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  “Right.”

  “Right, he says.” Ski laughed. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to hang my white behind out this window and take some shots at the guys who are following us, because, honestly, if I don’t, at the rate they’re catching up, we’re all gonna die before the top of the hour.”

  “Okay,” Bolan said. He turned to Yenni. “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I did not laugh.” Behind her scarf, her eyes were bright with amusement.

  “Right,” Bolan said.

  Ski laughed again. He shifted in his seat with some difficulty; he was a big man, and there wasn’t that much room in the Mahindra’s cab. But he managed it nonetheless.

  “I know a girl, her name is Sue,” Ski said in a singsong cadence. “She can do things that will turn your—” Whatever off-color comment he made was lost in the noise of his short-barreled M4 as its muzzle turned into a bloom of orange fire. “I proposed marriage, she said no,” Ski continued singing. “So I took her by the hand and I—” Again, his words were lost in gunfire.

  “His plans are probably horrible,” Yenni said.

  “You’re really stuck on that, aren’t you?” Bolan replied, putting the Mahindra’s accelerator to the floor.

  “I count four trucks,” Ski said, shouting to be heard over the air rushing past the window. “Angry loyalists, no doubt. The trucks are those dodgy Chinese Hummer-looking things. Probably smell like burned plastic and bad choices inside.”

  “Can you get a head count?” Bolan asked. They were entering a curved portion of the dirt trail, which caused Ski to lean hard against the side of the cab. Bolan did his best not to lose control and put them off the road.

  “Maybe…three in the first truck,” Ski said. He aimed carefully through the red-dot scope on his M4. Once again the rifle bucked, this time with a single shot. “Okay, two in the first truck. Can’t really tell about the ones behind. Average of three at least, though. They’re loaded for hell and all. I think seeing their buddies wasted has them riled up. That your fault?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Bolan said. “I’m a broken clock.”

  “Good buddy,” Ski said, firing his rifle rapidly. “I’ve heard a lot of guys say a lot of things when I talk at ’em, but that has to be the first time anybody’s said that. I’ll remember that, Streaker.”

  “Striker.”

  “Call me Iron Wombat, then.”

  “I am not calling him that,” Yenni said.

  Bullets began to strike the rear of the Mahindra. Bolan focused on shoving the truck from side to side with fast shifts of the wheel, trying to make them an erratic target. It was a dangerous game. Every time the vehicle slewed he ran the risk of dumping them off the road entirely, and if he ditched the truck, their pursuers would reach them and kill them as surely as Bolan had killed so many of their fellows.

  “So what was so important that they sent you into a war zone to track us down, with nothing to go on but a target list?”

  “Hey, I didn’t say what it was,” Ski said. “Fact is, I don’t know that. I don’t want to know that. Coordinates are just coordinates to me.” He leaned out again and took careful aim with his next shot. The M4 barked. “Lead truck just has one, the passenger. Driver’s got a sudden case of dead. Okay, lead truck crashed. New lead truck in a pack of three vehicles. Three guys in it.”

  “Two,” Yenni said. Ski’s rifle belched flame.

  “Two,” he echoed, taking a moment to grin at her through his bushy beard.

  “Just in case you take a bullet while you’re out there,” Bolan said, “you should probably tell me what you know.”

  “Oh, right, right. Okay. Turns out the fella who tried to assassinate the President back in the States is kin to Fafniyal, this Wolf character. His brother. The Syrians have spent a lot of time and effort covering up that connection, but when it was discovered, word had to get to you.”

  “What?” Bolan said. “Say that again. Less folksy this time.”

  “Fafniyal and the assassin are brothers. Which means—”

  “Which means,” Yenni interrupted, “the attempt on your President’s life was most likely staged by the Wolf for Hahmir’s benefit.”

  “And that would mean they did it so Hahmir could be the hero and open up better relations between Hahmir’s government and the United States,” Bolan said.

