Enemy agents, p.18
Enemy Agents, page 18
And if he blew it, he wouldn’t be the only one to pay a deadly price.
“YOU THINK HE’LL MAKE the shot?” Larry Mosier asked.
“I know he’ll try,” Halsey replied. “He has the proper weapon and the necessary skills. Beyond that, I’m no fortune-teller.”
“But we still go if he misses?” Webb asked from the driver’s seat.
“Hell, yes! We’re not his limo service, Steve. We came to back him up if anything goes wrong.”
“Okay. Just checking.”
“What’s that noise?” Mosier asked, turning for a look down West Lancaster Boulevard.
“It sounds like motorcycles,” Webb replied.
Halsey saw nothing in his wing mirror. “Might be the motorcade,” he said, checking his watch. “They’re early, but—”
“Too many cycles for a motorcade,” Webb interrupted him. “They put a couple out in front, a couple more bring up the rear, with limos in between. This sounds like—”
“Holy shit! It’s bikers!” Mosier blurted out. “Dozens of goddamn bikers!”
“What the—”
Halsey swiveled in his seat, peered through the tinted tailgate window of his SUV and saw the outlaws coming. Even with the sunglasses and small black helmet planted squarely on the biker’s head, confining his unruly hair, Halsey recognized Ace Winegart at the head of the procession.
“Comancheros,” he informed his two companions.
“That can’t be coincidence,” Webb said.
“Not even close,” Halsey agreed. Reaching between his feet, he reached into an open duffel bag. He found an Uzi submachine gun, lifted it and cocked its bolt.
“We splitting?” his driver asked.
“Not a chance. Just watch, for now,” Halsey said. “If they spot us and make any kind of move, be ready.”
As he spoke, the Comanchero column’s point man reached the point where Halsey’s SUV stood at the curb. Winegart glanced over at him, locking eyes with Halsey in the Blazer’s shotgun seat…and smiled.
The biker gunned his motorcycle, speeding up to 50 mph for a block, then raised his left hand overhead and twirled his fingers in a circle. Halsey had time to notice that Winegart was wearing a fingerless glove, when the Comancheros’ president swung his bike into a sharp illegal U-turn, doubling back. His troops began to follow Winegart’s lead with the precision of a well-rehearsed drill team.
“They’re coming back, Clay!” Mosier warned.
“You think I can’t see that?” Halsey snapped, already reaching for the inside door handle with his left hand. “Steve, alert the rest. Get everybody on the street.”
As Webb picked up his two-way radio, Mosier leaned between the two front seats, smelling of panic sweat. “The President’s not here, Clay. If there’s shooting—”
“Then we’d better be the people doing it,” Halsey replied. “Unless you’d rather die right here and miss the chance to fight another day.”
Beside him, Webb was barking orders to the other teams, receiving most of their acknowledgments. “I can’t raise Simms and Loomis, Clay,” he said.
“Screw Simms and Loomis,” Halsey growled, as he opened his door.
“But Stone—”
“Can cover us, the same way we were meant to cover him. Get ready!”
There was nothing more to say, then, as the bikers thundered toward him, drawing weapons. Halsey leaned across the Blazer’s hood, bracing his elbows on the hot metal and squeezed the Uzi’s trigger.
17
As Bolan reached the library’s flat roof, a crackle of gunfire erupted below him downrange. He faded to the left, keeping the exit door’s housing between himself and Stern as he reached the edge of the roof and scanned West Lancaster Boulevard.
The presidential motorcade was nowhere in sight, but battle had been joined on the block between Fern Avenue and Gadsden, west of the Performing Arts Center. The street was filled with swerving Comanchero motorcycles and pedestrians, some running to escape the cross fire, others clearly bent on joining it. Some of the runners carried guns and wore police uniforms, while others were clearly militiamen.
A few yards off from where he stood, a heavy weapon coughed through its suppressor, and he saw a cop sprawl on the pavement, crossing West Lancaster Boulevard. The sight put Bolan back in motion, circling for a view of Ubel Stern.
And for a second, there, he couldn’t find the sniper. Then the. 50-caliber Barrett snorted again, and Bolan saw a puff of dust rise from the roof, a rippling in the tar paper that betrayed Stern’s location.
