Книга - Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning
Don Pendleton


FINAL PAYBACKThe United States consulate in Jordan is firebombed, its staff mercilessly killed. With the group responsible scattered to hideouts in war-torn hot spots around the globe, Mack Bolan has to hit these terrorists hard before they can warn one another.Soon Bolan is turning safe houses and desert refuges into killing fields as he battles to take down the terrorists three by three. But the last of the group vanishes just as Bolan discovers their ultimate target: an international conference in Switzerland headed by the American President. The world’s leaders are caught in the crosshairs, and the Executioner has to stop the splinter group before they strike a global deathblow.







FINAL PAYBACK

The United States consulate in Jordan is firebombed, its staff mercilessly killed. With the group responsible scattered to hideouts in war-torn hot spots around the globe, Mack Bolan has to hit these terrorists hard before they can warn one another.

Soon Bolan is turning safe houses and desert refuges into killing fields as he battles to take down the terrorists three by three. But the last of the group vanishes just as Bolan discovers their ultimate target: an international conference in Switzerland headed by the American President. The world’s leaders are caught in the crosshairs, and the Executioner has to stop the splinter group before they strike a global deathblow.


The gunner in the Mercedes van cut loose with another burst

Bolan’s assault rifle spit flame, and the chase car’s left headlight exploded. His volley was too low and too far to the right as Grimaldi swerved to avoid incoming bullets, spoiling the Executioner’s aim.

He fired another short burst, strafing the van’s narrow grille. The fusillade wouldn’t stop the Mercedes immediately, but an overheated engine could slow them in the short run.

They had reached the last paved road before the riverbank, crossing from east to west, while north-south drivers blared their horns, shook fists and shouted curses in the Audi’s wake.

Road rage. Damn right.

The van was crossing the river, pursuing them, with the biker trailing it, decelerating now that he knew where the fight was headed. Bolan hoped the guy would be smart, turn back and live to see another day...

But that wasn’t Bolan’s call. He had four men to take out, at least, before they finished him.





Dead Reckoning










Don Pendleton








Justice delayed is justice denied.

—William E. Gladstone

Justice may be late sometimes, but it’s inevitable. I don’t judge my targets. I am their executioner.

—Mack Bolan


For John Christopher Stevens and Sean Smith


Contents

Cover (#uee01f4d4-412d-5cfd-90c9-ead8b6f919ea)

Back Cover Text (#u2e929026-f502-5779-a8a6-740e656d9b8a)

Introduction (#ue4afefed-fb0a-5c67-b80f-11d0b62855e6)

Title Page (#u22b87680-d3cc-5946-9972-c531aaa418db)

Quote (#uca282bee-f0e8-5764-8029-e21b96944554)

Dedication (#ub50ee4cc-1f86-5f66-9cc4-afdf3fbfba50)

PROLOGUE (#u3ceea2b4-2cc7-5f31-b09a-d8d4fd10fd50)

CHAPTER ONE (#u9b55fd45-e178-531b-9e53-99d17e538ccd)

CHAPTER TWO (#ue91c1287-a80f-55b1-818b-dc40b1f5985f)

CHAPTER THREE (#uc8b0a376-54f2-5ccf-ad92-562e60d40dff)

CHAPTER FOUR (#ufe187259-eb3a-5dfd-afa6-1f27bd59b7bb)

CHAPTER FIVE (#u0f76d79b-3957-51ba-9260-c041336e765c)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


PROLOGUE (#ulink_d773747e-54ee-5393-a318-628d65c73eeb)

Zarqa, Jordan

The mob was heating up outside. Its rhythmic chanting of the past two hours had given way to random shouts and jeers from individuals amid the larger, heaving mass of human fury. Rocks were flying, and if experience was any guide, Molotov cocktails wouldn’t be too far behind.

Mark Hamilton stood watching on a closed-circuit television, since the US consulate had no external windows. It was basically a bunker, the design dictated by security concerns, with eight-foot concrete walls around it, topped by razor wire.

That wouldn’t stop the mob, if its excited members were determined to get in.

“Still no police?”

Hamilton turned to face his aide, Arnie Connelly. “Not yet.”

“Jesus, how long does it take?”

Hamilton shrugged. They both knew members of Jordan’s national Public Security Force should have shown up by then, if they were coming. Their headquarters, another bunker, stood roughly half a mile from the consulate, a five-minute drive at rush hour, even without lights and sirens.

“They’re hanging us out to dry,” Connelly said.

“We’re not hung yet,” Hamilton answered, trying to sound confident.

The trouble, this time, had blown up out of nowhere. Back in the States, in some southern backwater, a crackpot preacher short on congregants and craving national publicity had hatched a plan to gain recruits and pocket their donations with a protest against Islam. Picking up a couple dozen copies of the Koran—likely the only ones for sale in his reactionary cotton-picking state, Hamilton suspected—he had invited all and sundry to a grand book-burning ceremony, featuring a barbecue, a bluegrass band and his incessant pleas for money to support his “great, important work.”

Predictably, the Muslim world had gone insane.

Now, here he was with Connelly, one other staff member, and two US Marines, manning a bunker in the middle of the night, a lynch mob at their gate.

Great time to be a diplomat.

Most people in the States couldn’t explain the difference between an embassy and a consulate. Embassies were the larger, more important facilities, defined as permanent diplomatic missions, generally located in a foreign nation’s capital city. Consulates, by contrast, were smaller outposts, normally sited in tourist cities, where they handled minor problems involving visas, travelers’ problems, and wheedling complaints from expatriates. They had smaller staffs, fewer guards, less prestige.

Zarqa was not a tourist town, per se. There were no tourist towns in Jordan, at least so far as jet-setting Americans were concerned. Zarqa was Jordan’s second-largest city, with a population of 481,000, and housed more than fifty percent of all Jordan’s factories, fouling the air till it hardly lived up to its own name’s translation: “the Blue One.” Zarqa also moved about ten percent of Jordan’s exports—leather goods and clothing, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

That meant that while sun-baked foreign tourists were in short supply, the city saw its share of Western businessmen, wheeling and dealing in suits that cost more than Hamilton earned in a month. Few of them visited the consulate, preferring to discuss their needs with the ambassador in Amman, but Hamilton was there, in case one of their trophy secretaries lost her purse and didn’t think the native cops were suitably outraged.

“What’s Rigby doing?” Hamilton inquired.

“Burning a lot of papers.”

“Shit!”

Hamilton left his aide staring at the monitors and went to find Cale Rigby in his office. Rigby was supposed to be a cultural attaché, which was not-so-secret code for CIA. Their spook in residence, he was involved in God knew what, lording it over Hamilton and Connelly as if he were the consul, and the pair of them were just his flunkies.

Then again, given the climate of the times and the leanings of the State Department back in Washington, he might be right.

Hamilton didn’t knock before he entered Rigby’s office—still the only one he’d ever seen that had its own incinerator in one corner, with a stovepipe routed through the outer wall. Rigby was sitting in his roller chair, with the incinerator door open in front of him, feeding the flames with documents one handful at a time.

“You think we’re that bad off?” Hamilton asked.

The CIA man didn’t bother facing him. “We could be screwed,” he answered, “but it doesn’t matter. This is protocol.”

“All of your hard work, up in smoke.”

“No sweat. It’s all on file at Langley, anyway.”

The first shot sounded like a firecracker outside, but Hamilton could tell the difference. His bunker had been strafed and stoned before, though never by a mob this size, so furious.

“Better go check that out,” Rigby advised, dropping another wad of top-secret reports into the fire.

* * *

THE FIRST SHOT was a signal, nothing more. Saleh Kabeer checked his Rolex watch and saw that it came right on time. He trusted other members of his team to hear and carry out the orders he had drilled into their heads over the past two weeks, in preparation for this moment.

He was grateful to the backwoods bigot in America who had devised a plan to outrage all of Islam at a single stroke. Without him, Kabeer would have had to plan a local incident himself, whip up the necessary anger to collect a mob and go from there. This stroke of luck, headlined and amplified by Muslim news outlets from Nigeria to Indonesia, was surely a gift from God to aid his endeavor.

Given the time and opportunity, Kabeer thought he might send the scrawny Crusader a fruit basket, as thanks. Of course, the fruit would all be poisoned.

Kabeer was supervising the attack, which he had also planned from its beginning as a spark of rage against the West. His group was not yet large enough to tackle major targets, but this would be a decent start. His young men were the best, most dedicated he could find, all disillusioned by the endless talk and feeble action from al-Qaeda and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, craving battle and glory.

Starting this night, their wish would be fulfilled.

* * *

“JESUS! YOU SEE THAT?” Connelly blurted out.

It was impossible to miss. Someone had thrown a grappling hook over the razor wire topping the consulate’s south wall and was hauling in its line, ripping the coiled wire from its moorings. “And there’s another one!”

He turned and followed Connelly’s finger, pointing toward the west wall’s monitor. Same thing and same result. Within another minute, maybe less, the north and east walls both had broad gaps in their curly razor wire. A moment after that, he saw the ladders going up. Dark, nimble figures scrambled over, dropping down inside the walls.

Welcome to US soil, Hamilton thought. For whatever that’s worth.

Not much, this night, with no police in evidence and only two Marines to guard the consulate. He’d issued orders not to fire on anyone unless the building was invaded, then use common sense in self-defense. Hamilton knew Marines were tough, but two of them could no more stop a mob of hundreds—was it thousands, now?—than they could stop a tidal wave with sandbags and harsh language.

Five men altogether, in the consulate, and what would happen if he broke out extra guns for Connelly and himself? Would it make any difference to the inevitable outcome?

Hamilton had already phoned the embassy, not once, but half a dozen times. Their answer was the same each time he called: Hang on. Help’s coming.

So was Christmas, but the way things looked right now, Hamilton doubted he’d be celebrating it. More likely, he would be the ghost of Christmas past.

“Look! That guy’s got a rifle!”

By the time Hamilton turned, the man Connelly had seen was on the ground and out of sight. Another one came close behind him, though, and this one definitely had some kind of military rifle slung across his back, together with a heavy-looking satchel.

Ammunition? High explosives? Hamilton was betting that the gunman hadn’t scaled their wall to drop off a petition or his dirty laundry.

“We need to get out of here!” Connelly said.

Too late, Hamilton thought.

“And go where?” he inquired.

“Pile in the Hummer,” Connelly answered. “Rush the gate. Whoever tries to stop us, run them down or shoot them. Make it to the embassy.”

That might work, in an action movie, but the gates were fortified to keep a semi tractor rig from smashing through. The Hummer in their motor pool could take down a few rioters, but it could never part the human sea outside their walls. It was a fantasy.

“You want a shotgun?” he asked Connelly.

“What? Um...well...”

A flash of light on one monitor screen, accompanied by thunder in the building, told Hamilton that the bunker was breached. They had minutes left, maybe seconds, before the mob reached them. Hamilton turned to his aide, hand extended, smiling into Connelly’s pallid, panicked face.

“It’s been good working with you, Arnie,” Hamilton declared. Connolly was stunned, too terrified to answer, much less shake his hand.

“Um...um...”

Shouting and gunfire erupted in the hallway, drawing closer by the second.

Calm now, Hamilton turned toward the door he’d locked behind him, coming back from Rigby’s office. Thinking of his wife and daughter, he put on a smile and waited for the end.


CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_6bb0be7b-4860-5a2f-a2e2-508004aab2d8)

Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

“It’s freaking hot down here,” Jack Grimaldi complained, lifting off his baseball cap to draw a handkerchief across his sweaty brow.

“It’s South America,” Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, answered from the meager shade cast by his Tilley hat.

“Hot,” Grimaldi echoed. “Like I said.”

