Free Council of Kings by Don Pendleton Page B

removed a pair of plastic riot cuffs from his shoulder bag and looped and tightened one around the young man's hand before he awoke. Bolan's hand, and then a wide piece of tape went over the struggling youth's mouth.
    Another cuff went around an ankle, and Bolan put him behind the counter on the floor.
    In the first room on the ground floor was a torture chamber, containing whips, ropes, high-watt floodfights, chairs nailed to the floor, a motorcycle chain and numerous brass knuckles. Bolan took two steps into the room and the floor gave way beneath him.
    With a desperate lunge he made it back to safety and watched as a trapdoor swung down, revealing a pit below.
    The bottom was filled with Nam-type sharpened punji stakes pointing upward.
    He went along a hall to another room. Soft noises came from behind the door. It was locked. He quickly picked the lock and swung the door open.
    In the dim light he saw six wooden cages made of two-by-fours, each four feet square and each containing a naked girl.
    Four were white, two black.
    All but one was asleep. She curled up and glared at him.
    "No, not again!" she cried. "I'll do it! I'll do anything now!"
    He tested the floor, then stepped to the cages and wrenched the wooden and wire doors off their hinges. He told the captives to find their clothes and get away if they could.
    The next room could have been a drug-cutting room. There was no trace of illegal substances in the room, but on a long table was a set of sensitive scales.
    Hearing something behind him, he turned as a large black man hurtled toward him. Bolan sidestepped the diving man and drove his knee upward into his side. The man hit the floor, rolled and returned to his feet, arms held wide like a wrestler's. He started to reach for a revolver at his belt, but Bolan's 93-R came up first and chugged once, drilling a small neat hole through the attacker's heart, dropping him to the wooden floor.
    Bolan spun as the door opened. A tall black girl entered, wearing only a short see-through nightie. She saw the girls getting out of the cages and smiled.
    "Hey, honkie, if you really want to help us, come this way. That white trash lives on the third floor, and almost nobody gets up there to see him after he sets the switches. Come take a look." She was about five-ten, with a centerfold body, and seemed totally at ease.
    She motioned, and he followed her out of the room and along the hall to a door at the end. It opened into a room in which a circular stairway wound upward.
    The black girl led the way. At the second story Bolan saw the thick metal plate that, when in position, sealed the upper floors from below, and saw how it could be reinforced with two-inch bars of steel.
    Fortunately the metal door was open; unfortunately there was no ladder continuing to the top floor.
    The black girl stepped off the stairway and pointed down a dimly lit hall.
    "He calls it the Hallway of Terrors. See how shiny that part of the hall floor is? It's usually electrically charged with enough juice to kill the giant rats that run round this place."
    "What's in the rooms?"
    "I don't know. I've never been farther than this. In one of them is another circular staircase to the bastard's private lair. He's got one or two ladies up there who we never see. He gets his supplies from a small dumbwaiter, too small for any of us to get inside." They entered a room containing a cot, a dresser and two wooden chairs.
    "A good short on that electrical field should blow out all the power in the place," Bolan said.
    The black girl shook her head. "He built it with that in mind, at first for the rats. Then he surged the power and put in a whole box of circuit breakers and automatic resets. The controls are in that room." She pointed to the opposite end of the hall.
    Bolan picked up a wooden chair and threw it onto the electrified part of the floor.
    Blue flames shot outward. The chair's legs smoldered where they touched the floor. Then the zapping electrical fire