Fatal Combat

“Who are they?” Davis shouted over the din.

“Hired help,” Bolan said, dropping a nearly empty 20-round magazine and swapping it for a fresh one from the pouches in his custom leather shoulder holster. “And they didn’t just come from nowhere. Look for a vehicle with passenger capacity, or a cluster of cars.”

The Charger’s engine was starting to spew black, oily smoke, spraying the wrecked windshield with spurts of oil. Bolan urged it on, shooting across the street, charting a course directly for a man with a MAC-10 submachine gun dressed in dark pants and shirt with a stained trench coat over these. Something about this one, in particular, struck Bolan as familiar—just as the Charger struck its target. A spray of heavy .45-caliber slugs almost chewed through the roof as Davis and Bolan threw themselves to either side. The bullets ripped up the interior of the car and smashed out what was left of the rear window.

Bolan cut short, sharp circles with the car, his jaw set, his eyes roving the crowd and the players running among it, gauging targets of opportunity and screening friendlies from his mental computations. He gripped the wheel with one hand and fired with the other, the Beretta barking a deadly rhythm. He stroked triple bursts of 9 mm hollowpoint rounds from the snout of the machine pistol, cutting down another, and another, and another gunman. Bodies were beginning to pile up two deep, or so it seemed.

That was an illusion brought on by the adrenaline, the tunnel vision, the tachypsychia of mortal combat. Bolan, while not immune to the physiological effects of life-and-death battle, was certainly no stranger to these sensations. He was as comfortable operating with and through them as it was possible for a human being to be. Still, that did not mean a great deal. Bolan understood, as so many veteran operators did, that much of combat efficacy was simply learning to function efficiently and accurately despite the psychological effects of the fight itself.

Combat was as natural to Bolan as breathing. And he did not think these things, did not subvocalize them, did not consider them as he swapped out another empty 20-round magazine in the Beretta, leaning on the steering wheel with his left knee as he racked the Beretta’s slide and chambered the first round.

“Cooper!” Davis yelled. Again Bolan did not think; he did not need to ask. He flattened himself against his headrest and squeezed his eyes shut, tucking his chin, as Davis’s Glock came up in his direction.

The shots were deafening in the enclosed space of the Charger’s front seats. Davis had seen the man in the leather jacket before Bolan and had responded, as he was trained to do. The gunner held a drum-fed semiautomatic shotgun and managed to scrape the driver’s-side fender of Bolan’s vehicle with double-00 Buck pellets as he went down. Davis’s shots took the shooter in the neck and under the jaw, folding him in a heap like dirty laundry. Bolan’s ears were ringing, but he nodded once in acknowledgment to Davis nonetheless. The kid was good.

Bolan urged the Dodge back toward the Detroit police, who were using their vehicles as cover and firing straggler shots into what little resistance remained. As quickly as it had begun, the worst of it seemed to be over. Bolan hit the brakes suddenly, jerking the car to a stop, and leaned out his window, tagging a running gunman who was trying to break for a nearby alleyway. The man went down yelling, with a bullet in his leg, and Bolan was out of the rolling car with his Beretta in his fist.

Behind him, Davis scrambled into the driver’s seat and stepped on the brake again before shifting the battle-torn Dodge into Park.

Bolan was on his quarry like a hawk on a mouse. The shooter rolled onto his back, his leg spraying blood from a bad wound, his face already pale as he brought up his TEC-9. The Executioner slapped the ungainly weapon aside as he landed on the wounded man’s chest with one knee, driving the air out of the gunner’s chest.

“Junk,” Bolan said, snatching the TEC-9 from the man’s hand. He shoved the black muzzle of the Beretta into his face. “Always were a jam waiting to happen.”

“I want a lawyer!” the disarmed shooter squealed. “I got rights!”

“Give me a name,” Bolan said. “Or all you’ll get will be a bullet in the brain when I’m finished with you.”

The dialogue sounded corny even to Bolan, but it was the kind of language spoken by punks-for-hire. Bolan could hear Davis coming up behind him and hoped the young detective wouldn’t overreact to the soldier’s bluff.