They were on Avenida los Yerbales, near the sprawling greenery of Parque Jose Asuncion Flores, looking for a man who dealt in death. Their quarry didn’t advertise himself that way—in fact, his neighbors knew him as an importer of farming implements and sporty motorcycles—but behind the public face, familiar from his television commercials, the guy pursued a thriving trade in weapons.

Paraguayan law mandated record keeping for acquisition, possession and transfer of all privately owned firearms, yet no statute regulated activities of arms brokers or transfer intermediaries. Authorities claimed that one million guns, both registered and otherwise, were owned by Paraguay’s people.

“We’re here,” Grimaldi said, standing at ease while foot traffic eddied around him.

Bolan eyed the tractor showroom, looking for a trap, and came up empty. The interior was air-conditioned, almost frosty next to the oppressive humidity outside. Before they’d had a chance to look around, he saw the owner moving toward them, flashing the electric TV smile.

“Good day, gentlemen. How may I serve you?” the dealership owner said in Spanish.

Bolan bit the bullet on the coded answer and replied in English. “We’re concerned with pest control.”

The famous smile lost just a hint of luster, then came back full-force.

“Of course, if you will follow me.” Crossing the showroom, heading for a storage area, the man called out, “Antonio! You have the floor.”

In the back, he led them to a steel door, tapped out numbers on its keypad, then they descended to an air-conditioned basement. The “armory” contained a cornucopia of killing hardware racked or hung on walls, some of the larger pieces free-standing on tripods. Crates of ammunition made a double row running the full length of the space, stacked chest-high beneath fluorescent lights.

“Gentlemen, what I have is yours,” he said, then added, “For a price, of course.”

“Of course,” Bolan acknowledged.

He was flush with cash from his last mission in the Bahamas, liberated from a narco-trafficker who didn’t need it anymore. The mony had been converted into Paraguayan currency at the going rate. Browsing, Bolan chose a Steyr AUG assault rifle, backed up by a Glock 22 autoloader in .40-caliber S&W. Grimaldi agreed with Bolan on the Glock but picked a Spectre M4 submachine gun for his lead weapon. Suppressors all around, with ample extra magazines and ammunition to feed their deadly tools.

Bolan switched next to heavy hitters, picking out a Neopup PAW-20 grenade launcher. Designed and manufactured in South Africa, the Neopup fired 20 mm point detonating rounds from a 7-round detachable box magazine, with an advertised effective range of 400 meters. For closer work, he took a case of U.S.-made M-67 frag grenades, in standard use throughout the Western Hemisphere and well beyond.

For cutting tools, Bolan bought an all-steel Randall Model 18 survival knife with a 7.5-inch blade honed to razor sharpness. Grimaldi made do with a six-inch Italian switchblade, basic black.

“Reminds me of the old home neighborhood,” he said, wearing a crooked grin.

With pistol shoulder rigs and other stray accessories, the price was staggering—at least, in Paraguayan currency. Bolan paid up in one-hundred-thousand guaraní banknotes, significantly lightening his roll, but leaving plenty for their travel and emergencies. Bidding the tractor man farewell, they lugged four heavy duffel bags back to their rented Hyundai Accent.

“Next stop?” Grimaldi asked, when he was at the wheel.

“Lay of the land,” Bolan replied.

Ciudad del Este was Paraguay’s second-largest city and capital of the Alto Paraná Department. It was a chaotic, crowded place, hosting thousands of foreign tourists per year. Visitors were drawn by counterfeit Viagra, exotic pets, pirated CDs or DVDs, and weapons like the stash riding in the backseat of Bolan’s rental.

None of that had drawn the Executioner to Ciudad del Este.

He was looking for specific men, and he had payback on his mind.

* * *

BOLAN’S TARGETS HAD chosen Paraguay for its place on the Triple Frontier. The name referred to a tri-border region where the Iguazú and Paraná rivers converged, bringing Paraguay into kissing contact with neighbors Argentina and Brazil. The US State Department claimed, with evidence to back it up, that thousands of Lebanese inhabiting the region funneled cash to terrorist groups including al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Egypt’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya. That was possible, in part, because Paraguay, for all its pious claims of dedication to the war on terrorism, had no laws against financing foreign insurrectionary groups. Such laws as did exist, meanwhile, were hamstrung by the country’s rank political corruption and its weak judicial system

The men Bolan was hunting were among the world’s most wanted fugitives. Unwanted might have been a better way to phrase it, since no country publicly supported them or made them welcome as official refugees. The FBI had placed three-million-dollar bounties on their heads, sixteen in all, for a payday of forty-eight million if someone could bring them together in one place, then blow the whistle.

So far, there’d been no takers.

Bolan didn’t hunt for money, and his lead to Paraguay had come around the hard way, through concerted effort and relentless digging, biometric facial recognition software and the spiteful word of an informer who had lost his woman to a fugitive’s seductive charm. In Washington, there’d been discussion of a covert military op—deploying navy SEALs, maybe a killer drone—but either one could backfire, big-time, in the theater of bitter politics. Americans had come so far from a consensus on the simplest things that no one cared to risk an act of war in South America.

Enter the Executioner.

“Are we firm on this address?” Grimaldi asked, wheeling the Hyundai along Calle Victor Hugo Norte, less than a quarter-mile west of the Rio Paraná and the Brazilian frontier.

“They were confirmed here yesterday,” Bolan replied. “Hanging with Hezbollah.”

“A meeting of the minds?”

“Or something.”

Hezbollah was well entrenched along the Triple Frontier, collaborating with similar groups on occasion, skirmishing with them when tempers flared over logistics or fine points of Muslim doctrine. They were Shi’ites, modestly labeled the Party of God, and if a person bought that one, he or she might also believe that Jesus smiled upon the Ku Klux Klan.

One thing about extremists, Bolan had discovered during years of hunting them. Most could be flexible enough to deal with kindred souls of alternate persuasions in the short-term, if it profited both sides.

Sometimes, like now.

The target was a former tenement that Hezbollah had purchased from its slumlord owner for a song, assisted by the standard offer he couldn’t refuse, then remodeled into two-bedroom apartments with a storefront office at street level, serving double duty as a mosque and faith-based charity soliciting donations on behalf of Middle Eastern refugees. The mosque preached war against the West; the money donated for displaced persons went, in fact, to Hezbollah’s war chest. As for the eighteen apartments, six to a floor, they housed members of Hezbollah and anyone they favored with accommodations for a stopover.

How many gunmen could a two-bedroom apartment hold? Plenty.

Say, four on average, and the total was over seventy. If they were really crowded in, it could be double that, without counting the mosque and office space downstairs.

A simple way would be to bring the whole place down. Strategic high-explosive charges, detonated simultaneously or in swift succession, could collapse the building with all hands inside, ensuring that they didn’t live to fight another day. It was effective but completely indiscriminate.

And Bolan needed to be sure that certain targets were included when he made his sweep.

Three names, three faces were to be scratched off Bolan’s list. But first, he needed further leads to their associates, directions to wherever they had burrowed in, waiting to surface once the present storm had passed.

None of the men he hunted would be likely to cooperate. Bolan took that for granted and had come prepared—both physically and mentally—to do whatever might be necessary. Torture wasn’t something he condoned or trusted, having seen men lie outrageously to stop the pain, say anything their tormentors desired to make it end.

But the flip side of that was his determination not to take “no” for an answer.

“Ready?” Bolan asked.

Grimaldi nodded, then answered, “As I’ll ever be.”

* * *

GRIMALDI WAS READY for damn near anything. He hadn’t flown forty-seven hundred miles to sit on the sidelines and watch Bolan do all the work, or to gripe about odds that were stacked against them. That was the name of the game as he’d learned years ago, when Bolan had snatched him out of his old life—long story—and set Grimaldi on a new path unexpectedly.

For the better, sure, but not without risks.

And what was life without risk?

Their plan was relatively simple when they’d sketched it: breeze in through the building’s office space and make their way upstairs from there, in broad daylight, three specific faces foremost in their minds while they were taking out the trash. Spare one or more of those until they could be squeezed for information, preferably at another site, removed from what was bound to be a bloodbath. When a plan like that was put into practice, though, there was a tendency for things to go to hell.

The good news: everyone inside the building should be hard-core Hezbollah, except the trio at the top of Bolan’s hit list. Once they got inside, it was a free-fire zone, no quarter asked or offered, and their sole constraint was time. How long before police arrived to intervene, assuming that they came at all?

The Paraguayan National Police had roughly 22,000 officers nationwide, spread over 157,000 square miles of city and jungle, riding herd on nearly seven million citizens, plus tourists, drifters and the like. Police might show up at a crime scene late or not at all, depending on the victims’ status in society.

With Hezbollah involved, who knew what might go down?

Grimaldi double-checked his submachine gun, with its casket magazine containing fifty 9 mm Parabellum rounds. The Spectre M4 had a double-action trigger, which allowed the safety to be disengaged without a risk of accidental firing under any normal circumstances, and a shrouded barrel to facilitate cooling. He’d have to watch it, or the cyclic rate of fourteen rounds per second would devour a magazine in nothing flat. But Grimaldi had used the gun before and liked its feel, its firepower and its reliability. The suppressor he had screwed on to its threaded muzzle would prevent the gun from climbing in full-auto mode, as well as muffling the racket that it made.

Rain had begun to drizzle, which was normal for the tropics, handy for the lightweight raincoats Grimaldi and Bolan wore to hide their weapons as they moved along the sidewalk toward their target. Hezbollah had no men on the street that the Stony Man pilot could see, and there was no sign of surveillance cameras around the entrance to their ground-floor offices.

Apparently, they felt secure enough in Paraguay to drop their guard a bit.

Strike one.

The door, all glass, allowed a clear view of the office—or at least its front reception area—from where Grimaldi stood outside. There was a young guy sitting at a desk, directly opposite the door, with no one else in sight. He might be armed, but at the moment he was busy talking on the phone, half turned in profile to the street, oblivious.

Strike two.

When Bolan gave the door a push, it opened at his touch.

Strike three.

A little chime went off as Bolan entered, with Grimaldi on his heels. No doubt it was supposed to warn whoever occupied the office that they had a walk-in, and it brought the young guy’s frowning face around in time to see two silenced weapons pointed at him. Blurting something in Arabic, he dropped the phone and shoved a hand into the knee well of his desk, maybe for a weapon or a panic button hidden under there.

He never made it.

Bolan’s Steyr AUG coughed out a single round and granted the Hezbollah’s receptionist the martyrdom he may have dreamed about when he signed on to be a terrorist. The exit wound sprayed abstract art across a filing cabinet behind him, and he slithered out of sight beneath the desk.

* * *

ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS tired of being cooped up in the small apartment, only seeing sunshine through his window or on those occasions when his hosts allowed him access to the building’s roof. He understood that he and his two roommates were on every watch list in the world, their faces posted on the internet with prices on their heads, but he was sick and tired of hiding.

He was sick and tired of Paraguay.

Sitting on a sway-backed sofa in his underwear, Rajhid ticked off the things that irritated him about the country he’d been sent to as a fugitive.

The weather. He was used to heat, of course, but Paraguay’s humidity was killing him. It sapped his energy and made him feel exhausted from the moment he awoke each morning to the final hour when he dragged himself to bed.

The insects. He had lived with desert scorpions and spiders all his life, and cockroaches, but those in Paraguay were monsters, grown unnaturally large, and they could turn up anywhere. Just yesterday, he’d found a black, five-inch scorpion hiding beneath his pillow when he went to bed, a shock that left him wondering if one of his so-called protectors might have placed it there to rattle him.

And Hezbollah. That was another thing. Its members, with their clique in Paraguay, had treated Rajhid almost like a leper from the moment he arrived with Walid Khamis and Salman Farsoun. It was as if they thought their little private army was the only group entitled to make war on the Crusaders in the name of God. Rajhid wrote it off to jealousy, but he resented being forced to smile and thank them for their hospitality. The war was going on without him, and he wanted to get back to it.

