Dead Reckoning Read online

  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.”