Bolan didn’t hesitate. He double-tapped the sheet of tar paper, watching it pop and recoil with the impact of 9 mm rounds, but instead of going limp beneath it, Ubel Stern rolled clear, returning fire with his high-powered rifle.
The armor-piercing slug sizzled past Bolan’s face, singeing his cheek with its hot tailwind as Bolan threw himself behind the exit housing. A metal door and lathe-and-plaster walls concealed him from the German sniper, but they wouldn’t stop the Barrett’s rounds from finding flesh and bone.
Stern slammed his next shot through the structure three feet above roof level, where a crouching man’s head might be found. Bolan was lower, lying prone, but Stern still had six shots left in the Barrett’s 10-round magazine before he was forced to reload. He could stitch them across the framework’s base and virtually guarantee at least one stunning hit.
The time to move was now, and no mistake.
But left or right?
From Stern’s perspective, Bolan had ducked out of sight on the housing’s left side. Would he expect Bolan to second-guess him, think that he’d be waiting for a target on the right, and so sight to the left?
At thirty-odd pounds with its scope and loaded magazine, and nearly five feet long, the Barrett was too unwieldy for accurate snap-shooting. Stern could cover one side of the exit housing or the other, but not both.
It was a gamble, either way, and Bolan knew that he was running out of time.
He hedged his bets, triggered a shot around the right-hand corner—Stern’s left—then rolled out the other way as two suppressed rounds ripped into the structure that had shielded him. One blew away a fist-sized chunk of plaster, while the second came through dead on-target for the spot where he had been a heartbeat earlier.
And by that time, the Executioner was clear, wide open for the man who meant to kill him, scuttling across the sunbaked roof on stinging hands and knees, seeking a kill shot of his own.
CORWIN DREW HER GLOCK 22 at the first sound of gunfire and stepped from her car, retaining the presence of mind first to lock it, then pocket the keys.
She was parked a half-block south of the Performing Arts Center, on Fern Avenue, and had seen the bikers rumble past on West Lancaster Boulevard a minute or so before the shooting started. From the sound of it, all hell had broken loose along the desert town’s main drag, and Corwin didn’t plan on being left out of the action.
Rushing in was foolish, she supposed, with so many cops and bad guys running around, but she’d taken all available precautions. Despite the day’s heat, she was wearing her ATF jacket, with her badge on a chain around her neck, conspicuous against her Kevlar vest. She had no shotgun in the Crown Victoria, but with the Glock and two spare magazines she had forty-six rounds at her fingertips.
Was it enough?
Corwin hadn’t counted the Comancheros as they passed her vantage point, but if forced to guess, she’d have said there were twenty or more. Same number, give or take, for Halsey’s NMM hit team. Put them together, and forty-six shots didn’t sound like a lot—didn’t sound like enough, as a matter of fact.
Relax, Corwin told herself, as she ran north on Fern toward West Lancaster. No one’s asking you to shoot them all yourself.
“That’s freaking great,” she muttered. But she held her pace, advancing toward the battle zone as two more cops in uniform ran past the intersection, one of them armed with a shotgun. Christ, they looked so young!
And still the gunfire, rising as it seemed to a crescendo, echoes rattling between the Performing Arts Center and shops on the north side of the boulevard. The crash of glass added a brittle, jarring note. The burned gunpowder smell reminded Grace of fireworks shows on Independence Day.
When she had almost reached the corner, a wild-eyed Comanchero suddenly appeared, hell-bent on running in the opposite direction, south on Fern. He skidded to a halt on seeing Corwin, her badge and gun, blinked at her in surprise. It seemed to take a moment for the biker to remember that his right hand clutched a pistol.
“Drop it!” Corwin commanded. “Drop it now!”
Instead, he smiled and raised the weapon, something Corwin would never understand. It would’ve been so simple to survive. And when she shot him twice—okay, one precious bullet wasted, more than likely—Grace felt nothing but the satisfaction of a dirty job well done.
Passing the corpse, she stooped to pluck his weapon from the sidewalk, slip it underneath her belt. A few more extra shots for her, and no one else could come along to claim the pistol, maybe use it against her.
