Agent of Peril Read online

  Saving Faswad was one thing, but there were innocent lives at stake. He spun and raced down the steps back to the lobby.

  “Tera, Alex. We have noncombatants penned in on the second floor at least,” Bolan said.

  “Noncombatants here?” Geren asked.

  “Children, Tera,” Bolan snarled.

  “Oh, damn,” she answered.

  “I saw at least one kid armed. Be careful, and try not to hurt anyone,” Bolan ordered.

  “You make it sound so easy,” Kalid quipped.

  “If I were interested in easy work, I wouldn’t be here. Move it!”

  SURE, GEREN THOUGHT AS she ascended the stairs to the second floor, Alex “Johnson” on her heels. Brandon could go storming into a firefight where he could shoot anyone he damn well pleased, but he left them to the no-shoot scenarios.

  “I presume you speak Arabic,” Kalid said to her as he braced himself in the hallway.

  “Yeah. I find it a useful job skill for when I travel to nations full of Arab people plotting to kill Israelis,” she responded.

  “These are kids,” Kalid told her. “They’re too young to plot.”

  “You’ve never seen a seventeen-year-old with a bomb strapped to her belly take out a schoolyard before,” Geren responded.

  Kalid froze, then turned toward her. “We can discuss the politics of your handling of the Palestinian peace accord after we are away from people trying to kill us, all right? Until then, speak only when spoken to.”

  “Yassah massah,” Geren mocked.

  Kalid looked as if he were a few steps from a major cerebral hemorrhage. Geren smirked at this minor victory.

  “We come in peace!” Kalid called out in Arabic. “You can keep your weapons with you if you want, but we have to get you out of here and to safety. There are commandos trying to kill everyone!”

  “Oh, like they’re going to believe you,” Geren remarked, also in Arabic.

  “Screw this,” Kalid muttered, handing off his VEPR to Geren. “You can see I’m unarmed. Come on, we have to get out of here now!”

  He started walking down the hall when a gunshot exploded at the other end. Geren lifted her VEPR, but Kalid stepped into the path of her muzzle, glaring at her for a moment.

  It was a girl, crouched, with a pistol too large for her tiny hands aimed at Kalid. Between his boots was a section of floor where the bullet shattered tile.

  “How do we know we can trust you?” the girl asked.

  “Because you’re aiming at my heart, and I’m putting my back in the path of a stream of autofire that can stop you from killing me. I’m not going to let my partner gun you down because you’re scared,” Kalid said. There was iron in his voice, and Geren let her finger ease off pressure on the trigger.

  Above, gunfire was still shattering as desperate enemies fought against each other.

  “Alex, the fighting’s not slacking off!” Geren called out.

  “There are kids here who don’t want to leave their parents,” the girl called out.

  “What’s your name?” Kalid asked.

  The girl looked surprised. “F-Fayorah,” she said, stuttering.

  “Fayorah, we’ll try and make sure everyone’s parents get out, but…it might be too late for some of them,” Kalid told her.

  The crack of sadness in his voice made Geren’s heart feel as if it were caught in a vise. Even though her brain told her that he was speaking about an organization whose goal was the smashing of her home country, her heart realized that he was speaking to the children.

  “I know,” Fayorah spoke up. “I can…I can…”

  “Tell them to close their eyes, to protect them from the smoke,” Kalid ordered. He looked back at the sprawl of corpses along the hallway. “Hold hands, and we’ll walk single file out of here.”

  Fayorah bit her lower lip, looking back into her room.

  She let the handgun lower to the floor. Over the gunfire, Geren couldn’t hear her as her lips moved a mile a minute. Obviously she was coordinating the children with her.

  Then, amazingly, a chain of children started out into the hall. Kalid took Fayorah’s hand as she, too, kept her eyes clenched shut. He handed the children off, one at a time, to Geren, who began to lead them down the stairs and out into the lobby.

  BOLAN NEARED THE TOP landing when he spotted a shape.

  “Zimal?” a voice called.

  Bolan quickly answered “Yes,” hoping that the sound of the gunfight would make his accent intelligible.

