Brognola had been waiting for the voice, but when it came to him from out of the gloom he was startled all the same. He lurched around, embarrassed, hoping that the darkness had concealed his momentary fear. He concentrated on the voice and willed his hands to cease their trembling.
"You're alone?"
"As ordered."
Hardmen liked that tone of deference. He kept his fingers crossed that it might lead the contact to relax his guard.
"I ought to check the car."
"Feel free."
The shadow had a human shape now, drifting nearer, pausing less than fifty feet away. His contact hesitated, thinking on it, and Brognola flexed the fingers of his gun hand. Waiting.
The shadow had made up its mind.
"Forget it. Hell, we trust each other, right?"
Brognola did not answer. He was working on the voice, trying to remember where and when he might have heard it in the past. It was familiar and yet...
"You brought the list?"
Brognola slipped his left hand in the pocket of his trench coat, and the shadow tensed, prepared for treachery. He tried to gauge the man's reaction time, encumbered by a greatcoat as he was, his hands apparently encased in gloves. If he was a professional the extra layers of clothing might not count for anything, but then again...
He had the empty sheets of paper in his hand and now he held them up, allowed the shadow just a glimpse before his arm fell back against his side.
"All right. I told them you were good for it. Some of them had their doubts, but I was on your side."
"I'm touched."
"Hey, don't go bitter on me, friend. We're in this thing together."
"Not quite."
"Well, damn, I'm sorry you feel that way."
The shadow was advancing slowly, one hand edging toward his open coat, a movement so relaxed, so casual that Hal might easily have missed it if he had not been on edge, expecting the betrayal to begin at any moment. He saw the cross-hand draw before his enemy was even close, his own reaction taking him away and low, outside the first instinctive line of fire. The Bulldog .44 was in his hand before his belly hit the pavement, teeth clenched tight to keep the precious air from being driven from his lungs on impact.
And it was the shadow's turn to jump this time. The guy was dragging out an automatic from beneath his arm, sidestepping in a last-ditch bid to save himself. But he was far too late. Brognola braced the Bulldog in both hands, squeezing off in double-action as his human target tried to bring the automatic into rough alignment with his face. A blind man could have made the shot at something under forty feet, and in the instant that he fired, Brognola's night eyes were performing perfectly.
Round one punched through the target's primly buttoned vest and rocked him on his heels, the automatic booming in reflexive fire. He was already going over backward when Brognola's second round ripped through his armpit, flattening to mutilate one lung before it came to rest behind a shoulder blade.
Hal was scrambling to his feet when the surrounding darkness exploded in his face. Converging streams of automatic fire erupted from the shadows, tracking, searching for him, driving him to the ground again. Aware that Bolan had been right, deriving little in the way of consolation from that knowledge now, he scuttled crablike on his belly for the cover of the Unknown Soldier's monument. Around him bullets screamed and whined on impact with the pavement, snapping overhead as hidden gunners tried to find the range and elevation.
An enemy round traced liquid fire across his buttocks and another whispered past his head. Scrambling for his life, Brognola felt like some enormous lizard struggling to cross the highway, caught by traffic in the middle of the noonday rush. Another moment and the whispering death would overtake him.
But he had taken one of them, and he wasn't finished yet. He was alive and fighting.
The monument was looming over him, and Hal was braced to make a final rush for cover when the gunner showed himself, a slender shape detaching from the deeper shadow of the Unknown Soldier's tomb, an errant shaft of moonlight glinting off the silenced Ingram in his fist. Brognola fired instinctively, the Bulldog rising as he cranked off three in rapid-fire, the big rounds ripping in from groin to solar plexus, their explosive impact devastating at a range of less than fifteen feet.
The gunner sat down hard, his back against the smooth face of the monument, and Hal was scrambling past him even as the shadow gunners realized that he was still alive, that it had been their comrade slouched in death against the tomb. He snatched the Ingram from lifeless fingers and slid into cover as reactive fire began to eat the night around him, seeking flesh and finding only darkness.
They would try to flank him now. It was inevitable. They could not afford to let him live, and they did not have time to wait him out. Already, someone might have heard the gunfire, though he wondered who would be abroad in Arlington at midnight.
From the direction of the car he heard a burst of submachine gun fire ripping like a buzz saw through the smoky darkness. Turrin had arrived, and he would give the hidden gunners something else to think about before they made their move. The odds were shifting, balancing upon a razor's edge, and any sudden jolt might skew them in Brognola's favor.
A jolt from Bolan, if the soldier was alive.
If he had not been ambushed in the darkness by a wary lookout. It happened to the best, but as he hunkered in the shadows with both hands locked around the captured Ingram, Hal was praying that it had not happened here tonight. They needed Bolan desperately if they were going to survive.
They needed Bolan now.
Bolan followed the reports of gunfire from the point where he had stalked and killed the second sentry, instinctively homing on the sounds of combat. The second guard had delayed him, struggling briskly, giving up his life reluctantly to Bolan's blade. If the lookout had been a fraction swifter, Bolan might have been the one stretched out beneath the willow's trailing fronds, his lifeblood soaking into grass that had already seen enough of death.
