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  He poured on the firepower, dropping the magazine from his rifle, slamming another one home and rocking the plunger back in a practiced motion. Now the sniper within him came out. As well armed as he was, there were many battles ahead of him, and he could not simply burn ammo recklessly. He began targeting the camouflaged men for head shots, striking an eye here, a throat there, a forehead beyond that. With minute shifts of his body he brought the sights of his rifle onto one figure after another, punching rounds through them as easily as tagging metal silhouettes on a static range.

  Bolan stood now. The vehicles surrounding the launcher were burning, smoking, churning out heat and flame that made the encampment glow orange-yellow. Stalking forward, weapon at the ready, he began firing again, in short bursts. His feet started to pump beneath him.

  He was charging the encampment. He was emptying his rifle, reloading, emptying it again. Now he was in their midst, and as soldiers ran from the flames, they encountered the heavily armed wraith who had visited this destruction on them. One man nearly stumbled directly into Bolan, who took a moment to smash him down with the butt of his M16. As the fallen gunman struggled to pull a pistol from a flap holster on his belt, Bolan triggered a burst that nailed him to the ground.

  The Executioner swiveled. He was vulnerable here in the open, and ranks of enemy gunners were moving up around him, trying to flank him. The hairs at the back of his neck shot up and he dropped to one knee, ducking his head and covering up with one arm.

  Yenni’s machine-gun fire ripped through the ranks of the enemy soldiers, spraying them across the burning vehicles, clearing a hole for Bolan that he was quick to surge through. He kept firing along the way and punching rounds through man after man. Then he was on the other side.

  Flames guided him like a lighted runway, eclipsing the harsh Syrian sun. He marched forward to the launching system and, as he’d been instructed in his mission briefing, found the control panel.

  The shipments of advanced weapons machinery had included launchers of this type, which could be programmed for surface to air or surface to surface. It was what made the weapons so devastating; they could be used to control Syrian airspace and also to devastate targets to a range of many miles. This launcher was just one of many weapons that could not be allowed to stay in hands that were not sanctioned by the Man.

  Bolan checked behind him, making sure he was not about to become a target. The burning, roiling destruction all around him was nothing but smoke and fire, dead men and empty brass. Yenni was still firing from above him, but her targets were far off and to the left of him. Blazing trucks separated Bolan from whomever she was taking down. He was as covered as he was going to get.

  The control panel opened when he slid its outer cover back. The display screen came up in multiple languages, one of them English.

  “Configure,” read the text on the screen. “System not initialized.”

  That was good. That meant these men, whatever affiliation they had, still had not managed to activate the system or target anything with the weapons. Bolan took the Semtex charges with their attached detonators from his war bag, planted one directly on the control panel and placed two more at the junction of the launcher’s swivel mount beneath the rockets themselves. The detonators were wireless. Next he took out the control switch and popped the protective cover. These switches were dead-man capable, meaning pressing the red button on top of the metallic cylinder would arm the detonation signal. Releasing that button would cause the charges to explode.

  Bolan pressed the button. As he walked away from the circle of smoking wreckage, he realized that the chatter of the FN had stopped. Yenni had apparently done as much damage as she needed to. He kept walking, putting distance between himself and the launcher. The Semtex would not detonate the warheads in the rockets. That required an electric sequence internal to each warhead. The material inside would simply burn once the missiles were torn apart.

  Bolan released the switch in his hand.

  The launcher exploded, sending pieces of itself in every direction, digging a fiery crater in the center of what had been the enemy camp. Bolan looked left, then right, scanning the ground for movement. There was none. There would be none. Nothing lived here now, except him and, high above, Yenni with her machine gun. That was how it had to be. Many more would fall before this mission was over.

  Bolan kept going. He did not look back.

  7

  Rough terrain had forced them to leave the truck half a mile back. The trail they were following paralleled the shore of Al Asad Lake. They were moving in the direction of the Euphrates River now, through the vast stretches of territory that separated the populated areas in this remote portion of the country. Ahead of them, however, they had spotted plumes of smoke that signaled fairly decent-size fires. There was a camp of some kind up ahead.

  From the protection of a rock outcropping, Bolan and Yenni broke out their optics and surveyed the threat. The soldier scanned the tents and people ahead of them. He did not like what he saw.

  “They are flying a red flag,” Yenni said. “There are many wearing red scarves.”

  “A loyalist camp.”

  “Without doubt,” she replied. “We should skirt their camp, give them a wide berth. I see nothing that could be stockpiles of your American weaponry here. And none of the rocket-launching trucks.”

  Bolan continued searching the camp. She was right. It made sense for the loyalists to be out here, far from Hahmir’s government, where they could live off the land and prey on small villages. Bolan’s dossier had mentioned just that. Satellite imagery indicated raids by the loyalists on small, unmapped communities out here in the Syrian wilderness. In fact, it was happening right in front of Bolan’s eyes.

  The loyalists had prisoners.