  “You figure he did it so the Man would give him presents?” Ski dropped one of his magazines, reached for another in his vest and reloaded. Enemy AK fire took off the mirror on his side, nearly hitting him. He swore and ducked back inside the truck for a moment. “The weather out there’s not great,” he said. “This thing go any faster?”

  “We could throw grenades at them,” Bolan said.

  “Now, there’s an idea. Trade you.” Ski handed his M4 to Bolan. Yenni took it instead, propping it on the seat next to the Executioner. Then she looked to Bolan for approval. He nodded, and Yenni handed the M16/M203 combination to the contractor.

  “I will pass the grenades,” she said. She plucked one from the bandolier on Bolan’s chest, leaning close as she reached for it, then handed it to Ski.

  “Get a room, you two,” the man said. He loaded the launcher tube. “Now we’re talking.” Another bullet knocked paint from the rear of the Mahindra, and Ski looked at the back of the truck as if he hadn’t considered its cargo before. “Uh, hey, you don’t have a lot of old dynamite or something in the back, do you? Because I’d rather not explode.”

  “No,” Bolan said. “Mostly Semtex, small arms and ammunition. A few heavier items. Oh, and some ancient grenades that might blow if we shake them around too much.”

  “Awesome,” Ski said. “Hold her steady, Strikeforce.”

  “Striker.”

  “Broken Clock,” Yenni said quietly. “This is what we should call you.”

  “Don’t encourage him.” Bolan spared Yenni a look. “You realize that we still don’t know exactly what’s going on here. Say that Fafniyal and Hahmir did cook up the assassination to make Hahmir look like a hero. Maybe they knew the natural response to a friendly regime in Syria would be to prop it up with modern weaponry, the very thing everybody in this region wants to get their hands on. If that’s the case, why doesn’t it stop there? Hahmir gets his weapons and then uses them to shore up his regime. Why would he let them go missing? What does he gain?”

  “Maybe there’s more players on the checkerboard.” Ski paused, aiming. “Fire down below,” he said and chucked a 40-mm grenade through the air. In the cracked mirror on his side, Bolan watched the lead truck explode in a fireball that engulfed its engine compartment. “Score one for the home team!” hooted Ski. Then he frowned. “Uh, wait, that’s not right. Technically, we’re the visiting team.”

  “Who are we visiting?” Yenni asked.

  “Not you,” Ski said. “Say, I bet you’re hot under that scarf.”

  Yenni glared at him. Bolan smiled despite himself.

  “Players on the checkerboard,” the soldier echoed. “Hahmir really does need those weapons to secure his hold on the nation. The constant civil wars have made maintaining control difficult. His enemies know that. So they arrange to steal the shipments, taking advantage of the fact that Hahmir’s rule is less than total. And now they’ve set up the weapons around the country and are trying to figure out how to deploy them, so they can challenge Hahmir for control of Syria.”

  “This does not explain why the men we found with the launcher were not loyalists,” Yenni said. “The loyalists want Hahmir gone most of all.”

  “But they might have been,” Bolan said. “The loyalists might be too clever by half, and they’re trying to hide their possession of the weapons for the sake of international public relations. Maybe they’re going to carry out terrorist attacks on neighboring countries with the rockets. Maybe they want to make it look like it’s the work of Hahmir’s government, so he’ll lose Western support, and it’ll be that much easier to take him down.”
/>   “This is making my head hurt,” Ski said. He’d reloaded the grenade launcher and within minutes blew apart the next vehicle in the line. “I’m not great with math, but I’m pretty sure we’ve got just the one truck on our butts now.”

  “Well,” Bolan said. “Make it explode.”

  “Man after my own heart. I’m working on that, I truly am.” Ski fired several more grenades. The last of these struck close enough that Bolan could feel the concussion rock through the rear of the Mahindra.

  “Really, really old grenades,” he reminded the contractor. “I feel like I haven’t emphasized that enough.”

  “Keep your shorts on, Stealth Bomber,” Ski said. “Look, this last fellow’s tricky. He’s seen what we did to his buddies, and he’s not going to let me get a bead on him.”

  “All right,” Bolan said. “I’m going to slow down, let them come alongside of us.”

