Bolan jerked the guy's legs out from under him with his left hand.
The man fell next to Bolan, and before he had time to cry out, a pair of fists, fingers intertwined, slammed into the base of his skull.
The rifle-toting man went limp.
Bolan waited a few more seconds to be sure the man was patrolling alone, then he stood up and looked around.
This was the place, all right.
He had expected guards, but he did not think they would be expecting him. They would not know yet that the senator was dead at Bolan's hand... that the senator had talked... and would think the well-kept secret of this terrible operation had died with Floyd Wallace and Randy Owens.
Bolan went back to the corner of the warehouse where he could get a better view of the compound next door.
A high chain link fence topped by several strands of barbed wire ran all the way around the truck yard.
Inside were a dozen more tractor trailer trucks, parked in two neat rows near another building with a high door. The door was closed at the moment, but Bolan guessed that this building was used for truck maintenance.
The warehouse that interested him the most was the one with a truck, its idling engine the one he'd heard, backed up to the loading dock.
He glanced at his watch.
Ten minutes to midnight.
He'd made it in time, but not by much.
He saw movement inside the warehouse through the open door. Taking a small pair of compact binoculars from a slit pocket of the blacksuit, he unfolded the instrument and put it to his eyes.
The scene inside the warehouse leaped into focus.
He felt the rage inside him burn more than ever. The kids were there, all right.
He could not tell how many of them because his field of vision was restricted, but he could see at least half a dozen... a variety of races, frightened, scared, crying... being marched toward the truck by two hardmen carrying shotguns.
One of the children, a little girl about nine, lagged behind too much to suit a guard.
The slob reached out and gave her a shove that staggered the child.
She tried to catch her balance, failed and fell to the concrete floor.
The guard reached down, grabbed her arm and hauled her roughly to her feet. His mouth worked, and though Bolan could not hear from his position, he could guess at the filthy language that the guy was heaping on the little unfortunate.
Bolan's first impulse was to unleather Big Thunder and go in shooting, but a cooler part of his mind, the part that belonged to the savvy combat specialist, told him firmly to wait.
Charging in like that would not accomplish anything except to get some or all of those kids killed in a cross fire.
He needed a distraction.
He faded away from the corner of the warehouse.
Three minutes later, there was movement in the shadows to the rear of the truck yard.
Several mercury vapor lamps cast a high-intensity glow over the front part of the compound, but the spill of light did not reach to every corner here in the back, where Bolan found a small gate in the rear fence.
Two sentries with Uzis had been positioned nearby.
Bolan was not interested in that gate. He would go in another way. The sentries had to be neutralized, though, and the way the two guys were standing under that light, he could not take them down with the Beretta. Someone else was liable to see them fall.
He moved to the fence in a patch of almost total darkness and reached out to rattle the chain link.
One of the guards stiffened and looked around as he heard the sound.
"You hear that?" the guy grumbled to his companion, his words barely audible to Bolan.
The other guard shook his head.
"I didn't hear anything."
"Yeah, well, I did. I'm gonna go check it out."
Carrying the subgun ready in his fists, the punk started walking slowly down the fence line while the other guy shook his head and muttered to himself.
Bolan stood stock-still until the man was about five feet away, then shot him in the throat with the Beretta.
The guy dropped his Uzi and grabbed for his neck, trying futilely to stop the sudden spurting with his hands, his knees buckling underneath him. He slumped to the ground, twitching once or twice before lying still.
The other sentry heard the clatter of the falling subgun and the silenced whisper of the Beretta that was not loud enough to be identifiable at that distance in the open air. He tensed, pointing the muzzle of his own weapon at the shadows into which his partner had disappeared.
"Jerry!" he called softly. "Jerry, what are you doing down there?"
Jerry didn't answer.
The guard waited another moment, then nervously started toward Bolan.
Bolan watched him come but did not move or make a sound.
The guard spotted the body of his buddy then and froze in place, sweeping the Uzi from side to side as he looked for something to shoot at. Seeing nothing, he knelt beside Jerry's sprawled form.
The guard hardly felt the bullet that smacked into the top of his head, splintering his skull and ripping through his brain. His body hit the fence and bounced off.
Bolan looked around.
No one seemed to have heard the commotion in this back corner of the lot, or at least no one was sounding the alarm or rushing to investigate, and that would have to do.
Most of the activity on the trucking company property remained centered at the loading dock on the far side of the center warehouse.
Bolan turned back to the body of the first guard, the one called Jerry.
The corpse was wearing an overcoat and had a cap perched on his head, the kind with fur flaps that folded down over the ears and fastened under the neck.
Bolan had the coat and the headgear off the dead body in a matter of seconds. He shrugged into the coat and settled the cap on his head.
He strode out of the shadows, heading for the trucks across the open space like a man who did not have a care in the world.
He was three-fourths of the way there when another sentry broke away from the building and trotted toward him.
"Hey, Jerry," the guy called. "What's wrong? Where's Ted?"
Bolan jerked a thumb over his shoulder back toward the fence and kept walking.
"Back there. He got sick."
The other guard fell into step beside him.
"Sick? What the hell's wrong with him?"
Bolan shrugged and kept walking.
The shadows cast by the huge trucks were only a few feet away now.
The guard caught at his arm.
"Don't you think we'd better go see what's wrong with him?"
"Suit yourself."
Bolan stepped into the shadows, the other guy still beside him.
The concealment was all Bolan had been waiting for. It could only have been a matter of seconds before this guy tumbled to his impersonation anyway.
He spun, his right fist flashing out in a sidearm slash, the hard edge of his hand crashing into the guard's throat, crushing his larynx.
The man staggered, sputtered, tried to bring his own subgun up into firing position.
Bolan did not give him a chance to do that. He lifted the MAC-10 and raked the barrel across the punk's face, opening a ragged slash. Then he drove the weapon in a fierce blow up into the guy's jaw, snapped his head back.
There was a sharp crack as the man's neck broke. The sentry slipped to the ground.
Bolan waited, the MAC-10 ready to spray death from his hands, until he was satisfied that no one else was coming to check on him, at least not right at this moment.
He doffed the cap and overcoat, slung the Ingram back to its place beneath his right shoulder. He crouched so that he could slip underneath one of the massive eighteen-wheelers.
He opened the small plastic bag containers attached to his belt and went to work, molding a plastique charge against the gas tank of the truck, setting the timer for four minutes.
With the children already being loaded up on one of those other trucks across the property, he could not allow himself any longer than that.