The food. Now, there was one thing Rajhid did enjoy. They all avoided pork, of course, but he was very fond of pira caldo, Paraguay’s fish soup; the great asado barbecues; the kiveve made from pumpkins; and the lampreado, fried cakes made with manioc. Rajhid had put on weight since landing at the hideout, but he tried to keep it down with exercise, the only form of entertainment granted to him, other than a television set that played three channels, none of which he understood.

He hoped Khalid would reach out to them soon. Rajhid and his companions needed action, not the world’s worst-ever tropical vacation, locked up in an apartment and eaten by mosquitoes, while they never even got to glimpse the rain forest.

Khamis was snoring in one of the apartment’s two bedrooms, while Farsoun was in the small bathroom, door closed for privacy. Rajhid was field-stripping a MAC-10 machine pistol, its components spread out on a coffee table just in front of him, and watching a peculiar game show, where the losers had their heads shaved to remind them they had failed. It was pathetic, childish and—

The first shot startled Rajhid, brought him to his feet in an involuntary reflex, clutching the MAC-10’s dismantled, useless pistol grip. He waited, thought perhaps someone had fumbled with a weapon, had a stupid accident—with Hezbollah, why not?—but then a blast of automatic fire rang through the building and he heard men’s panicked voices shouting.

The police? A US Navy SEAL team, just for him?

Rajhid had no time to consider who might be attacking them. He called out to his comrades while he tried to reassemble the MAC-10, his fingers as thick and numb as sausages in his excitement.

Fear? Not yet.

As soon as he was finished with the gun, he had to get dressed. Rajhid could not go running through the streets of Ciudad del Este in his underwear, with a machine pistol. Police in Paraguay might be slow and foolish, but they would not miss a chance to get their faces in the newspapers.

The last part of his weapon finally snapped into place. More firing came from the second or third floor, below him, as Rajhid snatched up a magazine, then loaded and cocked the little SMG. Now all he needed was a pair of pants, his shoes and one of those baggy shirts that everybody seemed to wear in Paraguay, hiding a multitude of sins.

And once he’d dressed, Rajhid could figure out whether to join the fight or run and leave his hosts to save themselves.

* * *

CLEARING THE DOWNSTAIRS rooms required less than a minute. The office, mosque and two small bathrooms were the whole of it, and all unoccupied except for Hezbollah’s late greeter in the lobby. The corpse was out of sight of anybody passing on the street, positioned beneath the desk, and they were set to take the game upstairs.

And upstairs it would be, specifically between the empty mosque and office space. The building had no elevator, meaning that anyone trying to flee the upper floors had to either fight his way past Bolan and Grimaldi, or go out the nearest window.

The Stony Man duo reached the second floor without encountering a problem, but it started to unravel there. The landing faced back toward Calle Victor Hugo Norte, three apartments on each side of a narrow hallway. Three doors open, three closed. Just as Bolan reached that landing, a bearded young man in a T-shirt and khaki pants, barefooted, stepped out of the second door down, to his left.

The terrorist saw them, saw their guns,and blinked once in surprise before he turned and lunged for the open doorway just behind him. Bolan beat him to it with a 3-round burst of 5.56 mm NATO rounds, punching the rag doll figure sideways, slamming him against the doorjamb on his way down to the floor.

The AUG’s suppressor wasn’t perfect, but it reduced the sound of gunfire to a kind of stutter-sneeze. Bolan moved forward, leaving his partner to cover the closed doors behind him while he cleared the first open apartment on his left. He stepped across the dead man on the threshold, checked the other rooms in nothing flat, and found them all unoccupied.

His next step was to double back and join Grimaldi for the two apartments he had bypassed, not surprised to find them both unlocked in what the occupants would have regarded as a safe environment. He barged in unannounced and uninvited, caught two more Hezbollah terrorists sitting on a sofa, eating pita sandwiches, and shot them both before they could react to the invasion of their home away from home.

Behind him, Bolan heard the muffled stutter of Grimaldi’s SMG, ending another argument before it had a chance to start in earnest. Seconds later, the Stony Man pilot was back beside him in the hallway, nodding, turning toward the next door that stood open, on their right.

This time, they heard a shower running. Bolan went to find it, leaving Grimaldi to guard the open doorway and the last two apartments downrange. The bathroom wasn’t hard to locate in a place that small, its door ajar, and Bolan eased his way inside. Behind a semi-opaque shower curtain, he saw two forms intertwined, both men, unless the women sprouted beards in Paraguay.

To each his own, in Bolan’s view—but this was strictly business. He preferred to give an opponent a fighting chance, but in this case it was a no go.

Six rounds did it, ripping through the shower curtain to find flesh and bone, spilling two bodies on to the tiled floor. One was a man approaching middle age, the other younger, neither one concerned about embarrassment now that their time had suddenly run out.

He left the shower running—put it on Hezbollah’s tab—and met up with Grimaldi in the corridor, to clear the last two apartments. Bolan would never know what had alerted one guy in the next apartment, to their right, but he was waiting with an AK-47, ripping off a hasty burst just as his door began to open under Bolan’s touch.

The Russian rifle’s 7.62 mm rounds were more than capable of piercing flimsy drywall, driving Bolan and Grimaldi to the floor. Instead of making it a siege, Bolan unclipped one of the frag grenades he’d fastened to his belt, removed its pin and pitched the bomb through the doorway, counting five seconds on its fuse. It blew on four, a foible common to that particular model, and he waited for the shrapnel storm to pass before he checked the apartment again and found his adversary facedown in a pool of gore.

No time to waste now, as they ran back to the stairs and stormed the third floor, ready for resistance from the Hezbollah terrorists remaining, meeting it almost at once. It was a tricky proposition, fighting for your life and watching out for three specific faces, knowing it was critical to capture one of them alive.

A challenge, right—but nothing unfamiliar to the Executioner.


CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b3a79afa-efb8-5edc-b502-32772e7d2d51)

Arlington, Virginia, Two Days Earlier

The punks were either soused or high on something, Hal Brognola guessed, noting their ruddy faces, sloppy walks and random slurring of their too-loud comments as they made obnoxious asses of themselves. They’d gotten an early start on getting wasted, since it wasn’t half past ten yet, and the four of them were well en route to being comfortably numb.

Skinheads. He knew the low-life type from long experience. They’d failed in school and couldn’t hold a job, assuming that they’d ever tried to find one, left their home or had been thrown out when Nazi tats and rants had riled their parents to the point of no return. Or maybe they’d been raised by homegrown fascists and had followed in their elders’ goose steps.

Either way, Brognola saw them as a waste of space, and not at all what he’d expected to encounter at the Ballston Common Mall, on Wilson Boulevard. All members of the public were welcome, of course, to the four-level, 580,000-square-foot mini-city with its hundreds of shops, salons, cafés and other offerings, but most of those who patronized the mall upheld a certain standard of decorum.

Not these guys.

They had a dress code, sure, all four of them in jet-black bomber jackets decorated with the symbols of their rage, from swastikas and SS lightning bolts to Celtic crosses, Rebel flags and the distinctive blood drop crosses favored by the Ku Klux Klan. Beneath the jackets, they wore suspenders over black tees decorated with more neo-Nazi “art,” tight jeans with metal-studded belts—a guy just couldn’t always trust suspenders in a street fight—and red laces in their black boots.

It was a uniform of sorts that marked them as outsiders—or, in the alternative, insiders of a small, supposedly “elite” subculture most Americans were happy to ignore until it pushed into their faces and demanded equal time.

Like now.

Brognola had been hoping they would pass him, standing alone and minding his own business at the second-level railing, near the food court. As a rule, he didn’t make a likely target for the random predators who scavenged urban landscapes. He was stocky, had an aging cop’s face and an attitude toward strangers that made most think twice about disturbing him.

Not this time.

Maybe these four punks believed the line about safety in numbers. Or maybe they were just too wasted to care.

“Hey, Grandpa,” one of them called out as they approached him. “Got a light?”

The big Fed figured silence wouldn’t be the way to go this time. He turned to face them, saw them fanning out into a semicircle as he said, “No smoking in the mall.”

“Ain’t what I asked you, is it?”

Their elected spokesman was a burly specimen whose forehead bore the inked slogan “RAHOWA”: Racial Holy War.

Brognola locked eyes with him as he answered, “No.”

“So, do you got a light, or not?”

The Justice man scanned the other grinning, slack-jawed faces, then said, “No.”

“Is that all you can say, man? ‘No?’”

The second speaker would have been a redhead if he’d let it grow a little. As it was, the stubble only made his scalp look sunburned, serving as a background for the swastika tattoo on top of his shaved pate.

“I could say, ‘Move along,’” Brognola offered.

That made two of them break out in laughter, while their leader and the almost-redhead eyed him with suspicion bleeding into fury. They were used to having people cringe before them, but it wasn’t working out that way, this time.

“There’s sumpin’ wrong wid you,” the leader said, and tapped his temple with an index finger. “Sumpin’ wrong up here.”

“Johns Hopkins, was it?” Brognola asked him. “Or maybe Georgetown? I’m surprised you found a med school that would let you in, with all that sloppy ink.”

He was pushing the limit now, but punks like these had always ranked among his top pet peeves. Bullies were made for beating down, not coddling.

“Man, you gotta have a death wish,” RAHOWA-face said. A thought surfaced inside his tiny mind. “Are you a Jew?”

“Are you a cretin?” Brognola replied. The four of them were close, but he still reckoned he could reach the Glock 23 on his hip before one of them punched him or landed a kick to his groin with a spit-polished boot. Bad news if it came down to that, but the big Fed had too much on his mind to suffer morons gladly.

“Man, you’re askin’ for it,” Red Fuzz said. “I oughta—”

But he never finished, as a deep voice just behind him asked, “Is there a problem here?”

* * *

“I HAD IT COVERED,” Brognola said. “They weren’t going anywhere.”

“I saw that,” Bolan granted. “But I thought about the paperwork, the wasted time.”

Brognola mulled that over, frowning, then agreed. “Who needs it?”

“Right.”

They’d gone to Charley’s Grilled Subs, once the four skinheads had gotten a glimpse of Bolan’s graveyard eyes and figured out that two-on-four wasn’t such inviting odds. He had a deli sub in front of him, with fries, while Hal was working on a Philly chicken hero.

“So, the mission,” Bolan prompted.

“Right,” Brognola said again. “I guess you’ve heard about the consulate in Jordan?”

“It’s been hard to miss.”

“Behind the politics, what hasn’t been on CNN or Fox is the ID on those responsible.”

“Already?” Bolan was impressed. “That’s quick work.”

“They left tracks—and two dead at the scene. The consulate’s Marines got in a few licks.”

“Semper fi,” Bolan replied. “Who were they?”

“Members of a relatively new group,” Brognola replied, chewing around the words. “It’s called Allah Qadum in Arabic, or ‘God’s Hammer’ to the likes of us. It split off from the AQAP roughly eighteen months ago.”

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, that was, a splinter group itself, founded in January 2009 by defectors from the group that had masterminded 9/11 and assorted other horrors. One thing that predictably retarded global terrorism was the tendency of psychopaths to quarrel among themselves and storm out in a huff to form their own demented fragments of a parent group.

“So, it was organized?” Bolan asked. “All I’ve heard has been the stuff about that yokel burning the Koran.”

“They saw an opening,” Brognola answered, “thanks to Reverend Redneck. They’d have turned up somewhere, someday, but his sideshow gave them the jump start they needed. Nothing on par with the World Trade Centers, of course, but it put them on the map. They’ll be looking to build on it, make a name for themselves and claim a seat at the table.”

“What table?”

