Death Run (20 page)

The Audi flew down Broadway until it reached the Broadway tunnel. Traffic was light, even for a Sunday morning, and once the Audi hit the tunnel, Osborne put his foot into the accelerator and was soon hitting triple-digit speeds. To keep up, Bolan had to keep the throttle pinned to its stop and tuck in behind the small windscreen. When they neared the mouth of the tunnel, Osborne slowed down to a still socially reprehensible seventy miles per hour. Even though that was nearly double the speed limit, it felt slow after the high-speed run through the tunnel.

Osborne didn't slow the Audi to anywhere near the speed limit until he neared Van Ness Boulevard. When he turned left onto Van Ness, he once again went so fast that he forced the Executioner to slide around the corner to keep up. Van Ness was wider than Broadway and even less crowded, and the pair set a street-racing record for covering the nearly thirty blocks between Broadway and the CSAA Building.

When they got to the CSAA building, Osborne slammed the Audi around the corner of Fell Street and drove down into the entrance to the loading dock, Bolan's BMW in tow. The soldier dismounted the bike and met Osborne as he emerged from the Audi's diver's seat.

"How are we supposed to get in?" Bolan asked.

"I suppose knocking at the front door would be too easy," Osborne offered.

"I think that submachine gun hanging around your neck might be a little off-putting."

Bolan surveyed the situation. The entrance to the loading dock was in the southeast corner of the building, fairly well hidden from traffic on Fell Street.

"I don't think we have time to be subtle," the soldier said, producing several chunks of C-4 from a kit in the left saddlebag of his motorcycle.

There were two large overhead doors in the bay, along with a pair of hinged steel doors that swung outward into the loading-dock area. Bolan molded one piece of the explosive around each of the four large hinges that held the steel doors in place and placed a blasting cap in each chunk. He motioned for Osborne to follow him to a nearby Dumpster. Once they were both crouched behind the Dumpster and holding their ears, Bolan hit the red button on a remote device that looked like a typical key fob for a car. The C-4 detonated. When the smoke cleared, the two doors had fallen from their hinges and lay across the loading dock.

The young Filipino-American man curled the cigarette paper into a trough and crumbled some of the sticky marijuana bud into the paper. With one practiced motion he rolled the paper into a perfectly cylindrical cigarette. He carefully licked the tip of his tongue across the glue strip on the top of the paper and finished rolling the cigarette. When he was finished, he placed the pointier end of the cigarette between his lips, took out a disposable lighter, and fired up the opposite end. When the paper caught fire he pulled as much smoke as possible into his lungs and held it while he passed the cigarette to his left.

The six BNG members, three of whom were getting off of their shifts guarding the CSAA building and three of whom were about to start their shifts, had developed a shift-changing ritual that involved passing around a joint or two along with several bottles of malt liquor. Normally it was the most pleasant part of their day, but the events of the last few days had them all terrified. Rather than simple diversion, they now used the alcohol and drugs to provide the courage they found they lacked when confronting this faceless monster who had decimated their ranks.

"Man, I need to chill out," the man who'd just rolled the joint said. "All the shit that's been happening, that big motherfucker who's been capping everyone's ass, I'm about to lose my fucking mind."

"Get the fuck out of here," another said. "That's bullshit. Ain't no motherfucker like that. They've just bugged out somewhere for the weekend. They're just too goddamned lazy to work."

"No man," said a third. "They're dead. I saw Jake and them in Jake's Hummer, an' they're dead. Jake's mamma's already planned the funeral. They was supposed to bust a cap up some biker's ass and he busted caps up their asses instead."

"Get the fuck out of here," the other man repeated. "Ain't no man who can do all the shit they say this big guy is supposed to have done."

"I'm not shitting you, man. T.J. was there in Santa Cruz the night the big motherfucker killed just about everyone in a warehouse," another man said after he'd exhaled the marijuana smoke he'd been holding in his lungs while the other men conversed. "Motherfucker came out of nowhere and blew the place to shit. Killed everyone but T.J."

