скачать книгу бесплатно
“I wouldn’t miss it. What’s our estimated time of departure?”
“As soon as you can get up here to Arlington.”
Grimaldi did the calculations in his head. There was drive time from the pub to Opa-locka Executive Airport, eleven miles north of downtown Miami, then the prep and clearance for takeoff. He guesstimated flight time from OEA to Arlington in his Piper Seneca, cruising speed 216 miles per hour, then the rituals of landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport.
“Six hours, minimum. I’ll call you if they tie me up too long with paperwork.”
“That’s Reagan?”
“Right.”
“I’ll see you there,” Bolan replied, and he was gone.
The Sarge had never been the chatty type, a trait Grimaldi had appreciated from the day they met. Their hookup had been strange, perhaps unique—a kidnapping, in fact, Grimaldi on the hostage end of it—but it had given the pilot a new life. Maybe saved his life, although the new one was a hectic roller-coaster ride of peril.
Fun, though, in a demented kind of way, once you had settled in and got into the spirit of the thing.
The bonus, in Grimaldi’s case, was knowing that he sometimes made a difference. He’d gone from being part of the problem—a see-nothing, hear-nothing syndicate flyboy—to playing on the side of the angels.
No, scratch that. He would never be an angel, and the jobs he did for Stony Man, with or without Mack Bolan, sure as hell wouldn’t strike most folks as angelic. He was still outside the law, but with a twist, pursuing bad guys who had been above the law so long, they thought they were invincible. He’d hated bullies from the time he was the shortest kid in kindergarten class, until he’d learned to take a punch and give back three or four for every one received.
Grimaldi thought about the next few days, unsure when he would have another chance to eat, and finished off the plate in front of him. He quaffed the beer and pushed his empty back. “Another?” the barkeep asked.
“Wish I could,” Grimaldi told him, lifting off his bar stool. “But I have to fly.”
Ronald Reagan National Airport
WAITING FOR JACK GRIMALDI, with nowhere else to go, Bolan picked out a reasonably isolated seat in Terminal A and settled in to review Hal Brognola’s files. The thumb drive held a total of nineteen, one titled “AQ/AH,” the remainder bearing what he took for Arabic surnames.
Bolan started with the file on God’s Hammer, skimming over what he’d already learned from the big Fed about the group’s roots and creation. It was a splinter of a splinter, descended from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda by way of the “subordinate” AQAP, active mainly in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The parent organizations were dominated by Salafi Muslims—also called Wahhabis—who, in turn, comprised a subdivision of the Sunni sect. Bolan wasn’t interested in Islam’s doctrinal rifts, any more than he was by the multitude of self-styled Christian denominations, but he focused on Salafist jihadism preached by al-Qaeda and its descendants.
Bottom line: they were at war with Israel and the “decadent” West, especially that “Great Satan,” Uncle Sam. Whatever they could do to hurt their enemies, from bombing navy ships in port to 9/11, Salafist jihadists were ready to go.
And if they died in that pursuit, well, hello Paradise: ripe fruit in shady gardens, bottomless goblets of wine with no hangovers, dark-eyed virgins galore to serve a martyr’s every need.
Why not go out in one great blaze of glory for the cause?
God’s Hammer had made its debut with the consulate attack in Jordan, and lost two fighters in the process. Stony Man or someone else had managed to identify the dead as a twenty-three-year-old Egyptian, Djer Badawi, and a nineteen-year-old Saudi, Sulaiman Waleed. Waleed had been a rookie, more or less, arrested once during a protest in Riyadh. Badawi was—make that had been—a veteran of the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, suspected of participating in Alexandria’s al-Qidiseen church bombing that killed twenty-one Coptic Christians in 2011. He’d been living off the grid since then, and clearly up to no good.
Those two were dead now, and no longer Bolan’s problem. Moving through the other file as Brognola had numbered them, he came first to another Saudi, Saleh Kabeer, recognized as the founder and leader of God’s Hammer. He was thirty-seven years old, a Salafi jihadist from way back, the black sheep of a wealthy family who served the House of Saud without regrets. Kabeer had jumped the traces, following in bin Laden’s footsteps as a rebel who rejected his inheritance and chose the path of war over a life of luxury.