But Bolan's nameless enemy had not been swift or alert enough to save himself, and now the Executioner was closing on the sounds of battle, one fist wrapped around the silver AutoMag. He offered up a silent supplication to the universe, aware that he might be too late already. Hal and Leo might be dead or dying, riddled where they stood by snipers Bolan hadn't had the time to neutralize.
Bolan shrugged the morbid thought away before it had a chance to claim his full attention. Someone still was firing beyond a gentle rise in front of him. He recognized the booming voice of Hal's off-duty Bulldog, followed shortly by the chatter of Leo's Uzi, answering the muffled weapons of the enemy.
He topped the rise and melted into shadow, sweeping down upon the hostiles from their flank. He counted half a dozen muzzle-flashes, automatic weapons all, and he was closing on the nearest of them when the line began to break from cover, closing in on Hal and Leo in a pincer movement.
It took a moment, but he spotted Turrin lying behind a gravestone, waiting for a target to present itself before he wasted any more ammunition. Hal was harder to detect, and Bolan was about to let it go when a precision burst erupted from the shadow of the Unknown Soldier's monument, the nearest hostile gunner dead before his face impacted on the pavement.
Everyone was firing now, the hostiles rushing helter-skelter over thirty yards of open no-man's-land with automatic weapons blazing. Two of them immediately pinned Brognola down with probing fire. The other pair was veering off toward Leo, splitting up to flank him in a pincer of their own, assuring that there would be one survivor left to pin him down no matter what transpired.
But they had not included Bolan in their reckoning.
The soldier dropped to one knee, sighting down the barrel of the AutoMag and making target acquisition on the farthest mark first. He sucked a deep breath in, released a portion of it, held the rest to steady up his aim, already tightening his finger on the trigger, bracing for the heavy recoil.
Boom!
And downrange, closing on the Unknown soldier's monument, a gunner stumbled, sprawled, a fist-sized portion of his skull evaporating as 240 grains of screaming death punched in behind one ear, exploding through the ruins of his face to find the night again. His body wriggled briefly on the pavement as it undulated toward the curb and finally came to rest within a dozen strides of Hal Brognola's hiding place.
The second gunner had been taken by surprise, his own momentum broken by the disintegration of his comrade, and the momentary stall was all Brognola needed. Rising from the shadows of his sanctuary, tracking with his captured stutter gun, he cut the shooter's legs from under him and nailed him to the pavement with a fiery figure eight.
Big Thunder swept along the battle line and chose another target as the two surviving hitters tried to close the net on Leo Turrin. Bolan rode the recoil out and saw his target stagger, gutted by the heavy Magnum round before he had a chance to open up on Leo's blind side. Sagging to his knees, he swiveled toward the lethal darkness, bringing up his weapon, dying for a chance to take his killer with him.
Bolan let him see Big Thunder's muzzle-flash, the second round impacting on his scalp as the hollow man collapsed backward.
Turrin had already taken out the final gunner, stitching him across the chest point-blank and following him down, the Uzi emptying its magazine before he let the trigger go. The guy was as dead as hell, and as the silence settled in around them, ringing in the soldier's ears, he knew that they had failed.
They had no prisoners.
A nagging dread enveloped Bolan as he started down the grassy slope. Survival had been paramount, he told himself; the moment had not granted any leeway for selective fire. When all the chips were down the instinct for self-preservation took control. As he had killed to save his friends, so Hal and Leo killed to save themselves.
He knew the arguments by heart and recognized their truth, but there was precious little consolation in the fact that they were still alive. By their survival, they had sentenced Helen and Brognola's children to an almost certain death. By slaughtering the opposition gunners, they had wasted any chance of learning where the hostages were kept.
There would have been provisions for a callback to let the hit team know Brognola had been taken down. They would be waiting for instructions, where to take the wife and kiddies, how to handle the disposal... and there would be backup plans in case of an emergency. If everything went sour and no one called, they would have made provisions for a scrub, elimination of the witnesses and evidence, a way to cut their losses while they had a chance. He might have coaxed the necessary information from a prisoner, persuaded him to talk as if his life depended on it, but they had already blown their one and only chance.
Before he reached the pavement, Bolan saw Brognola moving down the line of bodies, pausing over each in turn and reaching down to check for vital signs. It was a futile effort, but the soldier left him to it, seeking Leo.
And finding him where he had fallen, propped up with his back against a tombstone, grinning through the rictus of his pain. Both hands were pressed against the inside of his thigh, and Bolan spied the pant leg, slick with blood from knee to ankle.
"He clipped me," Leo grated through his pain. "The bastard shot me after he was dead."
"You're lucky." Bolan crouched beside his friend and stripped off Leo's belt to make a tourniquet. "He might have really nailed you if he was alive."
"That's funny," Leo told him, but he didn't laugh. "So, how'd we do?"
"We got them all."
And Turrin recognized their failure instantly. "Well, shit."
"You need a doctor."
