poacher lunged forward, his lips bared back, looking for all the world like the wounded Kodiak whose only thought had been to move forward and destroy.
Lightstone had already dropped the sights of the S amp;W automatic and was starting to squeeze off the first point-blank shot into the center of Sonny Chareaux's chest when Carine Mueller suddenly sprinted off across the debris-covered floor.
Reacting instinctively, because Chareaux was already crippled and thus presumably a lesser threat, Lightstone spun around in a crouch and triggered three concussive shots in the direction of the disappearing figure just as Dwight Stoner threw himself forward at Chareaux's legs and Kiro Nakamura came in fast with a spinning kick that sent the fifth 180-grain bullet streaking over Sonny Chareaux's head and through the main door of the barn as the stainless-steel automatic was knocked out of Lightstone's hands.
For a brief moment, the two bare-handed fighters paused to stare at each other in the dust-and debris- strewn semidarkness while Dwight Stoner and Sonny Chareaux continued to twist and grunt and roll across the cement floor, sending boxes and tools flying as they hit and elbowed and bit and tore at each other's throat.
Then, sensing an advantage, Nakamura suddenly stepped forward, missed with a lunging, high jump kick, absorbed and then spun away from Lightstone's combination block and punishing side elbow strike to his upper rib cage, came back all the way around with a roundhouse heel kick to the side of Lightstone's head… and then went down hard when the Okinawan-trained agent recovered, shifted his feet and twisted his hips sharply as he drove a punishing left-handed punch into his assailant's floating ribs and then immediately followed with a reverse-direction right-elbow strike that caught the Skotokan black belt square in the mouth and nose.
Behind his back, Henry Lightstone heard a horrible crunch of breaking bones-and then an agonized scream- but he didn't have time to look around because his seemingly indestructible opponent was already back on his feet and smiling in apparent amusement through bleeding lips and nose as his flickering eyes searched for yet another advantage in the dust-filled semidarkness.
Lightstone had instinctively brought his feet back into a balanced defensive stance, ready to counter Nakamura's next move, when the far side door of the barn burst open and a curly haired body-builder type appeared, holding a short-barreled H amp;K 9mm submachine gun.
'Come on, let's blow this place!' the body-builder yelled, putting a stream of 9mm bullets ripping through the rotten wooden walls of the barn-sending Lightstone and Nakamura diving for the floor… before he and Carine Mueller disappeared through the far side door.
Looking around frantically, Lightstone finally spotted the reflective stainless-steel finish of his 10mm Smith amp; Wesson on the floor about ten feet away and was starting toward it when he heard, and then saw, Kiro Nakamura coming in fast.
The full-powered front kick would have caught Lightstone square in the face-and either knocked him unconscious or broken his neck-had it not been for Dwight Stoner, who pulled himself up out of the semidarkness on one leg, caught Kiro Nakamura by the shirt in midair, and then slammed the Shotokan master back into the rough six-by-six support beam, with his feet dangling a good sixteen inches above the floor.
Reacting out of pure instinct, Nakamura drove his left fist into the huge agent's exposed neck and then shrieked in pain as the broken bones of his wrist grated against torn nerves.
'Shithead!' Dwight Stoner screamed, glaring into Nakamura's agonized eyes. Then, holding the struggling Shotokan black belt up and out with his left hand, the infuriated agent drove his huge fist into Nakamura's chest, sending him crashing into the wall in a shower of loose boards and flying tools. He landed facedown on the hard concrete.
But then, to the astonishment of both Stoner and Lightstone, the crippled Shotokan black belt slowly pushed and pulled himself back up to a sitting position against the wall and smiled once again through his now profusely bleeding mouth as he brought Henry Lightstone's stainless- steel automatic up in both trembling hands.
The splintered end of Sonny Chareaux's bat was lying on the cement floor about six feet away, and Lightstone was already going for it- knowing that he'd be too late, but trying anyway-when the roar of new gunfire reverberated through the barn.
