hoped he would not die tonight. I'm getting too old for this, he thought again.
Two terrorist hit men.
A rookie partner.
And now, a wild card named Phoenix.
* * *
Two men had dinner in the private room of an exclusive French restaurant on Q Street in Georgetown.
"Tell me about Phoenix."
"I followed your instructions. I put two men on the CIA stakeout of Izmir and Kemal."
"Can they be traced?"
"To us? Of course not. I'm not using our own personnel on this. Not with Phoenix."
"What are their orders?"
"Phoenix is screwing up a Company operation. He could get caught in a cross fire."
"With a little help."
"Yes, with a little help. My men have been told to hold back. If the CIA doesn't hit Phoenix and if those Armenians don't get him, then my people take him out. I don't care how good the bastard is. He's boxed in, and he doesn't even know it. He's dead."
"What about Stony Man Farm?"
"Our contact inside is in touch. They're still without satellite communications. One sour note. Phoenix has requested a double check on all Farm security clearances."
"Is that bad?"
"I don't think so. Our contact is being doubly cautious tonight, that's all. After tonight, it won't much matter."
"What time do you attack?"
"Don't you think it's best to keep you in the dark on some things, sir?"
"Yes, you're right, I'll need to appear suitably surprised. But it is tonight?"
"It's tonight. Tonight we level Stony Man Farm
and
Colonel John Phoenix."
9
A row of brick houses occupied the east side of the street, opposite the offices of the Interstate Loan Association. Light shone from some of the windows, but most of them were dark.
The Executioner moved through backyards, silently negotiating shrubbery and at one point a five-foot-high chain link fence. The moving shadow encountered no one in the night. Twice he spotted the bluish glow from television sets behind windows, but that was all. There was no nightlife in suburbia. Not from its inhabitants, at any rate.
Bolan advanced on the loan office via a circuitous route that brought him to the building from its northeast corner.
A Toyota was parked at the curb of the street where blacktop met a row of four-foot-high hedges that ran back from the street to disappear behind the darkened building. The hedges divided the Interstate property from its neighbors.
Bolan scanned the night with cold eyes and a colder Beretta as he came within ten feet of those hedges.
Suddenly he stopped.
He saw blurred movement near the inky splotches of shrubs adjacent to the parking lot.
Bolan could barely make out a figure, several yards down, gripping a rifle. Closer toward his own position, he could discern more clearly the figures of two men, standing together. These men were carrying Remington 870 pump shotguns.
They had Mafia written all over them.
They were lying in wait, obviously. Their attention was focused on the parking-lot entrance of the Interstate Loan office.
Bolan was putting two and two together in his mind and very quickly getting a read on what was going down here. But he had to be sure before the killing started.
There was no sign of the Armenian terrorists, Izmir and Kemal. They had already entered the building.
There was only one way Bolan could confirm what he was thinking.
He crouched slightly, ready to spring into the deeper shadows around him if he had to.
"Identify yourselves," he said quietly.
The whispered words cracked like a gunshot.
Shrubbery rustled as all three men spun around in the direction of Bolan's voice. The man up the line stayed where he was, melding with the shape of the hedge.
Three shotguns pointed at Bolan.
The men who had been waiting along the hedge were all cut from the same mold of beefy hulks in expensive street suits. But the shotguns did not look out of place in their hands.
The one nearest Bolan, bulkier than the others, spoke to the nightfighter.
"Identify your own damn self."
"Frankie. From New York," said Mack Bolan. "I've got a
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