Righteous Fear Read online

  Bolan took aim with the FN SCAR-L, having replaced its shorter close-quarters barrel with a full 18-inch long barrel. He’d loaded the rifle with heavyweight boat-tail hollowpoint rounds and attached a suppressor to the end. The Executioner had gauged the distance to the rooftop gunner as 115 yards, and blowing flags gave him an estimate of the wind and airspeed.

  A few pounds of pressure on the trigger, a controlled squeeze and the Stony Man warrior lined his point of aim onto the bridge of the sentry’s nose. Bolan broke the trigger and 5.56 mm of steel-jacketed, spoon-nosed death smashed through the rifleman’s face. Brain matter gushed out around the entrance wound, and the exiting slug carried away a portion of the guy’s skull. The dead terrorist flopped back, rifle clattering by his side.

  At over a hundred yards away, the gunshot was imperceptible to anyone inside the garage.

  Bolan tracked to the minimart and the clerk at the counter. He hadn’t reacted to the gunshot, nor the sound of the body that had collapsed onto the roof.

  The Executioner looked more closely at the clerk. The young man was at his station, behind treated Plexiglas that was resistant to gunfire, a cage in which a gas station clerk lived during his work shift. It was a prison designed to keep an armed robber from adding cold-blooded murder to his robbery attempt. Sometimes it worked, other times the thief escaped with several less bullets and no money, a lifeless body slumped against the cigarette shelves. Normally, such a young man would seem bored, but this guy seemed nervous. He wasn’t looking for trouble from outside, either. He glanced continually at the door that linked the store to the garage.

  Worries danced on the youth’s face and they were the worries of someone thrown into the deep end of a crisis. He was involved in something he wanted no part of. Bolan had seen that look in the faces of dozens, hundreds, of young conscripts. He had sympathy for the kid. Young men like him were not the kind of troops the Executioner battled against. If given a sliver of an opportunity, they would throw down their guns and flee the battlefield, never to raise a hand in violence ever again.

  The kid was Muslim, but he wasn’t an Islamist. Islamists were the white supremacists of the Arab world, but instead of hatred and entitlement to the top caste of society based upon skin color, it was based around religious faith. Islamists believed in a theocracy, not rule by logic and democracy.

  Followers of Islam who just practiced their faith were not the kind of maniacs who cheered bombings of human beings.

  The youth was a noncombatant.

  Should the Executioner encounter him, he would let the kid go free.

  Majnuna and Asada spoke, their voices over the earpiece Bolan wore to keep tabs on the terrorists’ surveillance. They discussed the void of coverage for Islamic terrorists on the loose in Mobile.

  Bolan stowed his assault rifle and drew his Brügger & Thomet MP-9. He kept the earpiece in place and got out of his hide. He was in his blacksuit, and armed for war. He jogged the distance to the gas station. He was glad that his holsters and magazine pouches were more black-on-black, and he avoided the headlights of traffic. The MP-9 itself was similarly dark against his big frame. It took a few moments, merely the entirety of a philosophical discussion between terrorists about their faith in their path of violence, and he was at the front door to the minimart.

  The Executioner strolled through the entrance of the store. The kid behind the counter didn’t even look up from a worn-out porno mag left by the register. His attention wasn’t drawn by the ding of a customer’s arrival, and he flipped his gaze easily away from the shapely, naked women on the page to see if the men in the garage were there.

  “Slow night,” Bolan said through the hole in the Plexiglas.

  “Yeah,” the kid replied. He finally turned his attention toward the one-man army in front of him, bristling with an arsenal for mayhem. “Oh.”

  “You don’t want to be here,” Bolan said.

  The kid shook his head. “Hell no, I don’t.”

  “Are you locked in there?” the Executioner asked.

  “Yeah, I am,” the clerk replied. “You gonna kill me?”

  “No,” Bolan said. He drew a combat knife and sized up the employee’s only door leading to the cash register. He wedged the chisel tip into the jamb near the lock and swatted the pommel three times. The lock gave up and the clerk opened the door.

  “There’s a lot of them in there,” the kid said. “And they’ve all got guns.”

