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  His teeth clenched at the hiss of superheated steam, then the fountain spray belched and turned to a stronger stream of cool water that engulfed the heat and extinguished the fire completely.

  Bolan gave himself the luxury of thirty seconds under the fountain, breathing deeply, knowing the moment he withdrew his arm from the flow of water the pain of the burn would escalate again. In the darkness he tried to see the damage, but couldn’t tell what was charred linen sport coat, what was scorched cotton shirt, and what was cooked human skin.

  The worst possibility was that the pain would be intense enough to distract him. Bolan could not afford anything less than one hundred percent of his mental capacity. He was just becoming fully aware of his situation: this restaurant had to have closed down. The dry fountain and a few pieces of litter told him the place had gone unused for weeks.

  As the countdown in his head ended, Bolan withdrew the arm from the water, and when the pain hit him it was as bad as he had expected. That was bad enough. His teeth flashed like the fangs of a starving cat and he tore a chunk of charred linen from his arm like a bloody hunk of fresh meat, his jaws grinding into it, his forehead bathed in a fresh layer of perspiration, while his brain strove to think clearly.

  It was almost impossible—the injury was bad. His body was trying to shut down. It wanted to collapse into recuperative hibernation, and Bolan knew fighting it would be folly.

  His eyes fell on the open gate, and he half stumbled across the courtyard through the scattered chairs and tables, grabbing on to the rails of the gate for support, feeling a wellspring of anger come to life. He would not surrender to pain.

  With a force of will he mentally blocked the agony, stomping it into a vault inside his brain. The vault contained it—barely.

  The street was empty, but the whooping of emergency vehicles was drawing closer.

  Bolan examined the lock, then swung the gate closed.

  Mack Bolan began to put the scattered tables and chairs back the way he had found them.

  10

  The first dark blue Fiat with the National Police Force logo cruised the street three minutes later, piercing the interior of the cafe courtyard with the white blade of a searchlight.

  That was just seconds after Bolan had completed his cleanup job: restacking the chairs, shutting off the fountain and wheeling the Suzuki into a dark alcove. The pain was still under control, but his body was laboring with every movement, intoxicated with exhaustion.

  The searchlight blinked out. The squad car moved on.

  The courtyard’s roof was heavy foliage on a lattice, but he wouldn’t trust it to hide him from the helicopters that would be making their own search, probably soon.

  He heard the thrum of rotors.

  Bolan went to the heavy steel doors with his tools. It was like watching someone else’s shaking fingers at work. The stranger’s hands became dappled with moisture, as if in a light sprinkle of rain, the hot drops of his own sweat.

  The door opened, and Bolan wheeled the motorcycle inside the dark restaurant. He bolted the door at the same instant the courtyard became awash in brilliance from the spotlight on the belly of the police chopper just overhead.

  Bolan did not care to contemplate the number of times he had been pushed to his own limits, forced to endure what he had never thought endurable. His life had left him with a highly accurate sense of his own strengths and capabilities. Right now he knew he had limited resources. Every movement had to be efficient.

  The closed-up restaurant was a stroke of luck—but only if the Kuwaitis didn’t check it out carefully. Any close examination of the front gate would show the lock was broken, and then the place would be swarming with police.

  And Bolan would be here waiting for them, because he knew he didn’t have the energy to go farther—not with any stealth.

  How bad was the burn, exactly?

  Such speculation agitated the demon in the vault.

  In the kitchen, alongside a walk-in cooler that was open, warm and stinking, was a rickety steel rack of dry goods and cleaning supplies. He nudged it away from the wall a few inches, until there was enough space behind it for a man to lie on his side, at least partially obscured by the shelf contents. This would be his hospital.

  As he crawled into the niche behind the dry goods, scattering a nest of beetles, he wondered if he would awaken in a Kuwaiti prison. He ripped off more of the sleeve and dressed the burn with what first-aid supplies he had. The last thing he did was pull out painkillers—narcotizing codeine pills—and swallowed several.

