Dead Reckoning Read online

  Granted, the writing was not his idea. Saleh Kabeer, in his infinite wisdom, had chosen Sarhan as the organization’s official recording secretary and historian. His orders had been simple: to prepare the first draft of a document explaining why the group was formed, what it had done so far and what it planned to do in the pursuit of justice for Muslims living under the thumb of so-called “superpowers” from the heathen West. Kabeer should logically have done that job himself, but leadership demanded too much of his time, as he explained.

  In fact, Sarhan had seen his leader’s handwriting and knew that it was childish, barely legible. His thoughts, at least on paper, were unfocused and obscure, as difficult to follow as a looping snail’s track on a garden path, the product of a spotty education. Sarhan, by contrast, had been second in his class at Cairo’s Helwan University, studying Arab literature with an eye toward teaching at the college level, when he had been drawn into the movement by a young man’s passion to oppose injustice.

  Which, it seemed, had brought him here, to face an agonizing death.

  So far, neither of the Crusaders had laid hands on him, aside from clubbing him unconscious at the safe house and transporting him to the appointed place of his interrogation. Neither of them had so much as spoken to him yet, leaving Sarhan to watch them from his corner of the vaulted room while they stood out of earshot, tapping keys on a laptop, scrutinizing whatever appeared before them on its monitor.

  Trying to translate what he’d written out in Arabic, perhaps?

  Sarhan had tried to free himself. He thought the bonds restraining him might be electric cords, something his captors had discovered cast off in the onetime factory. In any case, they were unyielding, and he lacked the strength to break them. He was well and truly trapped.

  A scuff of shoes on concrete made Sarhan open his eyes. The white men were approaching now, no readable expression on their faces other than a vague disgust at being in his company. And how did they imagine Sarhan felt, looking at them?

  The taller of the pair spoke to him in English. “So, it’s Yemen next, I guess.”

  Sarhan tried to conceal the sudden churning in his stomach. He could feign incomprehension, make believe he did not speak their language, but to what end? Thinking quickly, trying to ignore the throbbing headache he’d awakened with from being bludgeoned, Sarhan tried to reconstruct what he’d last written in the document demanded by Kabeer.

  He had not mentioned Yemen by its proper name, that much he knew, but they had worked it out from the allusion to its nickname. Stupid! As to a precise location, there was nothing. He was sure of that. It all came down to his resilience now, his pain threshold and what he could endure without breaking.

  “You’re smart Crusaders, eh?” he said, sneering at them. “All right, go search the desert, then.”

  “You want to tell us where to look?” the tall one asked. “To make it easy on yourself?”

  “Infidels!” he spit at them. “Go on and do your worst.”

  The thinner man smiled and said, “If you insist.”

  Kassala Airport

  THEY HAD DECIDED on Grimaldi’s scheme, filing a flight plan for Khartoum, with no intent of going there. Bolan had watched for extra cops and soldiers at the airport terminal, but saw nothing that smacked of an emergency manhunt. With any luck, the scene where they had snatched Nour Sarhan would keep investigators busy overnight, sifting for clues in the rubble and coming up empty.

  It hadn’t been that hard to crack Sarhan, a shot of amobarbitol in lieu of something more extreme. Grimaldi had the drug on hand, anticipating problems if they had to question any of the people they were hunting. Bottom line, it was a barbiturate derivative with sedative-hypnotic properties, long used by the CIA and other covert agencies to loosen tongues when time was of the essence and an operative couldn’t trust pain to produce helpful intelligence.

  They’d be flying into Aden from Asmara International, assuming that they got that far and weren’t arrested on arrival. Sarhan had identified three of his cronies lying low in Lahij, north of Aden but with easy access to the airport and the sea, in case of an emergency. They would be hunting a Jordanian, Tareq Talhouni, and two Saudis, Khalid Kamel and Yusuf Zuabi. As to where they were, precisely, in the smallish city of some twenty thousand souls, Sarhan had no idea.

