backstage. There was a kind of dressing room—perhaps undressing room was more appropriate—with scraps of lingerie strewed here and there on furniture that didn’t match the pricey tone out front, and stronger perfume in the air.
Baiting the hook.
An elevator served the dressing area, its small car built to carry four passengers, tops. Call it seven trips for twenty young women, if someone rode the elevator up and down with them.
Bolan admitted to himself that there’d been time to clear them out since his first gunshots, but would Cako send them back upstairs into a firefight? Never mind humanity. It sounded like a risk of valuable merchandise, and any living witness could be used against him if she fell into the hands of medics, cops and prosecutors.
Since they hadn’t been exterminated in the dressing room, it followed, then, that Cako had removed them from the premises. Or he was trying to. They might be going with the buyers, in the fragile hope that he could still log sales despite the interruption of his little show.
No time to waste.
Bolan was turning toward the stairs once more when he heard shooters coming down to join him. He couldn’t guess their number or determine how well they were armed, but once he dropped the first of them the rest could hold the stairs forever with a single gun, keep Bolan bottled up below until they either smoked him out or the police showed up to make things infinitely worse.
Long years ago, Bolan had vowed that he would never drop the hammer on a cop. Occasionally he had broken that rule when faced with an extremely brutal, or murderous law enforcement officer. He regarded everyone who wore a badge as soldiers of the same side in his war against the predators. He would help honest cops arrest their dirty comrades, but would never kill an everyday officer to save himself.
If the cops found him here, with no means of escape, he’d surrender. Face trial yet again, with no help from Brognola or anyone else at the Farm. And beyond that?
The end.
He fired a short burst toward the stairs, discouraging the enemy advance, then looked around his prison. He could take the elevator up a floor or two, but if the shooters knew he was downstairs, they would cover all the stops, automatic weapons poised to smother him with fire before the door was fully open.
What, then?
If Cako’s buyers and their merchandise had left the house without going upstairs, there had to be another exit somewhere in the basement. Something Bolan could discover, given enough time.
But time was one thing that he didn’t have to spare.
“Start looking, then,” he muttered to himself.
It had to be right there. Somewhere.
With grim determination, Bolan started searching for a way to save his life.
FIVE MINUTES LATER, Bolan found it. There was yet another staircase hidden at the southwest corner of the house, disguised as storage space. The door was still ajar when he reached it, peered inside and saw steep stairs ascending to ground level. When nobody shot his head off, the soldier forged ahead, mounting the stairs and wondering where he’d wind up.
Fresh air washed over Bolan as he cleared a ground-floor doorway, hesitating long enough to verify that no gunmen were waiting for him to emerge. Maybe the housemen didn’t know about the stairs. Maybe they’d just forgotten.
When the Executioner emerged, a minicaravan of limousines was rolling off along the driveway that would take them out through Cako’s wrought-iron gates and off to anywhere they pleased.
Unless he stopped them first.
Bolan triggered a short burst toward the final car in line and saw his bullets spark off armored steel. He guessed the limos would have run-flat tires, as well, but even if they didn’t he was bent on stopping all of them, not just the train’s caboose.
Which meant he needed wheels.
Some fifty yards away he saw a seven-car garage standing with doors wide-open, as if all those shiny toys inside were left on permanent display. As for ignition keys, he’d have to work that out.
But first…
Below him, Bolan heard his trackers penetrate the basement, shouting, firing, drawing closer by the heartbeat, closing on the staircase that they couldn’t miss.
Scowling at the retreating limos, Bolan primed another frag grenade and waited until he heard footsteps on the stairs below him, then released the spoon and counted off four seconds. He dropped the lethal egg with only two seconds remaining on its fuse, and ran like hell.
He barely registered the blast, was focused solely on the long garage and cars inside it. On arrival, Bolan spied a small space off to one side where a wall rack held assorted automotive tools.
And keys.
He snagged one for a Rolls-Royce Phantom, dropped into a driver’s seat that felt more like an easy chair and gunned the 6.5-liter V12 engine into snarling life. After releasing the parking brake, the soldier stood on the accelerator and roared out of the garage.
He was in time to see a line of gunmen spilling from the exit he had used, a couple of them looking wobbly on their feet. Bolan had no time to examine them for wounds, determined as he was to catch the limo caravan, but they saw him and moved to intercept the Phantom as he powered out along the driveway.
Was the Rolls-Royce armored against small-arms fire?
He’d find out any second now.
They opened up at thirty yards with two Kalashnikovs, an Uzi and another SMG resembling an old Smith & Wesson M-76. It sounded as if Bolan was driving into one hell of a hailstorm, bullets scarring glass and gouging divots in the Phantom’s paint job, but they didn’t make it through to nail the driver in his comfy padded seat.
He could’ve saved himself some time by driving past the firing squad and simply leaving them behind, but they were running out to meet him now, still firing as they came.
A quick twist of the padded steering wheel and he was in among them, startled faces gaping at him in the high-beam glare of headlights. One was quick enough to dodge and throw himself aside, but Bolan took the other three.
A glancing blow for Mr. Uzi, maybe a broken hip of shattered ribs to pain him for the next few decades when it rained. His two companions took the full brunt of the hurtling Rolls. One rolled up on the hood, squealing, and smeared the windshield with blood where his face collided with the glass, before he slipped away to starboard and was gone. The other fell beneath the car, tires thumping over flesh and bone, five thousand pounds and change turning the shooter to a screaming pancake on the pavement.
Then he was off in hot pursuit of Cako’s limo train, the Phantom gathering momentum as he kept its pedal to the metal—or, to be precise, it’s stylish carpeting. Bolan could see the first black limousine already passing through the open gate, taking off. Number two was close behind it, with the others lining up to take their turns.
Bolan saw a bright spark in the rearview mirror, then a trail of fire was chasing him along the driveway, gaining fast. Before he had a chance to twist the steering wheel, the RPG projectile struck the Phantom’s left-rear fender and exploded, slamming the Rolls-Royce off course while delivering a solid kick to its tail.
Bolan hung on, feeling the tire go flat at the back, and kept the pedal down, grinding along the driveway, trailing smoke and sparks behind him.
HOW LONG BEFORE THE gas tank detonated, if it did at all? Bolan knew he was pushing it, stretching his luck to the consistency of tissue paper, but he had to reach the gate before it closed. Even if he was forced to let the limos slip away, he still had to escape from Cako’s walled estate, live on to fight another day.
He almost made it.
From a distance, the Executioner could see the rolling gate begin to close behind the final limousine. It wasn’t fast, but didn’t need to move like lightning, with the Rolls still sixty yards or more