“A name,” Bolan said. Sirens were erupting from the lot across the street as the police, having cleared their part of the gun battle, moved to seal off the area. It would be only moments before some of them blundered into this little scene. Bolan didn’t have time for that. He heard Davis behind him, running interference as the first of the Detroit PD closed in and started asking questions. He gave Davis mental points for that. The kid was doing well during his trial by fire. The noise and activity behind them increased as emergency response personnel started to arrive. More Detroit PD were showing up by the carload, too. The sudden war on this already tainted city block had brought half the department out in a bid to clamp down on the chaos.

In the noise and confusion, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Bolan’s prisoner tried to make play. The knife came out with surprising speed. Bolan heard the snick of the blade opening just as he caught the movement; he was ready for it. He grabbed the would-be killer’s knife hand and wrist in a crushing grip. Behind him, Davis gasped, probably because he was watching Bolan’s knuckles go white. Something cracked in the wounded man’s hand and he yelped. The folding combat knife fell to the pavement.

“Give me a name,” Bolan repeated. “Or I’ll break the other one.”

“Don’t know,” the man blurted, shaking his head as his pride gave way to pain. “Contract job. Never saw a face.”

“Contract on who?” Bolan demanded.

“Jacket…” the man said, gritting his teeth. “Jacket pocket.”

Bolan carefully reached into the man’s jacket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. The sheet was a photocopy of a photograph. The photograph showed Bolan meeting with Adam Davis outside the station house to which Davis was assigned. It was grainy and had obviously been taken with long-distance equipment. Bolan’s face was circled in a whorl of yellow highlighter.

Bolan signaled to the police officers nearby, who closed in to take custody of the wounded shooter. The Executioner led the confused Davis several paces away from the main knot of uniforms and support personnel before showing him the paper.

“But this…” Davis looked at it. “What does it mean?”

“It means somebody knew to watch,” Bolan said.

“Watch for what?”

“Outside interference.” Bolan folded the paper and pocketed it. Turning, he watched the wounded gunman being ushered, under guard, to an ambulance that was just rolling up. Several men in suits, badges displayed prominently on their belts, clustered around Bolan and Davis, giving them the hairy eyeball; these would be Detroit detectives eager to ask this representative from Washington just what the hell was going on, and what Bolan thought he was doing. The soldier could almost write this dialogue himself; he had heard it often enough.

Bolan took out his secure smartphone and began moving deliberately from corpse to corpse, kneeling over his fallen enemies with the phone so he could snap their pictures. Davis followed him, looking as if he was ready to draw the Glock he had only just reholstered. Bolan couldn’t blame the kid. The abrupt battle had the Executioner’s own system working against the fight-or-flight dump of adrenaline that lingered even though the gunfight itself was over.

“What did you mean by ‘outside interference,’ Agent Cooper?” Davis spoke up.

“Somebody knows that a Justice Department agent was assigned to poke around this case,” Bolan said. “Seeing you with me was all it took for our man with the telephoto lens, or whoever hired him, to finger me as that agent.”

“You’re talking about somebody inside the Department.”

“I am,” Bolan said.

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“I’m not.” Bolan continued his grisly work, photographing all of the dead men. Then he walked to the bullet-riddled Charger and put his back to the car’s pocked flank. “Keep an eye out for me while I do this,” he said.

Davis nodded. He watched nervously, looking this way and that, hand near his gun, as Bolan transmitted the photographs and a terse report of what had produced them. The Farm would collect the data and run the images through advanced facial recognition software, comparing the dead men to profiles in meta-databases across the globe. There was no law enforcement or government agency whose files Stony Man Farm could not access. At least, if there was, it was hard even for Bolan to imagine what those might be.

No, if these men had criminal records, Barbara Price and her people would dig them up. Bolan had no doubt that most if not all of the shooters would have long rap sheets. Things would get really interesting, however, when Bolan had the chance to see just where these gunners’ backgrounds pointed.

In the meantime, he would just have to keep shaking the tree, despite the target painted on his back. Davis, as his liaison, was no safer.

“You think I’m a dirty cop?” Davis asked bluntly. The steel in the man’s tone was mildly surprising. Again Bolan raised his estimation of the younger man.

Bolan looked at Davis. “If I thought that, I wouldn’t have asked you what I did.”

Davis looked away. Bolan could see him thinking about it. Finally, the set of Davis’s shoulders relaxed. “You’re right,” he said. “Everyone knows it, and nobody wants to say it out loud. Everyone knows the walls have ears. Nobody wants to say who’s on the take and who isn’t.”