  “You do that and they’re going to light us up before they get here.”

  “I wasn’t going to give them enough time to try,” Bolan said and stomped both feet on the brake pedal.

  The Mahindra screeched to a smoking, fishtailing halt, but somehow, Bolan managed to pull the truck to the side of the road without dumping them over or putting them in a ditch. The pursuing Hummer-like vehicle shot past them, knocking off the mirror on Bolan’s side, before the driver even thought about applying his own brakes.

  “Now,” Bolan said.

  Ski stepped from the truck, braced the assault rifle on the hood of the Mahindra and fired the grenade launcher. The explosive projectile took the rear wheels off the loyalist truck and pitched it up and onto its roof. Its engine went dead in the crash. Bolan was quick to put the Mahindra back on the road proper, then pull up cautiously alongside the enemy vehicle.

  “Any chance these loyalists will tell us anything useful?” he asked Yenni.

  “What is it you Americans say?” she said. “It cannot hurt to ask.”

  Bolan and Yenni piled out of the truck. There was movement inside the overturned Chinese “Hummer,” but no one was trying to crawl free. Bolan whistled to Ski, who tossed him the M16. Bolan caught it with his right and returned the M4 with his left. Ski patted the rifle as if it was an old friend. Then he dropped his folksy charm and became all business, covering Bolan’s and Yenni’s approach to the downed patrol truck.

  Bolan dropped to one knee and checked the men inside. One of the passengers had fallen on his neck, breaking it. He was upside down inside the truck, his leg twitching like that of a biology-class frog attached to a nine-volt battery. The other men were dead except for the driver, who’d been strapped into his seat. Using his combat knife, Bolan cut the seat belt, yanking the terrified loyalist from the vehicle. He threw the man into the dirt.

  “English?” he demanded. The captured loyalist spoke rapidly in a dialect Bolan could not interpret.

  “He says he does not speak English,” Yenni said.

  “Ask him if he knows anything about the weapons shipments.”

  Yenni asked. The prisoner answered. “No,” she said. “He claims he knows nothing.”

  “Ask him how he feels about getting his fingers chopped off one at a time.” Ski hefted his tomahawk, which he’d slipped from a fast-deployment sheath on his belt. “I haven’t scalped anybody in a week at least. You don’t have to add that part.”

  Yenni translated, but the response was not encouraging. “He says it does not matter how much we torture him because he knows nothing of value.”

  The prisoner started chanting under his breath.

  “What’s that about?” Ski asked.

  “He’s praying,” Bolan stated.

  “Yes,” Yenni said. “He makes peace with his god. He knows that one of you is going to kill him. He would prefer not to be scraped.”

  “Scalped, I said,” Ski retorted. “Not scraped. And you weren’t supposed to tell him that part.” He looked to Bolan. “What you figure? Leave him here without his boots so he can’t follow us?”

  “He’d just take a pair off the closest corpse,” Bolan said. His features hardened. To Yenni, he said, “Will you be able to tell if he lies to you?”

  “I think so. He does not seem very smart. And he is afraid.”

  “Ask him if he was part of the operation that took the village,” Bolan said. “Ask him how many children he murdered.”

  The prisoner stared, wide-eyed and terrified, at Bolan and Ski. Then he looked back to Yenni and muttered something under his breath.

  “Hell,” Ski said. “I don’t rightly know what he said, but I guarantee you that was a lie.”

  Yenni drew her Jordanian combat knife. “So do I,” she said and cut the loyalist murderer’s throat.

  10

  The little town of Sarrin sat northeast of Aleppo, just east of the Euphrates River. It had a population of just six thousand. Bolan’s dossier said the area was replete with archaeological sites, more than anywhere else in Syria, meaning this portion of the country had great history attached to it.

  Bolan’s target list told him this was where they’d find the next emplacement of stolen weaponry.

  They had dropped Ski off along the way. As much as he would have enjoyed fighting alongside them, he’d said, there were places to go and interesting people to kill there. He was on the clock, he explained, and that meant they would have to shoulder on through the rest of whatever covert mission they weren’t on without the benefit of his stellar company.