"Doctor, hell, I need a frigging keeper. If I could've winged that bird..."
"He would have blown your head off," Bolan finished for him. "Let it go."
"That's easily said."
"We didn't walk in here to make a human sacrifice. If that was it, you could have shot yourself before we left the house."
"Don't rub it in."
"Can you stand up on that?"
"I'd damn well better."
Bolan had the wounded warrior halfway to his feet when Hal Brognola's voice arrested both of them.
"Goddammit! Here! I know this guy!"
The others were beside him in a moment, Bolan serving as a crutch for Leo, who favored his belted, bloodied leg. Brognola grimaced at the sight.
"Are you okay?"
Leo's smile was forced. "I'm canceling my polka lesson for tonight. You make this dude?"
The question brought him back to the immediate priority.
"It's been a year or so," he told them both. "The name was Smith or Jones or some such throwaway. He worked for Milo Grymdyke."
"Ah."
The sound escaped from Turrin almost as a whisper, and Brognola couldn't tell if it had been inspired by pain or recognition.
"So, who's Grymdyke?" Bolan asked.
Brognola fielded it. "He's CIA. Clandestine Ops. I don't know what he's doing now, but he was handling the foreign wet work back when Farnsworth was around."
"I'd say he's gone domestic," Bolan offered, tight-lipped.
"Yeah."
"Where do I find him?"
"This one's mine," Brognola snapped. "I'll handle Grymdyke."
"Leo needs a doctor. Now."
"All right. I'll drop you at your car and you can run him by emergency receiving."
"Put it on the other foot. If Grymdyke gives his sponsors up, there won't be any time to waste."
"Time's all I've got," Brognola answered bitterly. "We blew it."
"Did we?"
"Look around you, dammit! Do you notice any walking wounded here? Somebody's waiting for a callback, and the frigging telephone is never going to ring." He felt the tears beginning in his voice and bit them back. "It's over, all except for mopping up."
"And if it's not? If there's a chance, however slim?" The soldier didn't waste his breath on phony reassurances. "I'll step aside if you say you can handle it alone."
The tears were in his eyes now, blinding him.
"God damn it."
"Let's get Leo in the car."
Brognola took his wounded comrade's other arm around his shoulders, helped him back to the sedan. When he was safely stowed in back, Hal slid behind the wheel with Bolan riding shotgun on his right.
"You handle it," he said when they were rolling, and the taste of shame was bitter on his tongue. "I'm out."
"The hell you are. I've never seen you quit before."
"You've never seen me throw it all away before."
"So is this where you write them off?"
"You're acting like I have an option." They were rolling toward a stoplight and he punched on through the red, ignoring horns and screeching brakes on either side. "I fucked it up, or else we all did. Either way, it's done."
"You're wrong. There's still a chance, and if we blew it, then the play's not over till you make things right."
Brognola made a sour face. He knew that things would never be quite right again.
And Bolan would not let him rest.
"Where can I get in touch with Grymdyke?"
"Last I heard he had a place in Alexandria, not far from Langley."
He was startled to recall the address with crystal clarity, the sort of trivia a tortured mind can vomit up in times of desperation. Hal repeated it for Bolan, listened as the soldier played it back.
"That's him. Assuming that he hasn't moved."
Assuming that the front man he had wasted back at Arlington had not been working on his own.
Assuming any one of half a dozen different scenarios that might make chasing Milo Grymdyke a colossal waste of time.
But they had time now, he remembered. There was no more need for haste. They had already crossed the deadline, fumbled in the end zone, trashed the play beyond repair. It didn't matter if he had to follow Grymdyke to Afghanistan and back. Brognola had the kind of time that men alone possess, free time in such abundance that it gradually crushes them beneath its weight.
He could not make himself believe that there was any hope. It would accomplish nothing, holding on to phantoms while the living still required assistance. Leo's blood was soaking through the seat, and Hal could not ignore the sacrifice his friend had made in the attempt to win his wife and children back.
He concentrated on the next light, and the next one after that, intent on dropping Bolan at his car before proceeding on with Leo to emergency. There would be police and questions to be answered, once the doctors got a look at Leo's leg, but that was fine. Hal had the time for questions now and there might even be some answers waiting for him.
God knew there was nothing else ahead of him but empty nights and hollow days, beset with memories of faces he would never see and voices he would never hear again except in dreams.
In nightmares.
He could hear them now, and they were whispering embittered accusations, carping on his failure. They had every right and he did nothing to evade them, taking all of it inside and nurturing his shame.
He had a single reason left to live, and that lay in the hope that Bolan might allow some stragglers to survive. There was a chance that one or two of Hal's tormentors might escape the cleansing fire, and he would have a reason to continue living while they lived, committed to extermination of the animals who had already torn his world apart.
When they were finished he would have to find another motive for survival, or surrender to the darkness that surrounded him already. For now, it was enough to concentrate on traffic, on the winking lights and on his pain.
He had sufficient time for any tasks that still remained unfinished, and there would be pain enough, he knew, to see him through his days.