  Bolan had done all he could for himself, and his energy was depleted. His only option now was to allow his body to rest and heal. As the first distasteful surge of the narcotic slowed his thoughts, Bolan closed his eyes and felt the demon in the vault weaken, its screams dying to mere howls of fiery agony.

  HAMZA AL-DOURI SWIGGED more vodka from the bottle.

  “You really think that will dull your senses less than a pill?” Maysaloun Jasim asked his question—for the eighth time—with the ball-cheeked smirk he always wore. Jasim had a baby face and supreme overconfidence that went far beyond everyman arrogance.

  “It’s a known entity. I don’t trust those pills because I don’t know what they’ll do to me,” al-Douri replied, seething.

  Jasim shrugged, still grinning. Except for the narrow beard on his chin, Jasim’s face was shiny smooth, like the flesh on the face of a prepubescent boy. His face was heavy and fleshy, and his perpetual smirk made his cheeks into polished apples. He looked ridiculous, like a merry old man from a fairy tale, and that was just one more reason to despise him.

  At the moment al-Douri despised everybody. The pain of the gunshot was throbbing, and he constantly fought to keep his temper in control.

  Shot by his own man! The idiot was dead now, and he deserved it. The round was small caliber, but it had slashed an ugly flesh wound across his ribs. The doctors had stitched him up under anesthetic, but it left al-Douri dopey and loose tongued. He’d still been muddled when the police tried to question him, and he knew he shouldn’t allow himself to be interrogated, but even feigned sickness didn’t put them off.

  Al-Douri was surprised when he was allowed to leave the scene of the attack. His doped-up answers had to have been good enough to raise no overt suspicions, but who knew how long he’d be in the clear.

  He went right to Jasim’s, a designated safe house, part of Jasim’s contract with Baghdad. Jasim’s wealth and influence made his home virtually untouchable by the police.

  Jasim efficiently handled the rapid citywide quest that tracked down the ministry attacker in just hours, then al-Douri hired a hit man to solve that problem. Two teams of mercenaries—Jasim’s personal security staff—were sent in to take care of any loose ends.

  Now they were waiting, and al-Douri turned to booze as the doctor’s pills wore off. He had to have something to take the edge off the fire in his gut. Jasim encouraged him to sleep, but al-Douri insisted on sitting up to monitor news from the field.

  The wall-mounted television screen was set to low volume, but the murmuring voice of the male news anchor repeated what little was known of the attack at the government offices that afternoon. Aside from the screen the room was outfitted like a sheikh’s parlor, not the office and command center it was supposed to be.

  Al-Douri was about to ask yet again what was taking so long when a phone tittered electronically somewhere, and Jasim reached into a lurid decorative pile of wooden furniture, extracting a phone.

  “Yes?” Jasim’s face transformed into an ugly frown and a large amount of flesh curled off his forehead over his eyes. All at once Jasim looked every one of his fifty-one years. Al-Douri was momentarily amused to see the man lose the facade—then he wondered what made it happen.

  Jasim hissed orders and slammed down the phone. “He escaped,” Jasim declared as he picked up the phone again and jabbed at the buttons. “He killed one of my men and got past—”

  Al-Douri t
hought about this as Jasim turned his attention to the phone, speaking in a hushed, angry voice. Then Jasim blurted, “What? Get in here!”

  Seconds later a man appeared with a portable radio set, which he placed on the garish desk and twisted the volume.

  It was the Kuwaiti police. The man was monitoring the emergency frequencies. There were frantic calls for fire and emergency medical teams, and they caught in passing the name of the hotel.

  “There was an explosion. Car bomb,” the radio operator reported. “It was in the garage, and three men were reported getting into the vehicle just before it blew. Now Mehdi’s car does not respond.”

  “How long have you been trying to raise them?” Jasim demanded.

  “A few minutes—since I sent you the call from the other car.”

  “Keep at it.”

