Black Death Reprise

In addition to stitching a straight line through the sapling causing its trunk to crack and split, her steel-jacketed triplets sliced through the gunman’s neck, all but decapitating him as he dropped the shotgun and fell three feet into the bushes, arms windmilling in a final release of nervous energy.

Outside, all was suddenly silent.

Dr. Zagorski slung the FNH P-90 submachine gun the way her female colleagues might carry a handbag. By securing the stock under her right arm, she could direct the gun’s barrel across a space with the sweep of her forearm as if the rifle was an extension of her hand. This one-armed technique freed her other hand to enable a descent while ensuring she’d retain the ability to fire her weapon on the way down.

As Zagorski stepped to the opening where the window had been and grabbed on to the thin cord with her free hand while wrapping her legs around the line, Bolan pulled two M-18 smoke canisters from his web belt, released their safety latches and tossed the canisters out the window. Within seconds, the area was immersed in thick clouds of billowing smoke as dense and concealing as the worst ocean fogs that occasionally drove ships off course in the North Atlantic.

“Northwest corner of the vineyard!” Bolan shouted into Zagorski’s ear a second before she disappeared into the thick smoke that clung in an impervious cloud along the side of the building.

Bolan stood with one foot on the windowsill, about to follow the doctor to the ground forty feet below. With the smoke from the M-18s providing adequate cover, and Zagorski’s demonstrated ability with the submachine gun, the soldier was confident that the odds for survival had shifted in their favor.

The damaged workbench, weakened by the riddling absorbed from hundreds of rounds that had shredded the door, suddenly burst ten feet into the laboratory with the force of a runaway locomotive. Guards with automatic weapons spitting death were close behind, using the workbench and door they were forcing forward into the room in much the same way infantry troops use an armored tank to lead the way into an area entrenched by the enemy.

In the back of his mind, Bolan could hear the intermittent staccato bursts of Zagorski’s P-90 and realized she was capitalizing on her downward movement through the smoke. Having been in that situation many times himself, he knew Zagorski could use the ground troops’ muzzle-flashes, made visible by the thick smoke, as targets. As long as she engaged them with short bursts and continued her downward rappel, her own position would not be betrayed. Bolan also knew that inches above her head, rounds would be sparking and ricocheting against the stone wall where moments earlier, she had been.

Straddling the windowsill with the arm holding his Beretta wrapped around the thin grappling cord, Bolan directed his Desert Eagle at the imploding door and workbench and began pulling the trigger. The combat inexperience of the three guards who were pushing forward behind the workbench was evidenced by the way they aimed their fire directly to their front rather than in wide-sweeping arcs, as if their task was to clear a walking path through dense foliage. Their guns chattered without pause, spraying a steady stream of 5.7 mm rounds, demolishing glassware and work stations, filling the space inside the lab with flying debris.

From his position slightly to the left of the attackers, Bolan fired a rapid quartet from his Desert Eagle, the throaty retort of the .44 Magnum pistol roaring like an angry beast, its heavy bass voice overpowering the lighter pops of the P-90s with tympanic explosions that pulsed against Bolan’s eardrums.

The Desert Eagle’s steel-jacketed slugs stopped the initial guards cold, tossing the leading two backward as violently as if they had been stuntmen with hydraulic ropes attached to their backs. Bolan’s third shot hit a charging gunman square in the chin, the bullet shattering his jawbones like cheap crystal before smashing into the man’s chest. The slug exited through his lower back, leaving a fist-size hole that spurted a crimson stream of blood as he fell to the floor.

Bolan leaned out the window, continuing to engage his enemies as they charged into the lab. Bullets snapped the air a finger’s width from his face as he prepared to drop to the ground. A guard with his gun on full-auto appeared beyond the shattered door, swinging his weapon’s muzzle toward Bolan. The soldier shot him in the upper torso a split second before the FNH rounds hit home. As the dead guard fell backward, he continued firing, sewing a parabolic pattern of 5.7 mm stitches up the wall and across half the ceiling.