  It was something to work on when they got there. Bolan had the brains at Stony Man working that problem, combing undigested intel from the NSA, searching emails, captured cell phone chatter—anything at all, in fact, that might direct them to their targets.

  Bolan had considered greasing palms to get them out and on their way in a timely fashion, but Grimaldi had advised against it. As he noted, you could never tell when some petty official might go rogue and try to throw his weight around, if something struck him as an insult to his dubious integrity. Better to simply run for it, in Grimaldi’s opinion, and to trust the Hawker’s speed.

  Five minutes remained until they reached the border, maybe less. No sweat.

  If someone in Kassala put out an alarm to the Eritrean authorities—unlikely, Bolan thought, given the countries’ history—they’d have to deal with that upon arrival. Clearance from the tower in Asmara would release them for another hour’s flight to Aden, some four hundred fifty miles to the southeast.

  Grimaldi filed their flight plan via radio, in conversation with the tower, and got clearance for a takeoff to Khartoum in twenty minutes. He was smiling when he gave Bolan the thumbs-up signal, showing they were good to go. What happened when they jumped the rails and headed east, instead of west...well, that was up for grabs.

  The good news: Bolan had a copy of their flight plan on his laptop and was fiddling with it as they taxied toward the runway. By the time they landed, it would show Asmara as their destination all along. He hoped that would be good enough.

  If not, Bolan still had an hour, give or take, to come up with plan C.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Zermatt, Switzerland

  Saleh Kabeer tried his sat phone again, speed-dialing Nour Sarhan’s number and waiting through eight, nine, ten distant rings, before he gave up for the fifth time. A sour taste in his mouth made him wish he could drink alcohol, to wash it away, but this was no time for falling out of favor with God.

  Sarhan was gone, he thought, along with Asker and Libdeh. The rule was to immediately answer any sat-phone calls, to keep apprised of news and any changes in their plan that might be necessary. Breaking contact was forbidden, except in the direst emergency—and even then, there was a coded, automated message ready to be sent before the final curtain fell.

  So, they were dead. Kabeer had lost one-third of his Zarqa survivors within the past thirty-six hours, and he still had no idea specifically who was responsible.

  Americans, of course, which meant the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security or any of a dozen other agencies that worked in competition or collaborated as the mood took them. To stop the bleeding, though—and to assure a margin of success for his dramatic sequel to the consulate attack—Kabeer needed to know which agency, how it had found his scattered men and where the hunters would strike next.

  All answers that eluded him and made Kabeer’s pulse throb until his ears rang. He felt like a man confronting enemies inside a pitch-black room, unarmed, swinging his fists at empty air and striking no one.

  His next window of opportunity would open briefly, in the coming week. This time, he would not have to chase his targets: they were coming his way, to an epic meeting in Geneva, about one-hundred-fifty miles by car from where he sat in his hotel room, with a clear view of the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa through his windows facing northward. The surviving remnants of his team should join him two days prior to the attack, and they would all descend together with a day to spare, taking their time on unfamiliar mountain roads to reach their places on what the Crusaders liked to call
D-Day.

  That was, if any of his men were still alive.

  Impotent rage consumed Kabeer. Instead of strengthening him, as a rush of fury often did in battle, this sensation left him feeling weak and drained, almost...ashamed. He had burned bridges when he left al-Qaeda, certain that he could improve upon its leader’s sluggish tactics and produce important victories. Perhaps he’d let his ego get the better of him, but the goal was still within his grasp.

  His focus was on world leaders traveling from half a dozen of the planet’s richest Christian nations to Geneva, where they would enjoy the very best cuisine while plotting how to run, manipulate and loot the vast “Third World.” If Saleh Kabeer could take them out, his place in history would be assured.

  If he could do that and escape to fight another day, it would be proof that God smiled on him.