  He watched as one of them prodded a string of women forward. They were a chain gang, literally chained together at the neck, and the loyalist guard behind them was moving them from one tent to another, using what might have been an electrical cattle stick. There were other loyalists swinging rods that Bolan recognized as livestock whips—flexible lengths of fiberglass, not unlike the African sjambok weapon, which inflicted pain without doing damage more serious than bloody welts.

  Bolan’s blood boiled. The loyalists were herding their captives like animals being driven to slaughter. And the soldier had no doubt this was exactly what was happening. When predators like these were finished violating their captives, they would not see a point in keeping those captives alive. They would kill them and leave the bodies in a shallow grave, if they bothered burying the dead at all.

  “There is no benefit in targeting this camp,” Yenni said.

  “No, there isn’t,” Bolan said. His hand clenched the monocular. His knuckles turned white.

  “There is nothing to be gained by killing these men,” Yenni added. “We will burn ammunition and time and gain nothing that advances your purpose here.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “We are going to hit the camp anyway,” Yenni said. It was not a question.

  “We’re going to hit the camp anyway,” echoed Bolan.

  “Very well, Cooper.”

  “Take the machine gun,” he said. “Circle around to the left. Find a vantage point and start taking them out when I initiate contact. That big tent on the right, where that line of prisoners was just driven… I’m going to start my sweep from there, free as many of them as I can. Drive forward and meet me in the center of the camp. Once there, we’ll knock off any stragglers.”

  “And then?”

  “Then,” Bolan said, “we burn everything.”

  “This is a good plan,” Yenni said.

  “Go.”

  She did as instructed. Bolan checked his assault rifle and made for the right, moving in as irregular a pattern as the terrain would allow, just in case someone spotted him and tried to take a shot at him from a distance. He did not think anyone would notice, however. The camp had the smell of a party, the
type of celebration that takes place after the homes of the helpless have been pillaged. What did the loyalists out here have to do, after all, except bide their time in their conflict with Hahmir? There was no reason they wouldn’t spend the afternoon savaging their prisoners, simply to amuse themselves. That was how the minds of these creatures operated.

  Mack Samuel Bolan was their natural predator.

  He could hear the screams and cries of the captive women as he neared the large tent from the rear. All over the world that sound was the same. All over the world, the harsh laughter of men willing to inflict themselves on others was also the same. Bolan slung the assault rifle over his shoulder and drew his combat knife.

  He needed to give Yenni time to get ready. He was going to have to reveal his position and, for that matter, his very presence in the enemy camp. When he did, he would become the focus of every loyalist fighter here. That meant a silent kill or kills to start, if he could manage it.

  His knife cut into the fabric of the tent effortlessly. He pulled downward, enlarging the slit, feeling the canvas give under his blade. The tenor of the rough voices, the laughter and the screams of the victims inside did not change. The loyalists were too focused on their war crimes to notice the Executioner slipping into their midst.

  Finally, the hole was large enough. Bolan stepped into the tent, crouched low and waited. The only illumination was from the sunlight that filtered in through the tent’s doorway. He waited for his eyes to adjust.

  On air mattresses spread along the floor of the large enclosure, several loyalist fighters managed to sleep through the noise of their fellows’ depredations. Bolan had seen that before. A man with combat experience could sleep through pretty much anything, anywhere, in any position. It was a skill he possessed himself.

  The captive women, chained together at the neck, were huddled in the corner under the watch of a guard with a red scarf tied around his throat. The man had a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder. His back was to Bolan.

  One of the prisoners had been separated from the chain line and was being dragged toward an empty air mattress in the center of the tent. Her captor was another of the loyalists, who was not alone. Two other soldiers were behind him, each hitching up his belt, obviously anticipating the day’s entertainment. They, too, had their backs turned, focused as they were on the screaming, struggling girl.

  They should have posted a guard outside. They should have posted sentries. The loyalists had become accustomed, way out here, to operating with impunity.

  Then again, if this was the type of military discipline that typified the loyalists, it would explain how Hahmir, with the brutal Wolf to back him up, had asserted control over Syria in the first place.

  Bolan crept up behind the group of men standing around the girl on the mattress. He picked one almost at random, as they were all more or less easy targets. His hand snaked around to cover the loyalist’s face and snap his head back, as he jammed the blade of his combat knife into the man’s kidney with the other.

  His comrades turned, their jaws dropping. Bolan didn’t give them time to process what was happening. He swung the bloody knife, plunging the blade into the side of a second loyalist’s neck, then ripped it through. Blood sprayed. The third man was now drawing an old Browning Hi Power from his belt, but Bolan was quicker. The blade of the combat knife entered the loyalist’s eye socket and pierced his brain. Bolan jerked the weapon free as the corpse collapsed.

  The Executioner’s sixth sense was telling him he was due for gunfire from behind. He was not wrong. As he spun, pulling the silenced Beretta from his shoulder holster, he saw the hapless guard trying to grab his Kalashnikov, but he was in such a hurry, the motor skills needed for this task were beyond him. Bolan put a suppressed round right through the bridge of the man’s nose. The women he’d been guarding screamed.

