Vickers pulled the safety harness tight across his chest before he started the cruiser's engine. He wasn't concerned with safety — he just didn't want a lucky shot to knock him over, rip his hands off of the steering wheel before he had a chance to show Rivera something special. Glancing at his watch, the lawman saw he had four minutes, thirty seconds left to live, and he was startled to discover he was not afraid.
He put the car in motion, rolling slowly down the alley's length, aware that he had time to spare before the stranger's lethal deadline. It occurred to him that he had never asked the gunman's name, but he supposed it didn't matter. Rivera meant to kill him, kill them all, and any ally in the midst of danger was a welcome hand.
He reached the alley's northern mouth and paused again before he turned the cruiser east toward Main Street. Vickers eased the Python from his holster, placed it on the seat beside him, knowing he would never have an opportunity to use it. It made him feel a damn sight better, having it there, even if that made no sense at all.
He thought that Becky might have figured out his secret toward the end. The stranger knew for certain, somehow; he had seen it clearly, in those graveyard eyes. And yet the man had seemed to pass no judgment on him. Maybe, Vickers thought, the knowledge that he would be dead within five minutes made a difference. Maybe.
But he was relieved that Becky had not challenged him, that there had been no time for her to put the pieces in place. No doubt she would be able to deduce the rest of it, but he would not be there to see the accusation in her eyes, and Vickers hoped the manner of his passing might incline her to spare his soul a kindly thought from time to time.
Three minutes, and he brought the cruiser onto Main Street, idling outside the vacant hulk of what had once been Sundberg's Dry Goods. There was action halfway down the block, and Vickers caught a glimpse of someone on the roof of Stancell's gas station, rising up to take a potshot at Rivera's soldiers with a rifle, ducking down again before they had a chance to return fire. The sniper's profile looked familiar, even from a distance, but he didn't have the time to mull it over. Thankful that some resident of Santa Rosa had come up with guts enough to make a stand, he dropped the squad car into gear and tromped his foot on the accelerator.
Downrange, the gunners saw him coming, heard the squeal of tortured rubber as he powered toward them from a standing start. He hit the switches for the cruiser's lights and siren, letting it unwind as he accelerated past the hardware store, the pharmacy, the clinic where Rebecca and her patient hid. The stranger would be up there, watching from the roof, but Vickers could not see him. He was concentrating on the startled gunners, some of them already scattering, a handful seeming to deduce his target, standing firm and laying down a screen of automatic fire. The cruiser started taking hits, like hail against the fenders, doors and grille. He heard one of the revolving lights explode above him, and he grimaced as a bullet drilled the cruiser's windshield, spilling pebbled safety glass into his lap. He scooped up the Python and thrust it through the vacant window-frame, and he was smiling as he started squeezing off in rapid fire. No time to aim, but at the very least he thought that he could keep the bastards hopping.
Half a block to go, and Vickers swerved his cruiser toward the diner and the cars lined up outside. A flying squad of runners was retreating toward the restaurant and firing as it ran, the bullets drilling bodywork and snapping close beside him in the speeding car. The constable ignored them, as a hunter might ignore the gnats that buzz around his head on an excursion through the forest, concentrating on the sleek Mercedes, which was first in line. It might not be Rivera's private car, although he thought he recognized the dealer's style, but it would do, in any case.
The other winking light exploded overhead, its colored fragments swept away in Vickers's slipstream. He was twenty yards from impact when a white-hot pain shot through his shoulder, knocking him off balance, ripping one hand from the steering wheel. The harness saved him, and he held the cruiser firmly on its course, his boot depressing the accelerator to the floor. He measured out his life in fractions of a second now.
"Kick ass!" he shouted, knowing that the gunners could not hear him, and before the lawman had a chance to lift his good hand off the steering wheel, his world was swallowed up by rolling thunder, tinged with fire.
Lying on the clinic's roof, Mack Bolan watched the squad car and its driver self-destruct. On impact, both the cruiser and the lead Mercedes were obscured by a rolling fireball, oily smoke ascending, blackening the sky. A lake of fire was spreading underneath the other cars in line, and as he watched, a burning scarecrow staggered out, arms flapping in an agonized, demented parody of flight. It was not Vickers, and he let the runner go, his captured automatic weapon seeking other targets in the street below.