Bolan had stemmed the initial attack, but he fully expected another assault to come as soon as the door fortifications completely collapsed. While continuing to fire his Desert Eagle into the laboratory until the bolt clicked open onto an empty chamber, he swung himself outside into the smoky cloud. Without reloading, the combat veteran shoved the oversize handgun into his hip holster while plucking one of the concussion grenades from the suspenders on his web belt.

Aware that the lab was about to fill when his enemies mounted their next counterattack, he set the fuse on the grenade to a 6-second delay before tossing the explosive into the glass-filled room. As he watched the apple-size orb bounce across the white linoleum tiles toward the back wall with its floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with laboratory glassware, his peripheral vision registered five or six men pushing through the clutter surrounding the door opening. Their muzzle-flashes were visible through the smoke that had drifted from the window opening into the lab to mix with the already copious supply of gun smoke that choked the air. Moments before releasing himself into the night for his slide to earth, Bolan grabbed his Beretta 93-R and sent a delaying burst into the fray, adding a final contribution to the overpowering stench of burning cordite and flesh.

During the entire two and a half seconds he free fell, with hot lead whizzing by his face making the time seem like an eternity, Bolan instinctively knew at every moment exactly how far above the ground he was. At the last possible instant, he snapped the hand holding the grappling cord, causing his descent to come to an immediate halt. As he released the thin line and stepped onto the ground, he drew his Desert Eagle and rammed a fresh magazine into its ammo port.

Fifty feet above, the concussion grenade detonated with an air-expanding blast followed a nanosecond later by a deadly blizzard of shredded glass that spewed out the window with the force of a Gulf Coast hurricane. A horrific medley of angry cries and painful shrieks erupted as a black cloud of toxic smoke poured from the building.

With handguns drawn, Bolan struck off on a course through the woods that would get him to the road in two or three minutes. From there, he’d have a short run to the corner of the vineyard where he hoped Dr. Zagorski would be waiting by the all-terrain vehicles. The foliage was sparse, with none of the clinging vines or heavy vegetation he had encountered on so many other hellfire trails around the world, and he reached the edge of the woods without incident.

When he came to the road, Bolan paused for a second to gauge the degree of his enemies’ resistance. Occasional bursts of sporadic automatic fire could be heard coming from below, but the pattern of gunshots was not indicative of an organized assault or defense. Hal Brognola had thought there were fewer than two dozen armed guards at the monastery. A quick calculation told Bolan that he and Zagorski had already dispatched approximately half that number.

Most of the smoke from the M-18 canisters had dissipated, but the residual tendrils, in combination with the inky black night, severely limited visibility as the soldier ran down the curvy road. Pulling his goggles over his eyes and switching into IR mode, he was able to quickly pick out Dr. Zagorski as she zigzagged like a running back sprinting toward the goal line.

Approximately twenty yards behind her, two guards were firing their submachine guns in her direction, their hot barrels glowing incandescently through Bolan’s IR-enriched lenses. With the hand holding his Beretta, he thumbed the selector switch, aligning the arrow with the three white dots. Without breaking stride, he sent a triburst of 9 mm rounds into the head and neck of one guard while simultaneously firing his Desert Eagle at the other. His action drew reciprocal gunfire from a guard ten yards or so farther down the road, causing Bolan to immediately adopt a zigzagging pattern similar to Zagorski while he engaged the gunners.

With both hands dispatching death, Bolan sprinted through an IR-illuminated shooting gallery, the deep-voiced roar of his hefty Desert Eagle drowning out the lighter patter of the Order of Raphael’s weapons.

By the time Bolan caught up to Zagorski, they were close to the bottom of the hill. The only concealment available was from the flimsy cloak of darkness.

Holstering his weapons, the Executioner jumped onto the wired all-terrain vehicle, yelling for Zagorski to get on behind him. While she was climbing onto the wide seat, they came under fire from a position close to the stairs leading up the hill to the monastery. When Bolan flipped the ignition switch and the ATV leaped to life, Zagorski returned fire, hosing the area at the base of the hill with a steady stream of rounds until her magazine ran dry.

Her rounds found their mark, causing the guard to dance and jerk. She released the spent clip, replacing it with the final one she had taken from the fallen guard in the lab. Bolan plied the throttle, propelling them at breakneck speed through the vineyard between two rows of vines, leaving the noise of battle behind.

