Hell Night

“No,” Bolan said. “It’s just the way this thing has to go down, that’s all. If you don’t want to do it, say so now. I’ll try to think of something else.” He glanced at his watch. “But I’ve only got eleven minutes to come up with it and pull it off.” He paused, then finished with, “So, Coleman. What’ll it be?”

Bolan could see the concern on the man’s face as he weighed his responsibilities to the job versus those to his family.

“All right,” Coleman finally said. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do.” He paused, then added, “And you can still call me Ron.”

The Executioner smiled. It was a brave man he was working with.

“When I give you the word, just stand up and start walking directly toward the window. If you see the ski mask, make tracks for the brick column. After that, just stay where you are.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Coleman asked.

“Scaling the wall. But don’t look my way under any circumstances. I need that lookout’s attention focused on you, or the inside of the bank’s going to look like a Chicago slaughterhouse.”

Coleman reached up and adjusted his vest, making sure the steel plate was in place. “Makes me wish I’d sprung for the steel-plated jockstrap you can get with these things,” he said. “But what the hell. I’ve already got three kids and the wife and I were talking about a vasectomy anyway.” He turned to face the Executioner. “Say when.”

Bolan slung his M-16 A-2 over his shoulder and waited until the blue ski mask made another quick appearance, then disappeared. “Now!” he said under his breath and rose to his feet at the same time Coleman stood up. Coleman rounded the trunk, and the Executioner cut in front of the front bumper as both men made their way toward the building.

Bolan was running, Coleman walking—as he’d been instructed. So the Executioner reached the brick column supporting the carport several steps in front of the man. Sprinting at full speed, he lifted his right knee almost to his chin as his leather-and-nylon combat boot hit the bricks. His momentum carried him upward, and he got one more step with his left boot before he felt gravity beginning to overcome his own velocity.

Reaching skyward, the Executioner got his fingertips just over the edge of the shake-shingle roofing.

A second later, he had pulled himself up and out of sight on top of the carport.

No sooner had he risen to his knees than he heard several shots fired below him. Looking down, he saw Coleman driven back a step as the rounds clanged off the steel plate in his vest. But the balding cop he didn’t let that stop him. Before the man inside the window could fire again, he dived behind the brick column.

Bolan leaned over the side and looked down. He could see Coleman sitting with his back against the bricks, the sparse and spiky reddish-gray hair pointing straight up at the top of the carport. The Executioner whispered downward, “Ron, you okay?”

The KCPD patrolman was savvy enough not to look upward when he answered. “If you call feeling like you just took three straight hooks to the chest from Buster Douglas okay, then yeah—I’m just peachy.”

The Executioner chuckled. At least the man was out of danger now. He could sit out the rest of this encounter. “Okay,” he said. “Stay where you are.”

Bolan looked down at his wrist. He had a little under ten minutes before the hostages started dying. Switching on the microphone mounted to his shoulder, Bolan realized he had no call letters or numbers of his own, and he didn’t know what Tom Glasser’s were, either. So he said simply, “Cooper to Glasser. Cooper to Glasser. Come in, Glasser.”

“SWAT 1,” Glasser’s voice came back. “This is Glasser, Cooper. You got a call name?”

The Executioner lowered his voice until he suspected it could barely be heard on the other end of the line. “I go by Striker, SWAT 1. And I’m on the roof,” he whispered. “Have you had any more contact with the subjects inside?”

“Negative, Striker,” Glasser came back. He was whispering, too. “But we’ve got the funny money on the way here, compliments of the Secret Service.”

“How about the chopper?” Bolan asked.

“We’re trying to find one big enough. And that’s not easy if you don’t go to the military.”

Bolan immediately understood the reason behind the SWAT captain’s words. The regular military was forbidden from taking action in police matters inside the U.S., and most of the time that was a good thing—it ensured that America would not become a military state ruled by its armed forces. But there were exceptions to that rule, when the use of the armed forces seemed like the only logical answer.

This was one of them.

