Dead Reckoning Read online

  * * *

  AS SOON AS Bolan sent the HEAT round on its way, he had unsheathed one of the fragmentation rockets slung across his back and loaded it into the hot RPG-7. Grimaldi would be on the move now, coming in the back, and Bolan didn’t want to jeopardize him with the second 40 mm round, so timing would be critical.

  He counted off five seconds from the first blast, which had left a smoking hole in the beige adobe-like front wall. It could have taken down the door for Bolan, but he’d counted on the HEAT round turning plaster, concrete, or whatever the supporting walls were made of, into shrapnel. Now, he meant to follow up with the real thing.

  The OG-7 antipersonnel rounds had a relatively small kill radius, around twenty-five feet. Bolan couldn’t be sure that anybody was inside the room his first warhead had penetrated, but he had rockets to burn and meant to use them well.

  He sighted on the hole his first round had created in the front wall, saw flames leaping in the room beyond, and sent his follow-up directly through the bull’s-eye. This time, when the 40 mm round exploded, there was less visible fire, more smoke and dust with jagged bits of steel flying in all directions, seeking flesh to mangle, bones to break.

  Bolan laid down his launcher, shucked the dangling pouch and ran toward the house with his AKMS on full-auto. He guessed the front door wasn’t locked, considering its recent traffic back and forth to cars, and felt his guess confirmed as the knob turned under his hand.

  He shouldered through into an entryway just off the smoky room where his two rockets had exploded, to his left. He checked that open doorway, squinting through the smoke screen, and saw no one sprawled on the floor. The rounds hadn’t been wasted, though. Bolan had simply rung the doorbell to announce that he was dropping in.

  Someone was shouting from another room, making him wish they had an operative floor plan of the house. There’d been no time, and nowhere he could think of where the plans might have been cached. Kassala was the kind of town where people holding land built what they wanted, how they wanted it, and greased inspectors with a payoff if the neighbors didn’t like it. He supposed there was some kind of building code downtown, all evidence to the contrary, but outside the city’s crowded business district it was clearly each man for himself.

  Bolan hesitated for a heartbeat at the junction of a central hallway, then turned left, trailing the sound of voices. He had no idea what they were saying, but the mood was obvious—startled, frightened, pissed off. One voice was talking loud over the others, trying to bring order out of chaos and not being successful.

  He had the likely source of all that chaos marked, and was approaching yet another open doorway when a young man bolted through it, bailing out and shouting back over his shoulder as he left the room. He wasn’t one of those from Brognola’s rogues’ gallery of fugitives from God’s Hammer, but he had a pistol in his right hand, finger on the trigger.

  His first sight of Bolan, dressed in battle gear, cut off whatever the young man was saying in midsyllable. He blinked once, then began to raise his pistol, fairly quick with his reaction time, all things considered.

  But not quick enough.

  A 3-round burst from Bolan’s carbine took him in the chest and blew him backward, through the doorway he’d just cleared, dropping his body back inside the room, as if he had been reeled in by a bungee cord.

  And that was when all hell broke loose.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Bahjat Libdeh had no idea what had gone wrong. One moment, he was standing in the parlor of their safe house, building up his nerve to join Nour Sarhan in gunning down the five young locals they had hired to help them with surveillance and disposal of their enemies. He was concerned about the odds, of course, but thought Sarhan would be the focus of attention when he started firing, freeing Libdeh to unload from his position in a corner of the room.

  A cross fire. Take them down in seconds flat, before the targets could react.

  Not safe, exactly, but it was a decent plan.

  Libdeh was reaching for his pistol, wishing there’d been time to fetch a sound suppressor, when the world exploded. Shaken by the blast, though physically uninjured, he had looked to see how Sarhan would react. Were they still going to kill the others, or had that plan been discarded?

  “Get your weapons,” Sarhan told the five who had been marked for death without their knowledge. Frightened and disoriented, they began to sluggishly obey. Sarhan, meanwhile, was edging toward the nearest exit from the parlor. His eyes locked with Libdeh’s for a moment, then he turned and bolted from the room.