In quick succession, three. 45-caliber jacketed hollow- point bullets caught Kiro Nakamura in the chest, neck, and forehead, slamming him backward into the broken and splintered wall boards like a rag doll.
As both Lightstone and Stoner spun around, they saw Larry Paxton standing on one crutch and braced against the doorway, a smoking SIG-Sauer pistol in his outstretched right hand.
'Karate, mah ass,' the cut, bruised, battered, and seriously wounded agent grinned through his broken teeth.
'Where-?' Lightstone started to ask, looking around quickly as he crawled over and retrieved the stainless- steel automatic from the lap of the now-dead black belt. Then he remembered what the curly haired body-builder with the submachine gun had yelled:
Come on, let's blow this place!
'How the hell did you get here?' Dwight Stoner rasped through his swollen and bleeding lips as he stared up at Paxton.
'Thought you candy-asses might need help,' Larry Paxton shrugged, wincing from the pain as he moved his left shoulder cautiously, 'so I dragged my ass out of the swamp and-'
Then, in the light from the far open door, Lightstone saw the wires running to sticks of dynamite that had been taped to three of the ten-gallon gas cans sitting next to the tractor.
'This place is wired! Get out of here, now!' Lightstone yelled, and then frantically helped Paxton pull and drag their partner out of the barn and across the grass until, suddenly, the monstrous explosion behind their back sent the agents tumbling to the ground in a shower of shattered wood, broken tools, flaming gas cans, and the bloody remains of Sonny Chareaux and Kiro Nakamura.
'Okay, Lieutenant, here's what we've got so far,' Sergeant Peter Balloch, senior homicide investigator for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, said as he spoke into the phone. 'You got the recorder on?'
The tired voice at the other end of the line muttered something affirmative.
'Okay,' Balloch sighed, 'at approximately eleven twenty-five hours, this date, a Mrs. Wanda Perkins reported what she believed was a gunshot fired in the vicinity of her next-door neighbor's home. According to the informant, the neighbors were on vacation and the house was supposed to be vacant. A two-man car was dispatched to check it out. However, before the patrol got to the scene, the informant called back to say that she had just heard numerous gunshots-some of which she thought came from an automatic weapon, because they sounded like what she watched on TV-in or around her neighbor's barn. According to dispatch, she was still on the line when they heard one hell of an explosion in the background that basically blew the neighbor's barn all over the fucking neighborhood.
'What? Yes, Lieutenant, of course I know you're recording this. I asked you to, remember?' Balloch said, rolling his eyes skyward as he asked himself for perhaps the five hundredth time how the man had ever managed to pass the lieutenant's exam.
'Anyway,' Balloch went on quickly before he said something on tape that he might actually regret, 'when our guys arrived, they found four bodies. One of them has been positively identified as Sonny Chareaux. C-H-A-R-E-A- U-X. There should be some kind of warrant on file for him out of Louisiana.'
Balloch paused as the man on the other end of the line apparently said something.
'Yes, I think that would be a real nice idea to call Louisiana and let them know,' Balloch said, wondering if there was any chance that one of the captains might listen to the tape some day.
'Anyway,' the homicide sergeant went on, 'at least two of the other bodies have been tentatively identified as Dwight Stoner and Larry Paxton, federal agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Yeah, right. As far as suspects go, we've got witnesses who saw two Caucasians-one male, short, curly blond hair, armed with an automatic rifle of some kind, and one female with shoulder-length blond hair-take off in a silver van, no plate, in one direction. Yeah, right. And one Caucasian male, six feet plus, running away on foot in the opposite direction. Yeah, go ahead and put it out on the wire. I'll keep you posted if we pick up anything else.'
Shaking his head sadly, Homicide Sergeant Peter Balloch hung up and then looked over at the man who was sitting in his favorite lounge chair.
'That about what you guys want?' he asked.
'I think so, buddy,' Henry Lightstone nodded. 'How long do you think you can keep it running?'
'The way that asshole handles things, probably not very long,' Balloch said. 'Probably depends on how much