  “Good, so do I,” Bolan replied. “Get out of here. Go home. None of this will fall on you.”

  Majnuna’s voice intruded through Bolan’s earpiece. “Why are we hearing nothing from the police?”

  The Executioner quickly hit a button on his combat smart tablet. He pulled it out, found the radio app and locked onto the police scanner frequency that Majnuna listened to, using the surveillance program. He growled his answer to Majnuna’s rhetorical question.

  One thing that Bolan learned long ago was the power of panic over an enemy. He’d proved it with loud and deadly precision gunfire and distraction devices back at the abandoned factory. He would further utilize it here in the quiet gas station garage.

  Through the connecting door, and over the surveillance feed, he heard Majnuna and Asada react to his sudden intrusion.

  They knew he was coming, but they had no idea how close he was to them. For all they knew, he had a brick-piercing anti-materiel rifle aimed at them. Or, he was on the other side of a door that led to the garage from the outside. Their boy at the cash register surely would have warned them, or made some sort of noise if the Executioner raided them through the store.

  He stretched out a fiber-optic camera from a spool on the combat tablet and stuck it under the door. He swept the garage floor, taunting Majnuna in his most intimidating voice.

  “Men!” Majnuna yelled. “We’re getting raided!”

  The terrorists in the garage headed for automobile bay doors or a service entrance. No one spared a glance at the door connecting to the store. They were so sure of themselves, their rooftop sniper and the allegiance of a frightened teenager, that they had their attention focused elsewhere. Even if they had sent a guard to this doorway, Bolan would be prepared for his arrival thanks to the fish-eye lens on the under-door camera.

  He tested the lock. He had free access to the garage.

  Taking a flash-bang grenade off his battle harness and arming it, Bolan turned the door’s handle and lobbed the mini bomb into the garage.

  The ensuing thunderclap was the signal for the festivities to begin.

  Chapter Nine

  Mack Bolan’s distraction device erupted moments before he put the door between himself and its detonation. He’d sailed the flash-bang ten yards into the garage, so he would be out of its effective range, sparing his eardrums and preventing a serious sinus headache, but the door also provided him with further protection should anyone spot his sudden movement and fire.

  The fuse on the flash-bang bounced brutally off the door, denting it on the Executioner’s side, so the prescience of putting sheet metal between him and the noisemaker kept him safe from serious injury. As soon as the detonation cracked and the door deformed under several ounces of high-velocity metal, Bolan threw it open and charged through.

  He hadn’t counted on bright light to do much in the well-lit garage, but one of the terrorists turned blindly toward him. His nose bled, greasy red streaks furrowing through his mustache and down his stubble-covered chin. The terrorist had probably seen better days where he didn’t wear a thick sheet of crimson over his jaw, but he wouldn’t see another.

  The Arab gunman had a machine pistol that looked much like Bolan’s own and, even deafened or suffering sinus rupture, he still had the presence of mind to swing the gun toward the Executioner.

  Bolan had the MP-9 at his shoulder within a moment and a caress of the trigger enabled him to kill the terrorist
with a salvo of four 9 mm projectiles. Majnuna’s gunman jerked violently as a cloverleaf of slugs ripped through his work shirt. Only one bullet hadn’t struck bone and popped out his back to clang loudly off the garage bay door behind him. The others shredded lung and arteries, broken pieces of rib added to the flesh rending mayhem like billiard balls scattered by a cue ball.

  One killer dead, nine more staggered by a deafening blast. Bolan scanned the room. He wanted Majnuna and Asada most. If either of them got away, Dr. Annis Hassan would find no peace. Bolan’s sweep of the room informed him that both of those targets had ducked out of sight. With cars and SUVs in the garage, there were plenty of places for them to find concealment, bulletproof cover at that. A couple vehicles were on hydraulic lifts, which meant that they were useless as escape vehicles. Rolling tool cabinets and worktables provided more places for enemies to seek protected places to fire from.