  Where was he going? Maybe to the small room he had turned into an office.

  Libdeh did not plan to follow him.

  The hirelings had guns in hand now, saw that Sarhan had deserted them, and turned to Libdeh with expressions ranging from raw fear to fury. Thinking of himself, Libdeh produced his pistol, brandished it above his head, and told them, “The Crusaders are upon us! Find and kill them now!”

  When no one budged, he pointed toward the front part of the house, where the explosions had occurred. “There! Go!” he ordered, watching as they muttered, then moved off to battle with an enemy they’d never seen, bearing their motley collection of pistols and full-auto weapons.

  The moment that their backs were turned, Libdeh slipped through another exit from the parlor. This one took him through the kitchen to another doorway and a corridor beyond. He cleared the door—and stopped short when confronted by a stranger in a baseball cap, weapons hanging all over him, a short Kalashnikov pointing at Libdeh’s chest.

  “I know you,” the intruder said. “Lay down your gun.”

  Libdeh could not decide if he should fight, flee or surrender. Was that truly even possible, under the circumstances? His mind vomited images of torture by Israelis or some other client state of the Crusaders, maybe even at Guantanamo, where it was said that the jailers recognized no law. How would he hold up as the pain increased? What secrets would he spill?

  Libdeh lifted his sidearm, and the stranger fired a burst from fifteen feet.

  The pain was everything.

  The agony within Libdeh’s chest was absolute. He felt nothing when his shoulders struck the wall behind him, and he slithered down into a seated posture. When he tried again to raise his pistol, there was nothing in his hand.

  “Payback’s a bitch,” his killer said, kneeling in front of him before the world went black.

  * * *

  BOLAN SAW NOUR SARHAN from a distance, halfway down the corridor in front of him, emerging from a room to Bolan’s right and turning left immediately, jogging toward another doorway on the hall’s left side. Even in profile he was recognizable, his hawk nose prominent beneath the thick eyebrows shown in photographs from Hal Brognola’s file on God’s Hammer. The pistol in his hand was muzzle-heavy with the fat extension of a sound suppressor.

  Bolan did not call out for Sarhan to surrender, knowing the odds of getting him to drop his gun and come along without a fight were nil. He had the AKMS at his shoulder, aiming low to cut the runner’s legs from under him, when suddenly a group of armed young men burst through another doorway to his right, blocking his aim.

  They all saw Bolan, recognized an enemy and stopped dead in the hallway, obviously thinking his Kalashnikov was aimed at them. He couldn’t fault them much on their reaction time—only a second, maybe two, before one of them opened fire and all the rest joined in, spraying the corridor with bullets.

  But if their reaction time was decent, Bolan’s was superb. He’d dropped and rolled before he finished counting heads downrange, forgetting Sarhan for the moment as he scrambled to survive. The storm of fire from pistols and at least one submachine gun passed above him, ammunition wasted as the bullets meant for Bolan ripped through walls, some going high and wild into the ceiling overhead, where a fluorescent light exploded, raining glass
, phosphor and toxic mercury.

  Bolan began returning fire before the jumpy shooters could correct their aim, working from left to right along their ragged skirmish line. He pumped three 5.56 mm rounds into the nearest target—young man, clean-shaven, armed with what appeared to be an old Beretta M12 SMG—and put him down. Falling, the youth triggered one last spray of Parabellum slugs into the ceiling, bringing down more plaster and a rat that landed on its feet, considered options in a heartbeat and escaped past Bolan, squealing all the way.

  Second on Bolan’s hit parade, a chubby, bearded guy dressed all in black like something from a movie, trying to look sinister and coming up short. His pistol was a knock-off of the venerable Colt 1911, loud and dangerous, but jumping in his hands as if it wanted to escape. When Bolan shot him in the chest, the man in black seemed to deflate, collapsing where he stood.