He found them almost instantly. A squad of hardguys had emerged from cover near the diner, darting in and out along the edges of the spreading conflagration, desperate to save the other cars before they all went up in turn. Across the street, from the direction of the service station, Bolan heard another rifle shot and glanced that way in time to see the sniper ducking under cover. He had missed that time, but now his enemies were dodging, seeking cover, hastily abandoning their mission with the convoy.
Bolan chased them with a short, precision burst and cut the legs from under one of them, his human target toppling across the line of fire and twitching as the last three rounds tore through his head and chest. The others scattered, seeking cover in the diner, in the mouth of an adjacent alleyway, or veering off across the empty street toward other shops. The soldier tracked them with his submachine gun, dropped another as the runner gained the opposite sidewalk, his death roll ending with the body crumpled against a standing mailbox.
Sudden automatic fire from an entirely different quarter raked the cornice to his left, and Bolan wriggled backward, out of range. The gunners had divided, probably in answer to the challenge of the sniper at the filling station, and a pair of them were on the street below him, firing skyward, pinning Bolan down.
If he had come prepared with frag grenades, it would have been no contest, but it would be suicide to rise above the cornice, scanning for a target while he posed in silhouette against the sky. There might be more than two below, although at present he could only hear two weapons — one 9 mm, by the sound of it, the other popping .45s — and while he might gain time by shifting his position to another section of the road, he might as easily be killed while on the move. Worse yet, he knew that it would not be long before the gunners tried to reach him through the clinic proper, scouring the rooms for safety's sake, locating Dr. Kent and her sedated patient in the process. It was time to move, unless ...
As if in answer to his secret thoughts, the nameless sniper showed himself again, this time directing rapid fire against the gunners moving near the clinic. Bolan could not judge the rifleman's effectiveness, but only one of the assailants answered fire, a ragged burst that drove the sniper under cover once again.
The soldier made his move, already up and running as the scheme took shape. The building next to Santa Rosa's clinic, seemingly a vacant storefront, stood across an alley roughly ten feet wide. In case the scuttling gunner might have missed his move, he fired an aimless burst skyward as he ran, then tucked the stuttergun beneath his arm and leaped across the yawning canyon of the alleyway.
It was an easy jump, all things considered, but the roof of the adjacent building was a good foot taller than the clinic's, with a higher cornice, and the soldier lost his footing, going down on hands and knees to catch himself, the submachine gun clattering beside him. Thankful that the roof was flat, instead of canted at an angle, Bolan spent a heartbeat breathing deeply, mindful of the sudden, spastic pain that emanated from his wound as sutures tugged against the tender flesh. Below him, angry shouts and a halfhearted burst of autofire informed the soldier that his shift had not been overlooked.
With any luck, they would pursue him, leaving Dr. Kent and Amy Schultz in peace for now. If nothing else, the Executioner could try to buy them time, a chance to cut and run, but he was not primarily concerned with holding actions. It was not by accident that he was closing on the diner, where the greatest concentration of Rivera's gunners seemed to be. The palace guard would stand its ground around el jefe, and if Bolan did not miss his guess, Rivera would be inside the restaurant.
Grant Vickers had succeeded in annihilating the Mercedes tank. The other cars in line were burning furiously, on the verge of secondary detonations as their fuel tanks were licked by flames. As they exploded, one behind the other, it was like a string of giant fireworks, spewing jagged shrapnel, spouts of oil and gasoline like fiery streamers in the air. A Cadillac, parked close behind the long Mercedes, was the first to blow, its broad hood airborne, like a piece of cardboard riding on a desert whirlwind. Next in line, a dusty squad car — captured somewhere, somehow, from the Border Patrol — erupted in a ball of greasy flame. A secondary blast destroyed the cruiser, broke its back, and left it squatting like a blackened toad on melting tires. The others blew in turn, their detonations culminating in a blast that ripped the stolen ambulance apart, emergency supplies and rolls of bandages erupting, all in flames. A tank of oxygen exploded, with the echo of a giant's fowling piece, and then the battleground fell relatively silent, save for the devouring crackle of the flames.