Or so he said, at any rate. Brognola’s dossier revealed that Saleh Kabeer had founded God’s Hammer with a start-up contribution from his kinfolk, petro-dollars he had spent while posing as an enemy of any commerce with Crusaders from the West. Hypocrisy was nothing new, of course, and none of those who joined God’s Hammer appeared to mind Kabeer’s personal brand.
Kabeer’s number two was a fellow Saudi, twenty-two-year-old Mohammed Sanea. He didn’t share his leader’s gold-plated background but came by his radicalism the old-fashioned way, after his father served three years in prison for his role in founding Saudi Arabia’s National Society for Human Rights. Perhaps ironically, that hadn’t turned him against his homeland’s rigid Islamic monarchy, but rather against the “Western parasites” who propped it up with billions for oil and foreign aid. Suspected of leading terrorist raids from Yemen, Sanea had survived a US drone strike in 2013 and came back more rabid than ever.
Other known members of God’s Hammer, still at large after the raid in Jordan, included four Palestinians, four Jordanians, two more Saudis, two Syrians, one Lebanese and one Egyptian. Bolan read their bios, noted their affiliation with various terrorist groups, drifting into al-Qaeda and on from there to God’s Hammer as their views became more radical over time. All were relatively young men, ranging in age from nineteen to thirty. All but two were named in outstanding warrants from their homelands or neighboring countries, circulated by Interpol and Europol.
Sixteen mad dogs, and Bolan only knew where three of them were hiding. He’d have to do better than that, and quickly, before they could regroup and try to top their first outing for mayhem and publicity.
Why not? He only had to search the whole damned world.
“What are we flying south?” Grimaldi asked, once he was on the ground at Reagan, with his Piper battened down for the duration.
“Hal’s got something waiting for us, subject to your signing off on it,” Bolan replied.
“Close by?”
“A couple hundred yards that way,” Bolan said, pointing to the west.
“Let’s check it out.”
They walked across the tarmac to a hangar labeled Bellair Charters, where an Eclipse 500 microjet sat waiting for them. “Not bad,” Grimaldi offered as they did a walk-around. “A service ceiling of forty-one thousand feet, maximum range of 1,295 miles and a top speed of 425 miles per hour. That’s five refueling stops before we land in Paraguay. I’m thinking Dallas, Oaxaca, Mexico, Panama City over the Gulf, Canaima, Venezuela, Alta Floresta, Brazil, then on to Asunción. A lot of stops, but it’s the best this little bird can do.”
“How long?” Bolan asked.
“Air time, about eleven hours. Ground time, messing with the locals?” Grimaldi considered it and shook his head. “Your guess would be as good as mine.”
“No time to waste, then,” Bolan said. “The sooner we’re airborne, the better.”
“Roger that. I’ll start the preflight check right now, then have a chat with the tower.”
Bolan left Grimaldi to it. He wasn’t happy with the time lag between takeoff and their final touchdown in Paraguay. If something spooked the people he was hunting in the meantime, he could miss them altogether and be back to square one, hoping Stony Man could run them down again.
And if they couldn’t, he’d be waiting for the next attack, like everybody else.
But that was unacceptable. Failure was not an option for the Executioner.
The plague of terrorism was as old as humankind. It could not be eradicated, only held at bay, until such time as fundamental change in human nature was achieved. So far, in Bolan’s lifetime, there had been no sign of that occurring. Planet Earth still needed soldiers standing watch against the predators who populated so-called “civilized” society, taking advantage of the weak and hopeless for their own ends, masked by politics, religion, pick your poison.
In his idle hours, few as they might be, Bolan sometimes philosophized about a world without atrocities, devoid of greed and cruelty, hatred, discrimination and suspicion. He would never live to see it—no one would, in fact—because the human animal was deeply and irrevocably flawed.
Men craved what they could not afford, what they had no right to possess. When frustrated in their pursuit of more, they turned on those presumably obstructing them. Some humans learned to channel greed and hatred into lucrative careers in various fields. Others sated their greed through commerce, raping the environment with utter disregard for future generations. Altruists, when they appeared, were such a novelty that they were usually murdered, canonized as saints or both.
