LITMIR.BIZ

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guy was fast; but Bolan was faster and he had the drop.

      Bolan loosed a burst that hammered the man’s center mass, knocking him off his feet as though he’d just been struck by a thirty-foot tidal wave.

      Suddenly gunfire flared toward Bolan from the surrounding jungle, chewing into the ground and kicking up geysers of dirt around his feet. He dropped into a crouch and darted left. He stroked the MP-5’s trigger on the run and sprayed the jungle with a torrent of 9 mm rippers. The hail of gunfire bought him a couple of seconds and he started for the house.

      Another guard stepped across his path, a Beretta 92-F extended in a two-handed grip, the muzzle locked on Bolan’s head. The man hesitated for a moment, giving the big American a chance to squeeze off another burst from his weapon. The slugs slammed into his target, striking the hip and continuing diagonally across the man’s abdomen, chest and shoulder. The guard crashed to the ground in a dead heap.

      Cracking a fresh clip into the H&K, Bolan continued toward the house. He’d hoped to take out the men with knives and silenced weapons. But that idea was shot to hell, thanks to the army of unseen spotters tracking his movements.

      Where the hell had they come from? Bolan wondered. He had scoured the area for backup troops and had found nothing. He’d even made a second sweep when the State Department men had failed to show. Had he missed something?

      He didn’t have time to second-guess himself.

      Several men spilled from the doorway of Talisman’s stronghold, firing assault rifles and automatic pistols in Bolan’s direction. The warrior plucked a fragmentation grenade from his web gear. Pulling the pin, he lobbed the bomb toward his attackers and threw himself behind a nearby Mercedes. The weapon exploded, causing thunder, orange yellow flames and screams to pierce the compound.

      Bolan peered around the Mercedes’ front end and surveyed the damage wrought by the grenade. Some hardmen were dead; others, soaked in their own blood, fire chewing through garments and flesh as they screamed, shook or gasped for breath. Bolan plowed through the dead and dying, plugging an occasional mercy round into the wounded as he closed in on the house.

      More gunfire streamed out of the jungle, whipping around Bolan, passing just inches from his body. He wheeled and spotted a pair of men simultaneously sprinting from the brush and converging on him from opposite directions. Caressing the H&K’s trigger, Bolan laid down a sustained burst and hosed the men down.

      A dull thud sounded behind him. Anyone else would have missed the sound amid the sounds of battle, but not Bolan. He had senses, combat instincts, honed to a keen edge from countless battles. Turning, he saw a grenade in the dirt just a few yards from where he stood. If lucky, he had three seconds or so before the numbers dropped to zero and he found himself in the heart of a deadly firestorm.

      A door, Bolan’s only hope of refuge, yawned open before him. A gunner with blood in his eyes folded himself around the doorframe and drew down on Bolan with an assault rifle.

      Caught in a no-win situation, Bolan did the only thing he could.

      Legs pumping, heart slamming into overdrive, he closed in on the house and hurled himself forward into what seemed a certain death.

      RYTOVA WATCHED the big soldier fighting it out with Talisman’s men while also taking fire from behind, and decided she’d seen enough.

      Cradling an Uzi tricked out with a sound suppressor, she pushed her way through the tangles of trees and vegetation surrounding Talisman’s compound and closed in on the fence surrounding the property. Autofire crackled ahead of her, a din occasionally interrupted by screams or a pistol’s lone bark.

      Rytova stepped into a morass of mud, a leftover from the rainy season, and felt her foot sink up to the ankle. She grimaced and cursed under her breath. If indeed there was a hell on Earth, this African sinkhole qualified. Pulling her leg free, she continued on. Perspiration slicked her palms, and she worried it might cause the Uzi to slip from her hands at a critical moment. Moisture-laden air and sweat-soaked clothing clung to her trim form like a second skin, at times seemingly suffocating her. Her ash-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail and hidden under a black baseball cap, but loose wet strands clung to the back of her neck. What the hell was she doing here?

      She pushed the grousing from her mind and instead focused on the job at hand. She’d come to Africa looking for the man—the monster—who’d decimated her entire life.

      Nikolai Kursk.

      The very thought of his name stoked a fiery rage within that scorched her heart and soul and seemed her only companion. The bastard had robbed her of everything—killed the two men who’d meant the most two her, her husband and her father. Normally, Kursk barely would remember either one. However, during the past several months, Rytova had taken steps to insure he’d never forget them.

      God knew she wouldn’t.

      Her friends in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service—the small number of men and women willing to stand up to the Russian Mafia’s murder machine—had said Kursk was in Africa, but didn’t know exactly where. To get that information, she needed to talk to someone on the inside of Kursk’s organization, specifically his African operations. Talisman, who ran guns and diamonds for the butcher she sought, filled the bill perfectly.

      She’d expected to find Talisman and his gunners lounging, drunk or stoned out of their minds, easy pickings. Instead she found them engaged in a full-fledged firefight with a stranger. The hell of it was, the stranger seemed to be winning.

      She watched as he wheeled, fired on a pair of gunners who burst from the surrounding brush and unloaded weapons in his direction. Both died in a hail of gunfire as the man fanned a sound-suppressed submachine gun in their direction. The weapon seemed an extension of the man, an appendage wielded with deadly efficiency,

      The powerful man dressed in black reminded Rytova of Dmitri, strong and confident in battle. But—and it felt a form of sacrilege to think this—the stranger was even more so; he was like a human cyclone, ripping through his opponents with an ease that seemed almost impossible.

      Still, he was outnumbered. And no single person could survive against those odds.

      Staying in a crouch, she tunneled through the heavy jungle foliage surrounding the killing field and closed in on the compound. Tracing the muzzle-flashes emanating from within the jungle, she pinpointed at least two of the gunners. One was positioned fifty yards northeast of her; a second was closer, about twenty yards straight north. She moved in that direction.

      Rytova had brought a pair of night-vision goggles with her, but had decided against using them. Outdoor halogen spotlights powered by an unseen generator illuminated Talisman’s stronghold, and accidental exposure to intense light while wearing the goggles could have left her temporarily blind.

      As it was, the lights threw off enough glare to make trudging through the jungle manageable. And, under the circumstances, manageable was about the best she could hope for.

      She wasn’t sure if the man tearing up the compound was a law-enforcement officer or a military operative. Perhaps Talisman had run afoul of his handler and Kursk had ordered him hit. She dismissed that thought outright. Odds were the man wasn’t carrying out a hit at Kursk’s behest—he’d send in an army, not a single man, even someone with this man’s fighting prowess.

      Subtlety wasn’t Kursk’s style. She’d learned that painful lesson months ago.

      Anger again burned through her body and a coppery taste filled her mouth. She swallowed hard and gripped her Uzi tighter. Let the mystery fighter try his head-on assault. She’d rely on stealth.

      She came in behind one of the gunners. He shouldered an assault rifle and stared through a scope, apparently trying to catch the black-suited stranger in the weapon’s crosshairs.

      She drew down on him with the Uzi, hesitated. She’d killed before, but always in head-on attacks. Could she shoot a man from behind?

      Her quarry suddenly stiffened and turned, swiveling at the waist as he sought her out

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