Whipsaw (16 page)

The character of the walls began to change now. In addition to the massive stonework, massive steel beams stabbed down into the ground on either side.

Others, just as sturdy, bridged the paired beams.

Bolan realised that the nature of the city above him had changed. Heavy weight, too heavy to rely just on stone and mortar, pressed down on the tunnel. He must have come nearly to the waterfront now, with its huge warehouses, some of them full of newly unloaded cargo and others, abandoned, lying empty and lifeless as bleached skulls on a desert floor.

He had been surprised not to have encountered an intersection, and grateful, too. Surprised because such tunnels usually snaked and interlaced in mazelike tangles, and grateful because this particular one did not. And he realized, too, that it was by design. Harding must have deliberately chosen a building giving access to a tunnel he could seal and control without attracting attention. That could only mean that Harding himself lay in wait at the end of this damp, murky passage.

Bolan shut off his light and stood still. The humming was much louder, but he still wasn't able to identify it. Turning on the light once more, he moved more quickly, watching the floor for another trap, but saw nothing. Then a heavy slam resounded through the tunnel, and shouting voices echoed off the clammy walls.

Bolan skidded to a halt and clicked off the light again. The noise intensified, as if a door had been opened somewhere on a room full of heavy machinery. Then, as suddenly as the first clap of thunder had come, the humming died, not fading away, but abruptly and completely cut off, as if something had been shut down.

A dim glow filtered to him now, but he could see nothing directly. He had to get closer, and he had to do it in the dark. Again relying on the wall to guide him, he inched forward, tensing his muscles, prepared to stop at the first sign of resistance to a poised foot. The voices continued to reverberate through the tunnel, and a spear of light slashed along the far wall from around a tight bend.

Heavy feet splashed in the water, and the light bounced up and down. Bolan flattened himself behind one of the steel pillars and pulled his Beretta out. He set it on single shot and held his breath.

From the sound of things, two or three men were in the tunnel and headed his way. He eased around the pillar and skipped to the next, just before the bend in the passage. The voices sharpened, and Bolan caught a scrap of conversation as he leaned into the wall.

"Son of a bitch is probably dead. Old Juano doesn't fuck around with them traps. One of the three should have worked. Bet we find a few hunks of raw meat and a pile of rock."

"No way. We would have heard something, man."

"Not necessarily. You can't hear shit with that fucking conveyor going."

"When's it going down, anyway?"

"The witching hour, babe. In the midnight hour. Cordero blows half the city in two hours, or some shit, and then we do our thing."

They were talking about him.

And they were in for a surprise.

Bolan held the flashlight in one hand, the Beretta in the other. He aimed the flashlight along the barrel of the deadly weapon and trained both on the bend in the tunnel, his thumb poised on the light switch.

The flashlight came into view first, but Bolan waited to get a look at the odds. Behind the man with the light, in the reflected backwash, he saw two more. All three were armed with AK-47's. None of them seemed overly concerned they might not be alone in the tunnel.

Bolan aimed carefully and fired once, taking the last man out first. The Beretta spat, an ugly little cough, and the slug plowed through flesh with a wet smack and broke bone with a sharp crack. The tail stumbled, his arms just shadows flailing at his chest, then he fell over, cracking his skull against the stone wall.

His companions didn't react at first, but the man with the light seemed to have sensed something. He swiveled back and swung the light around. The second man bumped into him and nearly tripped.

"Hey, Randy. What's with you?" The man with the light seemed confused. Bolan took his companion out with his second shot. The man staggered back under the impact of the 9 mm slug. He dropped to one knee, waving his arm wildly and trying to raise his rifle to shoot something he couldn't see.

The man with the light found Randy in his beam, and Bolan saw the bright blood smeared on the shirt front.

"What the?.." Then the light went out. Bolan heard footsteps, and he stepped away from the wall, clicking on his light at the same time. He picked out the running man instantly and fired just as the man started to shout. The slug slammed his skull forward, and an eerie geyser of blood and brain tissue spattered the far wall of the tunnel as the body fell away from under the gory cloud.

Bolan started forward, cautiously damping the light against his hip. He heard nothing but his own footsteps. Letting a little light seep out, he stopped beside Randy to snatch his AK and a spare clip. Bolan ignored the remaining two bodies, stepping over the dead man with the flashlight. The light had gone on when he fell, and it lay in the water, its broken lens flecked with blood, turning the water a pale ruby color until the tube filled and the light died out.

"Strike two, Mr. Harding," Bolan said grimly as he headed toward the pale well of light up ahead.

The huge block of bright light floated above him like a square sun. Bolan heard several voices, all echoing down through the opening from some cavernous building nearly twenty feet overhead. The tunnel itself took the jumble of sound and garbled it still further. He looked at his watch, and read the dimly lit numerals 11:00. He had an hour.