“Wherever the nuts meet and greet,” Brognola replied.

“You said a couple of them didn’t make it out.”

“Correct. Jordan’s General Security Directorate identified them from their rap sheets and drew up a list of known associates. CIA and Saudi intelligence put their two cents in, and some files turned up at Interpol. We now have sixteen names confirmed as God’s Hammer members still at large.”

“All present at the consulate?” Bolan asked.

“Hard to say, but probable. The whole bunch was in Jordan before the raid, and now they’ve scattered. Globally, we think.”

“You think.”

The big Fed took another bite of Philly chicken, chewed it, swallowed part of it and said, “You know how that goes. Whispers in the wind from NSA and anybody else who’s listening. As of two days ago, we know three members of the gang are in Paraguay.”

“That’s some commute,” Bolan observed.

“It’s relatively safe,” Brognola said. “We’ve had an extradition treaty with the government there since March 2001, but you know how that goes in South America. They talk tough on terrorism, and they crack down hard on anyone who threatens their control, but when it comes to foreign groups, they’ve got no statutes on the books. Their courts are as crooked as they come. We need chapter and verse to push an extradition through on narco-trafficking, much less something they view as foreign politics.”

Bolan trimmed it to the bottom line. “They need retrieving, or elimination.”

“Either one suits me, but here’s the problem. When I say we have a fix on three, that means the other thirteen goons are in the wind. They could be anywhere from Marrakesh to Malibu by now, and burrowed deep. We figure their three pals in Paraguay will have some means of reaching out, but if they all go down without a chance to talk...”

Brognola left it hanging there.

Bolan saw the problem now, and it was not a pretty one.

“I’ll take it,” he told the big Fed. “But I need more intel.”

Brognola slid a thumb drive in a paper sleeve across their little table. “That’s got everything we know, so far, but we can run it down right now.”

Bolan reached out and made the thumb drive disappear. “Okay,” he said. “Before you start, though, if we’re going global, I may need some backup.”

“Anyone in mind?” Brognola asked.

“Just Jack.”

Miami, Florida

THE CELL PHONE’S buzzing caught Jack Grimaldi with a pint of Guinness at his lips, a plate of fish and chips in front of him, inside an Irish pub on South Miami Avenue. He recognized the number, took a sip and let it ring once more, then picked up.

“Hey, what’s happening?” he asked.

“You busy?” Mack Bolan inquired.

“Just having lunch.”

“I mean the next few days.”

Grimaldi smiled. “I’ve got a window, if there’s something going on.”

“There is.”

“Details?”

“We’d have to scramble it.”

“Wait one,” Grimaldi said. He had a special app to handle that, engaged with one keystroke while Bolan set up on his end.

“Okay,” Grimaldi said. “Ready.”

Bolan ran down the basic details, adding new twists to the foreign news that had been dominating every channel on the TV in Grimaldi’s hotel room for the past week. The Stony Man pilot felt his pulse rate quicken. He took another sip of beer, then set down his glass.

“So, Paraguay,” he said, when the Executioner was done.

“It’s all we’ve got right now,” Bolan replied.

“Someplace I’ve never been. Still Nazis down there, are they?”

“That was Stroessner. He was overthrown a while ago, but his party still runs things. They impeached a president in 2012 for not cracking down hard enough on the Left. Replaced him with a guy who spent ten years running a soccer club. The DEA claims he’s connected to the drug trade.”

“Sounds like they could use a visit,” Grimaldi said.

“Only for the fugitives, this time around,” Bolan reminded him.

“Too bad. Three guys, you said?”

“Hopefully giving us directions to the rest.”

“You know me. I can be persuasive.”

“So, you’re in?”

“I wouldn’t miss it. What’s our estimated time of departure?”

“As soon as you can get up here to Arlington.”

Grimaldi did the calculations in his head. There was drive time from the pub to Opa-locka Executive Airport, eleven miles north of downtown Miami, then the prep and clearance for takeoff. He guesstimated flight time from OEA to Arlington in his Piper Seneca, cruising speed 216 miles per hour, then the rituals of landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

“Six hours, minimum. I’ll call you if they tie me up too long with paperwork.”

“That’s Reagan?”

“Right.”

“I’ll see you there,” Bolan replied, and he was gone.

The Sarge had never been the chatty type, a trait Grimaldi had appreciated from the day they met. Their hookup had been strange, perhaps unique—a kidnapping, in fact, Grimaldi on the hostage end of it—but it had given the pilot a new life. Maybe saved his life, although the new one was a hectic roller-coaster ride of peril.

Fun, though, in a demented kind of way, once you had settled in and got into the spirit of the thing.

The bonus, in Grimaldi’s case, was knowing that he sometimes made a difference. He’d gone from being part of the problem—a see-nothing, hear-nothing syndicate flyboy—to playing on the side of the angels.

No, scratch that. He would never be an angel, and the jobs he did for Stony Man, with or without Mack Bolan, sure as hell wouldn’t strike most folks as angelic. He was still outside the law, but with a twist, pursuing bad guys who had been above the law so long, they thought they were invincible. He’d hated bullies from the time he was the shortest kid in kindergarten class, until he’d learned to take a punch and give back three or four for every one received.

Grimaldi thought about the next few days, unsure when he would have another chance to eat, and finished off the plate in front of him. He quaffed the beer and pushed his empty back. “Another?” the barkeep asked.

“Wish I could,” Grimaldi told him, lifting off his bar stool. “But I have to fly.”

Ronald Reagan National Airport

WAITING FOR JACK GRIMALDI, with nowhere else to go, Bolan picked out a reasonably isolated seat in Terminal A and settled in to review Hal Brognola’s files. The thumb drive held a total of nineteen, one titled “AQ/AH,” the remainder bearing what he took for Arabic surnames.

Bolan started with the file on God’s Hammer, skimming over what he’d already learned from the big Fed about the group’s roots and creation. It was a splinter of a splinter, descended from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda by way of the “subordinate” AQAP, active mainly in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The parent organizations were dominated by Salafi Muslims—also called Wahhabis—who, in turn, comprised a subdivision of the Sunni sect. Bolan wasn’t interested in Islam’s doctrinal rifts, any more than he was by the multitude of self-styled Christian denominations, but he focused on Salafist jihadism preached by al-Qaeda and its descendants.

Bottom line: they were at war with Israel and the “decadent” West, especially that “Great Satan,” Uncle Sam. Whatever they could do to hurt their enemies, from bombing navy ships in port to 9/11, Salafist jihadists were ready to go.

And if they died in that pursuit, well, hello Paradise: ripe fruit in shady gardens, bottomless goblets of wine with no hangovers, dark-eyed virgins galore to serve a martyr’s every need.

Why not go out in one great blaze of glory for the cause?

God’s Hammer had made its debut with the consulate attack in Jordan, and lost two fighters in the process. Stony Man or someone else had managed to identify the dead as a twenty-three-year-old Egyptian, Djer Badawi, and a nineteen-year-old Saudi, Sulaiman Waleed. Waleed had been a rookie, more or less, arrested once during a protest in Riyadh. Badawi was—make that had been—a veteran of the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, suspected of participating in Alexandria’s al-Qidiseen church bombing that killed twenty-one Coptic Christians in 2011. He’d been living off the grid since then, and clearly up to no good.

Those two were dead now, and no longer Bolan’s problem. Moving through the other file as Brognola had numbered them, he came first to another Saudi, Saleh Kabeer, recognized as the founder and leader of God’s Hammer. He was thirty-seven years old, a Salafi jihadist from way back, the black sheep of a wealthy family who served the House of Saud without regrets. Kabeer had jumped the traces, following in bin Laden’s footsteps as a rebel who rejected his inheritance and chose the path of war over a life of luxury.

Or so he said, at any rate. Brognola’s dossier revealed that Saleh Kabeer had founded God’s Hammer with a start-up contribution from his kinfolk, petro-dollars he had spent while posing as an enemy of any commerce with Crusaders from the West. Hypocrisy was nothing new, of course, and none of those who joined God’s Hammer appeared to mind Kabeer’s personal brand.

Kabeer’s number two was a fellow Saudi, twenty-two-year-old Mohammed Sanea. He didn’t share his leader’s gold-plated background but came by his radicalism the old-fashioned way, after his father served three years in prison for his role in founding Saudi Arabia’s National Society for Human Rights. Perhaps ironically, that hadn’t turned him against his homeland’s rigid Islamic monarchy, but rather against the “Western parasites” who propped it up with billions for oil and foreign aid. Suspected of leading terrorist raids from Yemen, Sanea had survived a US drone strike in 2013 and came back more rabid than ever.

Other known members of God’s Hammer, still at large after the raid in Jordan, included four Palestinians, four Jordanians, two more Saudis, two Syrians, one Lebanese and one Egyptian. Bolan read their bios, noted their affiliation with various terrorist groups, drifting into al-Qaeda and on from there to God’s Hammer as their views became more radical over time. All were relatively young men, ranging in age from nineteen to thirty. All but two were named in outstanding warrants from their homelands or neighboring countries, circulated by Interpol and Europol.

Sixteen mad dogs, and Bolan only knew where three of them were hiding. He’d have to do better than that, and quickly, before they could regroup and try to top their first outing for mayhem and publicity.

Why not? He only had to search the whole damned world.

“What are we flying south?” Grimaldi asked, once he was on the ground at Reagan, with his Piper battened down for the duration.

“Hal’s got something waiting for us, subject to your signing off on it,” Bolan replied.

“Close by?”

“A couple hundred yards that way,” Bolan said, pointing to the west.

“Let’s check it out.”

They walked across the tarmac to a hangar labeled Bellair Charters, where an Eclipse 500 microjet sat waiting for them. “Not bad,” Grimaldi offered as they did a walk-around. “A service ceiling of forty-one thousand feet, maximum range of 1,295 miles and a top speed of 425 miles per hour. That’s five refueling stops before we land in Paraguay. I’m thinking Dallas, Oaxaca, Mexico, Panama City over the Gulf, Canaima, Venezuela, Alta Floresta, Brazil, then on to Asunción. A lot of stops, but it’s the best this little bird can do.”

“How long?” Bolan asked.

“Air time, about eleven hours. Ground time, messing with the locals?” Grimaldi considered it and shook his head. “Your guess would be as good as mine.”

“No time to waste, then,” Bolan said. “The sooner we’re airborne, the better.”

“Roger that. I’ll start the preflight check right now, then have a chat with the tower.”

Bolan left Grimaldi to it. He wasn’t happy with the time lag between takeoff and their final touchdown in Paraguay. If something spooked the people he was hunting in the meantime, he could miss them altogether and be back to square one, hoping Stony Man could run them down again.

And if they couldn’t, he’d be waiting for the next attack, like everybody else.

But that was unacceptable. Failure was not an option for the Executioner.

The plague of terrorism was as old as humankind. It could not be eradicated, only held at bay, until such time as fundamental change in human nature was achieved. So far, in Bolan’s lifetime, there had been no sign of that occurring. Planet Earth still needed soldiers standing watch against the predators who populated so-called “civilized” society, taking advantage of the weak and hopeless for their own ends, masked by politics, religion, pick your poison.

In his idle hours, few as they might be, Bolan sometimes philosophized about a world without atrocities, devoid of greed and cruelty, hatred, discrimination and suspicion. He would never live to see it—no one would, in fact—because the human animal was deeply and irrevocably flawed.

Men craved what they could not afford, what they had no right to possess. When frustrated in their pursuit of more, they turned on those presumably obstructing them. Some humans learned to channel greed and hatred into lucrative careers in various fields. Others sated their greed through commerce, raping the environment with utter disregard for future generations. Altruists, when they appeared, were such a novelty that they were usually murdered, canonized as saints or both.