She reached the corner, risked a glance along West Lancaster and found herself peering at Hell.
SON OF A BITCH HAD TRIED to kill me, damn it. That message was foremost in Ace Winegart’s mind as he swerved his Harley, ducking the first Uzi bullets, then felt the bike beginning to slide.
In Winegart’s opinion, pumping bikes is a bitch on the best days, but dumping a bike under fire was the god-awful worst. Aside from the damage to paint, chrome and whatever else, aside from the bruises and road rash, incoming rounds reduced Winegart’s odds of survival by half, maybe more.
So he went with it, sliding and rolling through sparks that his Harley threw up in its wake. There’d been no time to reach his holstered weapon, but he felt it slapping heavily against his ribs. Still there, assuming Winegart ever had a chance to use it. Bullets rippled off the pavement as he tumbled past the SUV where Halsey and some others were working overtime to finish him.
But his boys were weighing in, returning fire. Winegart knew it from the general direction of the new gunfire, and from the way his would-be killers lost their focus, forced to duck and dodge behind their ride. As for the cops, God only knew what they were doing. Winegart personally didn’t give a crap, as long as he could frame Clay Halsey in his sights before the lights went out.
Winegart scrambled to his feet, ignoring the pain that roared from flayed elbows, drawing the MAC-10 he carried and sprinting toward Halsey’s side of West Lancaster Boulevard. Bullets were everywhere, buzzing like bees in a garden, whining off pavement, brick walls and parked cars. It was hell on a Ferris wheel, something to talk about years down the line.
For whoever survived.
Winegart saw an old cop running toward him, pistol waggling in his fist. They mostly wore Kevlar these days, so the biker fired at his legs, put him down in a welter of blood and moved on.
A slug drilled Winegart’s left biceps and nearly made him stumble, but he kept his balance somehow, plowed ahead until he reached the sidewalk, sliding into place behind a cop car. There was no one in it or behind it, and he had to marvel for a heartbeat at the way some things worked out.
In front of him, Halsey and a couple of his so-called soldiers were fighting like jack-in-the-boxes, bouncing up and down, all taking turns at firing from behind their bullet-punctured SUV. Winegart was lining up his shot, prepared to zip all three of them, when the nearest one saw him and shouted a warning.
Winegart gutted him with a 9 mm burst, tracked on to nail the second man and then drop Halsey, but his main target was faster on the pickup. With his left hand, Halsey clutched his buddy’s collar, shoved the man in front of him to be a human shield. While Winegart’s Parabellum slugs were slapping into number two, Halsey was ducking, lining up his Uzi to return fire.
Winegart took it in the chest and toppled backward, lot his MAC-10 as the fight and life ran out of him. His last thought wasn’t eloquent, but it was apt.
“This sucks,” he wheezed. And died.
STERN WAS CROUCHED behind his .50-caliber Barrett and covering the wrong side of the exit housing when Bolan drew down on him, framing the German’s grim face in his sights. Stern’s snarl told Bolan that he wasn’t coming in alive, and that was fine.
The Beretta coughed twice from twenty feet out, its rounds punching through Stern’s left eye and his forehead with less than a second between killing impacts. The German was dead before gravity claimed him, but still he squeezed off one more round from the Barrett, a shot angled down through the roof and beyond.
Bolan leaped forward, snatched the heavy rifle from Stern’s lifeless hands and dumped his duffel bag to spill out two spare magazines. Swiftly replaced the old one, with its three rounds left, and took the two spares with him, moving to the southwest corner of the roof.
Downrange, bodies were scattered over four lanes of West Lancaster Boulevard, combatants running every which way, firing as they went at other gunmen crouched behind cars and in recessed doorways. When a woman appeared at the corner of Fern and West Lancaster, crouching and edging along the facade of the Performing Arts Center, Bolan zeroed in on her with the Barrett’s scope and mouthed a curse.
Grace Corwin was moving right into the thick of things, despite his warning—and her previous agreement—to stay clear.
Her choice, Bolan thought, and went back to work. He couldn’t sacrifice his mission to protect one person on the battlefield, when there were still so many threats to neutralize.
Beginning this second.