"What he's saying is true," another gangbanger said. "He's the same motherfucker who killed every one of our boys down in Davenport. Ain't none of us left but maybe fifteen, twenty boys."

"T.J. says the man's seven feet tall," one BNG banger said. "Motherfucker got guns coming out of his arms like Edward Scissorhands. Ain't no one can stop him because the motherfucker's dead already. He's one of them walking dead."

"I don't know about that zombie shit," yet another of the group said. "But I hear he likes to cut people, slice their throats ear to ear. He's carving guts out while they're still alive."

"Shit," said the skeptic. "You all been to too many movies. Ain't no man can do any of that. You're all afraid of the boogeyman." Before he finished his thought a loud roar came from the loading dock area.

"What the fuck?" he asked.

"Man, someone's trying to get in through the loading docks," another said. "Where're your guns? Grab them motherfuckers and get out there!"

Bolan and Osborne were in the building and had taken defensive positions behind two garbage Dumpsters when the gang members came bursting into the storage area through a basement door. Each man carried an SAR-21. As the store owner had predicted, there were six of them. When they saw the blown door, they spread out, keeping behind cover as best they could. One chose a spot that protected him from Osborne's position, but left him wide open to Bolan. The soldier took the opportunity to open up on him with the P90, stitching him from the thigh up to his armpit. The man dropped the SAR-21 and fell to the ground, clutching his side.

At the same time, Osborne got off a shot at another of the attackers, punching a 5.7 mm round clean through his torso, right below his neck. Bolan could see that the shot had hit the man in his spine, and he watched the unfortunate gangbanger drop instantly.

So far none of the BNG members had even fired a shot. The remaining four men cowered together behind a forklift. Each held an assault rifle, but none of the men showed interest in firing their weapons. Bolan decided to try to get them to surrender.

"Drop your weapons!" the Executioner shouted. "Give yourself up and you won't die."

Bolan could hear the men talking among themselves.

"How do we know we can believe you?" one shouted. "You killed all of our brothers, man. Why wouldn't you kill us?"

"You have my word," the Executioner said. "You surrender, I promise we won't kill you. You don't surrender, I promise we kill you. That shouldn't be a tough decision."

"You won't kill us," the man said, "but you'll send us to jail for the rest of our lives. No thanks, man. I rather be dead."

"We won't even send you to jail if you help us find the bomb," Bolan said.

"What bomb?" another man asked.

"The one that the Malaysian set up in this building yesterday," the Executioner replied.

"What kind of bomb?" the man asked.

"The nuclear kind. It's set to go off this evening and when it does, it'll take all of San Francisco and most of Oakland with it. That includes you."

"Is that why the fat man wore the big rubber suit when he worked here yesterday?" the man asked.

Bolan thought he must be referring to an NBC suit. "That's why. Your boss bin Osman was trying to kill you guys along with everyone else."

"I'll kill that motherfucker," the man said.

"Too late," the Executioner said. "He's dead. What do you say? You help us and live or fight us and die?"

The gangbangers talked among themselves for a few moments before one said, "We're throwing down. Don't shoot, man."

One by one the Filipinos tossed their SAR-21s to the floor and came out with their hands up, their fingers interlocked over their heads.

"Check them for other weapons," Bolan told Osborne.

The blacksuit found at least one knife on each of them and one of them had a handgun stuck in the waistband of his pants. When they were clean of weapons, the Executioner said, "Okay, now show us the bomb."

Bolan knew he was in trouble when he examined the explosive device. It differed radically from the schematic drawings he'd pulled from Gunthar Maurstad's corpse and the instructions he'd received from Kurtzman didn't match up with what he saw before him. Kurtzman had a team of experts on standby to help talk him through disabling the device, but he had no cell phone signal in the underground storage area covered by thirty stories of steel and concrete.