The bottom line: there were no angels, and no demons. Every man and woman on the planet was an individual, resisting or surrendering to baser instincts as they passed through life, taking it one day at a time. Some gave free rein to their desires, and in the process jeopardized communities, whole nations, or the world at large.

When those predators stood beyond the reach of ordinary law, they had to be curbed by extraordinary force.

Enter the Executioner, commissioned to continue with a job he’d started on his own, without official sanction, to repay a private debt of blood. He kept on fighting now because he could, because somebody had to if “polite” society was going to survive.

That meant confronting human monsters where they lived and preyed on others weaker than themselves. It meant destroying them, scorching the earth to stall—where he could not prevent—another monster rising in their place.

The war, he realized, could not be won. It was a holding action, not some grand crusade.

Bolan would occupy the firing line as long as he was able. After that...

He hoped that someone would rise to grab the torch.


CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a0cc521d-717e-5ef4-b190-24c38cd2d55f)

Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

Bolan had reached the fourth floor and still had not seen any of the God’s Hammer fugitives among the men he and Grimaldi had put down so far. This was the last floor left to check, and he’d begun to worry that they might have slipped the net—or, at the very least, gone shopping, out to get a meal, whatever, and eluded him by sheer coincidence.

Not good.

Before they rushed the final set of apartments, Bolan huddled with Grimaldi on the stairwell. Just above and to their left, he heard the last defenders talking excitedly and priming their weapons, maybe trying to decide if they should rush the stairs or dig in for a last-ditch fight.

“It’s getting dicey now,” he told Grimaldi, almost whispering. “The guys we’re after could be here, but if they’re not—”

The Stony Man pilot saw where he was going and finished for him. “Then we need to bag somebody who can tell us when they left and where they went.”

“Right,” Bolan said. “I’d like to take one down but leave him breathing so we can question him, but don’t take any chances. Still take care of Number One.”

Grimaldi flashed a grin. “Which one of us is Number One?”

“Ready?” Bolan asked him.

“Set.”

Bolan eased up and pitched the frag grenade that he’d been holding while they talked, a blind toss down the narrow hallway. Four-point-something seconds later it exploded, filling the corridor with smoke and dust.

One guy was down and out, sprawled in the middle of the hallway, leaking from at least a dozen shrapnel wounds. A couple others staggered through the battle mist, approaching Bolan in a daze, but neither of their faces rang a bell from Brognola’s portfolio of God’s Hammer fugitives. The Executioner dropped both of them with one round each and moved on, searching.

First door on his left, ajar. He ducked and nudged it open, ready for a burst of autofire, but it was vacant, no one hiding underneath the bed or in the tiny bathroom. Doubling back, he heard Grimaldi’s muffled SMG responding to a challenge from the Hezbollah gunners and went to join him on the firing line.

Grimaldi had already cleared the rooms directly opposite, then run into a roadblock from the second flat in line, off to the right. At least one terroriat was battened down in there, firing short bursts from a Kalashnikov without putting much effort into aiming. So far, he had strafed the ceiling and the walls to either side, while Grimaldi lay prone out in the hallway, waiting for a shot.

Bolan got there ahead of him, his different perspective granting him an early crack at the defender. Three rounds from the Steyr chewed his adversary’s face off—not a face he recognized—and dumped him back across the threshold of the last room he would ever occupy.

Grimaldi bolted to his feet and cleared the apartment, while Bolan took the next one on his left. He saw no further movement in the hallway, no signs of continuing resistance, but they’d have to go the whole route, checking every room and closet, just in case.

Unless...

There was no one in the apartment, but on a whim, he checked the window, the first one he’d seen standing open yet, despite the building’s air-conditioning. A fire escape was bolted to the wall outside, and down below, three men were running toward the far end of an alley lined with garbage bins. One of them paused long enough to glance back at the room he’d lately vacated, and Bolan made his face.

Salman Farsoun, one of the three he’d come to find in Ciudad del Este.

“Jack!” he shouted, through the empty rooms. “Outside! They’re bailing!”

The Stony Man pilot was in the doorway, following, when Bolan clambered through the window and began his steep rush down the fire escape.

* * *

ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS SLOWING, almost at the alley’s mouth with cars and foot traffic beyond, when Salman Farsoun overtook him, blurting out, “I’ve seen them!”

“Seen who?” Rajhid asked him without stopping, without looking backward.

“The Crusaders! One of them, at least.”

“Then he’s seen you,” Rajhid replied. “Come on!”

Walid Khamis was already ahead of them, shoving his Micro Uzi underneath his baggy shirt. Rajhid did likewise with his MAC-10, hoping Farsoun could do something with the larger MP-5 K submachine gun he carried. The sounds of battle from the building they’d abandoned were already drawing notice. Rajhid did not fancy jogging down the boulevard with military weapons on display, alerting passersby to summon the police.

“He was a white man,” Farsoun said, still going on about the fellow he’d seen or had imagined. “An American, perhaps.”

Rahjid would never fully understand these Palestinians. Although himself a Saudi, he was well aware of how the Arab residents of Palestine had suffered since the state of Israel was created by outsiders from the West. Indeed, that had been the spark that lit the fuse on Rahjid’s own jihad, but there was still something peculiar about soldiers such as Khamis and Farsoun. They suffered from excitability, erratic moods, and Rajhid found them easily distracted at important moments of an operation.

Now, for instance, when his mind was focused on escape, Farsoun wanted to talk about some man he’d seen—but why? To what result?

“Come on!” Rajhid repeated. “We can talk about it later.”

“But—”

“Enough! Now hide that gun or leave it here!”

Farsoun lifted his shirt and shoved the MP-5 K underneath one armpit, lowering his arm to keep the weapon clamped against his side. Rajhid hoped he could keep it there, but had no plans to stay behind and help Farsoun if he got careless, drawing notice to himself.

The sidewalk they emerged on to was crowded, some people already slowing, peering down the alley toward the sounds of battle echoing along its length. Rajhid pushed through and past them. He might have warned Khamis to slow his pace a bit, attempted to act more normal, but he didn’t want the strangers passing by to put the two of them together.

One less thing for them to tell the police when they finally arrived.

And the police could turn up any moment, Rajhid realized. Then there could be gunfire, explosions, smoke and flames, for all he knew. The residents of Ciudad del Este were well acquainted with crime, but not with pitched battles fought in their midst.

Putting distance between himself and the scene, Rajhid spared a thought for whoever had raided the complex. Unlike Farsoun, he’d seen none of the raiders, therefore had no clue if they were locals or some kind of special unit from outside. The charm of Paraguay, for freedom fighters on the run, lay in its curious interpretation of what constituted terrorism. Any opposition to the ruling party was suppressed, but what a man did elsewhere—most particularly if his actions were directed against Jews and their supporters—might be overlooked, especially if cash changed hands.

But if the raid had been conducted by Crusaders, as Farsoun surmised, that would be something else.

Bin Laden had been slaughtered a US Navy SEAL team, at his lair in Pakistan, without a by-your-leave to the legitimate authorities. How many other heroes had been slain by rockets from a clear blue sky, triggered by hunters sitting in a bunker somewhere, half a world away?

Watching the traffic pass, alert for military or police vehicles, Rajhid wondered how the damned Crusaders could have found him here.

No matter.

For the moment, all he had to focus on was getting out alive.

* * *

THE ALLEY STANK, but that was par for any urban landscape in the tropics, where the seasons ranged from hot and damp to hot and soaking wet. The blacktop under Bolan’s feet was old, but still felt tacky from the heat, as if it had been freshly laid. He was halfway to the alley’s intersection with the street when Grimaldi dropped from the fire escape and started after him.

The runners he had glimpsed were gone, but they had turned left when they reached the street and Bolan went from there, tucking the AUG back underneath his raincoat, pausing long enough to let Grimaldi overtake him on the sidewalk.

“Farsoun was the one I recognized,” he said. “That makes the others Khamis and Rajhid. Two wearing white shirts, one in red, all three in khaki trousers.”

“Packing?” Grimaldi asked, while his eyes swept both sides of the street.

“Farsoun had something like an Ingram or a Micro Uzi. It was hard to tell. Assume they’re loaded.”

“There!” Grimaldi said, pointing as Bolan’s eyes locked on to a red shirt, retreating through the flow of window shoppers. Even as he spoke, the man in the red shirt glanced backward, seeming to meet Bolan’s gaze.

“Farsoun,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Before they’d covered half a block, he saw the other two, moving ahead of Farsoun on the same side of the street. Rajhid and Khamis wasted no time looking back, perhaps afraid of what was gaining on them, maybe just intent on getting clear and finding someplace new to hide. Whatever, Bolan had them spotted now, and he was bent on stopping them before they had a chance to disappear.

That thought had barely formed when one of them, wearing a white shirt, separated from the others, darting into traffic like a kamikaze bent on suicide, ducking and dodging as he ran to reach the far side of the street.

“I’m on him,” Grimaldi said, launching from the curb into a stream of steel and chrome, ignoring angry bleats from auto horns.

Instead of watching the pilot’s progress, Bolan pursued the targets dressed in red and white. They weren’t exactly running yet, but they were picking up the pace, anxious to clear the neighborhood before it swarmed with uniforms. Bolan had much the same idea himself, but couldn’t bail before he’d caught at least one of the fugitives.

Or done his best to catch them, anyway.

In a scene like this, he knew there was a chance he could lose both of them, or else be forced to take them down without a chance to ask the vital questions. Given that choice, Bolan would prefer dead terrorists to killers still at large and plotting their next move.

Ahead of him, the runners reached a cross street; one of them said something to the other, then they broke in opposite directions. One guy peeled away to Bolan’s left and out of sight around the corner, while his comrade bolted to the right, crossing against the light and nearly getting flattened by a taxi just before he reached the other curb.

There was no way to take the farthest runner down without endangering civilians and revealing he was armed. Bolan turned left and started running hard after the red shirt as its owner put on speed.

* * *

GRIMALDI WASN’T BIG, but he was fast. A mad dash through traffic with horns blaring at him, brakes screeching, had gotten his heart pumping. The shoulder-slung Spectre M4 slapped his ribs as he ran, until the Stony Man pilot clamped his right arm against it to stop the drumbeat. Every footfall sent a jolt along his spine and urged him to run faster.

Up ahead, his target—leaner, younger, desperate—had gained a lead on him and wasn’t slowing. The guy had glanced back once, treating Grimaldi to a glimpse of a familiar bearded face, then started running as if his life depended on it.

Which, in fact, it did.

Crossing the street in mid-block took them to another alley and more stinking garbage bins, rats the size of puppies scurrying where trash had overflowed or simply been discarded carelessly. The ground beneath their feet was asphalt, not concrete, almost spongy in the heat with soft rain pattering. Grimaldi knew that they were eastbound, headed for another street crowded with traffic and pedestrians, cars parked at crazy angles, people shopping under awnings that, for some reason he couldn’t grasp, were mostly blue.

It was the last place he would have chosen for a firefight.

If there was going to be gunplay—and Grimaldi didn’t doubt it for a second—he would rather keep it in the alley, where he didn’t have to fret about civilians wandering into the line of fire. The alley’s distant mouth was problematic, open to the street for any shots downrange that missed their mark, but it was better than a dose of Wild Bunch action on a teeming thoroughfare.

The runner had to have thought so, too, because he stopped abruptly, jerked some kind of stubby automatic weapon from his waistband, and cut loose at his pursuer from thirty yards. Grimaldi dodged behind a large garbage bin to his left, heard slugs plowing through blacktop and a few more rattling off the far end of the bin.

Whatever his intended mark was carrying, it had a rapid rate of fire—one of the MACs, perhaps, or one of the homegrown knock-offs. Whatever, it could slice and dice a man in nothing flat, the down side being that it burned through magazines like there was no tomorrow.