  The third shooter in line saw what was imminent, tried to turn and run, but wasn’t fast enough. A single slug from Bolan’s carbine drilled a tidy hole between his shoulder blades and burst out through his chest in front, taking enough of his heart with it that he dropped facedown on to the carpet, shuddered once, then moved no more.

  The two surviving shooters both had Bolan covered, but he didn’t give them time to take advantage of their opportunity. He stitched them left to right, then back again, and watched them fall into a tangled heap together, one’s head resting on the other’s shoulder as if seeking consolation from his friend.

  Sarhan had vanished from the corridor, but Bolan knew which door he’d chosen, fleeing from the firefight. As to where it led, the only way to find out was by following his quarry.

  Bolan half expected more shooters to spring from somewhere, coming after him, but none appeared. Silence had settled on the not-so-safe house, with its smell of gunpowder and death. Now he was racing time, before police arrived or Nour Sarhan vanished into the desert night.

  The Executioner reached the door he sought, found it ajar and listened for a moment to the shuffling, thrashing sounds that emanated from the unseen room beyond. If Sarhan planned to ambush him, he wasn’t being very subtle. Pushing through the doorway, Bolan caught his man lighting a twist of paper, dropping it into a metal trash can filled with jumbled documents.

  Bolan leaped forward, slammed his carbine’s pistol grip into the base of Sarhan’s skull, and dropped him senseless to the floor. His next step tipped the wastebasket, spilling its contents just as they caught fire. He stamped out the flames, scooped up the papers and fanned the air with them until the last of them stopped smoking, then dropped them together on the small desk to his right.

  Behind him, Grimaldi said, “Good job, Sarge. My guy didn’t make it.”

  Grimaldi counted fifteen documents in all, or maybe it was fifteen pages of a single document. Counting was one thing, but he couldn’t read a word on any of the pages, written all in Arabic. It struck him as peculiar, not for the first time, numbers used throughout the world—your basic 1, 2, 3, etcetera—were labeled “Arabic,” and yet he thought the written language looked as if someone had dipped a beetle’s legs in ink, then let it run around the paper aimlessly.

  “Make any sense to you?” he asked, knowing the answer in advance.

  “I’ll scan them when we’re clear,” Bolan replied, “and email them to Stony Man.”

  “Speaking of getting clear...”

  “I know.”

  They heard no sirens yet, which was a good sign, but for all Grimaldi knew, Sarhan or Libdeh might have called for local reinforcements when their buddy Asker bit the big one. Getting out, sooner than later, ought to be the priority right now.

  “Is he coming with us?”

  “That’s the plan,” Bolan replied. “I doubt he’ll tell us anything, but trying’s why we came.”

  “We’d better get a move on, then.”

  Bolan folded the documents in thirds and stuffed them into his left hip pocket, then knelt next to Sarhan and started going through his pockets, tossing cash, a handkerchief, a folding knife. He kept the snoozing shooter’s wallet, satisfied himself that Sarhan had no other weapons hidden on his person, then said, “Help me get him up.”

  Grimaldi took one side, Bolan the other, hoisting Sarhan’s deadweight from the floor until they had his buttocks resting on the near edge of the little desk. Instead of letting him fall back, Bolan crouched, tucked his left shoulder into Sarhan’s gut, then rose, lifting their captive in a classic fireman’s carry. Almost as an afterthought, he took his AKMS from the desktop, holding it in his right hand, his left securing Sarhan’s dangling legs.

  The walk back to their rented Audi took a bit more time than crossing to the wooded property on their approach. They had to let three cars pass, one taking its own sweet time, but finally they stood behind the Audi, Bolan passing off his carbine to Grimaldi, digging in his pocket for the key fob, opening the trunk.

  Sarhan wasn’t a large man. Folded properly, he fit inside the trunk just fine. Bolan removed his belt, used it to bind his arms behind his back and keep him out of mischief if he woke up on the drive, then dropped the lid.