A digital timer on the device indicated that it would explode in a little over six hours. Bolan sketched out a schematic of the wiring he saw on the device and went outside to call Kurtzman.

Kurtzman patched him into a conference call with the group of explosive experts that Hal Brognola had assembled to assist the Executioner in dismantling the device.

"It sounds like Maurstad had to deviate from his original plan at the last minute," Tom Gardiner, one of the team members, said, and the others concurred. "My guess is that he had to rig some sort of off-the-shelf clock to the detonator and was forced to improvise."

The men had copies of Maurstad's original drawings, and Bolan described the changes he'd seen on the actual device.

"This isn't good," Gregory Lefrooth, one of the other team members, said. "I think I know what he did." Lefrooth explained his theory to the others and they agreed that his hypothesis was almost certainly correct.

"This could be disabled by clipping a single wire. The trouble is that there's no way for us to tell which wire it is. The only way would be to dismantle the device, but that would risk detonation."

"It doesn't sound like a very stable setup," Gardiner interjected. "I think upsetting the detonator would almost certainly set off the bomb."

The others agreed.

"It sounds like clipping a wire is the clear way to go," Bolan said. "So how do I decide which wire it is?"

"From what you describe," Gardiner said, "I don't think Maurstad set the bomb up to detonate if you clip the wrong wire."

"So I can just start cutting wires until the clock quits counting down?" Bolan asked.

"I don't think it will be that easy. I believe that cutting the wires might affect the rate of the countdown. Cut the wrong wire, and six hours could become six minutes. Or six seconds."

"Couldn't I just disable the timer?" Bolan asked.

"You could, but that won't stop the detonator. The timer is just there to provide information; it doesn't control anything. The only thing you'll accomplish by disabling the timer would be to prevent you from knowing when the bomb was going to explode."

"So I'm going to have to start cutting wires and hope for the best."

"That looks like it's your only option," Gardiner said.

Bolan crouched over the device with wire cutters in hand. He estimated how long it would take him to cut all the wires should he clip the wrong one first and speed up the detonation process. The fact that the device was fairly large — the tubular object stood almost four feet high and was about thirty inches in diameter at its widest point — and that the wires were not located in one spot but ran in and out of the complex device in what appeared to be a haphazard fashion, conspired to slow down his reaction time. In his mind he plotted out an order for cutting the wires that seemed most possible to do in less than six seconds.

With one eye on the timer, he cut the first wire, ready to start cutting the rest as fast as he could should the timer speed up. It didn't speed up, but neither did it stop counting down. He moved to the next wire, again mentally preparing himself for the mad dash of cutting all the wires in under six seconds should he clip the wrong wire.

When Bolan clipped the next wire, the countdown on the timer switched from five hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-six seconds to five minutes and seventeen seconds. Bolan still had seven wires to cut, but even though this last cut hadn't worked out as planned, he continued in the same sequence he'd mapped out in his head. It was the only way he would be able to cut the remaining six wires in the allotted time should the minutes switch to seconds.

Bolan cut the next wire in his sequence and nothing happened, but the wire after that tripped the sequence from minutes to seconds. The soldier switched into his alternative plan without hesitation. His life had depended on his timing ever since he'd begun his war and he'd developed a mental clock that was as reliable as a metronome. He clipped the first, the second, and the third wires in less than three seconds, but the fourth was around the far side of the device. With his mental clock keeping pace with the timer, he reached around and clipped the final wire.

The timer stopped.

His mental clock told him that he had less than fractions of a second to spare before the device detonated. Mack Bolan had perhaps the strongest nerves of any man who had ever walked the Earth, but coming this close to being on top of an exploding nuclear bomb had shaken him. It wasn't his own mortality that had rattled his nerves; it was the fact that he'd come so close to letting down his country and bringing about the deaths of hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people. The soldier took a deep breath and looked at the timer. He'd stopped the countdown with just twenty-three one hundredths of a second left before detonation.