And if the Stony Man pilot’s intended target blew his load on random fire, there wouldn’t be.

At least, for him.

Grimaldi risked a peek around the bin, and his enemy unleashed another burst, cut short as he ran out of ammunition. Switching magazines took time—not much, but possibly enough—and Grimaldi broke toward the spot where he had seen his man duck out of sight, behind another rusty bin marked with gang graffiti.

It was going to be close, but if his luck held...

He was halfway to his destination when the wiry runner popped back into view, his weapon leveled from the hip. Grimaldi fired without a break in stride, a short burst meant to wound, but that was tricky from a stationary post, much less while sprinting. He saw bullets strike the target’s shirt, crimson erupting through the white fabric, and then his guy was going down, wasting his fresh mag on a slash of open sky above the alley.

Grimaldi reached him, kicked his little SMG aside and crouched beside the dying terrorist. The pilot spoke English, Italian and a little Spanish, so he went with English first.

“You’re dying,” he informed the fallen gunman. “Do your soul a favor while you can. Tell me where I can find your buddies from the raid in Jordan.”

The shooter’s eyes were fading in and out of focus with the pulse of blood from open lips. Grimaldi wasn’t sure the guy could speak at all, but something came out, sounding like “Elif air ab tizak!” The way he smirked, despite his pain, told Grimaldi it hadn’t been a compliment.

And then, he died.

* * *

ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS WINDED, but he could not stop to catch his breath. Two men had chased him from the four-story apartment building, along with Khamis and Farsoun. One of them had pursued Farsoun when he broke ranks and fled across the street, a panicked move that nonetheless had helped Rajhid by splitting up their enemies. He’d tried to do the same again—and save himself—by sending Khamis east while he turned west at the next intersection, but the ploy had failed.

He was alone now, with an enemy behind him, closing in.

The MAC-10 underneath his belt was chafing, gouging Rajhid, but he could not pull it out in public, running down the sidewalk with the weapon in his hand. That would be desperate, a last resort, and only useful if he had a chance to kill his adversary with the first rounds from his small machine pistol.

If he was forced to use the gun with witnesses around, it did not matter who else fell, as long as Rajhid dropped his man and ended the insane pursuit. Beyond that, if his past experience was any guide, a blaze of gunfire on a busy street would shock and terrorize most workaday pedestrians and buy Rajhid enough time to escape on foot.

Where would he go?

There was another place in Ciudad del Este, operated by Hezbollah, though his brethren might not be pleased to see him after what had just occurred at their so-called secure facility. Police were probably swarming around the shooting scene by now, exposing things that Rajhid’s hosts would not appreciate.

It could be death, returning to their company—but at the moment, in this foreign land, he had no other choice.

Kill first, he thought. Then run and hide.

But first, if possible, he had to spot a likely murder site.

Not murder, he corrected. Self-defense.

He needed cover. Not a lot, but ample for a brief exchange of fire in case his first shots failed to do the trick. A drawn-out duel would be the death of him, no matter what his adversary’s fate. With cell phones all around him, someone—many someones—would alert police, bringing them down on top of him with sirens whoop-whoop-whooping like demented banshees.

That would be the end. A martyr’s death, of course, but not the one Rajhid envisioned for himself.

He still had plans for the jihad.

The cross street he had chosen was a kind of outdoor market, with stalls under awnings positioned outside stores. Its barely orchestrated chaos made him feel at home, reminding him of marketplaces where his mother used to shop, where he had run and played in childhood, still oblivious to all the perils of the world. Rajhid could pick out any stall and duck behind it for a moment, turn and—

Yes! the voice inside his head ordered. Stop wasting time!

* * *

MACK BOLAN SAW the changeup coming, read his target’s body language when the runner nearly glanced behind his shoulder, then resisted at the final instant. Breaking to the right meant running into traffic, no percentage there, but there were stalls and stores along the whole block to his left.

And left it was, a pivot in midstride, and Rajhid of the red shirt dropped from sight. Bolan slowed but didn’t halt his forward motion, just in case the Saudi had a bluff in mind, stalling pursuit with fear of gunfire, while he wriggled clear behind the outdoor stalls. It might have fooled somebody else, if that was what he had in mind, but not the Executioner.

Most definitely not this day, with so much riding on the line.

Bolan closed in at walking speed, ready to peel off left or right, depending on what happened in the next few seconds.

When it came, however, Bolan was surprised.

It started with a squeal. The woman selling used books from the stall where Rajhid had concealed himself let out the cry, as Rajhid sprang erect and whipped an arm around her throat, clutching her as a human shield. His weapon—a MAC-10 or MAC-11, unmistakable—was pressed against her head, its stubby muzzle in her ear. At that range, if Rajhid fired, he would blind himself with brain and bone fragments, but that would be no consolation to the woman he’d have killed.

Bolan already had the Steyr at his shoulder, half of Rajhid’s face framed in the reticle of his integrated telescopic sight. Rajhid was stuck there, obviously knowing that the only way to hide his face completely was to lose sight of his enemy.

“Put down the gun and you can walk away from this,” Bolan said, lying through his teeth.

“Put down your gun,” Rajhid replied, “and you can—”

Bolan’s bullet drilled Rajhid’s forehead just above his right eye. The 5.56 mm bullet left a tidy entrance wound, then tumbled through the man’s brain, yawing after it cleared the bony barrier of his frontal bone and found soft tissue. Dead before the impact registered, Rajhid slumped over backward, still clutching his female hostage as he fell.

Bolan was on the pair of them in nothing flat, released the woman from Rajhid’s dead grasp and plucked the subgun from his other hand. No questions would be answered here, but Bolan did his best under the circumstances, patting Rajhid’s several pockets, locating a compact satellite phone first and then a regular cell phone. He claimed both, then kept digging until he found a bulging wallet, while a group of cautious rubberneckers started edging closer.

Time to go.

Rising, he tucked the Steyr out of sight beneath his raincoat, left the stall with no attempt to hide his face and walked away. An alley beckoned to his left, and Bolan ducked in there, then sprinted down past its stinking garbage cans to reach another cross street, operating from a street map of the city he had memorized beforehand.

How long before police arrived to check out Rajhid’s corpse and start interrogating witnesses? The apartment-building battleground should distract most of them for a while. With any luck, enough time for him to regroup with Grimaldi and clear the scene.

When he was on the next street over, strolling with the flow, Bolan fished out his cell phone and pressed the button for Grimaldi’s number. Two rings in, he heard his voice.

“I blew it,” the Stony Man pilot confessed, without preliminaries. “Got the shot, but came up empty-handed.”

“Nearly the same for me,” Bolan replied, “but I’ve got two phones and a wallet.”

“Could be helpful,” Grimaldi said.

“Fingers crossed. I’ll meet you at the car in five.”


CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_0080901a-1761-558c-bada-6d4c63403520)

Walid Khamis sat and watched the Hezbollah fighters conferring in the dining room, just out of earshot from the sofa where they’d ordered him to sit and keep his mouth shut. They were angry, obviously, seeking ways to blame him for the raid on their apartment building, but he did not intend to stoke that anger by admitting the attack might well have been, in fact, his fault.

Not his specifically, of course, but all of theirs, his comrades and himself. He sat and wondered if the others, Rajhid and Farsoun, were even still alive.

Upon arrival in the city, when the Hezbollah team had grudgingly accepted them, Khamis and his companions had been warned against leaving the four-story apartment building. If they managed to forget that simple rule, or were forced out somehow and got lost, they’d been provided with an alternative address, the house in which he now sat, waiting for these strangers to decide his fate.

There was a chance, he understood, that they might kill him. Hezbollah was ruthless with its enemies, and he might qualify as one if they believed he was responsible for the attack on Calle Victor Hugo Norte, costing them that property and any men who had been killed or nabbed by the police because of it. They risked the wrath of God’s Hammer if they executed him, but Hezbollah was vastly larger than his own small group of fighters, famous globally for decades, and they feared no one.

His only hope, Khamis believed, was to play stupid, claim that he had no idea the raiders could have come for him and his compatriots specifically. The more he thought about it, Khamis almost managed to convince himself. Who could have traced their path to Paraguay and mounted an attack there, after all?

A phone rang in the dining room. One of the Hezbollah fighters answered, listened and answered in Spanish. Khamis had no clue what he had said, but when the call was ended, his interrogators whispered urgently among themselves, glancing frequently in his direction, then approached him as a group, their faces dour.

“Your friends are dead,” their spokesman told him bluntly.

“Both of them?” Khamis thought he could feel the planet tilting underneath him.

“Both. Shot down a mile apart. You separated?”

“To escape,” Khamis acknowledged. “Yes.”

“And you alone survived.” There was suspicion in the man’s gruff tone.

“If you say so.” A shameful tremor shook his voice. He had been disarmed upon arrival and felt vulnerable now, an easy target.

“We have had no trouble at the safe house for the past eight years,” his interrogator said. “You arrived mere days ago, and now we have a dozen soldiers dead, police demanding answers. It’s peculiar, you’d agree.”

“I would not,” Khamis answered. “You’re all fugitives from the Israelis and Crusaders, just as I am. Who’s to say they did not come for you, over the rockets that you send from Gaza?”

His hosts—captors?—exchanged dubious glances, two of them shaking their heads. Their mouthpiece said, “The timing is suggestive. We have no faith in coincidence.”

Khamis stiffened his spine and squared his shoulders. It was time to bluff, he thought. What did he have to lose?

“All right,” he said. “If you believe I am responsible for this somehow, then I shall leave you. Give my weapons back, and you will see no more of me. Whatever happens next, find someone else to blame.”

The Hezbollah man smiled at that, a hungry jackal’s smile.

“It’s not so easy,” he replied. “Before we rid ourselves of you, we must decide whether you are, in fact, responsible for this attack. If someone wants you, it may be to our advantage to accommodate them. Possibly, we might receive some compensation for our losses.”

Praying that they could not see him trembling, Khamis said, “So, you would ransom me? A soldier of the same cause you avow? I thought the men of Hezbollah were freedom fighters, not a pack of gangsters.”

“You’d be wise to say no more,” the leader warned him. “Even if we sell you, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t take a few fingers and toes.”

* * *

BOLAN AND GRIMALDI chowed down at an American fast-food restaurant, a familiar stop these days no matter where on Earth you were. Over hamburgers and fries with coffee, Bolan gutted Rajhid’s wallet, while Grimaldi did the same with one he’d lifted from Salman Farsoun. Walid Khamis was in the wind.

Between the two of them, the fallen God’s Hammer members had been carrying a hundred and fifty thousand Paraguayan guaranís—some thirty-five US dollars—in cash, two bogus passports and a notebook, Farsoun’s, filled with Arabic notations Bolan couldn’t translate. He set the currency aside, secured the notebook in his pocket and placed the other items on the empty seat beside him, where he planned to leave them when they left the restaurant.

That left the telephones, two cells and Rajhid’s satellite phone. Each of them took a cell phone first, scrolling through their memories in search of any recent numbers called by either of the two dead terrorists.

“Nothing on this the past ten days,” Grimaldi said.

“I’ve got one local call,” Bolan replied. “Prefix sixty-one. Rajhid called it three days ago.”

“Around the time they’d have checked into Hezbollah Arms,” Grimaldi stated.

“We can try for an address from Stony Man,” Bolan suggested, reaching for the small sat phone. Three calls had been logged in memory and not erased, a bonehead move. He set the phone beside Grimaldi’s plastic food tray. “Do the numbers ring a bell?”

The Stony Man pilot studied them. “The 249 is a country code, so forty-one is the city and the rest a local number. Off the top, I couldn’t tell you where it is. Sorry.”

