Two blocks down and diagonally across the street from Frank Spinoza's Gold Rush, the Executioner sat back and lifted off the twenty-power sniperscope. Slowly, he let the pent-up breath he had been holding whistle out between his teeth, already reloading the rifle by touch. The lever-action Marlin .444 held four rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. It took Mack Bolan something under seven seconds to reload, and he could hear the numbers falling in his mind by the time he had finished, warning him that he was running out of time. Someone in the hotel below him must have heard the shots. And doubtless, someone downrange at the Gold Rush would have heard them coming in. Along the street below him, somewhere, anywhere, there would be someone on the telephone already, jabbering excitedly to the police, reporting shots, a sniper... whatever.
But the Executioner was not finished.
He had picked off DePalma and his backup gunners, but the soldier was not satisfied with the dimension and the impact of his strike. Spinoza's cage was rattled, right, but not enough.
Not yet.
Bolan had gained access to the roof by slipping on some nondescript coveralls, merging with the listless, faceless maintenance crew that each hotel-casino depended on for life itself. No one had questioned his right to be inside the service stairwell or the overlong bag he carried with him. No one seemed to even notice he existed. He had passed at least a score of paid employees on the way up and not one of them had registered the fact that he was new and out of place, a ringer.
So much for the human powers of observation.
He brought the Marlin's polished walnut stock back to his shoulder, adjusting to the eyepiece of the massive twenty-power, sighting in upon the ruins of Spinoza's penthouse conference room. He could see bodies stretched out and leaking on the rug in there, furniture overturned, the scars of his first wild shot on the wall eight feet above the floor. It had been necessary to break through the heavy plate-glass window with his first round to avoid deflecting other bullets off the glass. A single 240-grain slug had been enough to do the job, and Bolan had been looking down DePalma's throat before the mafioso knew exactly what was happening. From there it had been easy.
A simple shot one thousand yards away, beyond the calculated limits of the Marlin's range — but well within the big — game piece's killing distance. Bolan had to calculate the drop on each round that he fired and set his sights above the target, allowing the massive rounds to 'fall in' on the human silhouettes with grim precision.
No sweat, sure.
As long as you could work the complicated physics problems in your head while holding your breath and sighting down the barrel of roaring elephant rifle.
No sweat. As long as you remembered that each round you fired was ripping into flesh and bone, separating souls from bodies downrange, sending cannibals to whatever awaited them beyond the pale. No problem.
Anyone could do it, given years of military training and two tours of field experience as the leader of a hunter-killer team in hostile jungles.
It was a goddamned piece of cake.
He would have thirty seconds, maximum, before someone downstairs could make himself understood on the telephone. Half a minute before the troops started reacting at Metro HQ down on Stewart, only blocks away. But half a minute could seem like an eternity on the receiving end of Bolan's pinpoint sniper fire.
And they were starting to recover over there, some cautious heads just poking up above the level of the conference table. He started counting once again, marking each of them, verifying faces and positions through the scope. They might as well have been ten feet away from him. His index finger curled around the Marlin's trigger and Bolan took another breath, releasing half of it, holding onto the rest.
Inside his skull the numbers sounded like a bass drum. But he silenced them with an effort of will.
There was no room for a distraction now. Whatever happened in the next five seconds, Bolan had to concentrate exclusively upon his targets. He was reaching out to touch someone, damn right, and rattling Spinoza's cage as it had never been before. Anyone who lived through Bolan's shake-up would be looking back across his shoulder from now on, expecting death to strike at any place and time.
A frightened man became a careless man, in Bolan's estimation, and he knew that careless people made mistakes.
In fact, he was counting on it.
Bolan settled into the squeeze, his mind closing the gap between hunter and target before the bullet ever flew. The mental countdown started. Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
It took a moment for the ringing silence to break through Spinoza's mental fog of terror.
Lying prone beneath the conference table, clinging to the carpet as if he might somehow fall off the floor, the capo from New York was trembling violently, afraid to open his eyes and face the damage all around him.
But the silence penetrated, finally, and he risked a peek. His first view was a pair of wing-tip shoes, years out of style but still available in certain stores, and favored by a few of his 'executive' associates. He followed them along, over socks and pant legs, rumpled shirt and suit coat, until he found a face.
Or what was left of one.
And he was looking straight at Julio DePalma's. Somehow the bastard's somersault had brought him back around so that he lay facedown, his head turned to the left as if he had climbed down to check beneath the table for his cringing comrades. One eye peered back at Spinoza from the scarlet ruin of that never-handsome visage. All else — teeth and lips and nose and everything — had been punched back into a gaping fist-sized hole that no cosmetic job would ever close.
Sealed casket on this baby, Frank Spinoza thought, and he felt his lunch coming up. He turned desperately away from DePalma's leaking carcass, swallowing hard to keep everything inside and taking a deep breath to clear his head.
It almost worked.
Around him others were also taking note of the sudden silence, cautiously rising from their prone positions to assess the damage.
'Holy mother!' He recognized the voice of Johnny Cats. 'That nervy bastard!'
There was amazement in the mafioso's voice, but Frank Spinoza was distracted, puzzling out exactly who and what the man from Cleveland meant.
Who was a nervy bastard?
Who had the sheer audacity to raid his penthouse in this fashion, dropping Julio and both his boys that way, scattering the assembled might of the commission's representatives like frightened children? And the answer hit him like a fist above the heart, bringing lunch and everything back into his tightening throat.
Seiji Kuwahara.
Damn it!
Everyone had seen it coming down to this, except Spinoza. Everyone except Spinoza and The Man.
Spinoza scowled, wriggling backward from his place of concealment, his mind working a mile a minute now. Suppose The Man had seen it coming?
Suppose he staked Spinoza out like some kind of goddamned Judas goat, leading the others to the slaughterhouse for some reason that Spinoza could not even fathom at the moment?
No.
It did not track.
There was no reason for betrayal, not when everything was going well for all concerned.
Tom Guarini was first on his feet, and under urging from his capo, he stood up warily, surveying the damage and whistling softly between his teeth.
'You're gonna need a maid up here, Frank,' he said, trying for a light tone and missing it by a country mile. 'You got one helluva...' The sentence ended in a plopping sound, as if someone had sliced a watermelon with a cleaver.
