No options, right. Like always. And the flow of combat, the relentless give-and-take of battle was determining his moves. It was the price of taking on an unknown enemy on strange terrain. One on one, he had a chance: no more, no less.
The way to take it would be low and fast, assuming that his enemy would fire instinctively at waist level. Bolan would have seconds to spot the bastard's muzzle-flash and pin him down before he could correct his aim.
Unless the shooter was professional enough to know that he would come in beneath the normal line of fire.
The AutoMag's report would be enough to tell him that he wasn't facing down Brognola's woman now. He would be conscious of an armed intruder in the house, aware that he was on his own against a nameless, faceless enemy.
That made them even. And anything that shook the bastard's confidence from here on in would be a point in Bolan's favor.
But he was out of time, and stalling put the ball in his opponent's court. He could not afford to lose his slim advantage. He had to move right now, and once the move was made, he knew there could be no turning back.
Brognola heard a muffled scream and recognized the voice as male. It might be Jeff, and yet...
A burst of automatic-weapon fire ripped through the house as Hal kicked savagely against the door twice. If there was anyone inside the living room, they had to hear him now. They would be waiting for him if and when he crashed the door, their weapons swiveling to cut him down before he crossed the threshold.
More staccato firing came from inside, and Brognola threw his shoulder against the door, grunting with the impact, startled as the door gave way and sent him sprawling onto slick linoleum.
Somehow he retained his grip on both revolvers, and now he crawled across the entry hall on knees and elbows, keeping low, expecting to be shot at any moment. From somewhere to his front, the roar of stutter guns was etching out a heavy-metal harmony. Two weapons answering a third, their bursts precise and economical in contrast to the other's angry rattling.
A firefight, then, and he was closing on their flank, apparently unnoticed. It was too damned good...
He froze as ringing silence suddenly descended on the firing line. Then he heard someone calling for Gino.
There was no answer, and Brognola prayed that Gino was among the dead. The silence seemed to stretch for hours, though it must have only been a moment.
The same voice called out again, this time for Carmine.
From his hidden vantage point, Brognola risked a glance and spied two gunmen crouched on either side of what appeared to be a darkened hallway. At the far end light was spilling from an open doorway. The leader, blond and muscular, was leveling a mini-Uzi at one of them. Brognola realized this guy must be Carmine.
Carmine hesitated for another instant, finally took it in a rush, hunched over, fading into darkness. Hal was braced to make his move when he was stricken by a thunderclap that seemed to shake the very walls around him. Carmine's silhouette obscured the muzzle-flash, but there was no mistaking the report of Bolan's AutoMag. The single round eliminated Carmine as a threat and left the blond alone.
With Hal.
Whatever waited for him down that darkened corridor now demanded action. Hal was scrambling to his feet before the thought took conscious form, already firing as he rose, half-blinded by the fury that consumed him in the presence of his enemies.
The first two rounds were wide, the Glasers gouging plaster, detonating harmlessly on either side of his intended target. Now the blond was pivoting, the Israeli-made SMG tracking onto target, yellow flame erupting from the muzzle as he fought back skillfully. He was firing high, and the vest Hal wore would not have saved him if it weren't for Bolan, bursting from the kitchen, blazing with Big Thunder as he came.
The hardman hesitated, torn between two targets, and the delay was all Hal needed. Firing for effect, he unloaded with the Bulldog and the snubby .38 until the hammers fell on empty chambers, clicking like metallic pincers. In all the blond had taken seven of the Glasers, two of them directly in the face. The bastard was already dead before he toppled backward to the carpet, leaking like a human sieve.
But Hal could not stop squeezing off, the dry-fire clatter of his weapons coming to him from a distance, through the mist that fogged his mind. He kept on squeezing until the Executioner stood before him, reaching out to twist the empty guns from his hands, which had already started trembling.
"It's over."
Bolan's voice seemed distant, hollow in Brognola's ears. How could the soldier be so far away and still reach out to touch him? Hal's mind was grappling with the problem when a hint of movement on the edge of vision brought him right around to face the hallway, with its lighted doorway standing open at the end.
And he was dreaming, had to be. His mind had snapped. How else could he be seeing Helen and the children when he knew that they were dead before he crashed the door? How could they be alive and calling to him now?
Bolan slapped him on the shoulder, but Brognola was already running, sweeping Helen up in one arm, reaching for his children with the other, and he couldn't see them clearly now, goddammit. There was something in his eyes.
But he could hold them, touch them, hear their voices. And he knew, incredibly, that he was not too late.
It was enough. For now.
"We need to move."
Mack Bolan didn't want to break Brognola's mood, but there had been too damned much shooting even for a sparsely settled neighborhood. Unless the other residents were deaf or comatose, police would be arriving soon. The family reunion would have to be postponed.
Four faces, wreathed in smiles that contradicted teary eyes, were beaming at him now. Brognola nodded, herding Helen and the children past the riddled corpses toward the door. Outside, they found a sprinkling of porch lights burning in the neighborhood, illuminating former darkness, adding urgency to Bolan's own demand for haste.
"I'll follow you," he told Brognola. "When you've got them safe, we need to talk."
Brognola's smile had disappeared.
"It isn't finished."
"No."
Not while the brains behind Brognola's grief were still at large. Not while a crony of Lee Farnsworth still held power in the CIA. Not while Nicky Gianelli walked the streets of Washington as free and clear as any decent citizen.
They owed a blood debt to Brognola, to the Executioner. Before the final curtain fell on Bolan's hellfire tour of Wonderland, the cannibals would have to pay. In full.
"I'll follow you," he said again, already moving toward his car half a block away. There was whispering behind him as Hal conducted his family toward his own sedan.
The drive would give him time to think, collect the final scattered pieces of the puzzle. Motive still eluded Bolan, but he had enough to surmise that Gianelli was the guiding force behind the move against Brognola's family. Elimination of a ranking enemy at Justice had been tantalizing, obviously, but it took a back seat to the ambush laid for Bolan. Gianelli had been banking on the Executioner's assistance to a friend in need, and he had very nearly pulled it off. As for the CIA involvement, underworld connections with Clandestine Ops ran deep at Langley. Bolan had no reason to believe they had been terminated during the investigations of the seventies, any more than they had been eliminated by the dictates of a president in the early sixties. Indeed, there were suspicions — some still nurtured within official circles — that the gangland-CIA connection had been linked somehow to the removal by assassination of that President. Some even whispered that his brother, running for the presidency in 1968, had been taken out by agents of the same unholy coalition.