  Those few moments of searching allowed another of the Arab gunmen to open up. If the initial flash-bang hadn’t been deafening enough, then the naked muzzle-flash and roar of a short-barreled M-4 hit Bolan’s senses like a brick, even through his ear protection. The only thing that kept the carbine’s bullets from striking him, rather than merely the blast wave of the stubby barreled weapon, was its shooter’s haste, his senses numbed and concussed by the flash-bang, and the flash of the gunman’s profile that Bolan caught moments before he pulled the trigger.

  The Executioner stitched the rifleman with a quick burst. A row of 9 mm entry wounds stitched the terrorist’s chest with grisly power and efficiency. The gunman had no control over his full-auto rifle, likely a kitchen table conversion because it didn’t stop shooting even when it had almost wrestled itself out of its owner’s hands under recoil. Ceiling lights shattered as bullets ripped into them. Sparks and broken bulb glass rained over the garage.

  Handgun fire erupted from different directions and Bolan felt one round glance off his armored, load-bearing vest. He threw himself to the ground immediately, the door of a Chevy Malibu sporting new ventilation originally meant for the Executioner. The window on a Toyota pickup shattered and Bolan brushed the cubed safety glass from his face. Two shooters had joined the firefight and both of them came close to ending this hard probe early. Bolan looked beneath the frame of the pickup, then the sedan, but the shooters were too far out of his line of sight to present their feet.

  His sweep for exposed enemy legs ended as the two cars around him took more fire intended for him. Windows burst under impacts; sheet metal and fiberglass popped on impacts. The Executioner’s battle computer-quick brain concluded that firing under the chassis of a car would not buy him time. Instead, he grabbed a pair of smoke grenades off his harness, hooked the cotter rings and popped the pins out of them. He hurled the smokers as they started to vomit chemical clouds. White and dark gas erupted from nozzles on either grenade as they flew in low arcs over the vehicles he hid behind.

  Gunfire paused as the garage darkened with the contents of the grenade. Bolan scurried to his hands and knees. It was time to leave this gap between the two vehicles, and as soon as he no longer needed his hands for support, he clutched the Brügger & Thomet MP-9 and shouldered it. As he charged from cover, he slammed hard into another terrorist.

  This one was easily six feet and had a torso of hard muscle under a soft shell of fat, giving his chest a barrel appearance. It was like running into a wall as their heads and torsos collided. Machine pistol struck machine pistol, as well, knocking the weapons from two sets of numbed hands. Bolan hooked his arm over the bed of the Toyota pickup to keep his footing, while the terrorist stumbled back three steps. His thick black beard split with a slash of gritted teeth, green eyes blazing with rage.

  “I’m gonna rip your head off, infidel,” the man growled in English.

  Bolan put his weight on the sidewall of the pickup’s bed and brought up both feet. The truck suspended his weight enough for the Executioner to kick his opponent in both knees, one heel per leg. The snap-kick rewarded Bolan with two wet cracks and the gunman stumbled even more. He could no longer support his own weight and crashed to the garage’s hard, smooth concrete floor.

  Bolan was glad for the sling on his MP-9, as it kept him from losing the weapon after releasing his grip on it. As he returned to his feet and let go of the Toyota, he clutched the gun. He bent his knees and ducked, as well. Bullets rattled on the fender of the pickup; shooters had heard the brief sound of conflict and aimed for the noise.

  The Executioner crouch-walked across the garage floor, head low until he reached the back of a black SUV. Bullets no longer chased him, but he closed in on a fourth terrorist in the midst of reloading his handgun. The two men could only see each other as blurs in smoky wisps. Bolan knew that he had no friends in this garage, but the other man paused at the sight of someone who might be an ally. His concern that he might shoot a friend cost him his life.

  “Who’s that?” the hand gunner asked. He raised his pistol, but before he could bring the sights up to eye level, Bolan burned him down with a burst to the face. Four bullets smashed his features into a chunky pulp and slammed him hard into the wall. The worktable behind him upended, spilling tools to the concrete floor. A lamp crashed, its light bulb exploding like a single gunshot.