  “Yes, Jasim.”

  The news got worse as the night wore on. It didn’t take long for a runner sent by Jasim to confirm that the destroyed car was indeed his. Four of his security staff were dead.

  They listened in amazement to the police confusion as the hell-raising biker was trapped, only to be lost in a series of explosions. There was a moment of elation as Jasim’s patrolling enforcers reported stumbling across the man on the bike. Even Jasim’s smirk had returned.

  But not for long. The last confused radio reports from the enforcers told them two of their men were dead already. There was chaos out there. Jasim was insisting there had to be more attackers—one man couldn’t have pulled it off.

  About the time Jasim’s mercenary team stopped transmitting, the emergency scanners came to life again. Another explosion not far away. Bodies in the street. A tiny gasoline storefront guttering out the last of its fuel tank and a burned corpse visible in the inferno—but unreachable.

  How could it be? Jasim wore a face that reflected his internal confusion. He’d been defeated. The Jasim family was never outsmarted, outmuscled, overcome. Maysaloun Jasim was in unfamiliar territory.

  The Jasim family was rich. Oil rich now, but even before the 1930s the dynasty had old money. The legend was they became wealthy trading slaves, two hundred years ago, harvesting Africans from the continent and penning them in their own secret harbor on the west coast of what was now Gabon. They were middlemen—a sort of slave convenience store for European and American shippers who did not have the manpower to do their own reaping. Just as often they were patronized by slavers who had done their own gathering only to find their cargo withering from disease. The bad cargo was jettisoned, and the slaver would be forced to buy from the Jasim outpost—an expensive proposition, but Jasim’s quarantined slave pens were more likely free of disease.

  Once slavers recognized how the Jasim preconditioning made their cargo more robust, and more likely to survive the despicable conditions of the voyage to the auction block, the cost per head was easier to swallow. The Gabon outpost became one of the largest slave distribution centers. Only British and American harassment could have driven the Jasim family out of the business—but finally a small fleet of slave patrol warships converged on the outpost and dismantled it. The Jasims were forewarned by Americans and Europeans who were firmly in their pocket, and the family members and staff were on their way home twelve hours before the warships anchored.

  The slave business was no more, but the dynasty found continued success, generation after generation, and their ethical code, such as it was, had only deteriorated from their days as traders in human beings. Now the Jasim dynasty patriarch sold out entire nations.

  But he did it for the money, and that galled Hamza al-Douri.

  Al-Douri was born poor, grew up poorer and scraped his way into a position with the Iraqi government. It wasn’t until his skills were noticed and he was conscripted into the intelligence bureaucracy that he began living well, but times had changed and he was back to struggling for every meager comfort.

  Jasim had never worked for anything, never struggled. But Jasim had been instrumental in getting al-Douri established in the Kuwaiti government. Tonight he was giving the spy sanctuary—probably because he did not understand the risk, al-Douri decided.

  “He’ll come here,” al-Douri declared.

  “We’ll turn him away at the gate.” When he saw al-Douri’s sour look, Jasim shrugged with his eyebrows and added, “He won’t get inside.”

  “You think your security system will keep him out?”

  “I do.”

  “I do not. I’ve met the man, looked into his eyes. I knew at that moment if he was as good as he seemed I was in big trouble. He has proved that he is that good.”

  That was when they got word of the police investigation of a body, found in the hotel where the killings occurred. The man was a known criminal, the news said, and gave the name of the deceased. Al-Douri’s hit man.

  “He’s beat us,” al-Douri declared through the throbbing of his wound. “He’s outsmarted us every step of the way. You still think your security system is going to keep him out?”

  Jasim glared at him. If he was angry enough to wear his emotion on his face, then maybe al-Douri had actually reached the man. “The security system will keep him out if he ever comes here, and he won’t,” Jasim declared flatly. “You forget that he does not know where you are or who I am.”

  “Alnakeeb Alb did though.”

  The statement shocked Jasim.