Starting up the steel ladder, he held the Kalashnikov in his right hand, holding on to the rungs above him with one hand. Halfway up, shadow spilled down into the tunnel for a moment, and he froze as someone in fatigues stood almost on the lip of the entrance, his back to the hole.

The man bellowed at someone, then moved away, and Bolan let his breath out with a soft sigh. It was like climbing up from the bowels of the earth to an unknown place he'd never been. Every step brought him closer to the light. Every step brought him closer to Charles Harding.

Or to sudden death.

Near the top, he crouched to bring his feet up another rung. The AK cracked against the ladder, but the deafening din above swallowed the tolling of the metal strut. Leaning back, he could see the top of a corrugated sheet metal wall. The ceiling looked to be nearly fifty feet overhead.

Craning his neck, he looked in the opposite direction, but that wall was too far away for him to see.

Bolan poked his head up over the floor. The warehouse was a jungle of steel shelving. A conveyor snaked through it like a stainless steel river, winding in and out among the shelves. Crates, easily recognizable as rifles and ammunition, sat in twos and threes on the silent, motionless conveyor, and pairs of men raced back and forth, lugging the crates to the open tailgates of a half-dozen trucks smeared in rippling camouflage patterns of greens, browns and black.

Waiting for the opportune moment, Bolan tested the spring in his legs and, when no one was looking, vaulted up onto the concrete floor. He ducked behind a stack of empty wooden crates, then wormed his way back away from the conveyor. It was almost impossible to gauge the number of men in the building. He needed a better vantage point.

High on the wall and about ten feet below the roof, a catwalk circled the building, and two others stretched from wall to wall, dividing the building into thirds. Another, made of the same metal slats, ran across the building at a right angle. At the center of each of the walls, a ladder climbed up to the catwalk. It was a hell of a choice, but there was no other.

Ducking under a branch of the serpentine conveyor, he moved through tall stacks of cartons and crates. He bent to crawl through a section of shelving bolted to the concrete floor, and crouched behind some crates stacked in an aisle. As near as he could tell, there must have been twenty men working the floor, and the vigilant top kick bellowing unintelligibly made twenty-one. So far, there was no sign of Harding or Cordero.

And unless they were there, it was pointless to take on a small army. The men scurrying around the floor were wheels going nowhere without the engine of Charles Harding to drive them. Bolan reached the far wall, which was draped in shadows from the towering stockpile and unlit by the fluorescent fixtures dangling directly overhead. Bolan moved along the wall, darting from stack to pile to stack.

At the corner he peered out from behind a pile of ruptured and discarded crates to the next corner, nearly three hundred feet away. A small cubicle, looking absurd and tiny in the cavernous interior of the warehouse, occupied the corner. Frosted glass concealed the interior of the cubicle, but it was as good a destination as any.

He started along the wall and nearly tripped over a man turning the corner, bent at the waist under the weight of a crate of ammunition. The startled man dropped the crate with a dull thud and cursed him. He glanced at Bolan angrily, then realised Bolan didn't belong there and went for the .45 automatic on his hip. Bolan dove at him, driving his injured shoulder into the man's gut and knocking him to the floor.

The smaller man struggled to throw him off, but Bolan slammed a fist into his windpipe, and he gagged. The gun clattered away, skidding across the cement. Bolan slugged him a second time, and the man's head snapped back into the concrete and he lay still.

Bolan got to his feet as someone shouted, "Enrique, where the hell is that ammo?" Bolan started to run as the shouting voice came closer, echoing among the boxes. He looked back just as the shouting man broke into the clear. Bolan dove behind a mound of canvas, but too late.

He'd been spotted, and the pursuer came charging down the aisle, a pistol in his hand.

The man fired once, then two more quick shots. The slugs nipped at the canvas just over Bolan's head, then slammed into the corrugated wall, which boomed hollowly with the impacts. Bolan fired back, and his shot caught his target in the throat.

The man clutched at his neck, and his legs stopped pumping, but the momentum carried him forward into the canvas, where he landed with a thud.

Bolan jumped to his feet and started to climb up the nearest stack of shelves, pulling himself from shelf to shelf and crawling into the center of the fourth tier, where he had just enough room to lie flat.

Several men came running from different parts of the warehouse, and Bolan held his breath. He snicked the safety off the Kalashnikov and waited. The men milled around in the aisle fifteen feet below, but no one seemed able to decide what to do.

One voice, coming from far behind him, cut through the babble. There was no mistaking its authority. "What the fuck is going on here?" No one answered, and the voice barked again, even louder this time. "What's going on? Somebody start talking."

"We don't know, Colonel," someone stuttered, his voice faint and uncertain.

It was Charles Harding. Bolan felt a rising of energy, and a new alertness took hold of him. The quarry was in sight.

"Where's McAllister?" Harding snapped.

"There, sir." Bolan heard shaming feet as the men parted to give Harding an unobstructed view.

"What the hell happened?" Harding demanded. "Who did this?"