It was an artificial peace, and swiftly broken as Rivera's gunners scrambled out from under cover, gawking at the ruined vehicles that were their only transport home. They would discover other cars and trucks in Santa Rosa, given time, but it was Bolan's task to keep them jumping, whittling the ranks, so that they never found the necessary time to mount a search. He raised his captured weapon, rattled off a 3-round burst, and heard the hammer fall upon an empty chamber. Feeding in his solitary backup magazine, he was prepared to spray the street again when hostile fire erupted on his flank and drove him back to cover.
Bolan realized that he was cornered. He could not retreat in the direction of the clinic, nor could he advance to the diner from where he was. His only avenue of exit was the alley in back, assuming that the gunners did not flank him first, and in the absence of a ladder he would have to jump.
Procrastination was a fatal flaw in combat situations, and the soldier did not hesitate once he had weighed the narrow range of his alternatives. He popped up, fired a burst in the direction of the diner, then pivoted to bring the gunners near the clinic under fire. Before they could react, he was already moving out, across the dusty roof and toward the alleyway that ran behind the buildings fronting Main Street, separating them from stucco homes that faced the desert to the west.
A glance in each direction, verifying that the enemy had not surrounded him completely, and the Executioner was looking for the best way down when something hit the roof behind him, heavily, and started rolling. Bolan spun around and saw the frag grenade as it began to wobble toward him. He could hear the doomsday numbers falling as the lethal egg rolled closer, and he did not need to calculate trajectories to know that he was in deep trouble. Escape was mandatory, and it could not be postponed.
He leaped, free-falling, and the shock wave struck him in midair. He was a tumbling straw man, trapped and buffeted inside a smoky thunder clap, with angry hornets buzzing past him, plucking at his clothing. Then the ground was rushing up to meet him, and there was not even time to break his fall.
Rivera came out of his hiding place behind the counter, and he saw the line of cars outside reduced to twisted, smoking hulks. They were on foot now, but he knew that other vehicles would be available. It was not the destruction of machines that worried him, but rather the realization of who had destroyed them.
The constable had turned against him with a vengeance, overriding years of purchased loyalty to sacrifice his life for the town, choosing fiery death above allegiance to Rivera. It was not a typical reaction, and the dealer was disturbed. If he could not control his underlings, if one whom he considered bought and paid for could betray him thus, what might the other citizens of Santa Rosa do? What might they risk to save their miserable pest hole of a town?
The nameless rooftop sniper had apparently been joined by yet another, this one with an automatic weapon. Betting the percentages, Rivera recognized the odds against a local citizen possessing a machine gun, and he knew that in all probability the weapon had been captured from a member of his own crew. That meant another casualty, and he was stricken by the rapid decimation of his forces, conscious of the fact that they could not hold out for long inside the diner, if the town should rise against them.
Moving closer to the windows, scanning through the smoke, he searched the street for a sign of Hector. Shadows darted in and out amid the drifting, oily clouds, but he could not pick out their faces or identify the men beyond a general knowledge that they were his men, his troops. They held the street, but they were fighting desperately to keep it, and Rivera wondered if it might be a losing battle. Should the other citizens of Santa Rosa be prepared to sacrifice themselves as Vickers had, Rivera's gunners could not hope to stand before them. They had been outnumbered from the start, and blind fanaticism neutralized the opening advantage of their weapons, their professional experience.
It struck the dealer that he might be marked to die in Santa Rosa, but he pushed the thought away. He had survived too many close encounters with the Reaper to be daunted now, and he would persevere, no matter what should happen on the street outside. His honor was at stake. Rivera had not worked so long and hard to give it up without a fight. He had not killed so many men to be intimidated by a village full of peasants in rebellion. If he could not wipe them out entirely, he could make the bastards pay a ghastly price for their resistance. Even if the peasants should defeat him somehow, in the end they would remember him in grief and rue the day when they had raised their hands against Luis Rivera.
