Shock Waves(24)
The target tenement was marginally protected by a local gang, the Mau Maus, who presided over three square blocks of wasteland like an occupying army. Bonadonna might have wiped them out as easily as stepping on a cockroach, but he chose instead to put them on his payroll and let them take the front-line risks and give his own amici breathing room.
Bolan reached the eighth-floor windows, crouching to peer through filthy glass, alert for any sign of sentries lurking there.
Nothing.
The soldier passed on, scrambling down the rusty steps, his Ingram MAC-10 ready to respond if he was challenged.
There would be no Mau Maus, Bolan knew, inside the cutting plant. They were too unpredictable to work around the lab, and any one of them might grab a fistful of the magic powder, try to force it up his nose before the gunners standing watch could turn him into dog food.
They would be the outer guard, and if they were around, they would respond to the sounds of warfare once his strike began. If they appeared, the Executioner would deal with them as ruthlessly and finally as he would any cannibal adult, and let them know, damn right, about the pain that went with playing in the major leagues.
He hesitated just above the narrow landing of the seventh floor, and he bent to check out the windows. Where all the rest were coated with grime, the panes of these few were painted on the inside, guaranteeing privacy. The soldier smiled, knowing he had found his mark.
He donned a surgical mask and double-checked the Ingram's safety, making sure there was a live one in the firing chamber and extra magazines were readily available. Unclipping an Army-issue M-12 frag grenade from his web belt, Bolan hefted the lethal egg, calculating range and angles. Then he jerked the pin and let it fall, maintaining his grip on the curved safety spoon as he leaned into the pitch.
The grenade shattered the blacked-out pane, long shards cascading down like broken stalactites. Bolan backtracked, scrambling up the stairs and hugging gritty bricks.
Three seconds later, a smoky thunderclap cleared out the other windows, raining glass and plaster on the alley below. A shudder gripped the fire escape, but Bolan was already moving, vaulting through the open window frame and dropping to a combat crouch inside, his Ingram tracking, seeking targets.
One of three long laboratory tables had been overturned by the blast, tossing to the floor beakers and retorts, a hissing burner, flame extinguished now, a snowy drift of heroin and coke. A drifting haze of smoke and magic powder hovered over all, reducing visibility to well below the danger point. You could OD in there just breathing, right, and Bolan homed in on the choking, gagging voices of his enemies as he moved out of the light.
A sudden movement on his left, and Bolan pivoted, the Ingram an extension of himself, already locking into target acquisition as a slender lab attendant lurched erect behind the upturned table. He was decked out in hospital white, his surgical mask dangling useless below his chin, the strap — and half an ear — clipped neatly by a piece of shrapnel from the frag grenade.
The Ingram stuttered, parabellum shockers opening the lab coat and the tender flesh beneath, before the impact punched his target out of sight behind the fallen table. For an instant, Bolan's muzzle blast had cleared a section of the fog bank, and he watched it close before his eyes like the evaporation of a dream.
Or nightmare.
A pair of gunners loomed before him, navigating by the sound of gunfire, probing with their handguns as blind men do with canes. They never saw Grim Death in front of them as Bolan hit them with a blazing figure eight and blew them both away.
A door banged open on his right, and Bolan swung in that direction, found himself confronted by a member of the Mau Maus. Long and lean, with scrawny arms and an outlandish Afro hairstyle, he resembled a B-movie alien.
But there was nothing otherworldly about the sawed-off shotgun in his hands, and Bolan took an instant to decide if he would live or die. The punk stepped in, and Bolan's Ingram zippered him from crotch to throat, slamming him back against the doorframe; he hung there for a moment, finally slumping into a death sprawl.
Panicking, a pair of lab attendants broke from cover, sprinting for the open doorway; Bolan chased them with a burst, saw one man stagger, clutching his side; then they vanished. Seconds later, barking pistols told him they had found the Mau Mau rear guard.
As Bolan left, he fed a new magazine into the Ingram. From his web belt, he withdrew incendiaries, dropping them along his track, among the bodies, scattered pills, the drifts of heroin and coke. He cleared the window and was halfway to the roof before the fuses sizzled to life and tongues of greasy flame licked out behind him, lapping at the masonry, devouring the lab.
The fire would not put Don Francesco Bonadonna out of business. But it would make him stop and think. Inevitably he would start to shop around for enemies, for anyone who might desire to do him harm.