4

      Stuttgart, Germany

      The sun was low in the east, throwing the life-sized chessmen into stark relief against a bright green background of closely cropped lawns. Long, straight shadows cast by the chess pieces stretched across the marble chessboard, some reaching beyond the board’s sandstone border to touch manicured edges of grass. From behind the secluded bench on which Mack Bolan sat, Asian day lilies in well-tended beds filled the early-morning air with a cloying fragrance.

      Bolan’s position gave him a good view of the rolling lawns with their flower-lined walkways meandering like serpentine tributaries through randomly spaced clumps of trees toward a stand of thick pines about a quarter of a mile away. Except for a small flock of sparrows pecking the ground under a few benches and three maintenance men off to his left, cultivating a clump of short azaleas, the park was deserted.

      Brognola had told Bolan that Peter Randolph’s daily routine included a walk to work through the commons and, despite the field agent’s flat refusal of his offer to provide protection, Bolan was sitting out of sight behind a clump of birches about thirty yards from the huge chessboard, watching for Randolph’s approach.

      He unzipped his lightweight golf jacket so he could touch-check the fire-selector switch on his Beretta 93-R. Brognola had arranged for it to pass through customs. Unlike France and all of Scandinavia, Germany was one of the easier European countries to enter with weapons. Counting the 20-round magazine, already locked into the high-performance pistol, and the four spare clips he carried in his jacket pockets, Bolan was packing one hundred rounds of 9 mm parabellum ammunition.

      A fat bumblebee hovered close, its heavy drone filling the air like electricity under high-tension wires. As Bolan waved the insect away, he noticed movement between two clumps of waist-high zinnias about a hundred yards down one of the walkways. Even from that distance, he could tell it was Randolph, hands in his pockets, strolling casually through the multicolored flowers.

      Realizing that the three gardeners he had noticed minutes earlier were nowhere in sight, Bolan eased himself off the bench while drawing his Beretta from its shoulder holster. Eyes sweeping the park, he stepped forward into the cover offered by the small grove of birches.

      The scent of freshly mowed grass filled his nostrils and the air seemed almost crisp enough to touch. The memory of sitting next to a photographer in a Maui bar flashed through Bolan’s mind. The man had told him that early-morning and late-afternoon light, when the rays were coming in soft and low to the horizon, was the best for shooting intense, saturated colors. With his senses on full alert, registering the flower beds, the lawns and Randolph drawing closer to the chessmen, Bolan understood what the photographer had meant.

      The flock of sparrows took to flight with a ruffling sound a split second before the air was filled with the abrupt stutter of automatic fire. The birds gave Randolph—whose carefree demeanor had obviously been a ruse—the alarm he needed, and he threw himself to the ground without a moment’s hesitation as the first flurry of rounds zipped above him. Two of the gardeners had taken cover behind outcroppings and the third had settled himself among a group of small moguls that dotted a section of lawn like baby mountains. Their positions created a lazy triangle allowing them to pin Randolph with intersecting fire.

      Bolan rushed to the edge of the birches, firing his Beretta in 3-round bursts. His presence caught the gunmen by surprise and, before his first magazine was half spent, he drilled a hole through the jaw of the closest gardener who was on one knee hosing the area around Randolph with 9 mm rounds blazing from the business end of a Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine pistol. The man opened his lips as if to scream, but any final sound he intended to make was blocked by the scarlet geyser erupting through his mouth and nose. He toppled sideways to the ground, where his body convulsed for a few seconds with bone-rattling shudders before coming to rest.

      The two remaining gunmen redirected their fire at Bolan, shredding the brittle birch branches above him into thousands of pieces that rained onto his back and shoulders like black confetti. He dived into a bed of mulch behind a tight trio of trees, inhaling a nostril full of redwood dust that puffed up around his face in a dirty cloud when he landed.

      While the gunmen were busy throwing a reciprocating wall of lead at Bolan, Randolph took the opportunity to scramble on all fours to a safer spot behind a small mound of bloodred calla lilies in full bloom. He quickly entered the fray with a series of single shots from his Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. His action was met with a responsive barrage of fire that sent him ducking for cover behind the mound.

      Bolan ejected his spent magazine and rammed a fresh one home. Realizing that the thin trees affording him cover could not withstand a prolonged assault of automatic fire, he searched for a better position. The chessmen were approxiately six seconds away—an eternity when rounds were snapping the air all around you—but he couldn’t stay where he was. He pushed himself to his feet and rushed toward the life-sized pieces, firing his Beretta as he ran. When he reached a point about ten yards from the row of pawns, he launched himself into a horizontal dive, squeezing the trigger of his Beretta as rapidly as he could. A round creased his back just below his shoulder blades and he felt the hot sting of a flesh wound milliseconds before he landed hard on the chessboard. The space immediately surrounding him was filled with the sickening whine of ricochets as fist-sized chunks of granite exploded from the black king’s chest, clattering onto the marble squares next to where he lay.

      When Bolan chanced a look around the edge of the tombstone-high pawn giving him the cover he needed, he discovered that the man positioned among the moguls was out of his line of fire, obscured from sight by the gentle mounds of grass-covered earth that Bolan’s new spot placed between them. Lowering the Beretta’s front grip and loading a full magazine, he prepared to take on the gunman he could see, hoping to eliminate him before his partner came to his aid.

      As if in concert with Bolan’s thoughts, Randolph began laying down covering fire. Bolan rose to one knee behind the chess piece, firing. Sizzling hot brass poured from the smoking ejector port in a parabolic arc that shone gold in the early-morning light.

      The gunman under fire made an ill-timed decision to dash for a better spot, and the Executioner caught him first in the thigh, then stitched him from waist to neck with six fatal rounds.

      A round screamed past Bolan’s head less than an arm’s length away, the tone of the snap as the bullet sped by telling him it had come from behind. He threw himself prone, searching for the new gunman. There was open space all the way to the clump of pines.

      The park suddenly became deathly silent. In the distance, the sound of police sirens signaled the imminent arrival of German law-enforcement personnel.

      “Randolph!” Bolan shouted.

      “Yeah.”

      “Can you see them?”

      “I think they’re gone.”

      Randolph sprinted from his position behind the lilies to the chessboard, where he dived behind the black pawns, then crawled his way to Bolan’s spot. The dash behind the pawn had drawn no gunfire from either direction.

      Randolph remained focused to the front, Bolan to the rear. A full thirty seconds passed, with the sirens drawing closer.

      “I think they’re gone,” Randolph repeated.

      Bolan