“See if you can go through the state’s National Guard,” the Executioner said. “If they don’t have a chopper big enough on hand, they ought to be able to get one from the regular army.” He paused and felt his eyebrows furrow as he thought further. “And use this as an excuse to stall some more. Call into the bank on your cell phone and explain the problem with the chopper. See if you can buy some more time.”

“Affirmative, Striker,” Glasser said. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Negative, SWAT 1,” Bolan said as he made his way carefully across the shingled roof one shaky step at a time. “And the fact that I’m up top is for your ears only. We can’t expect fifty men—no matter how good they are—to keep from glancing up and being seen by the bad guys.”

“Roger, Striker,” Glasser said. “That intel stays in-house.”

Bolan finally made it off the carport roofs and onto the flat tar roof of the bank proper. His eyes skirted the building, seeing ventilation shafts, heat and air-conditioning equipment, and a variety of other pipes and housings sticking up out of the dirty black surface. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the building, staying just far enough from the edge that his head couldn’t be seen by the police officers on the ground.

He had meant what he’d told Glasser. All it would take would be for one of the Rough Riders below him to see one cop straining his eyes toward the roof to know someone was above them. Then the element of surprise would be gone.

The Executioner had hoped to find a return air shaft or some similar means to enter the building below, but he had no such luck. Banks were built with the hope of keeping people out after business hours, and the rough roof of First Fidelity was no exception. There were holes leading down into the building, all right. But the Executioner would have had to have been the size of a house cat to get through them.

With one exception.

Near the street side of the building, above what Bolan assumed would be the bank’s front lobby, was a large skylight. Slowly, he crept toward it, formulating his plan of attack as he went. If the skylight was plastic, he’d be out of luck here, too. He’d have to shoot enough holes through the plastic with the M-16 A-2 to create an opening large enough to drop through. And by the time that had been accomplished, the Rough Riders would have had time to kill the bank employees and other hostages several times over.

But if it was glass…

When he’d drawn near enough that he feared he might be seen be someone looking upward, Bolan dropped to his belly and used his elbows to pull himself the rest of the way to the skylight. Then, slowly—almost ceremoniously—he reached out with his left hand and tapped the clear surface in front of him.

Both the sound, and the feel, brought a smile to his face.

The skylight was made of glass. It would shatter just as quickly, and as surely, as the picture window next to the front door had.

Crawling back a few yards, the Executioner rose to his feet again and activated the mike on his shoulder. “Striker to SWAT 1,” he said. “Come in, SWAT 1.”

“I hear you Striker,” came back into his ear.

Bolan looked at his watch. He had a little over a minute before the twenty-minute deadline. “You buy us any extra time with the National Guard story?” he asked Glasser.

“Negative,” said the SWAT commander. “The guy just laughed, told me he knew a stall job when he heard one, then repeated his threat to start killing one hostage for each minute we were late.”

“Okay,” Bolan said. “Then it’s Plan B time.” He glanced at his watch once more.

Forty-five seconds remained.

He was about to speak to Glasser again when he saw another man in green coveralls and a blue ski mask shove a middle-aged woman directly under the skylight. The late-afternoon sun was at an angle that gave him an almost perfect view through the glass and, he suspected, would block or at least distort what could be seen by anyone looking up through the skylight.

But at this stage of the game he was taking no chances. Bolan took another step back until only the tops of the man’s and woman’s heads were visible. He had already seen all he needed to see.

The man in the coveralls had wrapped his left forearm around the woman’s throat. The short, stubby muzzle of an Ingram MAC-11 submachine gun was pressed against her nape. The watch on his wrist was clearly visible, and Bolan could see the Rough Rider staring at it, counting off the final seconds just as the Executioner was doing above, on the roof.

Bolan glanced at the MAC-11 again. Those submachine guns cycled at a phenomenally fast rate of fire. Unless the man firing the weapon was extremely experienced with it, he could empty the entire 30-round magazine before he let up on the trigger. All of which made the Ingrams less suitable for combat than for assassinations.

But an outright murder was exactly what was going to happen in less than thirty seconds unless the Executioner acted swiftly. The woman’s head would be almost completely gone before the Rough Rider even had time to let up on the trigger.

