Mack Bolan had not expected a man like Kennedy to be taken alive. Bolan tried. But the main thing was Bolan staying alive. He had to find Eve.
He leaped aside in the instant of time it took Kennedy to twist around.
Kennedy's burst slashed across the space occupied by Rideout's voice. Except that the origin of the voice was moving as fast as a voice could carry across a still desert night, and had slipped out of target acquisition even as the words were sinking in.
Bolan had slid in one process from a voice in the dark to a guy who was out of the picture.
Now Kennedy's execution was fast work. The Galil in Bolan's grip thundered three times in rapid fire. For good measure. Three heavy slugs exploded through living matter, rendering it deceased, spinning Kennedy into a dead man's roll across the ground, leaving a glistening trail of bloodied sand in his wake.
Bolan shoulder-slung his own rifle and picked up the dead man's chopper and an extra ammo clip. Then he hotfooted to the spot where Kennedy's transceiver was still crackling.
Doyle's voice.
"Does anyone read me? Is anyone there?"
Bolan depressed the transmitting button, then started out of there.
"Yeah, yeah," he growled irritably. "Hold on to your shirt!" He was already jogging away from Kennedy's body as he spoke to Doyle. "I'm all right."
He was approximating Kennedy's speech pattern.
He counted on the airwaves and tension of the moment to do the rest. It did.
"Top, what the hell's going on down there?" came Doyle's voice. "Are you in the village? Do you need backup?"
"Negative. Get ready to lift off. Ten minutes from now, whether I'm back or not. The pilots have the coordinates?"
"I gave 'em the same ones you gave me. Whadaya mean, if you're not back?"
"I'll catch up," snarled Bolan. "Don't disobey orders. I have something for Mr. Jericho."
Which was true enough, figured Bolan. He arced around, back toward the village at a steady gallop, hoping like hell that ten minutes would be enough time.
Bolan could not make out the type of markings of the truck that had been sent out of the village to investigate his shots. His hearing told him it was a heavy-duty personnel carrier.
The machine was speeding in his direction, bumping across the rough ground.
No headlights.
That confirmed it for Bolan.
The bulky shape of the truck emerged from the gloom, along a route predicted by the Executioner who was crouched off to the side and out of the truck's way. He could discern four men riding in the back of the truck. The vehicle was crashing along at fifty or more miles per.
Bolan opened fire with the newly acquired Largo Star. He directed his initial stream of fire at the front cab of the racing truck. He could not see clearly into the cab. He didn't need to.
He heard shattering glass.
A scream.
He kept on firing. The lightweight machine gun stuttered in his fists, illuminating the desert night with its muzzle flashes.
The truck veered too sharply. The vehicle seemed to hang suspended in time and space for several moments in a sickening two-wheel tilt.
Shouts from the falling men in the back.
The lurching vehicle lost its battle with gravity. It flipped onto its side. Momentum still pushed the truck through the rock and sand in a grinding for ward plow.
Bolan closed in. He discerned a guy's body trapped between the vehicle and hard dirt as the truck skidded along, mashing that particular attacker's torso into hamburger amid a barely human squealing that ended very abruptly.
Bolan moved in on the remaining three hardguys. In the Terrorist Wars, it was shoot or be shot as soon as your cover was blown. That fact John Phoenix knew very well; its implacable message was carved in the flesh of the campaigns already, now, part of his history.
History spoke again as a blistering fire track spat from the Largo-Star into the three-man night, turning it into a howling dark hole of damnation and wet, sticky, glistening desert sand. Bone shards exploded from body sacks in the trajectory of the Largo-Star's death spew — and the night became death for three non-notable terror creeps, a night of darkness as everlasting as would be the kind of war that brings such death. The Terrorist Wars. The War of Evolution. Here, in this damned desert of hellfire and moaning death.
Bolan saw a man's open chest bubble in the starlight. Twenty feet away from him, the soldier had been opened from top to bottom.
He veered away from the killing ground after that. He closed in on the village from a new direction. A stopwatch in his mind kept track of the passing seconds. He gave himself seven more minutes to fix this paramilitary force that had dared penetrate deep into Libya and secrete the sort of cargo about to be airlifted from the Jericho villa.
The African force here might still try to rush the villa and acquire Kennedy's purloined cargo for themselves by force. The only way to avoid such a strategic misfortune would be to deal these troops a decisive blow now, while they were uncertain, before they had time to move right.
Bolan would chew through all of these double-dealers until he found Eve.
He would use the tunnel leading from the inn back to what had been Kennedy's office. There would be no one to guard that route. Not at the inn end, anyway. Those choppers were going to lift off and "Mike Rideout" wanted to be on board. Those aircraft and the cargo would be on their way to Lenny Jericho. And Santos. And Eve.
He reached the back wall of a mud house in the desert on the outskirts of the village. There would be civilian faces at the front windows of the house, facing the activity of the remaining soldiers in the central street and dirt roads. But back here, nothing.
He stayed close to the clay-hard, stonelike building and moved swiftly around its nearest corner. He was heading along one wall of the house for a look into the street. Bolan had let the sounds of the troops guide him. He judged the majority, or possibly all, of the surviving troops to be in a vicinity not far from this house.
When Bolan reached the corner of the hut that gave onto the narrow mud, street, he eyeballed the scene at the center of the village where two rutted roads intercepted. His night vision was attuned to the darkness. He was able to make a clean head count of the uniformed men who crowded around an unmarked desert vehicle that matched the truck already destroyed.
Five soldiers stood around the vehicle. The Africans were heatedly debating among themselves in their own tongue.
The Executioner did not hesitate. He stepped clear of the wall. He remained in shadow. "Live free or die," he called out to toll their fate. He triggered a chattering blast from the Largo-Star.
The debate stopped and the soldiers went diving in all directions. Four of them moved under their own power, two dodging behind the truck, one making for the nearest building doorway, the other hitting the ground with rifle blazing in response to Bolan's fire.
The fifth guard did a brief crazy dance as a stream of screaming slugs stitched him from right to left like the heavy metal scythe of Time itself.
Bolan bent his knees into a low, low crouch and moved to the right. He heard bullets whisper near his ear; heard the ricochets of lead whine off the baked mud wall behind him.
Bolan triggered another short burst from the chopper in his hands. Geysers of dirt erupted in a line across the ground from right to left. Then geysers of blood spurted up as the line of bullets skewered the running target's life and set it up to roast in hell.
This was a major engagement.
The other running man was almost making the safety of the nearest building when another stutter of the machine gun checked the run into a sideways kick. Another hit in a festival of death lapping up losers in the flaming game of mankind's survival.