Loose Cannon

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Another bellowed, “And what about those GAM workers he had executed the other night? Explain that, Governor!”

“If you have a problem with the governor, take it up at the ballot box!” Ashar snapped. “Not here!”

Muhtar whirled on his bike and shouted at his brother, “Don’t antagonize them! Just do your job!”

Ashar nodded and fell silent. Muhtar could see that his brother’s gun hand was trembling slightly, as were his knees, which were pressed close to the sides of his idling motorcycle. Muhtar knew that Ashar had gone through crowd-control drills during his training at the police academy, but in the heat of the moment his brother had clearly reverted to his hothead instincts.

“Just relax, Ashie,” Muhtar called out. “Don’t rile them up and we’ll get through this.”

Ashar continued to nod, but Muhtar was concerned. If his brother’s uneasiness was as obvious to the mob as it was to him, things could easily go from bad to worse in an instant.

By now a small delivery truck and a minivan were coming up behind the governor’s car. Both vehicles slowed to a stop. The minivan’s driver, like those in the cars that moments ago had been coming from the other direction, quickly assessed the situation and thought better of trying to move past the confrontation. Veering off the road for a moment, the van turned around and doubled back toward Banda Aceh. The driver of the truck was apparently not about to let matters throw him off schedule. After the van had passed him, he drove forward, picking up speed as he moved into the oncoming lane as if intent on passing the governor’s car. However, when a hurled rock smashed through the passenger side of the front windshield, just missing him, the man had second thoughts. He slammed on his brakes, then jammed the truck into Reverse and backed down the road a good thirty yards before making a quick three-point turn. Like the driver of the minivan before him, he retraced his route back to the city.

The motorcycle officers, meanwhile, remained on their bikes and kept a wary vigil over the protestors. Pistols outstretched before them, they fanned the weapons steadily from side to side in an effort to keep the mob at bay. It looked to Muhtar as if he’d gotten through to his brother. Ashar’s visible fidgeting had stopped and he seemed locked in to his police mentality, forearms rigid as he continued to keep his gun trained on the demonstrators. Muhtar was relieved. Though they were clearly outnumbered, he felt certain they would keep the upper hand so long as they gave the sense of being in control.

There was, however, the matter of the human chain that continued to block their way to the airport. No one had moved, and the man on the right end of the chain was still holding the rock Muhtar had told him to drop. The man at the other end of the line had only partially complied with the order; his rock had gone through the windshield of the now-retreating delivery truck.

“Put the rock down and everyone move off the road!” Muhtar told the group again, this time with more authority.

The demonstrators held their ground.

“We want answers!” one of the women shouted, raising her shrill voice to make certain the mob could hear it over the drone of the motorcycles. She pointed past the officers at the car, adding, “Tell that coward to show his face and give him to us!”

As she’d hoped, the woman’s harangue rallied the mob. Once again they began to chant and jeer. Another rock and several ears of corn bounded off the car, and Muhtar grimaced when a small, flat stone struck him squarely on the shoulder.

“Zailik’s a coward!” someone in the crowd howled. Some began to clap their hands in rhythm, as if at a sporting event. “Zailik’s a coward! Zailik’s a coward!”

Drawn by the commotion, more residents of the tent city began to emerge from their dingy quarters and head toward the road. Some had already grabbed tools and makeshift clubs, and several others paused along the way to pick up more rocks.

“Not good,” Muhtar murmured under his breath, refusing to visibly acknowledge the stinging welt on his shoulder.

Concerned the balance would soon shift out of their favor, the two brothers, without taking their eyes off the growing mob, spoke hurriedly to one another, trying to determine the best course of action. There was no way they were going to let Zailik out of the car—it was too dangerous and both brothers doubted there would be anything the governor could say to diffuse the situation. Ashar thought their best chance was to proceed with the motorcade in hopes the demonstrators would scramble out of the way once they realized their bluff was being called. Muhtar, however, was concerned about the possible ramifications if the crowd failed to move and some of them wound up being struck by their motorcycles.