Bolan looked at his wrist. Twenty-eight seconds.

“Listen and listen fast, SWAT 1,” he whispered into the mike. “Fifteen seconds from the time I stop talking I’m coming down through the skylight. You should hear a few shots from me up top here, then glass breaking. Tell your men that’s their cue—when they hear the gunfire and then the crash it’s time to charge the building.”

“You’ve got it,” Glasser said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Make sure that your men know that once they’re inside the bank, they’re to take orders from me.”

“I’ll make sure they understand it,” Glasser said. “When do we begin the countdown?”

“Fifteen seconds from…now,” Bolan said.

He took a deep breath and squinted through the glass. From where he stood, he had a good angle at the head of the man in the green coveralls. He switched the M-16 to 3-round burst mode, then lined up the sights on the back of the man’s head. The holes he was about to drill through the glass would weaken it and make it shatter even easier.

The Executioner took a final glance at his watch, then returned his eyes to the sights. Slowly, he squeezed the trigger and watched the back of the Rough Rider’s head blow off as three tiny holes appeared in the skylight.

A second after that, he leaped onto the glass in a sitting position and crashed through the skylight into the First Fidelity Bank.

THE EXECUTIONER STRAIGHTENED his legs as he fell through the glass, thankful that the blacksuit was made out of cut-resistant material. Still, he felt a few shreds of glass scrape his hands and face, and by the time his feet hit the floor of the bank’s lobby he could feel tiny drops of blood running down his cheeks.

They mattered little in the grand scheme of things.

The Executioner landed on his feet, right behind the screaming woman and the dead Rough Rider who had fallen to her rear. To his right was a popcorn machine designed and built to look like the type found in old-fashioned movie theaters. Such fake antique popcorn machines seemed, for some reason, to be standard fare in modern banks. They were made out of thin metal and glass, and offered concealment but not cover.

Bolan pivoted on the balls of his feet, turning toward the cashiers’ windows. The first thing he saw were the hostages. Roughly a dozen people who looked like customers lay on their faces on the floor, their hands clasped behind their heads. Next to them, at least twice as many bank employees—both males and females wearing tan slacks and maroon polo shirts sporting the bank’s logo—lay in the same position.

The Executioner’s sudden descent through the skylight had come as a complete surprise to the bank robbers. Like the pair he had already encountered, they also wore green coveralls and blue ski masks. But Bolan noted one major difference.

The masks of these men had been rolled up into simple blue stocking caps. This aided their vision, but it told the Executioner something else, as well.

These Rough Riders weren’t worried about the customers or bank employees seeing their faces, which meant they intended to kill all the hostages.

A Rough Rider with a wide handlebar mustache was the first to recover from the shock of Bolan’s aerial entry. He lifted the Uzi in his hands toward the Executioner.

But Bolan was a fraction of a second faster. The Executioner’s first 3-round burst hit the mustachioed Rough Rider squarely in the chest. Above the explosions of the rounds Bolan heard a high-pitched ringing sound. He immediately realized that Coleman, the uniformed cop outside, wasn’t the only one wearing a Kevlar vest with a steel insert. At least some of the Rough Riders had them, too.

While the trio of rounds from the Executioner’s assault rifle had driven the man with the mustache several paces backward into a desk, they hadn’t stopped him. The Rough Rider began to raise his Uzi again, and more rounds from another direction whizzed past the Executioner’s ears, sounding like angry bees.

Bolan’s next triburst was aimed at his target’s head. The first slug took off the upper right half of his face and blew brains, blood and fragments of skull out the back of his head. The second and third rounds disappeared somewhere in the gore before the Rough Rider slumped to the tile floor in front of the desk.

The Executioner ducked behind the popcorn machine as more rounds from behind the tellers’ windows zipped past him. As he hit the floor, a barrage of fire from a variety of weapons shattered the glass of the popcorn machine and tore through the thin red metal stand.

Suddenly, the First Fidelity Bank lobby appeared to be snowing popcorn and glass, both raining over Bolan where he lay on his side. The unusual combined odor of exploding gunpowder, popcorn and butter filled the Executioner’s nostrils.

