surface. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the building, staying just far enough from the edge that his head couldn’t be seen by the police officers on the ground.

He had meant what he’d told Glasser. All it would take would be for one of the Rough Riders below him to see one cop straining his eyes toward the roof to know someone was above them. Then the element of surprise would be gone.

The Executioner had hoped to find a return air shaft or some similar means to enter the building below, but he had no such luck. Banks were built with the hope of keeping people out after business hours, and the rough roof of First Fidelity was no exception. There were holes leading down into the building, all right. But the Executioner would have had to have been the size of a house cat to get through them.

With one exception.

Near the street side of the building, above what Bolan assumed would be the bank’s front lobby, was a large skylight. Slowly, he crept toward it, formulating his plan of attack as he went. If the skylight was plastic, he’d be out of luck here, too. He’d have to shoot enough holes through the plastic with the M-16 A-2 to create an opening large enough to drop through. And by the time that had been accomplished, the Rough Riders would have had time to kill the bank employees and other hostages several times over.

But if it was glass…

When he’d drawn near enough that he feared he might be seen be someone looking upward, Bolan dropped to his belly and used his elbows to pull himself the rest of the way to the skylight. Then, slowly—almost ceremoniously—he reached out with his left hand and tapped the clear surface in front of him.

Both the sound, and the feel, brought a smile to his face.

The skylight was made of glass. It would shatter just as quickly, and as surely, as the picture window next to the front door had.

Crawling back a few yards, the Executioner rose to his feet again and activated the mike on his shoulder. “Striker to SWAT 1,” he said. “Come in, SWAT 1.”

“I hear you Striker,” came back into his ear.

Bolan looked at his watch. He had a little over a minute before the twenty-minute deadline. “You buy us any extra time with the National Guard story?” he asked Glasser.

“Negative,” said the SWAT commander. “The guy just laughed, told me he knew a stall job when he heard one, then repeated his threat to start killing one hostage for each minute we were late.”

“Okay,” Bolan said. “Then it’s Plan B time.” He glanced at his watch once more.

Forty-five seconds remained.

He was about to speak to Glasser again when he saw another man in green coveralls and a blue ski mask shove a middle-aged woman directly under the skylight. The late-afternoon sun was at an angle that gave him an almost perfect view through the glass and, he suspected, would block or at least distort what could be seen by anyone looking up through the skylight.

But at this stage of the game he was taking no chances. Bolan took another step back until only the tops of the man’s and woman’s heads were visible. He had already seen all he needed to see.

The man in the coveralls had wrapped his left forearm around the woman’s throat. The short, stubby muzzle of an Ingram MAC-11 submachine gun was pressed against her nape. The watch on his wrist was clearly visible, and Bolan could see the Rough Rider staring at it, counting off the final seconds just as the Executioner was doing above, on the roof.

Bolan glanced at the MAC-11 again. Those submachine guns cycled at a phenomenally fast rate of fire. Unless the man firing the weapon was extremely experienced with it, he could empty the entire 30-round magazine before he let up on the trigger. All of which made the Ingrams less suitable for combat than for assassinations.

But an outright murder was exactly what was going to happen in less than thirty seconds unless the Executioner acted swiftly. The woman’s head would be almost completely gone before the Rough Rider even had time to let up on the trigger.

Bolan looked at his wrist. Twenty-eight seconds.

“Listen and listen fast, SWAT 1,” he whispered into the mike. “Fifteen seconds from the time I stop talking I’m coming down through the skylight. You should hear a few shots from me up top here, then glass breaking. Tell your men that’s their cue—when they hear the gunfire and then the crash it’s time to charge the building.”

“You’ve got it,” Glasser said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Make sure that your men know that once they’re inside the bank, they’re to take orders from me.”

“I’ll make sure they understand it,” Glasser said. “When do we begin the countdown?”

“Fifteen seconds from…now,” Bolan said.

He took a deep breath and squinted through the glass. From where he stood, he had a good angle at the head of the man in the green coveralls. He switched the M-16 to 3-round burst mode, then lined up the sights on the back of the man’s head. The holes he was about to drill through the glass would weaken it and make it shatter even easier.

The Executioner took a final glance at his watch, then returned his eyes to the sights. Slowly, he squeezed the trigger and watched the back of the Rough Rider’s head blow off as three tiny holes appeared in the skylight.