"Don't know, sir."

"Anybody see anything?" Perfect silence. Bolan heard Harding's exasperated breathing for a few moments. Then he barked, "Johnson, pick eight men. Spread your asses out and look for the son of a bitch. Now! The rest of you get back to work. I want those trucks out of here in five minutes. Got it?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'll be in the command post if you need me. And you'd better not."

Bolan listened while Johnson made his selection, then the knot of men broke up and the feet shuffled off in every direction.

"All right, you two, down that end, one on either side. You two, same thing up this end. The rest of you, two teams of two, start there and sweep to the other end of this aisle. Anything moves, you kill it. I don't care if it's a cat. Find the bastard."

Bolan continued to hug the metal shelf, trying hard not to sneeze from the thick dust lying on the dull grey metal. One after another, the tailgates slammed shut. Bolan could hear the teams below him, whispering nervously as they peeked around corners and shoved piles of boxes aside, kicking likely hiding places and poking at empty boxes with their gun barrels.

A sound like thunder suddenly filled the huge building as the trucks fired up. Then, like an undercurrent of deeper, more distant thunder, one of the great doors moved up and out of the way. As the trucks started to roll, the floor of the building trembled, and the shelves picked up the vibrations. Loose bolts rattled like sizzles in a cymbal, and the entire building seemed to throb as if it were a single beast beginning to awaken.

With a grinding of gears, the first truck lumbered toward the door. It creaked under its load, and Bolan could only wonder where it was headed. The others followed, one by one, and he swiveled his body to try to see the door. A small triangle of visibility gave him just a glimpse of the last three freshly painted trucks. Then the door rattled shut again, the whine of its servo petulant, even testy, until it banged closed. The door trembled momentarily, and the sudden silence seemed more ominous than the thunder of the trucks.

"Find anything?" Johnson shouted, his voice partly muffled by distance and the huge columns of material strangely small under the high ceiling.

"Nothing."

"Keep looking!"

Bolan inched toward the edge of the shelf and raised his head just enough to look down into the far end of the aisle.

The single man guarding that end lounged carelessly against a column. A few yards closer, one of the two-man search teams poked casually at some rubbish. Their enthusiasm seemed all but gone, replaced by the indifference of men going through the motions to please someone in authority.

Bolan's watch read 11:35. It was time to act. Muffling the click as best he could, Bolan replaced the partial clip in his Beretta 93-R with a full one. The sound suppressor gave him a slight edge, but the metal on which he lay afforded very little protection. If they saw him, it was all over.

Using a two-handed grip, he took aim on the lounging guard. The search team was almost at the end of the aisle. If they turned to work their way back, they might see him. It was now or never.

Squeezing the hair trigger, he felt the satisfying jolt of the Italian beauty, its deadly spit no louder than an apple falling on soft grass. The guard changed position, but seemed unharmed. Bolan thought for a moment the shot had missed. When the stain began to spread across the front of the guard's shirt, he knew he hadn't. The body stayed upright, propped against the rough metal.

Firing two more quick shots, Bolan took out the search team, catching the man on the left almost dead center, just below the collar line. A broken spine allowed his head to loll, and the man dropped straight down, dead instantly. The second man was no luckier. Struck in the base of the skull, he spattered his dead companion with flecks of bright blood and toppled to the floor, his weapon clattering against an empty metal drum.

"Hey!" The shout sparked like electricity through the aisles, and someone ran toward the fallen men, probably the guard from the opposite end of the aisle. Bolan couldn't see anyone, but took the opportunity to move to the other side of his perch.

Pounding feet raced toward the end of the aisle, and as Bolan peeked out over the edge, he saw three men rushing toward the far end of the warehouse.

Checking both ways as the running men disappeared around a corner, Bolan climbed another shelf higher, then another. One more, and he'd be on top. The men far below seemed confused. He could hear their excited voices, and they appeared to be arguing among themselves what to do. Bolan took the plunge, grabbing the highest shelf and ignoring the stab of pain in his wounded shoulder as he hauled himself up.

"You better get the colonel," someone said, raising his voice to be heard over the hoarsely whispered argument.

"We don't tell him nothing, till we get the son of a bitch did this," Johnson snapped. "He'll have our asses, otherwise."

Bolan listened with half an ear as he considered his position. The aisles were wide. Wide enough for a forklift to maneuver among them. It was a good twelve feet. From a standing start, it was one hell of a broad jump.

But if he could get over two aisles, he could reach the catwalk.

"What the hell," he said.

And jumped.

The impact of his booted feet on the next shelf bounced around the girders above him like a sonic pinball. The metal and its echo made direction impossible to fix, and Bolan took the next leap and dropped to his stomach to wait before the noise had a chance to die down.

The men in the corner raced toward him, two aisles over. Picking the one spot that gave him a direct line among the shelves, he gripped the Beretta and waited for a target.

It wasn't long.