  There were worse things than death, of course. Being ignored was one of them; humiliation, even worse. Throughout his years as a guerrilla fighter, first with Hamas in Gaza, then with al-Qaeda, he had always felt devalued, being told to watch and wait his turn while older men either dismissed his plans or—worse yet—claimed full credit for themselves when Kabeer’s schemes succeeded. Finally, it was too much. He had stormed out to find his own path, joined by a handful of visionaries loyal to him, and their first effort, to Kabeer’s mind, had been an unqualified success.

  If they could carry off the second strike, even depleted as they were, it hardly mattered whether he survived or not. Success meant Kabeer’s enemies would marvel at his courage and audacity for years to come. The so-called allies who had cheated or ignored him would be stunned, and then humiliated when his manifesto reached the farthest corners of the Earth.

  Kabeer could watch all that from Paradise, content with his reward.

  But first, he had more bloody work to do.

  Asmara International Airport, Eritrea

  AS IT TURNED OUT, they had no problem with the altered flight plan, after all. An officer from Customs, middle-aged and lost inside a uniform too large for him, had shown up on the tarmac after they touched down, spoken to Grimaldi for a quarter of an hour and appeared to swallow everything the pilot told him. Bungled paperwork was common in Khartoum, he granted; some might say it was routine. In confidence, the officer shared his belief that most Sudanese air traffic controllers were hired on the basis of family ties or friendship, rather than any skill or training they possessed. Of course, the same could not be said about Eritrea!

  Grimaldi had agreed, nodding and smiling sympathetically. Their parting handshake, with five one hundred nakfa changing hands, sealed the deal. Grimaldi figured it just might be the best forty-eight dollars he had ever spent.

  “All set,” he told Bolan, when the Customs officer had wandered off, no interest in what they might be carrying aboard the Hawker, since the jet was only passing through.

  “You called it,” Bolan said.

  “It’s an acquired skill,” Grimaldi replied. “So, Aden, here we come.”

  “And Lahij,” Bolan added.

  “Right. I searched it while we were airborne, and I have to say it doesn’t sound like much.”

  “I thought about bypassing it and heading straight on to Zermatt,” Bolan said. “If I had to guess, I’d say Kabeer’s more likely to be hiding out in Switzerland than Yemen, but I could be wrong.”

  “And we don’t want to leave loose ends.”

  “That, too.”

  “If Kabeer is in Switzerland, and he’s been talking to his other buddies like the ones in Paraguay, smart money says he knows the net is closing on him. He could split and leave us nothing.”

  “Always possible,” Bolan agreed. “Less likely if there’s something in the neighborhood to keep him there a while.”

  “Such as?”

  “I did some searches while in the air, myself,” Bolan replied. “Turns out Geneva has a summit meeting scheduled for next week. Big names booked at the Grand Hotel Kempinski on the lake.”

  Grimaldi had to ask. “How big?”

  “Our President, Britain’s prime minister, the chancellor of Germany. World leaders.”

  “A tempting target.”

  “Could be irresistible,” Bolan said.

  “Even with security up the wazoo.”

  “When is enough enough?” Bolan asked, in reply. “It only takes a few committed shooters. Or, let’s say, a van from catering that’s dropping off plastique.”

  “The Swiss are good at this,” Grimaldi said. “But if they don’t know they’ve got God’s Hammer in their own backyard...” He let it trail away, unhappy with the general direction that his thought was taking.

  “Better off to nip it in the bud.”

  “When does the meeting start?” he asked.

  “Monday,” Bolan replied. “The bigwigs should be flying in on Sunday.”

  “So, we have to finish up in Aden—sorry, Lahij—and then do Switzerland, all in the next three days.”

  “If that,” Bolan replied. “Kabeer might not like waiting until Monday.”

  “Right. No pressure, then.”

  “But miles to go before we sleep.”

  Grimaldi smiled, said, “He’s a poet now. Come on. We’re burning daylight.”

  Lahij, Yemen

  “I THANK YOU for the warning,” Tareq Talhouni said. “We shall be alert to any threat.”

  “And if you think it wise to leave ahead of schedule...”