Bolan gunned the ATV’s engine while keeping his eyes on the skyline where the darker density of the woods bordering the vineyard converged with the night sky. He was searching for a specific spot along the top of the trees where the peaks of four centuries-old maples came together, pointing inward to form an easily recognizable pyramid pattern. They were drawing close, and he eased up on the throttle.

“What?” Zagorski yelled, her eyes probing the darkness for enemies.

“We’re close to the car.”

His eyes scanned the intersection of sky and trees as they proceeded forward.

“Here!”

He braked to an abrupt stop, flipped the power toggle switch to its off position and dismounted.

“Come on,” he shouted over his shoulder as he began crossing through the rows of vines. “Watch the wire,” he added, referring to the zinc cable running the entire length of each row.

When they passed through the final set of vines and reached a paved road between the vineyard and woods, Bolan ran directly across to a small stand of scrub pines where a silver Porsche 911 Turbo gleamed dully in the night. Zagorski was steps behind, carrying her submachine gun at port arms as she ran to the passenger door.

The instant Bolan’s fingers wrapped around the driver’s door handle, the car’s rear-mounted engine came to life, purring powerfully under the curved frame. He increased his pressure on the handle, and Zagorski’s door unlocked and swung open. She jumped in, holding her gun at an angle between her legs, with the hot barrel inches from the window.

“Who are you?” she asked as her door closed and Bolan pressed the accelerator to the floor.

The Porsche fishtailed out of the woods onto the paved highway, leaping forward like a pouncing panther when its tires met the tar surface. Bolan upshifted quickly through the powerful automobile’s second and third gears, swiftly accelerating to a speed in excess of 120 miles an hour as they zipped on a path as straight as an arrow down the highway, leaving the ancient L’Abbaye de Raphael in the rearview mirror.

“We’ll be at the tunnel in less than five minutes,” was all Bolan said.

Zagorski nodded, knowing he was referring to a mile-long tunnel under a section of foothills that rose to become the Pyrenees Mountains separating France from Spain. The customs checkpoint, where according to Brognola, Bolan’s vehicle would already be cleared for a direct nonstop drive through, was another five miles down the road.

“Thank you, whoever you are. They were going to kill me.” Zagorski paused, swallowed hard and added in a voice more appropriate for a confessional than the interior of a sports car, “The work they made me do is evil. I tried to go as slowly as I could.”

“You did okay,” Bolan replied, keeping his eyes glued to the front. “There’s a plane waiting for us in San Sebastian.”

The road was wide and smooth, with two lanes in each direction separated by a center median in which a row of red maples had been planted at intervals of approximately twenty feet. At the speed they were traveling, the small trees whizzing past in Bolan’s peripheral vision took on the appearance of a continuous hedge.

When they reached an area in the foothills where the road turned curvy, Bolan downshifted into the first S-curve while checking the rearview mirror.

“You think they’re coming after us?” Zagorski asked. “You keep looking into the mirror.”

“We don’t want to be surprised,” he answered as he accelerated into the curve, then quickly downshifted as they raced into the next bend. Displaying the timing and reflexes of a race car driver, Bolan alternated between downshifting and accelerating, negotiating one hairpin turn after another at speeds that caused the vehicles’s high-performance tires to smoke and squeal in protest. When he entered the last S-turn ending in a straightaway that covered the final half mile leading into the tunnel, two lights characteristic in size and shape of those designed on the front fuselage of a Bell 206 helicopter jumped into his rearview mirror.

The chopper was incoming fast, at close to twice Bolan’s speed, closing the gap between them at a rate that would place the aircraft on top of the Porsche before it reached the tunnel.

Bolan slammed his foot onto the brake and jerked the steering wheel to the left, causing the sports car to slide into a tire-smoking sideways skid that painted wide rubber stripes down the center of the highway.

The helicopter pilot was not anticipating Bolan’s maneuver, and he whizzed straight past, strafing the road inches in front of the Porsche’s reinforced bumper. The .20-caliber machine-gun rounds blazing from the helicopter’s underside left deep pockmarks in the highway’s smooth surface.