Bolan nodded. He didn’t say so, but he liked that Davis was still idealistic enough to be offended when he thought his integrity was being challenged. There wasn’t enough of that in the world, as far as Bolan was concerned.

“Is the CIA analyzing your pictures?” Davis ventured.

“Not exactly,” Bolan said.

“But somebody is,” Davis pressed. “You’re running identifications on the gunmen.”

“Which reminds me,” Bolan said. “Make sure we get a full run-up on the guy they’re taking in.”

“I’ll check back with the station and make sure. Unless someone suicides our boy in Holding.”

Bolan looked at Davis sharply. The detective managed not to grin for only a moment.

Bolan shook his head. “Let’s hope not.” Davis laughed.

The pair surveyed the damage to the Dodge Charger, but it was clear the car was critically wounded. Bolan paused just long enough to grab the rental car agreement from the glove compartment and pocket it.

“I don’t think you’re going to get your security deposit back,” Davis said mildly.

“I almost never do,” Bolan said.

Davis managed to beg, borrow, or steal an unmarked Crown Victoria from among the police personnel on the scene. He did not explain and Bolan did not ask. The silver-gray sedan was among three other vehicles parked along the increasingly crowded, chaotic street.

Bolan climbed in as Davis brought up the car, transferring his war bag from the Dodge to the Ford. As he did so, Davis pointed past him to the cordon being set up. There were a pair of television vans and a crowd of reporters gathering, shouting questions at the officers keeping them at bay.

“That’s going to be trouble, isn’t it?” Davis said.

“Yeah,” Bolan told him. “Nothing we can do about that now. Let’s get started.” He looked through the list Davis had provided and read the first address aloud. “You know this place?”

“There isn’t a cop in the city who doesn’t,” Davis said. “It’s not exactly one of our more affluent neighborhoods. A real hellhole, to be honest, Agent Cooper.”

Bolan said nothing at first. He opened his war bag and removed several loaded 20-round magazines for the Beretta. Davis looked over, wide-eyed, as he caught a glimpse of the hardware and ordnance inside.

“You don’t exactly travel light, do you, Agent Cooper?”

“If I could carry more, I would,” Bolan said. He began replacing magazines in the pouches of his shoulder holster. “Welcome to the war, kid.”

“Yeah,” Davis said. “Yeah.”

3

The squalid tenements on either side of the narrow street were crawling with people and sagging with furniture, garbage and other debris. A tangled maze of clotheslines linked facing buildings across the channel dividing them. As the unmarked Crown Victoria threaded its way around a series of abandoned, stripped vehicles, some of them bearing the scorch marks of past fires, children and adults scattered. Davis drove while Bolan watched from the passenger seat, his eyes scanning the rooftops and tracking the figures that ducked in and out of the shadows. The Executioner was no stranger to house-to-house close-quarters battle in urban environments. This neighborhood looked like yet another battleground awaiting the first shot to be fired.

“I hate coming down here,” Davis said. “It’s like a war zone sometimes.”

Bolan nodded. He checked the list Davis had given him. “According to this,” he said, “we want 1021, third floor, apartment C. A Ms. Kendall Brown. It looks like her son Mikyl was the first documented victim of these ritualized blade murders.”

“Kendall Brown,” Davis repeated. “Got it.”

It took them a while to find the right building, as most of the designations were either worn, missing completely, or covered by piles of junk or even cardboard signs. In a few cases, the numbers on the buildings had been spray-painted over or even switched. Bolan raised an eyebrow at one of the more obvious examples; the street signs at that intersection were also missing on one side.

“Trying to hide,” Davis explained. “Could be a lot of things. Enemy gangs. Rival dealers. Creditors, tax collectors, any of countless state agencies, like Child Protective under the Department of Human Services. Most of the veteran agency folks know where they need to go, so these games don’t fool anybody. But I bet it’s hell trying to get a pizza delivered.”

The dark humor in Davis’s comment, which seemed otherwise unlike what Bolan had seen of the man so far, bespoke bitter experience, perhaps as a uniformed cop on the streets. Bolan let it go. He had seen enough ghettos and poverty-stricken crime zones like this one the world over to know it for what it was. It didn’t matter if a place like this existed among the shantytowns of a third world banana republic, or in some of the worst overrun cesspools in Europe, or anywhere in the industrialized West. Poverty and desperation were feeding and breeding grounds for predators, who made those very problems worse, as they incestuously preyed on the communities that spawned them.