  The remaining terrorists had a hard time seeing through the gloom, but they were able to hear where the gunfire and body fall originated. That brought down firepower on the Executioner’s position, but so far, nobody’s bullets had the power to break the bullet-resistant glass or to penetrate the shell of the SUV. It was a Ford, he could finally see, and it looked up-armored for the terrorists. No company had left their logo in the corners of any of the blacked-out windows, which meant that this was an off-the-books job, albeit professionally done. Bolan chalked all of this up to the kind of money that the Taliban made from opium and heroin smuggling networks. Even with a vast area of their poppy fields taken over and destroyed by Coalition forces, those old smuggling networks were still in place with an infrastructure to transport other items.

  An underground cottage industry for armored cars had grown for drug dealers and arms traffickers, and both of those easily explained the presence of this rolling civilian tank.

  The ruckus pulled attention and gunfire, but the SUV took it. Bolan noted that the windows on the big, dark vehicle took bullets with only minor discoloration on the glass. He’d found a position of cover, one that blocked both sight of him and bullet penetration, but the tinted windows and the murky atmosphere made it hard to see through the vehicle and search for other gunmen. If he couldn’t find them, they couldn’t find him. Bolan unhooked another flash-bang—his last—from his harness and popped the pin.

  He counted down the fuse on his flash-bang before he hurled it toward the source of most of the muzzle-flashes in the garage. The distraction device blew almost immediately, and Bolan weathered the pressure wave from the high-volume explosion.

  “You fucker! Quit it with those!” someone bellowed. The warrior nearly chuckled at the frustration he fomented among his enemies. He was not a cruel man, but psychological warfare and annoyance were two of his better weapons, especially within such close quarters. The more uncomfortable they were, the better his chances against them.

  Bolan broke from behind the rear of the Ford tank and drew closer to the clot of gunmen whose weapons had only just blazed at him. The MP-9 lead the way, and the Executioner reloaded the magazine on the move; his eyes never left the sights. He’d gotten the gun bumped, dropped and jostled. He wanted to be certain that he had an undamaged, fresh box in place. The mag locked, and he worked its bolt onto a live round.

  He spotted a couple of gunners in the chemical fog ahead of him. They were tucked against a late-model hatchback. One rubbed his ear, having caught the flash-bang blast full-on. Bolan tracked the path of his bomb and confirmed that it had landed close enough to rupture the terrorist’s bloody ear. The Executioner put the
red-dot sight on the half-deafened gunman and took him down with two bullets from a quick tap of the MP-9’s trigger. Both 9 mm slugs ripped into the side of the gunman’s head.

  As the first terrorist jerked violently under the kill shots, the other man brought his pistol to bear on the rapidly approaching Executioner. Bolan snapped his aim to the second shooter and pulled the trigger at the same time the terrorist fired. The bullet hit on Bolan’s sore clavicle, bruised and battered by the crooked FBI agent. He had Kevlar weave over the tender bone, and the thick layers of polymer stopped any penetration by the projectile and its quickly following companion. Impacts on the bruised area knocked the wind out of Bolan.

  He staggered, one knee turned to rubber instead of flexing and holding him erect. He wiped out into the man who’d shot him, but unlike the Executioner, the terrorist was dead, four rounds embedded in a pulped, shattered mandible and his throat. Bolan rode the falling corpse to the ground, glad for the cushioning. His shoulder pain dissipated; the sudden shock of .45-caliber slugs gone as quickly as it came. Bolan pushed off the corpse and saw a metal ball bounce out of the smoke. The smooth skin and the top fuse told him all he needed to know—that this was a fragmentation grenade and he was well within the five-meter kill radius of its blast.

  He lunged, flopped onto his belly and slapped the grenade hard. The deadly orb launched like a hockey puck along the smooth concrete floor. He aimed for the far side of the garage, toward the door that connected to the minimart. As Bolan knew the bomb’s path away from him, he also knew where to tuck himself.

  Even as he curled into a ball behind the tire of the hatchback, the grenade detonated. Slivers of wire and pieces of the grenade’s shell plucked at his forearms and legs. The wheel and axle absorbed the rest of the shrapnel, just as Bolan had intended. The blacksuit managed to prevent most of the sharp, flying bits from carving into his flesh. Even so, a couple particularly large or fast-moving pieces produced a tear in his stealth garment, but the toughness of the fabric meant he received only minor cuts.