Assault on Soho by Don Pendleton Page A

simply no way to feign the racking distress of that distorted body. The camera angle was in bad relation to the lighting, besides which only the back of the victim's head showed—but Bolan knew immediately what had become of Edwin Charles.
    An animal growl rumbled past Bolan's lips and he was out of there and running up the stairs to the ground level before his thinking mind took charge. He erupted into the small room which lay just beyond the clubroom and smashed through into the party chamber. The scowling black clad figure with submachine gun in hand went virtually unnoticed through the crowd. Indeed, he looked no more out of place there than anyone present, and he received his first challenge at the labial doorway.
    Two of the leather-clad Amazons guarded that portal, standing stiffly spread-legged with crossed arms and dangling whips. The satanic-pretty faces registered puzzlement at Bolan's aggressive approach. At the last moment, one of the girls expertly curled her lash about Bolan's chest and the other stepped into his path. The whip, he found, was of soft and harmless nylon. The girl herself was something else, as big and strong as she seemed.
    Bolan snarled, "The old man's in trouble!" and pushed the girl roughly aside. He went on through and up the stairway, with one of the girls right at his heels and panting along in hot pursuit.
    He had only a vague idea as to his destination as he hurried through the cellular maze, but he knew he was getting warm when he spotted a devil girl crumpled to the floor in a doorway.
    To the girl following him, Bolan snapped, "Help her!"
    He stepped over the unconscious girl and into a reality much more horrible than could be gathered by a TV camera. The unmistakable smell of blood was mixed with the acrid odor of burnt flesh to overpower the atmosphere of the tiny airless cell; death had come there to release human agony and misery, and Bolan knew it the moment he stepped through that door.
    Here was one old soldier who had not merely faded away. Edwin Charles had died hard.
    The sawhorse affair was built of adjustable wooden legs and an iron crosspiece with conical protrusions along its top. The iron section had recently been intensely hot, and still was radiating considerable warmth. A blow torch lay discarded on the floor in the corner of the cell. Bolan decided that this had been used to heat the iron of the medieval device, which was then positioned beneath the arched back of the old man and probably slowly raised in height until the brittle old spine could no longer accept the demands placed upon it. He had sank back onto the red hot iron, and it had literally eaten its way into him.
    It seemed likely also that the spine had snapped, and perhaps other bones as well. The red heat of the iron bar had probably cauterized and sealed ruptured blood vessels as it advanced into the body, but bleeding of an internal nature had found its natural exit through both the bowel and the mouth of the victim. It was a macabre scene. Bolan could understand why even the devil girl had fainted.
    He grimly inspected the remains and muttered, "The things men do to one another." Then he stood there for a moment in angry contemplation of a grand old soldier's final moments. What was it the old fellow had said about the museum? Something about a deeper meaning, a sign of the times.
    Bolan grunted, "Yeah," and went back out. He found the two devil girls leaning weakly against each other in the next cell.
    "Is he dead?" whispered the girl who had chased Bolan up the stairs.
    "He sure is," Bolan muttered. "Just how long has this party been going on?"
    "Since eleven," the girl replied in a funereal whisper.
    Bolan looked at his watch. The time was then shortly past midnight. He shook his head and said, "I don't know how long the old man has been in that room, but he hasn't been dead for more than half an hour."
    The implications of that decision hit him immediately. Edwin Charles had died with his agony