“They put women and children out there for a reason,” Muhtar explained. “We run in to any of them and we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

“If we wait around for this mob to get any larger, all hell is going to break loose anyway,” Ashar countered, allowing his anger and frustration to override his earlier fears. “I say we head out and pick up speed as fast as we can, and whatever happens—”

“Wait!” Muhtar held a hand up to silence his brother. He stole a glance over his shoulder and peered back over the roof of the car. Ashar did the same.

“Finally!” the younger brother called out.

The crowd’s attention had been diverted as well, and the chanting quickly tapered off as they stared down the road. Heading toward them, swooping low as it approached from the city, was the overdue police helicopter.

“Not a moment too soon,” Muhtar intoned.

The sense of an impending riot abated as the chopper drew nearer. Moments later, there were worried murmurs among those in the crowd when they spotted a second, larger helicopter heading toward them from the direction of the airport. Beneath the massive Huey, a pair of Jeeps could also be seen racing along the road, filled with armed commandos. As if to make certain their approach had not gone unnoticed, several men in the lead Jeep fired warning shots with their assault rifles, gouging divots from the road’s shoulder just shy of where the protestors were gathered. The crowd took notice and quickly fell back on itself. Some of the latecomers turned heel and fled back toward the tent city. Even those still out on the roadway were given pause; the chain was broken as they turned to face the armed force that had just sucked the life from their demonstration.

“Densus 88,” Ashar Yeilam exclaimed with an almost reverential sense of wonder. He eyed Shelby Ferstera’s hallowed contingent as if he were some refugee from a comic book greeting the unexpected arrival of superheroes as a sure sign that soon all would be right with the world.

Though to a lesser degree, Muhtar shared his brother’s sentiment. He could barely keep himself from smiling as he kept his gun trained on the now-subdued mob. That was too close, he thought to himself.

SHORTLY AFTER THE FIRST ROCK had struck the windshield, Noordin Zailik’s chauffeur had advised him to lie low in the backseat. The governor had been quick to oblige, to an extent. Zailik had felt that lying across the seat would have only made him feel more helpless and vulnerable, so he’d compromised by half-crouching, half-kneeling between the seats, his attention divided between watching the drama unfold outside and draining his cell phone in an effort to get someone—anyone—to come to his rescue before the situation on the blocked roadway got further out of hand. Intelligence Director Dujara had transferred his initial call to Banda Aceh’s police chief, Irwandi Alkihn, who’d assured Zailik the helicopter assigned to him was on the way and that, furthermore, a Densus 88 unit stationed at the airport was taking action to fill the breach Zailik himself had created by leaving for the airport ahead of schedule.

As the governor had waited for the reinforcements, his anxiety increased with every passing second. After the second barrage of debris struck the car, Zailik had sunk lower between the seats until he was no longer able to peer out the windows. The chauffeur had tried to keep him apprised of what was happening outside the vehicle, but as he listened to the almost surreal play-by-play, Zailik found himself distracted. Over and over, his mind kept playing back the chain of events that had led to his predicament. He’d already come to realize that much of it was his own doing, but he was equally certain there was blame to be laid elsewhere, and as he thought back, he made a mental note of everyone who’d been privy to the alterations in his itinerary. Only a handful of people had known of the route change in time to have been able to forewarn the tent dwellers that he was headed their way. He’d just spoken with two of them, Dujara and Alkihn, but however much he personally disliked both men, Zailik had known them both for years and felt their loyalty was beyond reproach. His suspicions led him elsewhere; to the person who’d prompted his decision to take the back way in the first place.

Zailik wanted to believe there was no way Ti Vohn could have duped him into harm’s way—or that he could have allowed himself to be so easily led, for that matter—but the more he’d thought about it, the more convinced he’d become that his personal secretary, whom he’d known for all of eight months, was indeed the culprit.

The realization struck a strange chord inside the governor. Rather than viewing Ti Vohn’s betrayal in terms of the crisis it had gotten him into, Zailik instead found himself fixating on what a field day his wife would have when she learned the news. She’d warned him about the woman, after all, and though it had been for the wrong reasons, Zailik knew she would never let him live this down.

Driven by his wounded pride and ignoring the fact that he might not live long enough to incur his wife’s scorn, Zailik had become obsessed with trying to reach Ti Vohn on his cell phone. He was convinced that once she heard his voice, her startled response would betray her, just as she’d betrayed him. At that moment nothing seemed more important to him than verifying his suspicions.