As Bolan straightened his car and accelerated toward the tunnel’s entrance, the pilot pulled the nose of his aircraft upward, attempting to perform a complete reverse turn before his prey was able to reach the safety of the passageway. The pilot’s desire to align his chopper with the highway told Bolan that the machine gun was on a fixed mount. The configuration required the pilot to work with his gunner in order to get the barrel pointed generally in the right direction, a fact Bolan used to his advantage. He stomped the accelerator, and the silver sports car took off like a rocket, pressing both passengers into the plush leather seats as it sped into the safety of the mile-long tunnel.

Coming in from the dark, the brightness of the tungsten lights mounted into the ceiling made Bolan squint. There were no other vehicles in sight, and he eased off the gas pedal to give himself a few extra seconds of safety to consider his next move.

“They’ll send someone in to chase us out,” Zagorski said in a low quavering voice that made Bolan wonder if she had reached her point of exhaustion. After her performance at the monastery, he wouldn’t fault her if she had. “And the helicopter will be waiting.”

Unbeknown to her, an M-72 66 mm Light Antitank Weapon was sitting ready for use in the vehicle’s front trunk. The problem Bolan pondered was how to deploy the weapon in this particular situation. The tube in which the LAW’s missile was assembled was open at both ends, which meant the user had to account for a backblast. When the missile ignited, it sent a dangerous tongue of flame and hot gases six feet to the rear.

“We can open the roof, and I’ll fire at them as soon as we come out of the tunnel,” Zagorski said, shifting the P-90 she held at an angle between her knees.

“Not good odds,” Bolan replied. “Not with a Bell. There’s too much plate on the belly for your rounds.”

Spotting a pair of taillights ahead, he accelerated to catch up. As he got close, he saw it was a pickup truck at least ten years old, the faded paint dented and scratched in numerous places.

“We just got lucky,” Bolan said as he steered into the passing lane and tapped his gas pedal to pull even with the pickup. One of the hubcaps on the driver’s side was missing, and the metal sides around the open cargo area were pocked with large sections of maroon rust. The rocker panels had rusted completely through in so many places they appeared to be made of red lace.

“Get him to stop,” Bolan said, pressing the switch to lower Zagorski’s window.

She shouted in French to the driver, a man who looked to be in his midsixties, who first stared at her, shook his head, then stared straight forward, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly enough to turn his gnarled knuckles white.

Bolan moved forward until the Porsche was halfway beyond the truck before he inched the steering wheel to the right, easing the car’s back fender panel into the pickup’s front bumper.

The old man started shouting and gesturing with universally understood hand signals, but with sparks flying from where the two vehicles were rubbing together, and with the vast superiority the Porsche held over the old pickup, he was forced out of the lane onto a narrow breakdown shoulder barely wide enough for a car to sit beyond the traffic’s flow.

When they had come to a complete halt with the Porsche blocking the pickup’s path, Bolan said, “Come with me,” threw his door open and jumped out. Upon reaching the truck, he reached up and pulled the driver’s door open.

The old man continued shouting and gesturing wildly until his eyes glanced at the Desert Eagle in Bolan’s left hand. Under the bright tungsten lighting, the huge handgun gleamed with evil purpose.

Zagorski stared at the gun with eyes as large as saucers, apparently as apprehensive as the truck driver that Bolan was about to shoot him.

“Tell him not to be afraid.”

Zagorski translated quickly, but her voice as well as the old man’s face belied their belief in Bolan’s words. It was obvious they were both terrified.

“Buy his truck. Fifty thousand euros,” Bolan stated in a voice that held no room for negotiation. “The cash is in the glove compartment.”

Zagorski related the message, which, because it amounted to approximately one hundred thousand U.S. dollars, was not believed. The man’s bottom lip was trembling, and his hands shook as if he was afflicted with palsy. His eyes remained glued to the Desert Eagle.

“Get the money. Hurry,” Bolan said.

Zagorski ran the few steps back to the car, reached in through her open window and came back with a wad of high-denomination bills.

“Tell him again. Fifty thousand euros.”