A second after that, he leaped onto the glass in a sitting position and crashed through the skylight into the First Fidelity Bank.

THE EXECUTIONER STRAIGHTENED his legs as he fell through the glass, thankful that the blacksuit was made out of cut-resistant material. Still, he felt a few shreds of glass scrape his hands and face, and by the time his feet hit the floor of the bank’s lobby he could feel tiny drops of blood running down his cheeks.

They mattered little in the grand scheme of things.

The Executioner landed on his feet, right behind the screaming woman and the dead Rough Rider who had fallen to her rear. To his right was a popcorn machine designed and built to look like the type found in old-fashioned movie theaters. Such fake antique popcorn machines seemed, for some reason, to be standard fare in modern banks. They were made out of thin metal and glass, and offered concealment but not cover.

Bolan pivoted on the balls of his feet, turning toward the cashiers’ windows. The first thing he saw were the hostages. Roughly a dozen people who looked like customers lay on their faces on the floor, their hands clasped behind their heads. Next to them, at least twice as many bank employees—both males and females wearing tan slacks and maroon polo shirts sporting the bank’s logo—lay in the same position.

The Executioner’s sudden descent through the skylight had come as a complete surprise to the bank robbers. Like the pair he had already encountered, they also wore green coveralls and blue ski masks. But Bolan noted one major difference.

The masks of these men had been rolled up into simple blue stocking caps. This aided their vision, but it told the Executioner something else, as well.

These Rough Riders weren’t worried about the customers or bank employees seeing their faces, which meant they intended to kill all the hostages.

A Rough Rider with a wide handlebar mustache was the first to recover from the shock of Bolan’s aerial entry. He lifted the Uzi in his hands toward the Executioner.

But Bolan was a fraction of a second faster. The Executioner’s first 3-round burst hit the mustachioed Rough Rider squarely in the chest. Above the explosions of the rounds Bolan heard a high-pitched ringing sound. He immediately realized that Coleman, the uniformed cop outside, wasn’t the only one wearing a Kevlar vest with a steel insert. At least some of the Rough Riders had them, too.

While the trio of rounds from the Executioner’s assault rifle had driven the man with the mustache several paces backward into a desk, they hadn’t stopped him. The Rough Rider began to raise his Uzi again, and more rounds from another direction whizzed past the Executioner’s ears, sounding like angry bees.

Bolan’s next triburst was aimed at his target’s head. The first slug took off the upper right half of his face and blew brains, blood and fragments of skull out the back of his head. The second and third rounds disappeared somewhere in the gore before the Rough Rider slumped to the tile floor in front of the desk.

The Executioner ducked behind the popcorn machine as more rounds from behind the tellers’ windows zipped past him. As he hit the floor, a barrage of fire from a variety of weapons shattered the glass of the popcorn machine and tore through the thin red metal stand.

Suddenly, the First Fidelity Bank lobby appeared to be snowing popcorn and glass, both raining over Bolan where he lay on his side. The unusual combined odor of exploding gunpowder, popcorn and butter filled the Executioner’s nostrils.

Several of the rounds that had ripped through the red metal stand had missed Bolan by millimeters. And the bank robbers knew that sooner or later, if they simply kept peppering the popcorn machine with fire, some of their rounds would find vital organs.

The Executioner knew that, too. Slinging the M-16 over his shoulder, he suddenly dived from behind the machine into the open. Hitting the floor on his right shoulder, he rolled under several bursts of fire just inches above him. The shoulder roll took him all the way to the desk where the man with the mustache lay in death, and the Executioner squeezed in between the dead man and the desk, using them both for cover now. He saw a flash of blue as one of the Rough Riders raised his head to fire through a teller’s window.

Bolan triggered his M-16. The blue stocking cap blew off the top of the man’s head. So did half of the head itself.

Two men in coveralls suddenly emerged through a formerly closed door next to the tellers’ windows. Behind them, Bolan could see a private office. An employee wearing the same maroon polo shirt lay on the floor, bloody and battered but breathing.

