Thomas jumped up from the cot and wagged his finger angrily at his sister. 'But you should have told me! I'm in command here.'
'Co-command, was she said icily.
He shrugged. 'Well, you know what I mean.'
'Yes, dear brother, I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes before you even mean it.'
Thomas began pacing beside the cot. His voice was petulant but accepting, the way it always was when his sister outmaneuvered him. 'Still, I should have been told.'
She took a sip of coffee and smiled soothingly. '...Look, Thomas, when we decided to form this little group, we agreed that I would be in charge of security. Okay, I could have told you the truth, but then you'd have had to pretend to everyone else that we were going a day later. And we both know how hard it is for you to pretend. You were never good at it when we were children, nor are you any better at it now.'
'Well, I...' he protested.
'There's no need to deny it. I'm glad you're that way. Your honesty and candor is what make our troops follow you so readily into battle. They trust you. That's why you're in charge of training them.'
'Yes, yes, that's true.'
'Of course it is.' She widened her smile until he turned away, then she threw it away like old coffee grounds. As always, she had told him what he had wanted to hear, and that would satisfy him for the time being. Poor Thomas had always been a little weak in the brain. Though he was older by 86 seconds, she always looked upon him as her younger brother. Had it not been for her, he'd have flunked out of the university and be working in a Volkswagen factory somewhere. Some people were born to follow and some were born to lead. But Thomas had his uses. Men still did not like taking orders from a woman. So whenever possible, she gave the orders to Thomas and by the time he had passed them on to the men, he had convinced himself that he'd made them up. It worked quite well.
'Tomorrow we take the sergeant with us on the mission,' continued Tanya. 'After tonight's raid we are short of men. And we can use his military experience. Despite our own experience, he is still a professional and we are amateurs.'
'Why would he help us?' bleated Thomas.
She laughed dryly. 'We will offer him money. And after we're successful tomorrow, you and Rudi can kill him.'
Thomas smiled. 'And make him an example?'
'If you must.'
'It's the only way to show the world that we mean business,' seethed the brother.
His sister smiled. 'After tomorrow, history will know us in all our crimson magnificence. Do what you will, Thomas, do what has to be done.'
17
Rudi sat on the edge of his cot, the gnarled log balanced across his knees, his meaty hands wrapped around each end. He scowled across the room at Bolan, huge teeth glistening with saliva.
'We have to stop meeting like this,' Bolan grinned.
Rudi tightened his grip on the log. 'American humor,' he sneered and spat on the dusty floor.
'Yeah, well, you don't exactly keep me in stitches, guy. Though I think you'd like to.'
'Shut up!' spluttered Rudi, saliva spraying from his lips. He struggled to control his temper. It was what the twins would want him to do, but still it was so difficult at times, especially with this infuriating American. There was something about this man that made Rudi seriously nervous. Rudi had, to his knowledge, never been afraid of anything before in his life.
But with this American it was different. The U.S. Army sergeant goaded and pushed in such a way that Rudi wanted to crush him. Breaking his back would not be enough, he would have to use his thumbs to gouge out those taunting eyes, too. He hated those eyes. They were hard confident eyes that somehow drained Rudi of his own confidence. And that could not be tolerated. He would try to control his temper, for the sake of the twins, but there were limits beyond which even he could not be pushed.
'Enough talk,' Rudi warned. 'You talk too much, but say nothing.'
'An American custom,' Bolan nodded. 'We call it small talk. It's supposed to make us good buddies.'
'Buddies, hah!' Rudi snorted and spat on the floor.
'Is it true what they say about you?'
The muscles in Rudi's neck bulged like steel cables on a bridge. 'What do they say?'
'That the difference between you and an ape is that the ape smells better.'
Three hundred pounds of screaming flesh came hurtling across the small cabin, all of it aimed at Mack Bolan.
The Executioner dived to one side. Rudi went crashing into the cot, smashing it to splinters.
He arose like a maddened bull and lunged at his quarry, grabbing a new hunk of wood, in his hand as he did so. Bolan grabbed the man-mountain by the face, slowing his advance, and held back the club with all the strength of his left arm. Then he smashed his forehead into the thick wide nose of the giant terrorist. Rudi's cartilage cracked dully and a sticky spray of warm blood shot out of his nostrils as if from a garden hose. Rudi cried out, and Bolan snapped his head forward again, even harder. Rudi wailed and his grip loosened in every way. Rudi had had enough. He stood with his frying-pan hands covering his splintered nose and badly bloodied face, gulping air greedily through his mouth. But Bolan was just beginning.
He kicked the beast in the stomach. His lightning-fast right combat boot was propelled by a steel-spring complex of thigh and calf muscles that had the power to smash bricks and disintegrate doors.
The impact was the equivalent of a motor being thrown at human flesh. When the force connected with Rudi, it blasted the wind out of him, but he did not crumble.
Fine, thought Bolan. He wants humiliation and that is what he will get. Rudi's rage and shame will be my ally, it will turn against him and will destroy him. Bolan's next kick was higher, connecting with the chest. A blood- soaked Rudi, his sinuses open to the wind, grabbed the foot immediately, even as it sank into his gross pectorals like a cannonball into a listing ship.
He twisted the ankle in his grasp until Bolan was tossed over and facing the floor, head down, only his hands keeping his nose from being ground into the filth of the hovel floor. Rudi was dangling Mack Bolan upside down like some empty which elbarrow.
Bolan grabbed the vile creature's knees and took aim for his next shot. With the swiftness of a karate chop, he brought his head up with a jerk, aiming for the frontal pelvic bone, punching his speeding cranium into the — German's upper crotch with all the Zen overkill of one whose aim goes far beyond the actual target.
This effect was to bend Rudi over into a forward roll as his testicles continued on their new journey back up the bladder into a cave of endless pain. He exhaled hideously as his body tumbled toward the floor, Bolan rolling with him to come upright as Rudi groveled. Bolan was grinning. His head had now bounced three times off of bone, and each time the damage was so much greater than the impact might indicate. The nose hits had completely screwed up the workings of the bloated terrorist's face, meanwhile sending shudders of shock and pain waves of splinter-scrape all through the crazed Aryan's skull, as blood and mucous slime spewed forth unchecked from the facial wreckage. Then the pelvic shot had sent spasms through the beast's scrotum so severe that the solar plexus itself had gone numb with airless apoplexy. Rudi's fat viscera convulsed inside him. The Executioner's smile was not one of pleasure, nor amusement. It was a bitter one, adopted only to restrain his flaring anger. It was a smile of menace, repressing like a pressurized mask the thunderclap fury that could explode at any time.
Mack Bolan once more sent a foot flying into the body of Rudi, now lying doubled-over on the floor. The kick connected with Rudi's thick throat. Groaning turned to a bubbling choke.
'That one's for Munich,' intoned the Executioner.
Another vicious kick found its home on the carcass of the writhing giant.
'That one's for Mountbatten.'
Yet another kick buried Bolan's foot deep into Rudi's quivering flesh. The blows were a litany for the victim