Several of the rounds that had ripped through the red metal stand had missed Bolan by millimeters. And the bank robbers knew that sooner or later, if they simply kept peppering the popcorn machine with fire, some of their rounds would find vital organs.

The Executioner knew that, too. Slinging the M-16 over his shoulder, he suddenly dived from behind the machine into the open. Hitting the floor on his right shoulder, he rolled under several bursts of fire just inches above him. The shoulder roll took him all the way to the desk where the man with the mustache lay in death, and the Executioner squeezed in between the dead man and the desk, using them both for cover now. He saw a flash of blue as one of the Rough Riders raised his head to fire through a teller’s window.

Bolan triggered his M-16. The blue stocking cap blew off the top of the man’s head. So did half of the head itself.

Two men in coveralls suddenly emerged through a formerly closed door next to the tellers’ windows. Behind them, Bolan could see a private office. An employee wearing the same maroon polo shirt lay on the floor, bloody and battered but breathing.

Both of the men coming out the door carried Uzis, and both were well over six feet and broad shouldered. They made the mistake of trying to exit the office at the same time, and for a split second wedged themselves together in the doorway in a scene worthy of The Three Stooges. But the Uzis kept all humor out of the Executioner’s brain as he flipped the M-16’s selector switch to semiauto, then put one 5.56 mm bullet between each man’s eyes.

They fell to the floor, dead.

For a moment, the gunfire died down and Bolan heard the sounds of running footsteps outside the building. He smiled grimly to himself. Glasser and his men were on the way. Their arrival was confirmed by the sounds of window glass breaking and side exit doors being rammed open.

Quickly, Bolan assessed the situation. The fact that the gunfire had died down meant there were a limited number of men who could see him. Which, in turn, meant the Rough Riders had to be scattered throughout the bank. The breaking glass and doors being rammed meant Glasser’s SWAT teams were entering the bank at various positions. They would take care of the offices, vault area and other rooms behind the tellers’ windows. But there was still one place just off the lobby that needed attention. The safe-deposit box room. And the Executioner was the most likely candidate to cover it.

Bolan could see the barred door was on the other side of the lobby, across from him.

And the barred door was open.

The Executioner squeezed out from between the desk and the dead man with the mustache, the M-16 aimed toward the tellers’ windows. There was always a chance that he’d been wrong in his assessment as to the cease-fire, and one or more Rough Riders might be hidden back there, just waiting for an opportunity such as Bolan was now giving him.

But such was not the case. Making his way silently toward the safe-deposit box door, trying to avoid the broken glass, shreds of metal, popcorn and anything else that might make a sound and alert the men in the safe-deposit box room that he was coming.

When he reached the door, the Executioner dropped to one knee and peered inside. Row upon row of safe-deposit boxes were stacked to a height of seven feet or so, and they prevented him from seeing anyone in the room.

But they didn’t prevent his hearing the conversation.

“I can’t open them,” a young female voice pleaded between sobs. “It takes both our key and the customers’.”

“Then you’d better find some other way of getting into them,” said the same cigarette-smoking voice Bolan had heard over Glasser’s cell phone. “Because if I have to shoot the damn things open, and any jewelry or other valuables get damaged, my next shot is going right between those pretty little tits of yours.”

The sobs increased in volume.

A moment later, a lone shot was fired, but Bolan continued to hear the young woman cry. So the round had gone into one of the boxes rather than her chest.

But it was only a matter of time before the raspy voice grew impatient, realized they were already under attack and killed her in order to concentrate his efforts on escape.

Because by now the Rough Riders could be pretty sure that neither a helicopter nor an airplane was in their immediate future.

“Find anything, Carl?” the raspy voice asked.

“Nah,” said a new voice. “Nothing we can use anyway.”

“Then shoot the next one.”