Both of the men coming out the door carried Uzis, and both were well over six feet and broad shouldered. They made the mistake of trying to exit the office at the same time, and for a split second wedged themselves together in the doorway in a scene worthy of The Three Stooges. But the Uzis kept all humor out of the Executioner’s brain as he flipped the M-16’s selector switch to semiauto, then put one 5.56 mm bullet between each man’s eyes.

They fell to the floor, dead.

For a moment, the gunfire died down and Bolan heard the sounds of running footsteps outside the building. He smiled grimly to himself. Glasser and his men were on the way. Their arrival was confirmed by the sounds of window glass breaking and side exit doors being rammed open.

Quickly, Bolan assessed the situation. The fact that the gunfire had died down meant there were a limited number of men who could see him. Which, in turn, meant the Rough Riders had to be scattered throughout the bank. The breaking glass and doors being rammed meant Glasser’s SWAT teams were entering the bank at various positions. They would take care of the offices, vault area and other rooms behind the tellers’ windows. But there was still one place just off the lobby that needed attention. The safe-deposit box room. And the Executioner was the most likely candidate to cover it.

Bolan could see the barred door was on the other side of the lobby, across from him.

And the barred door was open.

The Executioner squeezed out from between the desk and the dead man with the mustache, the M-16 aimed toward the tellers’ windows. There was always a chance that he’d been wrong in his assessment as to the cease-fire, and one or more Rough Riders might be hidden back there, just waiting for an opportunity such as Bolan was now giving him.

But such was not the case. Making his way silently toward the safe-deposit box door, trying to avoid the broken glass, shreds of metal, popcorn and anything else that might make a sound and alert the men in the safe-deposit box room that he was coming.

When he reached the door, the Executioner dropped to one knee and peered inside. Row upon row of safe-deposit boxes were stacked to a height of seven feet or so, and they prevented him from seeing anyone in the room.

But they didn’t prevent his hearing the conversation.

“I can’t open them,” a young female voice pleaded between sobs. “It takes both our key and the customers’.”

“Then you’d better find some other way of getting into them,” said the same cigarette-smoking voice Bolan had heard over Glasser’s cell phone. “Because if I have to shoot the damn things open, and any jewelry or other valuables get damaged, my next shot is going right between those pretty little tits of yours.”

The sobs increased in volume.

A moment later, a lone shot was fired, but Bolan continued to hear the young woman cry. So the round had gone into one of the boxes rather than her chest.

But it was only a matter of time before the raspy voice grew impatient, realized they were already under attack and killed her in order to concentrate his efforts on escape.

Because by now the Rough Riders could be pretty sure that neither a helicopter nor an airplane was in their immediate future.

“Find anything, Carl?” the raspy voice asked.

“Nah,” said a new voice. “Nothing we can use anyway.”

“Then shoot the next one.”

Bolan squeezed through the small opening between the barred door and the wall, trying not to move the door in case its hinges needed oiling. When he’d accomplished that feat, he stayed low, duck-walking his way past the several rows of safe-deposit boxes until he came to a stack just beyond where the two men and the woman were standing. At least he thought there were only two men—because only two men had spoken. He reminded himself that there could be more Rough Riders there, assisting in the pilfering of the boxes, who had kept quiet.

Bolan flipped the selector switch to safety and set the M-16 on the floor. Slowly and silently he drew the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R. If there were more than just the two men, he would take out as many as he could with the near silent Beretta. With any luck, he’d capture the man with the raspy voice alive. He hoped it went down that way at least. Dead men not only told no tales, but they also gave up no intelligence information.

But it was not to be.

Behind them, through the lobby and at the rear of the bank, came the roar of gunfire as Glasser’s SWAT teams entered the building and engaged the Rough Riders spread throughout the bank. The raspy voice on the other side of the stack of steel boxes said, “Okay, that’s it. We need to get out of here. Kill her, Carl, and let’s get going.”

Bolan could wait no longer.

Still squatting, the Executioner leaned around the corner and saw a short, stocky man with a three-day growth of beard lifting a Government Model 1911 .45 to the temple of the openly crying female bank employee. He had already made contact with the muzzle of the .45 by the time the Executioner lined up the Beretta’s sights on him and flipped the selector to semiauto as he’d done with the M-16. But his other suspicions had been accurate. Besides the man with the unfiltered cigarette voice, three more armed men in coveralls stool in the aisle in front of the boxes.