Bolan’s jaw tightened. As many times as he saw this, it always moved something in him. There were innocents here, among the predators. They would be vulnerable to the creatures that hunted among them, terrorized them, bullied and brutalized and subjugated them. It turned the soldier’s stomach.

Davis parked the car as close to the building as he could, wedging it between a derelict pickup truck—the rusted bed was full of trash—and a garbage bin overflowing with neglected refuse. The two men could hear children playing in the bin. When the detective leaned on the horn, the kids took the hint and climbed out, scampering off while shooting glares of mistrust and disappointment back at Bolan and Davis.

“One of them’s going to get picked up and thrown into the back of a garbage truck one of these days,” he said.

“No time soon, from the look of it.” Bolan shook his head. “You’d better wait here.”

“I was worried you were going to argue with me about that,” Davis said. “I’ll keep the motor running.”

“Good idea.” Bolan nodded. He reached into his war bag and removed a pair of translucent plastic cases. Inside each case was an earpiece that resembled a wireless telephone earbud. Bolan fitted one of the small devices behind his left ear, where it all but disappeared. He offered the second case to Davis.

“What’s this?” Davis asked, accepting the earbud.

“These are short-range transceivers,” Bolan said. “They’re smart. They filter gunfire but provide good, audible communication between them. Speak in a normal tone of voice. You’ll be able to listen in on everything I’m doing, and I’ll be able to hear you if you speak or if anything goes down.”

“Standard issue at the Justice Department, Agent Cooper?” Davis said. He tucked the earpiece in his own ear.

“Something like that,” Bolan said. The devices had been developed, in fact, with the help of Stony Man Farm electronics genius Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz. Bolan had used them in the field many times.

“The useful range varies,” he told Davis. “If we get too far away to hear each other, there’s a problem.” He paused, double-checked and stowed his Beretta, and then checked the massive .44 Magnum Desert Eagle before replacing the handcannon in the Kydex holster behind his hip.

“Cooper,” Davis said.

Bolan stopped with his hand on the door handle, shouldering his canvas war bag with his free arm. “Yeah?”

“You’re not a cop.” It was not a question.

“No,” Bolan said. “I’m not.”

“Look, Cooper,” Davis said. “I am a cop, and I like to think I’m a good one. I know this place. It’s very unlikely anybody’s going to talk to you up there. You’ll be lucky even to find this Brown woman at home, and if you do, she probably won’t open the door for you. Nobody sees anything here, Cooper. They don’t call the police if they can help it, which means if they do call, all hell is breaking loose down here. They don’t talk to anybody if they don’t have to. It’s like this isn’t even the United States down here, Cooper. It’s bad. I know you’re some kind of government superhero or something, but it could be that all you’ll accomplish in there is burning the place down around your ears.”

“Understood,” Bolan said. “Keep your eyes open, Detective.”

Davis nodded. He watched, looking anxious, as Bolan made his way through the scattered garbage at ground level to enter the tenement.

The smell hit Bolan as soon as he cleared the outer doorway. The stairwell reeked of refuse, human waste and mold. There was a mound of trash blocking the inner entrance; he stepped over it, hands ready to go for the Beretta under his jacket.

The floor was covered in carpet so stained its original color was impossible to determine. It creaked under Bolan’s combat boots. Through the thin walls, he could hear and smell the usual signs of living at close quarters in an environment like this. Televisions blared. Repellant food odors hung heavy in the air. A domestic altercation of some kind simmered in one of the apartments he passed; there were angry screams in both Spanish and English. Bolan paused, hand drifting nearer the Beretta, wondering if intervention was required, until the voices grew more calm and quieted.

He moved on.

“Cooper,” Davis’s voice sounded in his ear. “Do you work alone?”

“What?” Bolan asked.

“There’s an old blue Chevy Caprice full of guys down here,” Davis said. “They’ve circled the block twice now, but I can’t read the plate from where I’m watching. They’re a little out of place in this neighborhood, and I don’t recognize them. I was kind of hoping you were going to say you had called in reinforcements.”

