19
Brognola had been waiting for the voice, but when it came to him from out of the gloom he was startled all the same. He lurched around, embarrassed, hoping that the darkness had concealed his momentary fear. He concentrated on the voice and willed his hands to cease their trembling.
"You're alone?"
"As ordered."
Hardmen liked that tone of deference. He kept his fingers crossed that it might lead the contact to relax his guard.
"I ought to check the car."
"Feel free."
The shadow had a human shape now, drifting nearer, pausing less than fifty feet away. His contact hesitated, thinking on it, and Brognola flexed the fingers of his gun hand. Waiting.
The shadow had made up its mind.
"Forget it. Hell, we trust each other, right?"
Brognola did not answer. He was working on the voice, trying to remember where and when he might have heard it in the past. It was familiar and yet...
"You brought the list?"
Brognola slipped his left hand in the pocket of his trench coat, and the shadow tensed, prepared for treachery. He tried to gauge the man's reaction time, encumbered by a greatcoat as he was, his hands apparently encased in gloves. If he was a professional the extra layers of clothing might not count for anything, but then again...
He had the empty sheets of paper in his hand and now he held them up, allowed the shadow just a glimpse before his arm fell back against his side.
"All right. I told them you were good for it. Some of them had their doubts, but I was on your side."
"I'm touched."
"Hey, don't go bitter on me, friend. We're in this thing together."
"Not quite."
"Well, damn, I'm sorry you feel that way."
The shadow was advancing slowly, one hand edging toward his open coat, a movement so relaxed, so casual that Hal might easily have missed it if he had not been on edge, expecting the betrayal to begin at any moment. He saw the cross-hand draw before his enemy was even close, his own reaction taking him away and low, outside the first instinctive line of fire. The Bulldog .44 was in his hand before his belly hit the pavement, teeth clenched tight to keep the precious air from being driven from his lungs on impact.
And it was the shadow's turn to jump this time. The guy was dragging out an automatic from beneath his arm, sidestepping in a last-ditch bid to save himself. But he was far too late. Brognola braced the Bulldog in both hands, squeezing off in double-action as his human target tried to bring the automatic into rough alignment with his face. A blind man could have made the shot at something under forty feet, and in the instant that he fired, Brognola's night eyes were performing perfectly.
Round one punched through the target's primly buttoned vest and rocked him on his heels, the automatic booming in reflexive fire. He was already going over backward when Brognola's second round ripped through his armpit, flattening to mutilate one lung before it came to rest behind a shoulder blade.
Hal was scrambling to his feet when the surrounding darkness exploded in his face. Converging streams of automatic fire erupted from the shadows, tracking, searching for him, driving him to the ground again. Aware that Bolan had been right, deriving little in the way of consolation from that knowledge now, he scuttled crablike on his belly for the cover of the Unknown Soldier's monument. Around him bullets screamed and whined on impact with the pavement, snapping overhead as hidden gunners tried to find the range and elevation.
An enemy round traced liquid fire across his buttocks and another whispered past his head. Scrambling for his life, Brognola felt like some enormous lizard struggling to cross the highway, caught by traffic in the middle of the noonday rush. Another moment and the whispering death would overtake him.
But he had taken one of them, and he wasn't finished yet. He was alive and fighting.
The monument was looming over him, and Hal was braced to make a final rush for cover when the gunner showed himself, a slender shape detaching from the deeper shadow of the Unknown Soldier's tomb, an errant shaft of moonlight glinting off the silenced Ingram in his fist. Brognola fired instinctively, the Bulldog rising as he cranked off three in rapid-fire, the big rounds ripping in from groin to solar plexus, their explosive impact devastating at a range of less than fifteen feet.
The gunner sat down hard, his back against the smooth face of the monument, and Hal was scrambling past him even as the shadow gunners realized that he was still alive, that it had been their comrade slouched in death against the tomb. He snatched the Ingram from lifeless fingers and slid into cover as reactive fire began to eat the night around him, seeking flesh and finding only darkness.
They would try to flank him now. It was inevitable. They could not afford to let him live, and they did not have time to wait him out. Already, someone might have heard the gunfire, though he wondered who would be abroad in Arlington at midnight.
From the direction of the car he heard a burst of submachine gun fire ripping like a buzz saw through the smoky darkness. Turrin had arrived, and he would give the hidden gunners something else to think about before they made their move. The odds were shifting, balancing upon a razor's edge, and any sudden jolt might skew them in Brognola's favor.
A jolt from Bolan, if the soldier was alive.
If he had not been ambushed in the darkness by a wary lookout. It happened to the best, but as he hunkered in the shadows with both hands locked around the captured Ingram, Hal was praying that it had not happened here tonight. They needed Bolan desperately if they were going to survive.
They needed Bolan now.
Bolan followed the reports of gunfire from the point where he had stalked and killed the second sentry, instinctively homing on the sounds of combat. The second guard had delayed him, struggling briskly, giving up his life reluctantly to Bolan's blade. If the lookout had been a fraction swifter, Bolan might have been the one stretched out beneath the willow's trailing fronds, his lifeblood soaking into grass that had already seen enough of death.
But Bolan's nameless enemy had not been swift or alert enough to save himself, and now the Executioner was closing on the sounds of battle, one fist wrapped around the silver AutoMag. He offered up a silent supplication to the universe, aware that he might be too late already. Hal and Leo might be dead or dying, riddled where they stood by snipers Bolan hadn't had the time to neutralize.
Bolan shrugged the morbid thought away before it had a chance to claim his full attention. Someone still was firing beyond a gentle rise in front of him. He recognized the booming voice of Hal's off-duty Bulldog, followed shortly by the chatter of Leo's Uzi, answering the muffled weapons of the enemy.
He topped the rise and melted into shadow, sweeping down upon the hostiles from their flank. He counted half a dozen muzzle-flashes, automatic weapons all, and he was closing on the nearest of them when the line began to break from cover, closing in on Hal and Leo in a pincer movement.
It took a moment, but he spotted Turrin lying behind a gravestone, waiting for a target to present itself before he wasted any more ammunition. Hal was harder to detect, and Bolan was about to let it go when a precision burst erupted from the shadow of the Unknown Soldier's monument, the nearest hostile gunner dead before his face impacted on the pavement.
Everyone was firing now, the hostiles rushing helter-skelter over thirty yards of open no-man's-land with automatic weapons blazing. Two of them immediately pinned Brognola down with probing fire. The other pair was veering off toward Leo, splitting up to flank him in a pincer of their own, assuring that there would be one survivor left to pin him down no matter what transpired.