Bolan dropped the nearly spent magazine from the Desert Eagle as he transferred the Beretta from his free hand to his armpit. Jerking another box mag of .44 Magnum rounds from his belt, he jammed it into the butt of the huge Israeli-made pistol.
He had seen the glitter of brass at the top of the ejected magazine as it fell from the Desert Eagle’s grips before hitting the floor. He had not been able to keep count during this battle, but the mere fact that at least one round was left in the discarded magazine assured him that another was already chambered in the .44.
No sooner had he reloaded the Desert Eagle than the Executioner’s fine-tuned ears heard movement above him, at the top of the staircase to his side. His head jerked that way and he saw yet another terrorist in a blue beret. The man wore the same brown slacks as many of the others. But it looked as if a tie-dyed T-shirt covered his chest—at least at first glance. As he turned toward the threat and got a closer look, the Executioner realized that the man was actually shirtless. His chest and belly had been completely covered with tattoos.
And he was aiming a Mossberg JIC—Just in Case—12-gauge shotgun down the steps.
The Mossberg—with a stubby eighteen-inch barrel, pistol grip and no stock—came as close to being the perfect close-quarters-combat firearm as any one gun could. But it was as useless as a stalk of dry spaghetti if a bullet took the shotgun’s wielder before he could pull the trigger.
Twisting at the waist, Bolan let the Desert Eagle rise, as if on its own accord, to shoulder level. He stopped as soon as the heavy barrel pointed at the nose of the man atop the steps.
The terrorist had obviously trained in the “competition style” of shooting, in which the shooter always tried to superimpose the front sight over the target before squeezing the trigger. There were several drawbacks to that style of shooting when it came to a real gunfight rather than a pistol match at a gun range. First of all, it went completely against human nature, during times of life or death, to focus on anything but the threat itself. The rear, ancient, primordial part of the brain literally screamed at the defender to look at the threat rather than the front sight or anything else.
Trying to find the front sight under such emotional strain was further complicated by the fact that the eyes got the message from the brain as well, and fought against focusing on the end of the gun when it was the target that was about to kill him.
And last, but hardly least, was the theory that the trigger should be gently squeezed rather than pulled. Under such tension, the human body’s small motor functions shut down and sent blood and adrenaline flowing to the larger muscle groups to increase strength. A death grip was automatically taken on the gun, and the trigger was pulled, not squeezed, regardless of what the shooter had been capable of doing during practice.
A true life-or-death gun battle was as different from a practice session at a gun range as a karate tournament was from a street fight. And, as he pulled the trigger of the big .44 Magnum pistol, Bolan thought of the moronic firearms instructors he had heard say that the stress of losing a pistol match duplicated the stress of a true fight to the death.
Such range “masters” had obviously never been in a real gunfight themselves. They might have trophies filling their living rooms and dens which they could show off to their friends, but they had never shot at anything that was shooting back at them.
The Executioner’s 240-grain, point-aimed, RBCD total fragmentation round drilled through the tattooed man’s nose and angled up into his brain before exploding. The now familiar pink mists shot out of the terrorist’s head from the front, back and both sides, hanging in the air for a moment like a quartet of crimson clouds. The terrorist dropped the shotgun, which bumped down the stairs, coming to a halt directly in front of the Executioner as if to say, “Use me.”
Bolan holstered both the Desert Eagle and Beretta, then reached down and lifted the shotgun in both hands. Racking the slide back far enough to see that a shell had already been chambered, he flipped off the safety with his thumb and stepped to the side to allow the near-headless body of the Mossberg’s former bearer to tumble down past him.
Behind him, the Executioner heard the explosion of Platinov’s 500 S&W Magnum revolver from across the street again. Good. The Russian woman had successfully reloaded the mammoth handgun and begun sniping again. But all of the men on the ground floor had been eliminated by now, so he had to guess she was taking potshots through the curtained windows of the floors above him. His suspicion was confirmed a second later when he heard the tinkling sound of broken glass above him.
Bolan raised the Mossberg’s stumpy barrel up the steps just as another pair of hardmen appeared on the landing, both armed with AK-47s. The man on Bolan’s right was right-handed and prepared to shoot that way. The terrorist to the Executioner’s left was a southpaw.
Standing side-by-side as they were, they looked almost like mirror images of each other.
Raising the shotgun to shoulder level, Bolan sent a load of double-aught buckshot into the throat of the man on his right. Rivers of crimson shot from the arteries in the man’s neck, and his head fell to his right shoulder, still attached to his body but only by the few tendons and ligaments.
The man to the Executioner’s left screamed out loud as his partner’s blood sprayed his face. Panicking, he pulled the trigger of his Soviet-made assault rifle and sent a fully automatic burst of 7.62 mm rounds flying high over Bolan’s head.
The big American took his time, steadying the shotgun, his eyes planted firmly on the blood-covered terrorist’s chest—just an inch to the right of center. A second later, he pulled the trigger and the 12-gauge buckshot spread into a tight, inch-and-a-half grouping as the lead balls struck home.
Both corpses fell headfirst down the steps past the Executioner to join their fellow terrorist at the foot of the steps.
Bolan racked the slide of the Mossberg to chamber another round. So far, he had fired two of the double-aught shells. The magazine held only five, so he had either three or four rounds left in the weapon, depending on whether the man who had introduced the shotgun into the fight had topped off the magazine after chambering the first round.
At this point, the Executioner had no way of knowing. What he did know was that he’d have to be ready to drop the scattergun and draw one or both of his pistols at a second’s notice.
The firing from across the street had ceased, which meant Platinov had come down off her perch to join him in the ongoing battle. Between the roars of the firearms, Bolan had heard enough noise above him to know there were more terrorists upstairs, on the second level and maybe even the third.
One thing was for certain. The fight wasn’t over yet.
Not by a long shot.
CHAPTER THREE
The smell of spent gunpowder burned the Executioner’s nostrils as he mounted the steps of the CLODO house, grasping the grip and fore end of the Mossberg JIC. He kept the barrel aimed slightly upward, roughly at waist level, ready to raise or lower his aim with lightning speed should an enemy face or body appear in the doorway or the window next to it. By the time he was a quarter of the way up the steps to the house’s second level, he could see half of the next set of stairs that led to the third, and top, tier of the dwelling.
The rooms on the second landing were all to his right. At the top step the Executioner dropped to one knee and inched an eye around the corner. The layout was simple. A bedroom stood just to his right. Another, next to it, faced him. And across the hall, he could see a bathroom.
The doors to all three rooms were wide open, which didn’t necessarily mean they were empty.
The Executioner knew there were plenty of hiding places.