  “He’ll be here,” al-Douri said simply.

  “He will not get in!”

  “How many times in one night will you let this American show you for a fool?” al-Douri asked.

  Jasim gave him a hateful, withering glare and said nothing.

  “Once more, anyway,” al-Douri said with a liquid chuckle as pain filled his mouth with saliva, and he sucked on more of the vodka.

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia, U.S.

  AARON KURTZMAN STARED at the reports on his screen, his mouth as dry as desert sand. The latest articles filed with the news agencies and correspondents in Kuwait City were confusing and conflicting. Nobody had a clue.

  It appeared no one knew who was responsible for the attacks against a minister in the Kuwaiti government. He had been ambushed right in his own office by a single gunman who was, witnesses claimed, an American. At least an English speaker with a North American accent. He was clearly a terrorist or a murderer with an unknown agenda, gunning down several government employees in cold blood. Curiously, however, these employees had come prepared for the battle, armed with high-powered weapons. The midlevel government official who had been the subject of the attack was not known to be dead or alive, having vanished after being questioned by police.

  Questions about the curiously armed ministry officials were being rebuffed by Kuwaiti investigators. None of the National Police Force officers who served as building security had been harmed.

  Kurtzman was one of the few people who knew who was responsible for these attacks, and why, but then came a whole new series of events that left Kurtzman guessing too.

  A string of violent events shook an upscale street in the city. More deaths—in the parking garage and a room in the same hotel. All the victims had questionable backgrounds.

  There were eyewitness accounts of a madman on a motorcycle stolen from the hotel. All that could be agreed on was that he had been spotted in one of the overpriced shopping districts and hemmed in by the police. A series of explosions followed. The subject escaped. The police couldn’t quite explain how he escaped, although they stated with conviction that there had to have been accomplices. Only one of the reports effectively drew together the facts and implied that the explosions were carefully used to provide an escape for someone who was beyond the law but did not want to hurt anyone in law enforcement.

  Then, less than two miles away, another strange altercation minutes later. No witnesses this time, but there was a dead man in the streets and another smoldering in the ruins of a burned-out gas station.

  The dead men could not be identified. The gunshot victim was described as �
��probably” Kuwaiti, which implied a complexion darker than that of Mack Bolan’s. But what of the man in the fire? The reports said dental records would be needed to identify the man—if his dental records existed anywhere.

  Bolan failed to check in on schedule. He wasn’t in jail. Kuwait was one of the few Middle Eastern countries with computerized law enforcement and immigration record keeping, designed to keep tabs on the huge percentage of foreigners who worked in the country at any given time. Arrests were electronically recorded with the speed and efficiency of a supermarket checkout.

  So if not under arrest, where was Striker?

  Kurtzman couldn’t stop thinking about it: Were the charred gas station remains all that was left of Mack Bolan?

  “Aaron.”

  Barbara Price was standing right next to him. He hadn’t even heard her. When her hand rested on his shoulder, he reached for it, taking it in his own.

  “Phoenix’s ETA is sixty-five minutes,” she said, but it sounded like she wanted to say something else.

  Kurtzman’s mind made the instant leap to the other situation, which had materialized out of nowhere the day before. He and Price had been sitting on the front porch of the old farmhouse sipping coffee, enjoying the quiet time, when Carmen Delahunt had come out to summon them to the latest crisis, so fresh it was still playing out for the global news media.

  What a difference a few hours could make. This morning Mack Bolan had been alive and well and doing what he did best. Phoenix Force and Able Team, the two commando units that were the official field units of Stony Man Farm, had been on stand-down.

  Then, simultaneously, fire erupted on one oil tanker after another. The tankers were thousands of miles apart and originated at various Middle Eastern ports, but a common element became apparent to the Farm cybernetics team: all the tankers were U.S. bound. Kurtzman and his staff traced communications between parties who seemed too interested and too handy to the fires, then tracked those communications to what might turn out to be another series of attacks on shipping vessels.