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The terrorist saw them, saw their guns,and blinked once in surprise before he turned and lunged for the open doorway just behind him. Bolan beat him to it with a 3-round burst of 5.56 mm NATO rounds, punching the rag doll figure sideways, slamming him against the doorjamb on his way down to the floor.
The AUG’s suppressor wasn’t perfect, but it reduced the sound of gunfire to a kind of stutter-sneeze. Bolan moved forward, leaving his partner to cover the closed doors behind him while he cleared the first open apartment on his left. He stepped across the dead man on the threshold, checked the other rooms in nothing flat, and found them all unoccupied.
His next step was to double back and join Grimaldi for the two apartments he had bypassed, not surprised to find them both unlocked in what the occupants would have regarded as a safe environment. He barged in unannounced and uninvited, caught two more Hezbollah terrorists sitting on a sofa, eating pita sandwiches, and shot them both before they could react to the invasion of their home away from home.
Behind him, Bolan heard the muffled stutter of Grimaldi’s SMG, ending another argument before it had a chance to start in earnest. Seconds later, the Stony Man pilot was back beside him in the hallway, nodding, turning toward the next door that stood open, on their right.
This time, they heard a shower running. Bolan went to find it, leaving Grimaldi to guard the open doorway and the last two apartments downrange. The bathroom wasn’t hard to locate in a place that small, its door ajar, and Bolan eased his way inside. Behind a semi-opaque shower curtain, he saw two forms intertwined, both men, unless the women sprouted beards in Paraguay.
To each his own, in Bolan’s view—but this was strictly business. He preferred to give an opponent a fighting chance, but in this case it was a no go.
Six rounds did it, ripping through the shower curtain to find flesh and bone, spilling two bodies on to the tiled floor. One was a man approaching middle age, the other younger, neither one concerned about embarrassment now that their time had suddenly run out.
He left the shower running—put it on Hezbollah’s tab—and met up with Grimaldi in the corridor, to clear the last two apartments. Bolan would never know what had alerted one guy in the next apartment, to their right, but he was waiting with an AK-47, ripping off a hasty burst just as his door began to open under Bolan’s touch.
The Russian rifle’s 7.62 mm rounds were more than capable of piercing flimsy drywall, driving Bolan and Grimaldi to the floor. Instead of making it a siege, Bolan unclipped one of the frag grenades he’d fastened to his belt, removed its pin and pitched the bomb through the doorway, counting five seconds on its fuse. It blew on four, a foible common to that particular model, and he waited for the shrapnel storm to pass before he checked the apartment again and found his adversary facedown in a pool of gore.
No time to waste now, as they ran back to the stairs and stormed the third floor, ready for resistance from the Hezbollah terrorists remaining, meeting it almost at once. It was a tricky proposition, fighting for your life and watching out for three specific faces, knowing it was critical to capture one of them alive.
A challenge, right—but nothing unfamiliar to the Executioner.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b3a79afa-efb8-5edc-b502-32772e7d2d51)
Arlington, Virginia, Two Days Earlier
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?”