  “I don’t believe that will be necessary, sir.”

  “Remember, we are counting on you,” Saleh Kabeer replied.

  “We shall not disappoint you, sir. Blessings be upon you.”

  “And upon you,” Kabeer replied, and he was gone, the sat phone going silent in Talhouni’s hand.

  The news was bad: three dead in Paraguay and three more in Sudan. Worse yet, Kassala was a ninety-minute flight from Aden via jet, with another twenty-minute drive from there to Lahij. For all Talhouni knew, a team of killers could be on Yemeni soil already, searching for him and his comrades.

  Let them come, he thought, and smiled.

  Unlike Kabeer or any of their comrades who had died within the past two days, Talhouni was prepared. It was dumb luck that they had caught the clumsy spy snooping around their safe house, but they had him. That was all that mattered. He would spill whatever secrets he possessed before Talhouni let him die, including the identity and number of the enemies he should expect.

  Talhouni sat hunched forward on a sagging, threadbare couch, his knees pressed against the near edge of a table where he had distributed the items taken from their spy. A well-worn nylon wallet held a laminated card identifying him as Naseem Damari, an officer of the Yemeni Criminal Investigative Department. No rank appeared on the ID, suggesting he was no one of importance, but the information he possessed could still be useful.

  Next to the wallet lay the spy’s sidearm, a standard-issue Makarov pistol with eight 9 mm rounds slotted into its box magazine. The weapon’s bluing had been worn away over the years, from being tucked away in pockets, under belts and into holsters. Whether it had ever killed a man or not, Talhouni could not guess, nor did he care.

  Beside the pistol there were other useless items: a cheap cell phone with its battery removed to frustrate traces; a small wad of Yemeni rial banknotes secured with a rusty paper clip; a few coins; a handkerchief someone had taken time to iron, though it was wilted now; a small spring-activated knife; and a red plastic whistle.

  The final item struck Talhouni as pathetic. Who had this Naseem Damari planned to summon with his child’s toy if all else failed? Who did he think would come to rescue him if he was captured?

  No one.

  Damari was alone and had not learned the address of their safe house when they scooped him up the night before. He had been drifting th
rough the local marketplace, pestering weapons dealers with “casual” questions about al-Qaeda and Yemen Islamic Jihad, obviously seeking leads to the guerrillas who had blacked out all of Yemen in June 2014, with a mortar attack on the country’s main power plant and transmission towers. In the process, he had mentioned God’s Hammer, and had thereby sealed his fate.

  Word got around. Naseem Damari was as good as dead.

  But first, he would reveal whatever secrets he possessed.

  Talhouni’s two companions had been working on the spy in shifts, not maiming him, but softening him up, persuading him that silence would not serve him well. He had resisted so far, rather bravely, but this night they would remove him to a special place Talhouni had procured for more advanced interrogation.

  The spy would speak, or he would scream until his throat burst, and he drowned in his own blood.

  Above the Red Sea

  SOME SCHOLARS SAID the Red Sea took its name from seasonal blooms of ruddy-colored bacteria nicknamed “sea sawdust,” sometimes found drifting on the surface in long, ropy strings. Others claimed the sea derived its name from the classical Greek word for south, just as the Black Sea’s name meant north in ancient times.

  Mack Bolan didn’t know who named the sea, or why, but he was headed south-southwest at thirty-seven thousand feet, hurtling toward his next date with the enemy at five hundred miles per hour. Laptop open on a folding table large enough to hold a three-course dinner, he was brushing up on Yemen, planning their first hours on the ground.

  First thing, there would be no sneaking around in search of weapons once they landed. Yemen ranked second worldwide, after the United States, for the number of guns in civilian hands. Public dealers were required to hold a license, but beyond that, anything was permissible, with open-air shops displaying everything from World War-era pistols to assault rifles, RPGs, mortars and light antiaircraft weapons. A glutted market kept prices down, letting the poorest man feel macho with a pistol on his hip or rifle slung across his back.