“No such luck,” Bolan said. “Watch yourself down there, Davis. Keep me informed if anything changes.”

“Will do.”

Bolan picked up his pace. He traversed the next stairwells with less caution; he could feel the numbers working against him and Davis. When he reached the third floor, he found apartment C and stepped well to the side of the doorway. He flattened himself against the wall, reached out and rapped on the edge of the hollow-core door.

It took several tries before he got a response from within. Finally, a woman’s voice answered, “What do you want?”

“Kendall Brown?” Bolan asked, as he came to the front of the door.

The door opened to the length of its chain revealing a middle-aged black woman wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and bracing a toddler on her hip with one thick arm. The little girl, who was chewing on a pacifier, looked up at Bolan with wide eyes.

The woman nodded slowly. “What do you want?” she said again.

“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, smiling briefly at the child. She continued to regard Bolan with amazement. “I need to talk to you about Mikyl Brown, your son.”

The woman wanted to shut the door; Bolan could see her knuckles turn white. To her credit, she held her ground.

“Cooper,” Davis said over their wireless connection. “I think that car I saw is parked behind the building. I saw it nose out and then reverse.”

“Mikyl is dead,” Brown said. “Murdered. Police already been here. Can’t say they much cared about him, if you ask me. But they were here. They asked their questions. They left. Mikyl is still dead. What the hell you think you’re gonna do now?”

“I understand,” Bolan said. “I really do, Ms. Brown. I’m hoping that if I can better understand the circumstances of Mikyl’s death, I can bring his killer to justice. I’m part of a special task force.”

“Cooper,” Davis’s voice sounded in Bolan’s ear again. “Cooper, I think you’d better hurry.”

Kendall Brown closed the door, removed the chain and opened it again, after putting the child on the ground and giving the girl a gentle pat to send her toddling in the opposite direction. She lowered her voice. “I don’t know who you are, mister,” she said, “but it’s damned cruel what you’re doing. Mikyl was murdered in a gang fight. Stabbed to death. The boy who done it, not even a year older than my son, is in prison. Probably get out sooner than he should, too. Just how things go.”

Bolan’s eyes narrowed. “Mikyl’s murderer was convicted?”

“Cooper.” Davis’s voice was growing more urgent.

“Who the hell are you, mister?” Brown said. “I don’t need you coming up in here and reminding me of my boy.” She slammed the door in his face with considerable force. Bolan looked up and down the corridor; nothing moved.

“I’m coming out,” Bolan said. “Something’s not right, here. Keep the front covered.”

“Understood,” Davis answered.

Bolan paused at the stairwell. Beneath the noise of the apartments, both in and outside the building, he could hear something else.

Shuffling. There were men in the stairwell.

Bolan reached into the canvas war bag. He removed a flashbang grenade, popped the pin and watched the spoon spring free.

Below him, someone moved in response to the noise.

The soldier leaned over the stairwell railing and let the grenade fall.

He turned away, shielding his ears with his palms, squeezing his eyes shut. The actinic flash of the grenade was bright enough that he could see it through his eyelids. The thunder-clap of the less-lethal bomb made his teeth vibrate. He heard a scream.

No sooner had the flash faded than Bolan hoisted himself up over the railing. He dropped, colliding heavily on the landing below, absorbing the impact with his legs. Rising from his crouch, he drew the double-edged combat-survival dagger in his waistband. The trio of men in whose midst he had landed, either held or were reaching for automatic weapons. They were dressed in what Bolan recognized as expensive suits, probably tailored to hide their shoulder holsters and submachine-gun harnesses. All three continued rubbing at their eyes or holding their ears.

The nearest of the gunmen managed to fix Bolan with bloodshot eyes, fighting the involuntary tears streaming down his face. His gun came up, but Bolan stabbed him in the neck and ripped the knife forward and away. The dying man spun, spraying the wall crimson.

Bolan kicked out the knee of the second man, dropping him to the floor. The third was on his hands and knees, trying to find the micro-Uzi he had dropped. The Executioner fired a kick to his ribs and was rewarded with an audible crack as the gunman rolled over. He threw his knife arm backward, sensing the second man surging back to his feet, and rammed the double-edged blade into the hollow of the gunner’s throat. Yanking the knife out in a circular motion as he wrenched the man’s head around, the soldier levered him down to die on the stairs.