Bolan got out his smartphone, thankful that the restaurant offered free Wi-Fi. He went online to check the foreign phone codes, found what he was looking fo, and told Grimaldi, “Two forty-nine is Sudan. The city code’s Kassala.”

“Never heard of it.”

“More homework for the Farm. I’ll send the numbers through.”

He switched to email on the smartphone, typed an address that would eventually allow the message to reach Stony Man Farm in Virginia without pinpointing his or Stony Man’s location and sent two phone numbers with a request for a speedy response. It was a relatively easy job for Aaron Kurtzman’s cyber-team, hopefully landing some pointers for Bolan within the half hour.

“When we get the local number—” Grimaldi began.

“We check it out.”

“Hoping Khamis is there, assuming that he even knows where there is.”

“Hoping,” Bolan granted. “If he’s not around, smart money says we’ll find another Hezbollah hangout.”

“Small favors.” Grimaldi was working on his last few fries. He washed them down with coffee, pushing back his tray. “Ready when you are, kemo sabe.”

Zermatt, Switzerland

SALEH KABEER WAS dining when Mohammed Sanea interrupted, bringing him a sat phone.

“My apologies,” Sanea said. “A call from Paraguay.”

Kabeer frowned at his second in command. “Rajhid?”

Sanea shook his head. “One of the Hezbollah men. Ashraf Tannous, he says.”

The frown became a scowl. Kabeer set down his fork and took the phone, waving Sanea toward the nearest exit from the dining room.

“Greetings.”

“And greeting be unto you,” the caller replied. “I hope I have not reached you at an inconvenient time.”

Kabeer glanced at his cooling dinner, likely ruined by the interruption. “Not at all,” he lied.

“We have a problem,” the man said. “Is this line secure?”

“It is, if you are.”

“Very good. I’m sorry to report that there has been...an incident.”

“Explain.” Kabeer was not the most patient of men, nor the most courteous.

“Crusaders have attacked a safe house here. It’s possible they came for your men.”

“Possible?”

The caller’s shrug was nearly audible. “Your three fled from the building. They were followed. Two of them are dead now.”

“Followed.” He was sounding like an echo chamber. “Do you mean pursued?”

“It seems so.”

“You say two are dead,” Kabeer stated.

“We have the third one here, Walid Khamis. He claims it was coincidence.”

“You disagree?”

“The evidence—” the caller began.

“I understand. Is he available to speak with me?”

“One moment.”

It took longer, but Kabeer tried not to grind his teeth. When Khamis came on the line at last, his tone was cautious, worried.

“Sir, have they explained what happened?”

“Not in any great detail. We’ve lost two friends, I understand?”

“Yes, sir. I can’t explain it, but—”

“Another time, perhaps,” Kabeer said, cutting off the man’s inept apology. “When we can speak more privately.”

“Of course, sir...if there is another time.”

“Why should there not be?”

“They...um...are considering a ransom.”

“Are they?”

“I’ve discouraged it, of course, but—”

“Pass me back to Tannous, if you’d be so kind.”

“Yes, sir.”

Another moment’s silence, then Tannous came on the line again. “You’ve finished with your man, then?”

Kabeer ignored the question, asking, “What is this about a ransom?”

He had spoiled Tannous’s lead-up to the pitch. The Hezbollah cell leader took time to clear his throat, then said, “Housing your men has cost us more than we anticipated. Twelve men dead, and our best safe house lost for good. I feel we should be compensated.”

“You feel?” Kabeer challenged. “Have you discussed this plan with your superiors?”

“They have received a tabulation of the damages,” Tannous replied, rather evasively.

“And their response?”

“I’m waiting for it now.”

“Do you imply that my men are responsible for the attack on yours? And if so, what do you present as evidence?”

“They were pursued by two Crusaders from the scene. Why them, if they were not the targets?”

“Ask the two Crusaders,” Kabeer told him.

“I would, and gladly, if we had them here.”

“So, you don’t know who sent them? Whether they’re Americans, Israelis? Nothing?”

“At the moment—”

“I thought not. But since you seek to profit from a tragedy we share, here is my offer—nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Tell Walid our prayers are with him. We shall miss him—and we shall remember you.”

Smiling at last, Kabeer cut off the call and turned back to his veal.

Barrio San Blas, Ciudad del Este

THE CALL CAME in twenty minutes, not a record for the Farm, but close. Kurtzman—called “Bear” by anyone who knew him well—read off two addresses, the first on Avenida San José in Ciudad del Este, the other in Kassala, halfway round the world, in far-eastern Sudan.

“That’s near a teaching hospital,” Kurtzman added. “Also near the Mareb River, if that helps.”

“It will, when we get there,” Bolan replied.

“It’s not the best place to go hunting, but you know that, right?”

“We do,” Bolan agreed.

Sudan’s latest civil war had dragged on for more than two decades, finally ending—at least, on paper—in 2005. Before the ink was dry on that treaty, slave traders went back to business as usual, capturing at least two-hundred-thousand victims in the intervening years, while mayhem in Darfur killed at least three-hundred-thousand people, displacing nearly three million more. Some of that was religious warfare, Muslims versus Christians, and conversion from Islam to Christianity ranked as a capital crime in Sudan. A recent State Department report found that in the Darfur slaughter, all parties to the conflict committed serious crimes.

Nothing much had changed since then. At least, not for the better.

“Well, take care,” Kurtzman said, at a sudden loss for words.

“I always do,” Bolan replied.

The computer wizard was laughing when he cut the link.

“So, what’s the word?” Grimaldi asked him.

“We’re good to go on both ends,” Bolan said. “Addresses, anyway.”

“And what’s the game plan if we don’t find Khamis at the new place? Do we stick around and hunt for him?”

Bolan had already considered that and shook his head. “If he hasn’t gone back to the Hezbollah team, it means he’s on his own and likely lost in Ciudad del Este. Or he could’ve caught the first bus out of town, maybe across the Río Paraná to Foz do Iguaçu. From there, who knows where?”

Foz do Iguaçu lay just across the river, linked by a Friendship Bridge constructed to promote traffic between Paraguay and Brazil. Another crossing, the San Roque González de Santa Cruz Bridge, carried traffic back and forth between Ciudad del Este and Posadas, capital of Argentina’s Misiones province. Either way, there’d be no way to track Walid Khamis once he slipped out of town.

Welcome to the wonderful Triple Frontier.

“The good news,” Bolan said, “is that he’s stranded here, at least for now. If we can find the other remnants of his crew and deal with them, he’s neutralized.”

“Until he makes his way back home and finds another crew,” Grimaldi pointed out.

“It’s not ideal, I grant you,” Bolan answered. “But the time we’d waste looking for him across three countries gives his thirteen pals a chance to plan their next performance.”

“Right, a trade-off. So we’d better hit it.”

Outside, the rain had stopped, and steam was rising from the pavement. To Bolan, glancing up and down the street, it seemed as if fires were burning underneath the city, looking for a place to break through and devour everyone above.

* * *

“YOUR FRIENDS DON’T want you back, it seems,” Ashraf Tannous told Walid Khamis.

“You expected them to pay for me?” Khamis was smiling, but it strained the muscles in his face and did nothing to ease the sickly churning in his stomach.

Tannous shrugged, seeming disinterested. “It was worth a try,” he said. “My problem, now, is what to do with you.”

“Release me,” Khamis offered. “Then you have no problem.”

“On the contrary. I doubt you’d last two days in Paraguay alone, much less in Argentina or Brazil. You don’t speak Spanish, don’t speak Portuguese, can barely manage simple English. How long until you make a mistake and find yourself in custody? From there, it’s but a short step back to us, when you begin to squeal.”

“I’m not a rat,” Khamis said indignantly.

“Not a rat so far,” Tannous corrected him. “Police in Paraguay...well, let us say they are not known for sensitivity, especially to foreigners.”

“Are they worse than the Saudis?” Khamis challenged him. “Worse than the Egyptians? Worse than the Syrian?”

“After the bloodiness this afternoon, they will be hunting Arabs to arrest and question. You, alone, don’t stand a chance against them.”

“So, show me a way out of the city, then,” Khamis replied.

“I have already lost a dozen men because of you and your two friends. You think I’d risk another? Even one?”

“What, then?” Khamis asked Tannous, hating how his dry throat made his voice crack.

“You disappear,” Tannous replied. “If any of your comrades ask—which seems unlikely, you’ll admit—I simply say that we released you, at your own request, to make your way...wherever.”

“Kabeer will not believe it.”

“Have you not been listening? Your friend Kabeer told me to deal with you as I see fit.

“All of Israel wants me dead,” Tannous reminded him, smiling, “along with half of the United States, at least, and much of Britain. The Saudis have sentenced me to death in absentia. Warrants are out for my arrest in Syria and Jordan. I assure you, little man, that Saleh Kabeer is the least of my worries.”

As Tannous spoke, he reached around behind his back and drew a pistol from its place beneath his shirttail. Khamis recognized the Beretta 92 issued to Paraguayan military officers as a standard sidearm, then noticed its extended, threaded muzzle, added to accept a sound suppressor.

“I’m sorry that you ever came here,” Tannous said. “More sorry for my brothers than for you, of course, but still. You struck a blow at the Crusaders. It’s unfortunate that you’ve become a liability.”

Walid Khamis was tired of worrying about what happened next. Now that his fate was sealed, he simply wanted to get on with it and minimize the small talk. Paradise awaited him, he still felt sure. Tannous was simply standing in his way.

“So, kill me, then,” he blurted, as Tannous affixed a sound suppressor to his Beretta. One of his men had produced it from a pocket, all the time watching Khamis for his reaction, seeming disappointed when he did not weep and wail.

“You’re anxious now?” Tannous inquired. “Ready to see the virgins waiting for you? Or would you prefer boys, if I may ask?”

“Bastard!” Khamis spit back at him.

“Alas, my mother is deceased, but she would not have joined in any such activity were she still living. Now, your jackal of a father, on the other hand—”

Khamis lunged for him, hands formed into claws, but someone struck him from behind, and suddenly the lights went out.

* * *

“IT DOESN’T LOOK like much,” Grimaldi said, as they rolled past the target.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Bolan said. “Low profile. Trying to fit in.”

“And Bear was clear about the address?”

“Crystal,” Bolan said. “He’s never steered me wrong.”

“Okay.”

It was still daylight as they drove down Avenida San José, but dusk was closing in on Ciudad del Este after one hellacious afternoon. Bolan knew crime was rampant all along the Triple Frontier, but he had no idea what the average daily murder rate might be for any of the district’s top three border cities. The number was totally irrelevant, but he and Grimaldi had bumped the day’s statistics.

And they were about to give the stats another nudge.

The rain had passed but might return at any time. Both warriors left on their raincoats, concealment for the weapons hanging from their shoulder slings, pistols in armpit leather, frag grenades attached to belts. Even in Ciudad del Este, those accoutrements would raise eyebrows and have observers reaching for their cell phones to alert police.

Their Bluetooth headsets, on the other hand, were normal.

On the drive across town, Grimaldi had scanned the neighborhood on Google Earth, getting the layout and an aerial of the Hezbollah safe house. It was on the small side, maybe four bedrooms, although he couldn’t judge the floor plan from a snapshot of the roof, taken from outer space. The last snap hadn’t captured any dogs roaming the fenced backyard, which faced a narrow alley at the rear. There’d been no guards outside, either, and Bolan wasn’t sure exactly what to think of that.

It could go either way, he knew, after their hit on Calle Victor Hugo Norte. If the Hezbollah hardmen were hurt and spooked badly enough, they might have fled the city, but he didn’t think so. It was more likely, to Bolan’s mind, that they would go to ground at their alternate hideout, pull the blinds and disconnect the phones, hoping the storm blew past them and moved on.

If he was wrong, this second stop-off was a waste of time. They should be airborne, winging out of Paraguay and toward their next meeting with God’s Hammer, on the far side of the world.

