Read Online Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno by Mike Barry - Free Book Online Page B

alone again, some naked woman crouched up against the wall in a fetal position now, flanks touching, looking at him with bright, demanding eyes.
    She was just another one of the sons of bitches out to get him, that was all. Here was yet another who was part of the enemy; the enemy was cunning and came in many guises, but underneath the amateurish mask that you could cut away like ribbons to show the living heart beneath the face was clear, the features cool and appraising. It would always be the enemy and had never been anything but, and Carlin saw it then, saw it in one burst that might have been flame but then again might only have been the defeating maneuver of the enemy as trapped it begged for escape by throwing up clouds of incense. Then he had leveled the gun in and it was exploding in his hand like a big prick, all depth, all recoil, plunging and plunging into the rotten center, and the enemy fell away, ribbons now flowing stripes, celebration in halo around the enemy’s head as she fell, the auditor drifting into the sudden gloom to give an approving wink and a circle with a hand to indicate that the job had been done.
    Well, of course the job had been done. Carlin had never ducked to a challenge yet, that was why he had gotten as far in the world as he had. You didn’t get anywhere by fleeing, you had to take your ground and defend it, stand upon it until the very end and make that ground yours.
    Giggling, he hurled the gun from him. It bounced once off the form in the room and then fell away.
    Then he left the room to begin his solitary but important flight.
    No one asked him anything at all. There was no reason why they should. He was utterly in command and Janice, like the rest of them, would do exactly as she was ordered and never anything else but. That was what the rest of them thought, anyway.

VIII
    It wasn’t a bad impact at all. Ten miles per hour head-on is enough to kill a child or unsettle a housewife. Ten miles per hour head-on is enough to shake the average surburban driver who has no sense of true speeds all the way down to his soul. But for an experienced driver who is used to driving on the edge of possibility, who knows exactly what impact is like and how to protect himself against it, ten miles per hour is manageable. Certainly it is a survivable impact, if you are fully prepared to take it. If you understand all the way to the ground exactly what it means, you can go even farther than that. You can come out of it untouched, at maximum alertness increased by the impact and ready to fight.
    Wulff came clear of the Cadillac even as it was still plowing through the Bonneville, fenders crumpling, the scream of the engine trying to whip the big Fleetwood through space that no longer truly existed. Rolling from the door, the gun drawn against him, he survived that one terrible instant in any crash where the possibility exists that the gas tank might go up. Rolling clear desperately, he concentrated upon nothing so much as simply putting enough space between himself and the ruined car to give him a chance on explosion. Then, in the long aching instant when he cleared, he knew that he was home free, at least in terms of the explosion. Coming out of his tumble he allowed only a blur of the landscape to whip by him, then he leveled the gun and fired, placing the assassin by instinct rather than by sight.
    Combat training. That was all it was; you got a good glimpse of the terrain, internalized the terrain so that it became part of your psychic landscape—that was the way the training sergeant had talked, anyway. Wulff had had a wild man for an infantry instructor, but the son of a bitch even with his rather Eastern orientation and rather private way of describing genitals and certain acts was a hell of a good teacher. You could move around in that landscape the way you could move around in your own head. As a matter of fact, all of the world became merely an extension of your psyche, that was the key,