The bottom line: there were no angels, and no demons. Every man and woman on the planet was an individual, resisting or surrendering to baser instincts as they passed through life, taking it one day at a time. Some gave free rein to their desires, and in the process jeopardized communities, whole nations, or the world at large.
When those predators stood beyond the reach of ordinary law, they had to be curbed by extraordinary force.
Enter the Executioner, commissioned to continue with a job he’d started on his own, without official sanction, to repay a private debt of blood. He kept on fighting now because he could, because somebody had to if “polite” society was going to survive.
That meant confronting human monsters where they lived and preyed on others weaker than themselves. It meant destroying them, scorching the earth to stall—where he could not prevent—another monster rising in their place.
The war, he realized, could not be won. It was a holding action, not some grand crusade.
Bolan would occupy the firing line as long as he was able. After that...
He hoped that someone would rise to grab the torch.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a0cc521d-717e-5ef4-b190-24c38cd2d55f)
Ciudad del Este, Paraguay
Bolan had reached the fourth floor and still had not seen any of the God’s Hammer fugitives among the men he and Grimaldi had put down so far. This was the last floor left to check, and he’d begun to worry that they might have slipped the net—or, at the very least, gone shopping, out to get a meal, whatever, and eluded him by sheer coincidence.
Not good.
Before they rushed the final set of apartments, Bolan huddled with Grimaldi on the stairwell. Just above and to their left, he heard the last defenders talking excitedly and priming their weapons, maybe trying to decide if they should rush the stairs or dig in for a last-ditch fight.
“It’s getting dicey now,” he told Grimaldi, almost whispering. “The guys we’re after could be here, but if they’re not—”
The Stony Man pilot saw where he was going and finished for him. “Then we need to bag somebody who can tell us when they left and where they went.”
“Right,” Bolan said. “I’d like to take one down but leave him breathing so we can question him, but don’t take any chances. Still take care of Number One.”
Grimaldi flashed a grin. “Which one of us is Number One?”
“Ready?” Bolan asked him.
“Set.”
Bolan eased up and pitched the frag grenade that he’d been holding while they talked, a blind toss down the narrow hallway. Four-point-something seconds later it exploded, filling the corridor with smoke and dust.
One guy was down and out, sprawled in the middle of the hallway, leaking from at least a dozen shrapnel wounds. A couple others staggered through the battle mist, approaching Bolan in a daze, but neither of their faces rang a bell from Brognola’s portfolio of God’s Hammer fugitives. The Executioner dropped both of them with one round each and moved on, searching.
First door on his left, ajar. He ducked and nudged it open, ready for a burst of autofire, but it was vacant, no one hiding underneath the bed or in the tiny bathroom. Doubling back, he heard Grimaldi’s muffled SMG responding to a challenge from the Hezbollah gunners and went to join him on the firing line.
Grimaldi had already cleared the rooms directly opposite, then run into a roadblock from the second flat in line, off to the right. At least one terroriat was battened down in there, firing short bursts from a Kalashnikov without putting much effort into aiming. So far, he had strafed the ceiling and the walls to either side, while Grimaldi lay prone out in the hallway, waiting for a shot.
Bolan got there ahead of him, his different perspective granting him an early crack at the defender. Three rounds from the Steyr chewed his adversary’s face off—not a face he recognized—and dumped him back across the threshold of the last room he would ever occupy.
Grimaldi bolted to his feet and cleared the apartment, while Bolan took the next one on his left. He saw no further movement in the hallway, no signs of continuing resistance, but they’d have to go the whole route, checking every room and closet, just in case.
Unless...
There was no one in the apartment, but on a whim, he checked the window, the first one he’d seen standing open yet, despite the building’s air-conditioning. A fire escape was bolted to the wall outside, and down below, three men were running toward the far end of an alley lined with garbage bins. One of them paused long enough to glance back at the room he’d lately vacated, and Bolan made his face.
Salman Farsoun, one of the three he’d come to find in Ciudad del Este.
“Jack!” he shouted, through the empty rooms. “Outside! They’re bailing!”
The Stony Man pilot was in the doorway, following, when Bolan clambered through the window and began his steep rush down the fire escape.
* * *
ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS SLOWING, almost at the alley’s mouth with cars and foot traffic beyond, when Salman Farsoun overtook him, blurting out, “I’ve seen them!”