Bolan squeezed through the small opening between the barred door and the wall, trying not to move the door in case its hinges needed oiling. When he’d accomplished that feat, he stayed low, duck-walking his way past the several rows of safe-deposit boxes until he came to a stack just beyond where the two men and the woman were standing. At least he thought there were only two men—because only two men had spoken. He reminded himself that there could be more Rough Riders there, assisting in the pilfering of the boxes, who had kept quiet.

Bolan flipped the selector switch to safety and set the M-16 on the floor. Slowly and silently he drew the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R. If there were more than just the two men, he would take out as many as he could with the near silent Beretta. With any luck, he’d capture the man with the raspy voice alive. He hoped it went down that way at least. Dead men not only told no tales, but they also gave up no intelligence information.

But it was not to be.

Behind them, through the lobby and at the rear of the bank, came the roar of gunfire as Glasser’s SWAT teams entered the building and engaged the Rough Riders spread throughout the bank. The raspy voice on the other side of the stack of steel boxes said, “Okay, that’s it. We need to get out of here. Kill her, Carl, and let’s get going.”

Bolan could wait no longer.

Still squatting, the Executioner leaned around the corner and saw a short, stocky man with a three-day growth of beard lifting a Government Model 1911 .45 to the temple of the openly crying female bank employee. He had already made contact with the muzzle of the .45 by the time the Executioner lined up the Beretta’s sights on him and flipped the selector to semiauto as he’d done with the M-16. But his other suspicions had been accurate. Besides the man with the unfiltered cigarette voice, three more armed men in coveralls stool in the aisle in front of the boxes.

One 9 mm round was all it would take to save the young woman, but it would have to be precisely placed, and he could control that placement better with the Beretta in semiauto mode. The shot would have to go directly into the Rough Rider’s brain stem and shut down all motor functions, lest the man called Carl pulled the trigger of the .45 in a convulsion of death.

Taking a deep breath, the Executioner let out half of it, stopped, then gently squeezed the Beretta’s trigger. The sound suppressor coughed out the bullet. A subsonic, semijacketed hollowpoint entered the man’s brain, and he dropped the .45 as he fell to the floor.

But the shot had drawn the attention of the other men down the aisle toward Bolan, and one of the coveralled men now raised a Heckler & Koch MP-5. With no time to switch to 3-round-burst mode, the Executioner aimed carefully again, hitting the main squarely in the nose. In his peripheral vision, he saw the raspy-voiced man he assumed was the leader take off down the aisle, away from him. But he had no chance to stop him because the second of the third men was now trying to fix the sights of a Glock on the Executioner.

Bolan remembered the vest on the man with the mustache and again aimed high. The shot took the Rough Rider in the scalp. But it was not a kill shot. The man got off one wild 10 mm round from his large-framed Glock. Miraculously it missed both Bolan and the female bank employee. The Executioner fired again.

And this time, his near silent 9 mm round caught the man in the right eye.

The only man left had taken off his ski mask completely, and Bolan could see it stuffed in a side pocket of the coveralls. He fired once more, and the 9 mm slug took out the last Rough Rider’s left eye.

All of the men who had accompanied the raspy-voiced leader into the safe-deposit room were dead.

Bolan rushed up to the young woman, who was sniffling between sobs. “You all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Thank you,” she managed through the crying.

Bolan looked past her to the end of the aisle. The leader of the Rough Riders was nowhere to be seen. The Executioner carefully searched the rest of the room, but was not surprised when the cigarette smoker didn’t turn up.

The man had used his own troops to give him time to escape.

Picking up his M-16 as he left the room, Bolan could still hear gunfire coming from the rear of the bank. One of the SWAT men was in the lobby, personally holding the front door open for the terrified hostages and telling each one to stay close—they’d need statements from them all.

“Anybody in the teller’s area?” Bolan asked the man as he passed.

The SWAT trooper shook his head. “What’s left of them is in the back. They’ve barricaded themselves in the vault.”

Bolan stopped in his tracks. “You get a look at the vault?” he asked.

The SWAT man nodded.

“Can the door be opened from the inside once it’s locked?”

The man holding the door for the hostages nodded. “I just caught a glance at it earlier when I ran by. And I’m no safe expert, but it looked like it to me.”