But Bolan wasn’t often wrong. He had a feel for what his enemies were thinking, how they’d play it in a given situation. Even dealing with fanatics hyped on hatred and religion, he could get inside most predators’ minds and guess what to expect, at least in generalities.

Because at bottom, where it mattered, they were all the same.

“You want the front or back?” Bolan asked.

“Front,” Grimaldi said. “I know enough Spanish to confuse them and get a foot in the door.”

“As long as they don’t chop it off,” Bolan said.

“No problemo, señor.”

“Okay, you convinced me.”

The back door could go either way, once Grimaldi dropped in around in front. The men they wanted could come boiling out the back or plaster Grimaldi with everything they had to keep him out. If it went down that way, Bolan would be a rude surprise for them, another drop-in they were not expecting.

Watching curtained windows as he made his move, he steeled himself for anything.


CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_5ddbf374-6341-5cb5-8532-d231520997e5)

Jack Grimaldi felt like Avon calling, but with nothing anyone inside the target house would want to buy. The treatment he prescribed wouldn’t improve their health or make them more attractive, but at least, if he applied it properly, the world would be a better place when he was done.

And would he still be living in it?

Doorbells hadn’t caught on yet, it seemed, in Ciudad del Este, though the door did have a peephole set at about eye level for a person five foot four or five. Whoever answered to his knocking wouldn’t see the Spectre M4 held against Grimaldi’s hip, ready to rise and shine the moment that the door was opened, but they’d have a fish-eyed view of the Stony Man pilot’s face underneath a faded baseball cap.

Just for the hell of it, he smiled.

Footsteps approached the door. Grimaldi willed himself to stay relaxed, at least to all outward appearances. A shadow blocked the peephole and a man’s voice called out to him through the door, “Quién es?”

They were speaking Spanish. Great. Grimaldi didn’t know how long the Hezbollah team had been in Paraguay or how much of the native language they had learned, but he could only bluff it out. Dropping his voice a notch to make the doorman strain his ears, he answered back.

“Es mi amigo en su casa hoy?”

Grimaldi had no friends in town, and if he had, they wouldn’t have been here, but what the hell.

“Que estás diciendo?”

Good question. What was he saying, standing there and waiting for a storm of bullets to rip through the door at any second? Broadening his smile, he tried again, pure gibberish this time.

“Mi perro es loco ahora por dias.”

The doorman wasn’t loving it. “Usted tiene la casa equivocada. Vete!”

But Grimaldi didn’t have the wrong house, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Mi elefante está enfermo,” he said, almost whispering, forcing the doorman to lean in closer to hear him.

“Que?”

Instead of answering that time, Grimaldi raised his SMG and fired a short burst through the door, approximately were the greeter’s torso ought to be, eyes slitted against any blowback from the flimsy paneling. A swift kick to the lock forced the door open, and it caught the Hezbollah gunner inside as he was falling, shoving him away to clear the threshold.

A hallway stretched in front of Grimaldi, rooms branching off to either side, the home’s back door facing the pilot from the far end of the corridor. In Dixie, once upon a time, they called homes with that simple layout shotgun houses, meaning you could fire a weapon through the front door, down the hall, into the yard out back, and never hit an intervening wall.

Somewhere inside the house, from some room to his left, a man called out a question. This one spoke in Arabic, not trusting Spanish, and Grimaldi didn’t bother answering. He ducked into the first room on his right and found a parlor, unoccupied, a TV set playing without an audience. Contestants on a game show looked excited, but Grimaldi didn’t have a clue what they were doing.

Two male voices called down the hallway now, first curious, then shouting when they saw their buddy stretched out in the foyer, marinating in a pool of blood. More voices answered from the back, all Arabic, and Grimaldi heard automatic weapons being primed.

The doorman he had taken down was not Walid Khamis. As for the rest, he’d have to meet the lot of them head-on and see what he could see. Grimaldi smiled ferociously and went to meet his enemies.

* * *

ASHRAF TANNOUS HAD watched while others rolled Walid Khamis up in a plastic tarp, secured at each end by black zip ties. Perhaps, he thought, the worthless slug would suffocate in there while they transported him to a disposal site, and save Tannous a bullet. They would have to check him, though, and not risk leaving him to struggle free once they had left

Another problem, courtesy of the strangers whom he had been ordered to accept as guests, providing shelter until it was safe for them to leave. Now, they were never leaving Paraguay, and neither were a dozen of his soldiers who had died in vain, protecting them.

Stupid.

The men in charge of Hezbollah should never have agreed to hide the upstarts from God’s Hammer, but they did not consult Tannous on such decisions, even when the order put his life at risk. He would be happy when the last of them was gone, and wondered if he ought to leave a message with the corpse, something to lead police away from Hezbollah, or would that only make things worse?

A knocking on the door distracted him. He heard Adel Asaad answer the summons, using the Spanish he had learned to send away whoever it might be. Tannous leaned into the hallway, listening, and saw Asaad bending as if to press his ear against the door. In profile, the man looked confused, then angry at whatever he was hearing, all of it inaudible beyond the threshold.

Asaad ordered the pest to go away. Tannous could understand that much, but something else was said, causing Asaad to stoop once more and ask a question. When a burst of automatic fire ripped into him, causing Tannous to jump, the shots were nearly silent but for rattling sounds as they punched through the cheap front door.

Tannous backpedaled, nearly tripping over Khamis in his rolled tarp, cursing as he heard the front door to the house being smashed open. There were no shouts to identify police, but what did that mean, in a town like Ciudad del Este, where the police were a lawless bunch?

Nothing.

Tannous could hear his soldiers rallying, responding to the sudden threat. He stood immobile for an instant, looming over Khamis, then bent and probed the bundle with his free hand, searching for the interloper’s head.

A muffled protest told him when he’d found it, and Tannous stepped back a pace, then fired two muted shots into the plastic where his finger marks were visible. Another second, and the dead man’s blood spilled out, pooling at first, then seeping into cracks between the wooden floor’s thin slats.

At least that job was done, and he could leave disposal to whoever managed to survive the firefight now in progress, echoing throughout the house. Whoever wanted him could have the worthless dog. Tannous had to think about survival now, and that meant getting out before he wound up with a bullet in his own head.

Job one was to obtain a better weapon. He’d already fired two of his pistol’s fifteen rounds and was not carrying an extra magazine. More firepower improved his chances of escaping, and the instrument was already at hand.

Stepping around the leaking bundle on the floor, Tannous retrieved an AK-47 from a nearby coffee table. The assault rifles were plentiful in Paraguay, despite laws restricting civilian ownership. They were traded for drugs at the border, no cash changing hands, or sold by rebel groups who needed money more than surplus arms. Tannous’s rifle was a vintage weapon but in good shape, loaded with a 40-round curved magazine that had another taped beside it, in reverse, for quick reloading in a fight.

He jacked a round into the chamber, swallowed hard and braced himself to join the fight—just as another home invader smashed in the back door.

* * *

BOLAN HAD MISSED Grimaldi’s entry to the house but heard it loud and clear when the defenders opened up on him in there. He waited for a heartbeat, just in case some of them tried to rush the back door, then he gave the door a flying kick beside the dead bolt and pushed through.

Downrange, the front door stood wide open with a body wedged behind it. There was no sign of Grimaldi, but his work was recognizable. Movement to Bolan’s left directed his attention to a kitchen, where two bearded men had been distracted from the chore of chopping vegetables and dropping them into a pot. Both of the Hezbollah hardmen held knives, but neither seemed to have a gun.

Bolan shot them, anyway, one muffled 5.56 mm round apiece, then scanned the kitchen to make sure he hadn’t overlooked a lurker waiting for the chance to jump him once his back was turned.

How many rooms were left to clear? Oddly, the house seemed smaller on the inside than it had when he was on the street, the very opposite of what he usually found on entering an unfamiliar structure. When he checked the central hallway once again, Bolan knew why: there was a second corridor, crossing the first halfway between the home’s two doors, with more rooms leading off it from either side.

More to explore. More traps waiting to close around him, if he didn’t watch his step.

More places for Walid Khamis to hide himself.

Shooting on the street side of the house had lagged for just a moment, but it started up again now, drawing Bolan toward the fight. He still had no idea how many Hezbollah gunners were in the house, how many more might be arriving from some errand or in answer to a hurried cell phone call once Grimaldi had breached the front door, but the racket they were making now would surely prompt at least one neighbor to alert police.

There was no time to waste.

Bolan had only two rules that he followed without deviation in his endless war. First, he would always minimize the risk to innocent civilians before he made a move or pulled a trigger. Second, he would not kill a cop. He viewed police in general as soldiers of the same side, earning danger money in pursuit of criminals.

If cops arrived, he had two choices: slip away somehow, or go to jail.

And jail, inevitably, would mean death.

Hearing the clock tick in his head, he left the kitchen, edged along the hallway toward the sounds of combat, closing on the next two doors in line. One ought to be a dining room, judging by proximity to the kitchen, while the other would be up for grabs.

The door to Bolan’s right flew open as he neared it, someone coming late to join the party, with a toilet and a dripping shower in the background. It was not Walid Khamis, which made the new arrival Hezbollah. He had a pistol in his hand, a towel around his waist and an expression on his face that might have been excitement, maybe fear. Whichever, Bolan shot him through his naked chest before the man had an opportunity to attack him.

Four down, including Grimaldi’s kill in the entryway, but from the sound of it, there were enough defenders left to hold the house if they could pull themselves together and decide on a strategy.

His job was to make sure they died before they had that chance.

* * *

ASHRAF TANNOUS SPENT a moment in the open doorway, wondering if he should fight or flee. He was a leader, with a certain standard to uphold, but that was only useful if he lived to fight another day.

The neighborhood would surely be aroused by now. The police were not loved there, were rarely called, and never to a simple family disturbance, but he knew that someone would alert them to a full-scale battle going on. Arrest meant prison, once they found Khamis and matched the bullets from his body to Tannous’s pistol. There was no death penalty in Paraguay, but he would rather die than spend his life inside a stinking prison cell.

With that in mind, Tannous began to plan his exit from the house. The room where he had killed Khamis was windowless—the very reason he had chosen it—so he would have to find another exit. That meant moving toward the sounds of gunfire and away from safety for the moment, until he could break off to the left or right, choosing a door and slipping through it, hopefully unseen.

Get on with it, a harsh voice in his mind commanded, spurring Tannous into motion. Three of his men passed by his doorway, one of them—Maroun Rahal—pausing to stare at him and ask, “Are you all right, Ashraf?”

“Fine,” he replied. “I’m right behind you.”

With a jerky nod, Rahal moved on, seemingly anxious for his chance to face the unknown enemy.

Young fools. At Rahal’s age, Tannous had felt the same, but he had quickly learned to bide his time, strike without warning and retreat, keeping survival foremost in his mind. Let others wear the vests with high explosives packed in scrap metal and cow dung, hastening their flight to Paradise. Tannous was happy to remain on Earth and plot his moves against the enemy from safety, letting others do his killing for him—and the dying, too.

What famous general in history was not the same?

He stepped into the hallway, saw Rahal and his companions jogging off to meet whatever fate awaited them, and followed at a cautious distance. When they reached the central, east-west corridor, Rahal and company turned left. Tannous had picked the opposite direction as his best path to escape, and he would hold to that unless something prevented him from using it.

“There is no shame in living,” Tannous muttered to himself. In fact, it was his duty to their sacred cause.

An explosion rocked the house as Tannous neared the central hallway. A hand grenade, he thought, and that was bad, because his men had none, even assuming they were fools enough to set one off indoors, where it could kill or wound their comrades. That told Tannous that his enemies had come prepared for anything and did not plan on taking prisoners.





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