  There were more quick words in Arabic thrown down to him as Bolan continued up. Dressed in his own combat blacksuit, he looked enough like the Egyptian commandos to fool them for the time being, especially under the stress of a massive firefight. As Bolan cleared the last of the steps, recognition dawned on the face of the commando, but it was too late.

  Bolan reversed his M-16 and slammed the stock hard into the Uzi of the Egyptian. Slugs tore into the wall from the initial trigger pull, but the weapon was dislodged from numbed fingers. With a second flick of the M-16, the fiberglass stock crashed across the man’s jaw, snapping him onto his back. Bolan moved forward and clamped his hand over the commando’s mouth, giving one final club to the gunman’s temple, making sure he was out cold.

  Bolan felt the Egyptian’s pulse, and found his skin to be cold and clammy. Shock was setting in on the guy and the soldier could see why. A pool of blood had spread where the man’s leg rested on the tile floor as he was protecting the landing. Bolan pulled a roll of electrical tape from his battle harness and ripped the cargo pocket off the man’s pants, wadding it up like gauze to form a pressure bandage. Taping the gunshot wound, Bolan at least stopped the man’s bleeding, and proceeded to bind his wrists and ankles with nylon cable ties. He wouldn’t go anywhere, and now the Executioner had a prisoner.

  Interrogation would come later.

  Bolan sensed a presence behind him and spun, bringing the M-16’s muzzle down. He held off on the trigger when he recognized Alex Kalid.

  “What are you doing here?” Bolan asked.

  “Checking to see if there were any more kids up here,” the adventurous ex-blacksuit said.

  “I have a prisoner. Get him to our vehicle, and make sure that he gets back to the safehouse,” Bolan ordered.

  “But what about you?” Kalid asked.

  “I’ll hitchhike,” Bolan explained. “This guy might have info we need.”

  “It’s your shoe leather,” Kalid proclaimed, yanking the unconscious Egyptian commando and hauling him over his shoulder.

  Bolan gave Kalid a slap on the back and turned to look at the progress of the firefight.

  There were two Egyptian commandos in the hallway, crouched behind walls, firing withering streams of lead at the Hezbollah defenders. To the right was an open window and a man at it.

  Bolan slung his M-16 and pulled his Beretta. He didn’t want to distract the commandos engaging the terrorists, and he wasn’t intending to take them out of the fight. All confusion in this three-way fight was to his advantage.

  The Executioner swung around and brought the front sight of the M-9 to bear on the Egyptian commando at the window. The guy was quick, reacting to Bolan’s presence and raising his weapon halfway, but Bolan was just an instant faster, tapping out five sound-suppressed shots that punched the commando’s ticket. He stood there, half dead, still struggling to bring up his weapon to avenge his own murder, then staggered backward and slipped out the window.

  Bolan was already halfway to the window when he heard a cry of outrage from the ledge.

  It was too late to turn back now, Bolan thought, hitting the window and levering out onto the ledge, barely a foot wide. He saw five Egyptian hitters crawling along the side of the building. The rearmost commando was bringing his Uzi around when Bolan fired at him with the Beretta.

  Stone chips rained on the Executioner’s head from the enemy’s autofire. The gunner reacted as if he were lanced with a hot poker, but only pulled back tighter. Eg
yptians started disappearing through a window quickly, getting off the ledge. The injured commando fired off a ragged burst with his Uzi to try to keep the Executioner pinned down. Finally the gunner’s fusillade ended when he was pulled in through the window.

  The whole floor came alive with a suddenly increased rage of gunfire. The Egyptians had joined the conflict in earnest. Bolan stuffed his Beretta into its shoulder holster and gripped the depressions in the wall, creeping along the ledge as fast as he could.

  His boot slipped, and his grip was tested against the ledge, his knuckles screaming in outrage at the sudden torture. Bolan fought to transfer his weight to the foot still firmly planted on the ledge, while he brought up his dangling foot, wrestling with gravity. Two fingers on his right hand popped loose from a depression. Bolan got his foot up, and with both legs under him, he redoubled his loosened grip.

  It was only five floors, he thought. The fall would only shatter his spine and leave him needing tube feeding and artificial respiration for the rest of his life. Bolan shook the thought from his mind and continued moving sideways. He reached the edge of the window the Egyptians had entered and paused. He got out the Heckler & Koch .45, loaded and ready, Safety off. He transferred the gun to his left hand and turned on the ledge, his back to the wall.