  “Here’s hoping,” Grimaldi said, as he slid into the driver’s seat.

  “Here’s hoping,” Bolan echoed, but Grimaldi couldn’t hear hope in his tone.

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  “BARB? WE’VE GOT something from Striker coming through.”

  “Be there shortly,” mission controller Barbara Price said, already up and moving as she answered Aaron Kurtzman via intercom.

  She found Kurtzman in his wheelchair, seated next to former UCLA cybernetics professor Huntington Wethers, peering at a string of documents reduced to thumbnail size on a laptop monitor in front of them. She leaned in closer, saw that they were all in Arabic, and asked, “Translation?”

  “Working on it,” Wethers said. “Handwritten documents this dense require—”

  “Some time,” she finished for him. “Right. Was there a note with these?”

  “Just basic,” Kurtzman said. He tapped a key and brought up Bolan’s terse email. It read: “Translate ASAP.”

  “A man of few words,” Wethers said, before he minimized the email.

  “How’s the translation going?”

  “The program should have the first page coming up in thirty, maybe forty seconds.”

  “Can we see it?” Price prodded him.

  “Patience, please.”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”

  “The page will not display until translation is complete, of course.”

  “Of course. So, how long now?”

  Wethers shot Kurtzman a sidelong glance. “I warned you not to call her yet,” he said.

  “You what?” Price felt the heat rise in her cheeks.

  “And here we are,” he said, ignoring her. “The first page.”

  Another key-tap, and the monitor displayed an English version of the first page scanned and translated. Price skimmed it, frowning. “What the hell is this? A letter home?”

  “It may have been intended as a correspondence of some kind,” Wethers replied. “The first-person description of events suggests as much. But we should not rule out the possibility that it’s a journal of some kind, perhaps a diary.”

  “Because?” she prompted.

  “For a start, the salutation.”

  “I don’t see one,” Price replied.

  “Exactly. One assumes a letter should bear some form of address. If not a name or nickname, then a title used in greeting, such as Father, Mother, Sir, To Whom It May Concern.”

  “I get it.”

  “This, as you can see, described events beginning— Ah! Here comes the second page.”

  And so it went, page after page. The writer—whoever he was—related events from the night of the consulate raid in Jordan
to his arrival in Sudan, and the move from Khartoum to Kassala.

  “It’s a confession,” Price said.

  “Or, more properly, a manifesto,” Wethers countered.

  “Like the Unabomber?”

  “Or any number of other fanatics. Not destined, I suspect, for publication at this point.”

  “You got that right.” She felt frustration settle on her shoulders. “Anyway, it’s all old news. If Striker has these, he’s removed the players in Sudan. It’s useless if it doesn’t give a lead to where the rest are hiding out.”

  “One page to go,” Wethers reminded her. “And coming up in five...four...”

  The page appeared, and Price read through it, feeling the dull pulse of a headache beginning at her temples. As she reached the end, she muttered, “Dammit! Nothing.”

  Wethers blinked at her. “Excuse me? It’s right there.” He pointed at the monitor.

  “Right where?”

  “The reference to comrades waiting at the Roof of Arabia.”

  “Okay, enlighten me.”

  “The Roof of Arabia,” he answered, smiling, “is a common nickname for Yemen.”

  Kassala, Sudan

  NOUR SARHAN HAD no idea where he was. Wherever the Crusaders had delivered him and bound him to a metal folding chair, it seemed to be an old abandoned factory of some kind, with equipment that he did not recognize standing around him, rusted and forgotten. The generic smell of mildew and rat droppings offered nothing in the way of clues, nor did it matter.

  They had brought him here to torture him while asking questions. Nothing else made sense. Unless they wanted information from Sarhan, why was he still alive?

  He sat—no choice—and cursed himself for being slow, clumsy and stupid. Why had he allowed his enemies to capture him, and in the process to obtain the manifesto he had started writing in his exile to Sudan?