The sight of the money brought a smile to the old man’s face. In this part of the world, populated along an international border with a culture bred of an interesting combination including ancient Christianity, Islam and Basque, men did not pass judgment on the business of others. Within the local value system, a smuggler or drug dealer could conduct legitimate transactions as subsets of an overall illicit plan without necessarily involving a third party in anything illegal or immoral. Regardless of Bolan’s business, he was offering a transaction the old man found very easy to view as legitimate.

The old man asked for the Porsche as well.

Zagorski couldn’t help but smile as she translated the request.

“No,” Bolan answered. “It’s not mine. Someone will come by to pick it up.”

A slight smile touched at the corners of his mouth for a second as he imagined Hal Brognola explaining to the President that one of the CIA’s high-technology special mission models complete with armor plating, bulletproof glass, and a 5.56 mm machine gun concealed above the tailpipe, was being used to run errands into town by an old hay farmer in Southern France.

“No,” he said again.

The man nodded, and, with his smile exposing a mouthful of crowded, crooked teeth, took the stack of bills from Zagorski and shoved them into his pocket. Despite the fact he was bareheaded, he made a motion of tipping his cap to both Zagorski and Bolan, and set off walking back the way they had come in.

“You drive,” Bolan said, pointing to the truck as he returned to the Porsche.

Zagorski climbed into the pickup and backed it away, allowing Bolan to ease the Porsche against the wall of the tunnel to keep it as far as possible out of the traffic lane until someone could retrieve it.

After shutting down the engine, Bolan released the latch to open the car’s front trunk compartment revealing the LAW.

“Who are you?” Zagorski asked again as Bolan grabbed the LAW and pulled on both ends to expand the weapon. The inner tube telescoped outward to the rear, guided by a channel assembly that housed the firing pin and detent lever. Once the detent was aligned under the trigger bar locking the inner tube in its extended position, the LAW was cocked and ready.

“A man with options,” Bolan answered while wrapping his free hand around the driver’s door handle to activate the car’s sophisticated antitampering system. The Porsche’s passenger window slid closed as Bolan hopped into the back of the pickup and settled himself into a kneeling position.

There were half a dozen holes in the cargo bed’s floor through which he could see the pavement moving by as Zagorski pulled out of the breakdown shoulder into the travel lane. As he visualized the helicopter awaiting their exit from the tunnel, Bolan shifted his position so he would be facing the rear, making sure he left adequate space between himself and the back of the cab for the missile’s backblast.

Bolan reasoned that the chopper would be hovering on top of the tunnel’s opening, its position placing it behind and above an exiting vehicle. The gunsights would be properly aligned with the highway, waiting for the target to appear. To his advantage, Bolan didn’t think his enemies would be expecting his getaway vehicle to be a dilapidated old truck. He figured he’d have two or three seconds to position the LAW’s front reticle sight onto the aircraft and press the rubber-enclosed trigger bar on top of the outer tube to fire the missile. Three seconds after exit was the best he could hope for—by then, the pilot and gunman would realize a man was kneeling in the back of a pickup with the business end of a shoulder-fired rocket launcher pointed their way. They would have but one response for that.

Zagorski pressed the truck’s gas pedal to the floor. The vehicle gained speed, gradually reaching its top velocity of slightly less than forty miles per hour. Ahead, the mouth of the tunnel appeared as a pitch black circle leading into the night.

As they drew close, Bolan flipped the reticle sight into its upright position, positioned the LAW on his right shoulder and lightly placed his fingers over the rubber-encased bar.

The LAW’s reticle sight was a piece of Plexiglas with an image resembling a V etched into the heavy plastic. The weapon was designed to assign the correct distance and elevation to the missile if the operator was able to place his target exactly within the lines of the V. If parts of the target extended outside the V reticle, which was graduated in twenty-five meter range increments, the missile would launch long and usually strike above the intended impact point. Too much space between the target and the walls of the V would result in a short shot.

With the LAW’s maximum effective range of 660 feet, Bolan hoped the helicopter would be hovering low over the highway. The lower the chopper, the better his chances to hit it with a less-than-perfect aim.