The cars were burning out, except for their upholstery and carpeting, but now there seemed to be more smoke outside than previously. Glancing to the south, Rivera saw a tongue of flame, extruded from the shattered windows of an empty shop. Beside it, yet another store was burning, and he saw Camacho now, with several other pistoleros racing from a third shop as the smoke began to billow on their heels.
Camacho was obeying orders, under fire, and thus far he had been successful. If another shop or two was set ablaze, the rest might catch spontaneously, from their neighbors, and the arson team could cross to work the other side of Main Street. Soon enough, the town would lie in ashes, and if that was not enough to smother the resistance by its occupants, Rivera's gunners would have little problem mopping up amid the ruins. Provided that they had not been overpowered in the meantime.
Reaching underneath the jacket of his leisure suit, Rivera pulled the nickel-plated automatic from its shoulder rigging, drawing back the slide to verify a live round in the firing chamber. He would not go quietly, whatever happened. If the peasants overran his troops, they would be forced to face Rivera last of all, and some of them, at least, would not survive the confrontation. He would make them pay for their impertinence, and if his life was forfeit, he would not go down alone.
If all else failed, he had the hostages. The cook was old and weather-beaten, but the waitress was young and succulent. A sniper might think twice before he cut the woman down, and any hesitation by the enemy could be converted to a positive advantage, with sufficient skill and daring. Confident that he possessed both qualities, Rivera slipped his side arm back into its armpit holster, moving back to the rear of the restaurant.
From somewhere to the north, he heard the muffled blast of a grenade, immediately followed by the sound of automatic weapons. That would have to be his strike force; in the worst scenario, he could not let himself believe the peasants had explosives on their side. His men were rooting out the snipers, running them to earth, and once the opposition had been stifled, if indeed it could be localized, they would be free to finish with the town, escaping in such vehicles as they might pick up off the street.
The stolen cars might be a problem, if they tried to cross the border in a convoy, but Rivera knew that there were ways around the difficulty. They could find another town, patch through a phone call to his home, and have vehicles meet them on the highway. And if worse came to worst, he carried cash enough to buy a car or two, with title in his name, before they headed south again.
A crafty businessman, Rivera took great pains to be prepared for any given situation. He had let his guard down once too often here in Santa Rosa, but he would not make the same mistake again. The unexpected treason of Grant Vickers might work out to his advantage, inasmuch as it prepared him for the worst and made him conscious of the fact that he was not invincible. It never hurt to be reminded of one's own mortality, as long as the reminder was not fatal in itself.
"Esteban!"
The gunner moved to stand before him, almost at attention. Even under pressure, he took care to show Rivera the respect that he deserved. "Si, jefe?"
"When Camacho and the others start to burn the buildings on this side, we must be ready to depart." He nodded toward the hostages and said, "These gringos will be coming with us, for security."
Esteban smiled approval of the plan. "Si, jefe. As you say."
"Be ready when I give the order."
"Si."
Rivera turned back to the windows and the street beyond, a gesture of dismissal that Esteban took in stride. The gunner moved away and left Rivera with his thoughts of life and death, defeat and victory.
He could prevail against the peasants, if his luck had not gone sour. He was not a superstitious man, but he had seen enough of life to know that even preparation might not always be sufficient to ensure success. There was an element of chance, or risk, in every human undertaking, and the odds grew worse as each new person was involved, each wild card added to the deck. Within established limits, it was possible to stack the deck somewhat, but you could never totally eliminate the element of chance. Dumb luck might cause the best of plans to go awry, and he was looking at a situation now where Fate had seemingly stepped in to lend a hand.
But if Rivera was not superstitious, neither had he ever been a man of faith. Predestination was a concept foreign to his thinking; he did not believe in a supreme intelligence or guiding hand behind the workings of the universe. Raised in poverty and filth, he put no stock in gods or idols, carrying a lifelong grudge against the notion of a great Creator who would leave the world in such a state. Within the limitations set by chance, coincidence and pure dumb luck, man was the captain of his fate, achievements limited by individual intelligence, initiative and drive.
Rivera knew that he possessed those qualities, and he had every confidence that they would help him to survive. If not, God help the peasants who were sent to bring him down.