Bolan knew the Barrett was correctly sighted in, because he’d watched Stern working with it, fine-tuning the Leupold Mark 4 telescopic sight. Now, with the sun baking the rooftop where he lay, Bolan peered through that scope and scanned the killing ground for targets.
Almost instantly, he found a Comanchero with a shotgun rising from behind a parked car, aiming toward a cop who seemed oblivious to the danger at his back. Another second, and—
He framed the shot and squeezed the Barrett’s trigger, rode the mighty recoil, tracking on without waiting to watch a dead man fall. Bolan could hear the numbers running in his head, reminding him that he was almost out of time.
But he still had a viper to decapitate.
Job one remained undone.
HALSEY WASN’T SURE how everything had gone to hell so fast, so furiously.
One minute, he’d been waiting for the President to show his face, waiting to see that famous phony smile erased forever by a two-inch, 400-grain boattail spitzer bullet made of solid brass, traveling at 2,800 feet per second. The next, he’d been dropped into a chaotic firefight with grungy bikers and all kinds of cops.
How had the Comancheros found him, he wondered, on this day of days? Why would they risk a showdown here and now, with so much law around, including the Secret Service? And finally, he asked himself, what frigging difference did it make?
He risked a glance around the Blazer’s right-front fender, then recoiled as buckshot struck the hood and spalled, spraying the wall behind him with slivers of lead. Halsey wished he could get the hell away from there, but even with the Blazer’s key in the ignition he was trapped. Incoming rounds had flattened both tires on the left, and drilled the radiator dry.
He wasn’t going anywhere, unless he found another means of transport and—
“Halsey!” a female voice barked at him, somewhere close at hand. “Lay down your weapon! Now!”
Turning his head, he saw a woman kneeling in the doorway of the big Wells Fargo bank behind him, aiming a gun at his face. Her windbreaker had “ATF” printed above her left breast, and a badge was dangling on a chain around her neck.
Perfect, he thought. The goddamned cherry on top of my sundae.
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked her, feeling Arctic-cold inside.
“Try me and see,” she answered, through clenched teeth.
“Okay, okay,” he said. Moving with glacial speed as he reached out to set his Uzi on the sidewalk. “You’re the boss, lady.”
“Now push—”
A gunshot interrupted her command, and Halsey spun to find one of the Comancheros lurching toward the lady Fed, clutching a wound in his left side but still able to lift his long-slide .45 pistol. The first shot had missed by a whisper, but if the biker had a second chance—
He didn’t.
The lady Fed shot him, a quick double-tap to the chest, and she was already turning toward Halsey again when he rushed her, put his full two hundred pounds behind the shoulder block and slammed her back against Wells Fargo’s granite wall.
The breath and fight whooshed out of her on impact, but he followed with a roundhouse to her left cheek, all the same. A second later, Halsey had her Glock in hand, was dragging her across the blood-streaked sidewalk toward his Uzi, shouting at her, “Where’s your goddamned car?”
“Forget it,” she responded, sounding sick and groggy. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Seething, he jammed the Glock’s muzzle beneath her chin and said, “You want to bet your life on that?”
TOMMY GRUBER WAS RUNNING away, still clutching an M-16 in his hands, when Bolan reached out and dropped him from three blocks away. The slug punched through him like a heated awl through cheese and spent its force inside a corner mailbox, while Gruber hit the pavement like a bag of turnips, boneless. DOA.
Bolan had three rounds left in his first magazine, and still no shot at Halsey. He’d picked out Halsey’s Blazer, parked a block west of the Performing Arts Center, but if the militia boss was crouched behind it, he was playing it safe, staying below the line of fire.
Or, maybe he’d escaped on foot while Bolan was sweeping the hellgrounds, dropping two more Comancheros and three militia shooters before he nailed Gruber. Maybe he was lying dead behind the Blazer, or inside it.
Maybe.
Bolan swung back to check the SUV again—and froze as his sight found Corwin. She was crouched in the recessed doorway of a bank, aiming her Glock at someone down behind the Blazer. Bolan guessed that it was Halsey, but before he had a chance to verify it, a Comanchero lurched in from the curb, missing Corwin with his first shot, then dropped as she swiveled and nailed him.