  Bolan thought he might actually miss the quirky contractor. He would have to ask Brognola about him. Ski seemed to think Yenni and Bolan were contractors like him, and had known enough not to inquire too deeply into their identities. He was a good man.

  That was a professional, right there, and Bolan would have been proud to stand with him again. He was also glad Ski hadn’t joined the legions of fallen allies he carried around in his mental roster…although, for a warrior like Ski, dying in battle was probably his life’s calling.

  Bolan’s was likely no different…but that wasn’t on the agenda today.

  Today, they were going to smash the enemy troop placement.

  They rolled into town, doing their best to look casual in a truck that was sporting several bullet holes and some body damage. Fortunately for them, in a country torn by an almost perpetual civil war, bullet holes and scorch marks were things nobody even blinked at.

  Bolan surveyed the town, finding plenty of evidence of human habitation. Here, a line of drying laundry was suspended between two stone buildings. There, a couple sat on a bench, with a baby carriage nearby. The streets were quiet, but he chalked that up to the remote village’s poverty.

  The community, however, was dominated by what appeared to be a large, modern factory. White walls rose in the center of town, and a stack attached to the side of that blocky structure emitted a plume of smoke. Here, in Sarrin, there was some form of industry.

  “This feels wrong,” Yenni said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I have never seen a factory like that. It has no markings. No names. No windows. Only a smokestack. And there is nothing around it. No loading docks. No places for the parking of cars. Nothing going in. Nothing going out. Does this not seem unusual to you?”

  “Yeah,” Bolan said. “It does. Come on. Let’s take a stroll through the streets of Sarrin.”

  They left the vehicle, careful to park in the shadow of an alleyway, where it would be less visible. Yenni hid her Krinkov under her coat, while Bolan carried only his concealed handguns. They made a circuit of the block, giving the civilians a wide berth, and then did so again.

  “What is it, Cooper?” Yenni asked. “You keep snorting the air.”

  “Sniffing,” Bolan said. “I’m sniffing.”

  “Snuffing what?”

  “Sniffing,” he corrected. “That smoke. Coming from the ‘factory’ at the center of town. That’s wood smoke.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Bolan said, “t
hat’s exactly what you’d smell if you made a small campfire beneath an empty smokestack to simulate a working factory.”

  “Twice a day,” Yenni said. “That is the saying. A broken clock is right twice a day.”

  “Touché,” Bolan replied. He stopped. The couple on the bench down the street hadn’t moved. “Look at them,” he murmured. “Strike you as odd they’re just sitting there with their arms by their sides?”

  “Let us look.”

  They approached carefully, but soon it was apparent they need not worry. The figures on the bench were mannequins. Their arms were by their sides because they were molded that way.

  Bolan peered into the baby carriage. Back in the States, almost no one used such things anymore. Strollers and car seats had replaced these now old-fashioned conveyances. But inside the carriage, beneath its canopy and wrapped in a dirty blanket, was a doll, not unlike the one they’d found in the doomed Syrian village. The parallel was infuriating.

  Yenni went to the clothesline. The garments hanging on it were streaked and stained, obviously not clean.

  Props. They were all props.

  “Why do all this?” Yenni asked. “Who does it help, to hide the weapons like this?”

  “Satellites,” Bolan said. “It makes perfect sense if you don’t know that my government has the ability to track the weapons using heat signatures and other means. They’re trying to fool overhead imaging from the West. They put a few weapons emplacements out where we can see them, hoping we don’t find them, but knowing they can be sacrificed. They hide others in a sham like this. They had no way of knowing we could see through it. They probably still believe it’s working. That’s why there aren’t any sentries out here.”

  “But…Sarrin is not a fake. Sarrin is a real town.”

  Bolan looked around. His head began throbbing again. “No,” he said. “Sarrin was a real town.” He picked a house at random, tried the door. It did not budge. He took a step back and planted his combat boot against it, smashing it inward.

  The smell hit them both like a hammer.