One 9 mm round was all it would take to save the young woman, but it would have to be precisely placed, and he could control that placement better with the Beretta in semiauto mode. The shot would have to go directly into the Rough Rider’s brain stem and shut down all motor functions, lest the man called Carl pulled the trigger of the .45 in a convulsion of death.

Taking a deep breath, the Executioner let out half of it, stopped, then gently squeezed the Beretta’s trigger. The sound suppressor coughed out the bullet. A subsonic, semijacketed hollowpoint entered the man’s brain, and he dropped the .45 as he fell to the floor.

But the shot had drawn the attention of the other men down the aisle toward Bolan, and one of the coveralled men now raised a Heckler & Koch MP-5. With no time to switch to 3-round-burst mode, the Executioner aimed carefully again, hitting the main squarely in the nose. In his peripheral vision, he saw the raspy-voiced man he assumed was the leader take off down the aisle, away from him. But he had no chance to stop him because the second of the third men was now trying to fix the sights of a Glock on the Executioner.

Bolan remembered the vest on the man with the mustache and again aimed high. The shot took the Rough Rider in the scalp. But it was not a kill shot. The man got off one wild 10 mm round from his large-framed Glock. Miraculously it missed both Bolan and the female bank employee. The Executioner fired again.

And this time, his near silent 9 mm round caught the man in the right eye.

The only man left had taken off his ski mask completely, and Bolan could see it stuffed in a side pocket of the coveralls. He fired once more, and the 9 mm slug took out the last Rough Rider’s left eye.

All of the men who had accompanied the raspy-voiced leader into the safe-deposit room were dead.

Bolan rushed up to the young woman, who was sniffling between sobs. “You all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Thank you,” she managed through the crying.

Bolan looked past her to the end of the aisle. The leader of the Rough Riders was nowhere to be seen. The Executioner carefully searched the rest of the room, but was not surprised when the cigarette smoker didn’t turn up.

The man had used his own troops to give him time to escape.

Picking up his M-16 as he left the room, Bolan could still hear gunfire coming from the rear of the bank. One of the SWAT men was in the lobby, personally holding the front door open for the terrified hostages and telling each one to stay close—they’d need statements from them all.

“Anybody in the teller’s area?” Bolan asked the man as he passed.

The SWAT trooper shook his head. “What’s left of them is in the back. They’ve barricaded themselves in the vault.”

Bolan stopped in his tracks. “You get a look at the vault?” he asked.

The SWAT man nodded.

“Can the door be opened from the inside once it’s locked?”

The man holding the door for the hostages nodded. “I just caught a glance at it earlier when I ran by. And I’m no safe expert, but it looked like it to me.”

Bolan hurried through the swinging door, stepping over several dead bodies in coveralls as he made his way to the back of the bank. He passed several private offices as he ran down an empty hallway. Turning a corner, he passed two more SWAT team members who lowered their AR-15s as soon as they recognized him.

The two men appeared to have gotten Glasser’s orders that Bolan was in charge. They both saluted as he ran by.

At the end of the hallway, Bolan found both the closed and locked vault door, and SWAT Captain Tom Glasser along with more of his men. A half dozen more dead Rough Riders, all dressed in coveralls and blue stocking caps, had been piled unceremoniously against the wall, out of the way.

Which was fine with the Executioner. Terrorists deserved no ceremony when they were righteously killed.

“What’s going down?” the Executioner asked the recent Stony Man Farm graduate.

Glasser’s eyes reflected a deep confusion. “They’ve barricaded themselves in the vault, and they’ve got hostages,” he said. “It’s really no different than when they held the whole bank a few minutes ago. The playing field’s just become smaller.”

“How many of them left?” Bolan asked.

“The bad guys? Five, maybe six. And they’ve got three or four hostages. Can’t be certain.” He paused a second, then went on. “That raspy voice we heard on the phone?”

“Yeah?” the Executioner said.

“He’s one of them.”

Bolan nodded. “Same demands?” he asked.

Glasser nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “but at least we can probably get them to settle for a smaller helicopter this time.”

The Executioner nodded at the attempt at dark humor on Glasser’s part. It was one of the ways cops and soldiers relieved tension.

Then he turned and looked at the vault door.

There would be no skylight to bust through here.

So he would have to come up with an alternate plan, and come up with it fast.