  The loyalist’s hand clenched the Kalashnikov. In death, he managed to trigger a wild round that buried itself in the ground between the dead men.

  Not good, Bolan thought, realizing the gunfire would draw unwanted attention.

  In the distance the FN started buzz sawing its way through the camp. That was Yenni, and it meant that loyalists were now moving, most likely to converge on Bolan’s position. Her gunfire would help draw some of them off, giving him less to deal with all at once.

  He holstered his Beretta and unlimbered the M16. There were many footsteps and urgent calls audible outside the tent. If he were out there, he knew his first impulse would be to cover either his own point of entry or the front flap of the tent. He did neither, drawing his knife again just long enough to cut another exit at right angles to both of these. Then he slipped outside.

  At least one loyalist saw him doing so and opened fire, but Yenni was on top of the situation. Machine-gun fire from the flank knocked the man down and kept him there as the female guerilla fighter raked the fallen man’s skull with a deadly blast. Bolan cut between two smaller tents, his eyes and ears open for more hostages, and worked his way toward the field latrine the enemy fighters had set up and cordoned off with canvas. The station was unmistakable from its smell.

  He saw a man dive inside to hide.

  Bolan reached into his war bag, popped the pin on an incendiary grenade and let the spoon fly free. He lobbed the canister over the canvas enclosure of the latrine as he ran past it.

  “Fire in the hole,” he said quietly.

  White phosphorous erupted in a shower of waste. Bolan was glad he was out of range. The poor devil caught within had time to cry out in pain and horror before that scream was cut short by the all-consuming chemical fire.

  Bullets ripped the soil at Bolan’s feet. He brought up his assault rifle and triggered the grenade launcher, punching a 40-mm round through the tent directly in front of him. It was close enough that he felt the heat and concussion from the blast.

  Havoc descended on the camp. Loyalists ran in every direction as Yenni, her machine gun raging, began to move through the area from Bolan’s left, sweeping the terrified, formerly complacent loyalists toward him like so many deer. The soldier used his M16 to burn them down. It was surgical. It was methodical. It was without rancor. Bolan was fueled by justice, not bitterness. His enemies were numerical obstacles, an equation to be balanced.

  Ahead of him, he saw first one loyalist, then another fall to Yenni’s gun. On the ground beyond the corpses, a hand suddenly materialized in the dirt. As quickly as the fingers appeared, they disappeared again.

  Now, that was something you didn’t see every day.

  Careful to move slowly enough that Yenni would be able to identify him, Bolan made his way to where he had seen the hand. What he found dropped him to his stomach in the dirt. He peered into the hole, which was covered by a metal grate.

  He saw three women wearing little more than rags. One stared up at him, wide-eyed, while the others huddled together and whimpered in fear.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Bolan said. He put his rifle on the ground beside him and grasped the grate with both hands. It was heavy, but he thought he could lift it. At each distant gunshot, the women in the pit flinched, but the pace of Yenni’s fire was slowing now. That was encouraging. Every moment Bolan spent here, not engaged in the fight, was another in which he might become a target. But these women needed him. He would not abandon them.

  The one who stared up at him opened her mouth to say something. Her voice cracked, but on the second try, she managed it. “A-American?”

  “That’s right,” Bolan said. It flew in the face of the mission’s requirements for plausible deniability, but this was a victimized woman, not a head of state. “I’m an American and I’m here to help. Do you speak English?”

  “I speak,” she said.

  “Good. I’m going to take this grate off,” he told her, “and then I’m going to help you and those other two out. Nobody is going to harm you. We’re here to help, to free you. You understand that? Freedom.”

  “Freedom,” she
said. She almost smiled…and then her eyes became saucers, fixed on something behind him.

  Bolan recognized that look and rolled aside, just in time to miss the blade of the bayonet that came down to strike the grate. The man who landed on top of him was a loyalist soldier, bleeding from a graze to the head, stabbing over and over again with his bayonet as if he were a sewing machine. Bolan managed to avoid the wild thrusts and clamp a hand on the man’s wrist.

  The loyalist wrenched free and tried to bring his weapon to bear once more. Bolan barely managed to block it. Over and over again, he stopped the knife from plunging into his body, but it would take only one stab to kill him. He had to get out from under this enemy and he had to do it now.

  He rolled.

  Whipping his leg up, he used his momentum to throw the enemy over his hip. The loyalist landed on the metal grate with such force that the barrier rang like a drum. He tried to get up, to press his attack, but his knife fell through the grate…and then he screamed. He was suddenly struggling to move, but couldn’t raise his arms.

  Bolan realized then what was happening. The women in the pit below had reached up through the grate and were holding the loyalist there, pinning him to the open mesh. His red scarf was being pulled through the grate, strangling him. His cries became quieter and quieter.

  Bolan stood, picking up his rifle. He started to aim it at the loyalist, but then thought better of it. The women in that pit had suffered horribly. This was their moment of justice. This was their payback for what had been done to them.