  The drop, in the darkness, looked farther than it really was. Bolan instead concentrated on his plan. He wrapped his right hand around the window frame, ignoring the bite of a piece of broken glass as it nicked his finger. The blood made his grip sticky and wet, each moment making it more difficult to use all the strength of his right arm to swing him around and to surprise the Egyptian commandos.

  That moved up his timetable, forcing him to make the desperate swing before he bled too much to keep a good hold.

  With a savage yank and a powerful leap, Bolan swung himself around, the big .45 blasting out rounds at the shadowy enemy warriors in the apartment.

  8

  Major Tofo didn’t know who had followed them out onto the ledge, and he had hoped to cover his own back but the gunfire blasting through the door of the apartment was incredible. Already one of his commandos was lying facedown in a growing puddle of blood. Tofo’s Uzi tore out buzz-saw bursts that ripped into the gunmen across the hall, shredding into them.

  He glanced back at Janza who was holding his bullet-creased arm.

  “Can you fight?” Tofo asked.

  Before he could answer, a thunderclap drowned out all sound. It was one of the Soviet-made RGD-5 fragmentation grenades his men had carried with them. Like the Uzis, the grenades were deniable weapons. They also had the power to turn a small room into an abattoir of death and destruction. Its official casualty radius was fifteen to twenty meters, but more often, in the heat of combat, soldiers were too spread out to take more than nicks and minor injuries past all their protective gear. However, against a group of casually dressed terrorists holed up in an apartment, the blast zone was completely fatal. A wind of serrated steel passed through the doorway, but Tofo and his men ducked out of the jet of shrapnel propelled by the concussive power of nearly four ounces of high explosive.

  Tofo checked his men. Three were alive, but Janza was wounded. Hamid was dead, facedown, torn apart by rifle fire that had punched through him mercilessly.

  Tofo went to the door and held out a small hand mirror to scan the hallway. He wasn’t going to risk his head by poking it into an enemy line of fire. There were three more doors on this floor with desperate gunmen taking up defensive positions. One weapon opened up, and Tofo dropped the mirror, pulling his hand back in before it got shot off.

  “They’re still dug in,” he said to his men. He pulled an RGD-5 from his harness and pulled its pin. He aimed for a spot on the far wall and swept his arm in an arc, releasing the grenade in a looping throw, then whirled back deeper into the apartment. The grenade bounced off the wall, skidding down the tile floor of the hallway.

  Instants later, the building shook with the crash of the explosion. Screams filled the air and Tofo shouted. Janza was hot on his heels as the pair dashed across the hallway to the apartment they’d cleared out. Token fire chased them in the hall, but Dinal and Ramid, who were still hunkered by the stairway, cut loose with a merciless volley of autofire.

  Janza had tied off his arm injury and was holding his weapon with both hands.

  “Can you knock a hole in the wall?” Tofo asked.

  “I have the use of both hands,” Janza answered.

  “Do it!” Tofo said.

  Janza quickly went to the wall of one apartment and produced some det cord, fast-burning explosives inside a cord that was spooled out like thread. Using some putty, Janza made a concentric, man-sized circle on the wall and then stuck in a blasting cap. Tofo grabbed a table and held it up against the explosion. He and Janza used it as a shield.

  Gunfire exploded through the window across the way, and Tofo looked there, seeing a man in black with a handgun diving into the apartment he was staging his assault from. The Egyptian major watched as a chest full of slugs cut down Amin.

  Tofo tucked his chin to his chest, shoulders rising to protect the rest of his neck.

  The det cord erupted on the other side of the table, giving only a slight push to Tofo and Janza. Tossing aside the furniture, the two of them dived through the hole they made, targeting enemy gunmen. The bastard in black would have to wait for later.

  THERE WERE ONLY TWO Egyptian commandos in the apartment when Bolan came through the window, tracking. Only one turned, reacting in time to notice the Executioner deliver his death sentence. The SOCOM blasted a deadly line of holes through the commando’s rib cage, tossing him lifelessly to the floor. The second Egyptian was spinning away from the wall, hands going to cover his ears. He saw Bolan but didn’t seem that concerned by a tall, ice-eyed man tracking a handgun on him.