Zailik had become oblivious to the ebb and flow of the confrontation taking place outside the car. Balled up behind the driver’s seat, all he could hear was the mad pulsing of blood rushing through his temples and the frantic stabbing of his thumb against the cell-phone keypad, followed time and again by a recorded message where his secretary explained that she was unable to answer the phone.

“Pick up, damn you!” Zailik seethed after the fifth time he’d dialed both her work and personal numbers.

He was about to dial yet again when the entire car began to shake and wobble. Zailik could hear a loud thundering outside the vehicle. Forced back to reality, Zailik’s first thought was that the demonstrators had stormed the car and were attempting to overturn it. But as he was unfolding himself from his crouch, he detected motion through the sunroof overhead and glanced up. It was then he realized the police helicopter had arrived and was hovering directly above him, using its intense rotor wash to drive back the demonstrators who’d yet to stray from the road.

Looking out the front windshield, Zailik could see the motorcycle officers hunched low over their bikes, uniforms snapping in the fierce downdraft as the chopper eased past them, then tilted slightly so that the demonstrators caught the full brunt of the whirlwind. Many of the tent dwellers lost their footing and tumbled backward, then found themselves rolling across the tarmac toward the shoulder of the road.

“I think you just lost a few votes,” the chauffeur called out as he prepared to shift the car back into gear. “But at least now we’ll be able to get you to the airport….”

MACK BOLAN WAS RIDING shotgun in the second of the two Jeeps racing down the road from the airport. Jack Grimaldi was behind the wheel and John Kissinger was in the back along with one of the Densus 88 commandos, Daud Umar, a 37-year-old native of Banda Aceh.

“So far, so good,” Grimaldi said as he watched the Huey bank toward the mob. Like the police chopper, the larger aircraft was using its rotor wash to keep the protestors off the road. Clouds of dust rose into the air, providing a protective screen as the motorcade began to inch forward. The lead Jeep had stopped thirty yards ahead of the motorcycle officers. Shelby Ferstera stood in the front seat, gesturing to the motorcycle cops that the Jeep would turn around once the motorcade had passed and would follow as they proceeded to the airport.

Watching things play out, Bolan had a sense that something was wrong. It was all going far too smoothly. Ferstera’s informant, after all, had said that Jemaah Islamiyah had planned to go after the governor, and from what he knew of the terrorist sect, he thought their game plan would have consisted of more than setting loose a rock-throwing mob.

“Keep an eye on the crowd,” he called out over his shoulder.

“On it,” Kissinger replied. He was already putting to use a pair of high-powered binoculars. “It’s a little hard, though, with all that dust.”

Bolan turned his attention to the other side of the road, where the skeletal wooden frames of several hundred homes spread out across a series of unpaved streets. A few of the structures closest to the road were nearer to completion than the others, their inner walls hammered into place with foil-backed insulation strips secured between the studs. A handful of construction vehicles was parked nearby, but there was no sign of activity. Bolan had binoculars, too, and he used them to take a closer look at one of the bulldozers situated between a Dumpster and a large stack of lumber. Half-hidden behind the earthmover’s large front scoop, the Executioner spotted a body sprawled across the dirt.

He was about to pass along his findings when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a thin ribbon of smoke trail out from a second-story window of one of the homes near the road. A split second later, the police helicopter disintegrated in a fireball, showering the road with debris.

“A trap,” Bolan shouted, even as a second missile streaked through the air, broadsiding the Huey. In an instant, Governor Zailik lost his aerial support, and the Executioner knew his instincts had been correct.

5

Once the last fiery remains of the two downed helicopters had crashed onto the roadway between his Jeep and the governor’s motorcade, Shelby Ferstera fought off his shock and cursed. Jemaah Islamiyah had lured him into an ambush and now, in the blink of an eye, more than a dozen of his best men were gone. He could see a few of them scattered amid the flaming shrapnel, lifeless bodies rent and torn by the force of the explosion. Some were engulfed in flames, others spattered with blood, all of them missing limbs so that they looked like the remains of storefront mannequins that had been run through a threshing machine. There was nothing to be done for them other than to see to it that they had not died in vain. And despite the devastating blow to his ranks, Ferstera was determined to carry out Densus 88’s mission and ensure the governor’s safety. To do that, however, he had to make certain the rest of his men were not slaughtered by the enemy.