“Seen who?” Rajhid asked him without stopping, without looking backward.
“The Crusaders! One of them, at least.”
“Then he’s seen you,” Rajhid replied. “Come on!”
Walid Khamis was already ahead of them, shoving his Micro Uzi underneath his baggy shirt. Rajhid did likewise with his MAC-10, hoping Farsoun could do something with the larger MP-5 K submachine gun he carried. The sounds of battle from the building they’d abandoned were already drawing notice. Rajhid did not fancy jogging down the boulevard with military weapons on display, alerting passersby to summon the police.
“He was a white man,” Farsoun said, still going on about the fellow he’d seen or had imagined. “An American, perhaps.”
Rahjid would never fully understand these Palestinians. Although himself a Saudi, he was well aware of how the Arab residents of Palestine had suffered since the state of Israel was created by outsiders from the West. Indeed, that had been the spark that lit the fuse on Rahjid’s own jihad, but there was still something peculiar about soldiers such as Khamis and Farsoun. They suffered from excitability, erratic moods, and Rajhid found them easily distracted at important moments of an operation.
Now, for instance, when his mind was focused on escape, Farsoun wanted to talk about some man he’d seen—but why? To what result?
“Come on!” Rajhid repeated. “We can talk about it later.”
“But—”
“Enough! Now hide that gun or leave it here!”
Farsoun lifted his shirt and shoved the MP-5 K underneath one armpit, lowering his arm to keep the weapon clamped against his side. Rajhid hoped he could keep it there, but had no plans to stay behind and help Farsoun if he got careless, drawing notice to himself.
The sidewalk they emerged on to was crowded, some people already slowing, peering down the alley toward the sounds of battle echoing along its length. Rajhid pushed through and past them. He might have warned Khamis to slow his pace a bit, attempted to act more normal, but he didn’t want the strangers passing by to put the two of them together.
One less thing for them to tell the police when they finally arrived.
And the police could turn up any moment, Rajhid realized. Then there could be gunfire, explosions, smoke and flames, for all he knew. The residents of Ciudad del Este were well acquainted with crime, but not with pitched battles fought in their midst.
Putting distance between himself and the scene, Rajhid spared a thought for whoever had raided the complex. Unlike Farsoun, he’d seen none of the raiders, therefore had no clue if they were locals or some kind of special unit from outside. The charm of Paraguay, for freedom fighters on the run, lay in its curious interpretation of what constituted terrorism. Any opposition to the ruling party was suppressed, but what a man did elsewhere—most particularly if his actions were directed against Jews and their supporters—might be overlooked, especially if cash changed hands.
But if the raid had been conducted by Crusaders, as Farsoun surmised, that would be something else.
Bin Laden had been slaughtered a US Navy SEAL team, at his lair in Pakistan, without a by-your-leave to the legitimate authorities. How many other heroes had been slain by rockets from a clear blue sky, triggered by hunters sitting in a bunker somewhere, half a world away?
Watching the traffic pass, alert for military or police vehicles, Rajhid wondered how the damned Crusaders could have found him here.
No matter.
For the moment, all he had to focus on was getting out alive.
* * *
THE ALLEY STANK, but that was par for any urban landscape in the tropics, where the seasons ranged from hot and damp to hot and soaking wet. The blacktop under Bolan’s feet was old, but still felt tacky from the heat, as if it had been freshly laid. He was halfway to the alley’s intersection with the street when Grimaldi dropped from the fire escape and started after him.
The runners he had glimpsed were gone, but they had turned left when they reached the street and Bolan went from there, tucking the AUG back underneath his raincoat, pausing long enough to let Grimaldi overtake him on the sidewalk.
“Farsoun was the one I recognized,” he said. “That makes the others Khamis and Rajhid. Two wearing white shirts, one in red, all three in khaki trousers.”
“Packing?” Grimaldi asked, while his eyes swept both sides of the street.
“Farsoun had something like an Ingram or a Micro Uzi. It was hard to tell. Assume they’re loaded.”
“There!” Grimaldi said, pointing as Bolan’s eyes locked on to a red shirt, retreating through the flow of window shoppers. Even as he spoke, the man in the red shirt glanced backward, seeming to meet Bolan’s gaze.