  The detonation’s shock wave slammed into Bolan like a giant’s fist, and for the second time in a week, he felt his body seemingly unplug itself from his brain for a moment. His consciousness trailed his mortal frame as he was thrown against a sofa, knocking it over. Only the cushions on the sofa saved the Executioner from shattering his spine in his uncontrolled fall, and the soldier desperately rushed to get a sense of control back into his body.

  His body folded up and he rolled, his toes touching the floor, knees straightening. His head whirled like a top inside, brain still on full rinse cycle from being put through the washer once more. Even so, he managed to get his gun lined up at the remaining Egyptian commando in the room, who had turned into a pair of gunmen. Bolan pulled his Beretta in one smooth motion, as the double-imaged killer went for his own gun, and fired at both of them.

  Bolan’s vision settled into a single image as he watched the double-dead gunman go sliding to the floor bonelessly.

  The Executioner didn’t have time to deal with his headache or congratulate himself on his shooting, as the hole blasted through to the other apartment suddenly became alive with Hezbollah killers. Pivoting, Bolan emptied both of his pistols into the improvised doorway between apartments, bullets cutting into the terrorists before they had a chance to trigger their weapons. At the same time, he dived for the cover of the sofa, even though the steel-cored slugs were already perforating the cushions. At least the sofa offered him concealment as he clung to the floor.

  Autofire blazed as Bolan felt for the M-67 fragmentation grenade he had on his harness. Popping the pin, he waited for the slowdown in rifle fire. It came on cue—the Hezbollah terrorists, firing in unison, ran out of ammo in unison. Bolan popped up and launched the grenade right through the hole, the little fourteen ounce hell bomb caroming off the skull of one gunman as he fumbled for a spare magazine. Bolan ducked and rolled to one side. There were scattered cries of panic next door as the grenade erupted.

  Silence reigned on the other side, and Bolan got to his knees. His pistols were empty, and he took a quick moment to reload them, stuffing them back in their respective holsters. He unslung the rifl
e from his back and dumped its partially spent clip, exchanging it for a fresh one. If there was someone left alive in the next room, he didn’t want to get caught flat-footed.

  Besides, the reloading gave his brain more time to recover from being slammed around. Even so, he popped some acetaminophen tablets down his throat. They’d stave off the effects of a compounded concussion for a little while more. Bolan did an orbit of the hole blasted in the wall, looking through to sweep the entire room, giving himself as much cover as possible. He slowly divided the room into angles, giving his enemy minimal exposure. Nobody was moving. He stepped through the hole and felt a hand grab at his ankle. Bolan stepped back, sweeping the M-16 down, looking into the half-torn face of a Hezbollah terrorist. Gleaming skull poked through flesh, one eye cored out by shrapnel, his mouth gaping wide open, and a wail escaping from his throat as he awakened from the shock that reduced him to something out of a monster movie.

  Bolan kicked free and fired a mercy burst into the gruesome features, hypervelocity slugs exploding the face and making it an even more nauseating mess.

  He looked around. The door was open, but he wasn’t going to risk taking fire from the other apartment. The gunfight had died down. That meant either the terrorists were dead, and Bolan was too late to get to Faswad, or that both sides were licking their wounds. He knew that the Egyptian commandos intended to leapfrog through the holes the drywall between the apartments generated with det cord. He stepped back and found the dead commando who made the hole he walked through. Sure enough, he had a spool of the stuff, and detonators.

  Bolan quickly began unwrapping the cord off its spool and winding it around his fist. Then he stuck in a timer fuse. Taking it in the palm of his hand he walked back to the first apartment, then broke the cap on the fuse and tossed it out the door toward the stairway entrance. Spinning back, he dived through the gap to the next apartment, hitting the floor as the explosion ripped down the hallway. He kept his mouth open all the way, equalizing pressure between the inside of his head and the incredible crush zone outside his skull. By the time he somersaulted to his feet, swinging the M-16 up on its sling, he felt no worse than he had before the blast.