Changing targets, Bolan fired five more times. Soon, the entire roof was covered with thick, dark gas, the vents sucking it all down into the building.
* * *
BOLAN WAITED TEN MINUTES for the sleeping gas grenades on the roof to stop working, and then another five for everybody inside the warehouse to be overcome. Then he pulled on a gas mask and climbed down from the water tower. Retrieving a heavy backpack from the bushes, Bolan drew his silenced Beretta and boldly walked across the open ground of the garbage dump toward the warehouse.
He encountered trip wires, easily avoided, and proximity sensors, rendered useless by an EM broadcast unit tucked into Bolan’s equipment belt. The two guards hidden in the garbage dump were slightly more trouble to neutralize, but Bolan had marked their locations well. The first died under an expert knife thrust to the back of the head, the “doorway of death” located just behind the right ear. The man went stiff and stopped breathing, dead before his mind could even register the attack. But the second guard must have heard something, and she spun around, frantically clawing for the Steyr machine pistol on her hip. Although Bolan disliked shooting any woman, he put a single hollow-point 9 mm into the bridge of her nose, blowing out the back of her head, and kept going. Swim in blood, you pay in death, he thought. End of the discussion.
Pausing just outside the main door, Bolan listened carefully for any suspicious sounds. But there was only a soft snoring mixed with the low hum of the refrigerators cycling on and off. The door was locked, but a keywire gun tricked it open in only a few seconds. The smoky interior was vast, stacked to the ceiling with boxes, barrels, crates and trunks of every possible description, all of them carrying military markings. Numbers only, but Bolan knew the codes. United States, France, Russia, United Kingdom, Iran, Argentina, the ordnance of the world was packed to the ceiling of the warehouse. Death incarnate.
Limp bodies were sprawled on the concrete floor, and, turning them over, Bolan recognized every man as part of the Cordan organization. The hard weeks of surveillance had been a success. His intel had been good. Every one of these people was a known murderer, most of them escaped convicts with rewards on their heads.
Bolan did a fast recon of the entire building and found nineteen men and four women, all of them wearing work clothes and carrying guns. No civilians present. It never hurt to double-check.
Suddenly, an engine revved and a forklift charged out of the shadows. Diving to the side, Bolan rolled to his knees with the Beretta leveled and ready for combat. Son of a bitch, it was Pierre Cordan himself. And the bastard was wearing a gas mask.
As Bolan took aim, Cordan fired a Skorpion vz 61 submachine gun with his free hand, the other tight on the controls. The wild hail of 7.65 mm rounds hit everything around Bolan, and a ricochet slammed aside the Beretta, making his own stream of copper-jacketed rounds stitch across the rear of the forklift, missing Cordan completely.
Screaming muffled obscenities, Cordan fired again, now angling the forklift directly at Bolan. As the twin steel blades filled his line of sight, Bolan dove into a shoulder roll and came up with the Beretta now braced in both hands.
Bolan hammered the side and rear of the forklift, the rounds throwing sparks as they were deflected by the safety cage. He hit Cordan twice, ripping holes in the skinny man’s shirt, but the bullets flattened harmlessly on the tight body armor underneath.
Wheeling around sharply, Cordan tossed aside the empty Skorpion and pulled out a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol. Knowing better than to fall for that old trick, Bolan quickly got behind a concrete support pillar just as the Glock seemed to explode, the disguised Model 18 machine pistol issuing 33 rounds in under two seconds. Several bullets caught the Beretta, sending it flying out of Bolan’s hands, so he reached behind his back to produce his reserve piece, a Desert Eagle .357 Magnum.
Laughing, as if this was some sort of a game, Cordan flung the spent Glock to the ground and jerked his left hand forward. A snug .44 derringer came out of his sleeve to slap into a waiting palm.
It felt like minutes, but each man paused for only a few seconds for better aim, then they fired in unison. Both barrels of the derringer blasted flame as the Desert Eagle sounded a single, solemn boom.
Bolan grunted as a graze ripped open his shoulder, exposing his own body armor underneath, and Cordan was thrown back against the safety cage as the massive soft-lead .357 Magnum round slammed him directly in the middle of the chest.
Expertly spinning aside, Bolan fired twice more as Cordan sped by, a round from the Desert Eagle neatly removing his gas mask. Gasping in surprise, Cordan inadvertently inhaled and started to reel. Fighting to regain control, the man angled the forklift again for Bolan, just as the Executioner took aim at the man’s vulnerable throat. Before he could fire, Cordan slumped at the controls, his head lolling about helplessly. The bastard had succumbed to the sleep gas at last.
Tracking the unconscious man with the barrel of his Desert Eagle, Bolan watched the forklift rattle past.
The machine careened off a steel support beam, then crashed through a closed wooden door and shuddered out into the night. Craning his neck, Bolan saw the forklift veering about on the dock, clanging off the steel pylons before rolling straight into the water. As Cordan and the machine disappeared beneath the waves, Bolan holstered his weapon and went to find another forklift.
It was far too clean a death for Cordan, but the man had always been lucky. Cordan was one of the biggest black market weapons dealers in Central America and had been responsible for taking thousands of innocent lives. His death alone paid for a host of bloody crimes. This was already a successful mission.
Climbing into another forklift, Bolan started ferrying stacks of munitions to the loading dock. When he had enough, Bolan pulled up a truck and packed it solid with neat rows of military shipping containers. Mostly American, but a few from the UK, Germany and Russia.
Bolan then returned to the warehouse and walked into an office, where a snoring man slumped over a desk covered with stacks of cash. Bolan grabbed a duffel bag from the corner of the room and stuffed it full, then drew his Beretta. With calm deliberation, he shot the electronic controls for the fire alarm.
In response, a hundred nozzles in the ceiling and walls began hissing out thick streams of halon gas. Water-logged weapons had to be carefully cleaned, and a spray of H20 could thwart thousands of valuable explosions. But halon stopped any conventional fire and would not harm any of the lethal inventory. More important, it dissipated quickly. Even when the sea breeze was so uncooperative.
Bolan headed back toward the truck, slipping on his gas mask before walking through the swirling clouds, then drove away into the night. Leaving the inlet behind, he pulled out a cell phone, tapping in a memorized number.
“Phoenix has the egg,” Bolan said.
“Confirm,” Hal Brognola replied. “Luck.”
Bolan switched the phone off and tossed it out the window. It was still airborne when the thermite charge ignited. The phone landed in an explosion of flames.
After a few minutes, Bolan reached a dirt road and parked the truck. He pulled out his night vision goggles and watched patiently as the halon gas swirled past the warehouse windows. On the ten-minute mark, it stopped abruptly. Everybody in the warehouse was now dead from asphyxiation. Flipping open a second phone, Bolan punched in a local number. “Panama City Fire Department?” he said in halting Spanish, trying to sound unfamiliar with the language. “There is a warehouse on fire over at Cordan Quay.”
“Madre mia!” the man on the other end gasped. “Are you sure? Who is this?”
“Just a concerned citizen,” Bolan said, turning off the phone and also consigning it to the wind.
Shifting into gear, Bolan drove onto the highway and pulled a small remote control from his pocket. He pressed the switch twice and a light on top turned red, then he pressed it once more. In the far distance, he heard a muffled bang as his abandoned backpack inside the warehouse exploded.
Trundling carefully along