Backlit by the holocaust, the meres had been reduced to black silhouettes. The only one moving was the driver of the jeep. As Carlos jumped down, rifle in hand, time cracked open again, and things moved furiously, as if to make up for lost time and get the universe back on track.
The meres moved as Carlos leapt. The other driver, also released from his paralysis, scooped his rifle off the ground. Carlos opened up, sweeping a viscious figure 8 through the knot of meres.
They scattered, but Bolan couldn't tell whether they'd been hit or chosen to dive out of the line of fire.
Charging ahead, his wounded arm flapping uselessly at his side, Bolan barreled into the other driver, knocking him backward again and sending his rifle cartwheeling away. Bolan lost his grip on the AutoMag, and the driver landed a sharp jab on the gunshot wound. A flash of bright light momentarily blinded Bolan as the arm went numb and he dropped to his knees.
The driver regained his footing and charged, knocking Bolan onto his back and pinning him.
Bolan reached out with his one good arm, but the driver slapped it aside and locked his fingers around Bolan's throat. The flames climbed higher, and the driver turned. For the first time, Bolan recognised Don McRae.
He pushed with all his weight, closing off Bolan's air. The light began to fade, and Bolan felt tired. He realized he was on the verge of blacking out, but all the strength seemed to have been drained from his body. He was aware of the pressure on his throat and of McRae's grinning face. His fingers clawed at the man's hands, but he was ineffective.
Over and over, McRae's lips moved, but Bolan heard nothing but a ringing in his ears. Then he realized that McRae was shouting, "Die, you bastard!" With every shout, he slammed his weight forward a little harder.
Galvanized by the demanding need to do something, Bolan groped for the Beretta. His fingers closed over a handle, and he pulled it free. It felt unfamiliar, and hazily Bolan realised it wasn't the Beretta as he brought it up and shoved with his last ounce of energy. It slipped between bones all the way to the hilt, and McRae twitched. His hands seemed to be the first to realize he'd been hurt, and they relaxed their grip. His arms were still rigid for a moment, then they, too, went slack, and Bolan choked down lungfuls of air.
McRae fell to his side with a great moaning sigh. Bolan tried to pull himself free, but he didn't have the strength. Vaguely aware of McRae's weight still pressing down on him, he watched from a great distance as the world began to spin. The orange light danced on the handle of the knife, the flames glittering on the pure-white ivory inlay.
Bolan thought it somehow fitting that McRae should be gravely wounded with his own knife, the same knife he'd used to torture the captives and to kill Thomas Colgan.
Then the world turned into a dark swirl, and he felt hands tugging at him just before he blacked out.
22
Bolan eased out of the car and let the door close softly behind him. The alley was pitch-black, and the air was thick with humidity and rich Chinese spices. Ongpin at night was like a piece of China moved two thousand miles and grafted on to a tropical island. As they had every place they'd settled, the Chinese had chosen to isolate themselves, keeping their culture intact, along with its wariness of foreigners.
Ongpin reflected that isolation, but unlike the last time Bolan had visited, the quarter seemed alive. Noise drifted through the open windows and the bright cracks under every door. As he moved down the alley, Bolan heard the melancholy wail of a biwa, its plaintive tune sounding surprisingly like the blues.
Mingling with the music, a different kind of sound drifted into the alley voices in urgent conversation.
Bolan glided cautiously, keeping to the wall.
He had three more blocks to go, slipping along back fences silently, his ears alert for every jarring note. Somewhere ahead, in a nondescript building, Charles Harding and Juan Rizal Cordero polished their plans to unleash a terror on Manila the likes of which it had never known.
Looking back on it, trying to piece it all together, Bolan realized that he had been a blind man in the desert. Walt Wilson had known more than he'd revealed, but not much. Frank Henson, his hooks only barely into Colgan, had a lead, but that must have been Harding's doing. It had been a way to keep tabs on Bolan. And with McRae on the scene, it was as good as having a beeper on him.
Harding had stayed offstage, disappearing into the darkness of the wings as surely as the Phantom of the Opera. He had come and gone, leaving nothing behind but blood and ragged bits of flesh. And for what?
To control a country that hadn't been up off its knees in three hundred years. Harding had been obsessed, and he had exploited others who were similarly obsessed though less clever. Men like McRae, who didn't care about anything as long as the pay was good, he bought.
Bolan wanted to get Harding like he hadn't wanted anyone in a long, long time. Seeing a city at night, spread out under the stars as defenceless as a sleeping child, vulnerable as a naked woman, really brings it home just how easy it is to make it wake up screaming.
That was the key to understanding men like Harding and Cordero. They knew how easy it was. They knew, and they loved it. And Mack Bolan loved the idea of taking them down, disassembing them as totally as a child takes apart a house of blocks.
But first he had to find them. There had been enough life left in Don McRae to make him want to trade information for keeping it, but he hadn't been sure where they were hiding. He knew three addresses, and his wallet had yielded a fourth.
Manila was a rabbit warren, a system of tunnels in plain sight. Under a dictator, people learn how to live two lives, to build a city within a city. Under Ferdinand Marcos, the people of the Philippines had done it, and under Corazon Aquino they had seen no reason to tear it down.
The three blocks passed in waves of light and dark, sounds swelling and fading away like waves drifting under a pier. And the first address lay before him. A ramshackle building, three stories of ordinary stone, every window dark, lay beyond a wooden palisade more ornamental than defensive in function.
Bolan scaled the fence easily, then moved close to the building through a neat garden of well-maintained shrubbery. A half flight of wooden stairs led to the back door. Bolan took the steps carefully, alert for the least indication that someone knew he was there. With his ear to the door, he strained but heard nothing.
A second-story window, the only one without bars, lay just out of reach to the left of the stairway.
He had to know whether anyone hid inside, but he couldn't get in through the door without calling attention to himself. The buildings lay in an unbroken row marching off in either direction, and Bolan backed down the stairs. Over the fence, he moved three doors down to a small shop, it's back wall slashed by rickety wooden stairs. He made it over a rusty wire fence and onto the stairs, then held his breath when someone stirred inside an open window.
Soundlessly he took the next flight and crawled over the wooden parapet. Moving back the way he'd come, over the rooftops, he found a skylight in the center of Harding's building. The skylight was locked, but he could slip the lock aside by shoving a knife blade down at an angle. It slid through the rubber melding, but he had to rap the knife handle sharply with the heel of his hand before the latch clicked open.
The skylight came free with a squeak. Inside, it was as dark as the bottom of a well, and Bolan leaned in, squeezing his eyes shut to accustom them to the darkness. When he opened them again, he could see blocks of shade, but there was no way to tell whether any of them were substantial enough to hold his weight.
With a shrug, he grabbed hold of the skylight ledge and dropped down, wincing as the pain shot through his wounded arm. He almost let go for a second, but bit his lip until the pain passed.