“Out of the Jeep and take cover!” he commanded, bolting from the vehicle. The surviving commandos followed suit, and not a moment too soon. Even as they were flattening themselves against the roadway, a stream of gunfire strafed over their heads and pelted the Jeep. The shots were coming from the direction of the tent city, so Ferstera crawled around to the far side of the vehicle. His men were right behind him. Three of them made it. A fourth caught a hail of bullets and slumped to the roadway, dead by the time his face struck the asphalt.

“Jackals!” Ferstera shouted.

He glanced quickly behind him. The Americans in the other Jeep had detoured from the road and were headed toward the housing development. They were veering to and fro to make themselves less of a target for the JI snipers firing from the upper floor of one of the uncompleted homes. Smoke and flames from the downed Huey’s charred fuselage blocked Ferstera’s view of those snipers, but he trusted that meant the enemy was similarly unable to take aim his way, allowing his men to focus on the gunners across the road.

Readying his M-16, Ferstera rose to one knee and peered over the Jeep’s hood. Through the rifle’s scope he was able to pinpoint a sniper positioned behind a large boulder on a raised knoll just beyond the tent city. The gunman had spent his ammo and was slamming a fresh cartridge into his rifle. He was a long way off, barely within range of Ferstera’s M-16, but the Aussie was an expert marksman and proved it as he cut loose with a burst that streaked above the rocks and found home in the enemy’s chest, taking the sniper down.

Wasting no time on self-congratulation, Ferstera scanned the knoll for more targets. He knew the playing field was a long way from being leveled….

MUHTAR YEILAM was knocked unconscious when a chunk of the obliterated police chopper crashed down on him. When he came to moments later, he was lying on the road next to his toppled motorcycle, fighting off a wave of nausea brought on by the stench of raw fuel and charred flesh. A searing, knife-like pain gnawed at his skull. Reflexively, he grabbed at his helmet and pried it off his head. The pain abated quickly as he noticed that the helmet had cracked almost in two while absorbing the impact of the fallen debris, which lay a few feet away, smoldering next to a severed arm. Staring past the grisly sight, Muhtar saw that the road was strewn with carnage. Beyond his field of vision, he could hear screams and gunfire and the flap of loose clothing as people fled in all directions, trying to take themselves out of the line of fire.

When he tried to rise, Muhtar became aware of a tingling numbness in his legs. Glancing down, he saw blood seeping through his right pantleg up high near his hip. He wasn’t sure what had caused the wound, but he knew he had to stop the bleeding. As he reached down, a sudden, aching weariness washed over him him, and he could feel himself on the verge of passing out again.

“No!” he gasped, shaking his head, fighting to remain conscious.

Then he thought of his brother.

“Ashar,” he murmured, groaning at the monumental effort it took as he rolled over and tried to get up. He collapsed back onto the roadway. He’d moved enough that he could see Ashar, however. His younger brother had been knocked off his motorcycle as well, but the blow had been less severe, as Ashar was on his feet, crouched near the front grille of the governor’s car, trading shots with an assailant firing down at him from one of the half-built homes off to his right. A group of commandos had entered the housing project and were heading toward the house where the shots originated.

“Need to help,” Muhtar moaned to himself.

He ignored the bleeding in his leg and looked around him. His service pistol lay a few feet away on the road next to his toppled bike. Drawing in a deep breath, he rallied his strength and willed himself to roll toward the gun, then reached out and slowly closed his fingers around it.

Straining, Muhtar turned onto his other side and propped himself up slightly with his free arm. He looked back down at his legs; they were still numb and the bloodstain on his hip was spreading. He took solace, though, when he realized he could wriggle both his feet. Not paralyzed, he thought. He knew he was probably in shock and convinced himself that the numbness would soon go. He would tend to the bleeding later, but for now he wanted to do what he could to help his brother protect the governor, who, Muhtar assumed, was still alive inside the car.

From his new position, Muhtar could see across the road, where there was a flurry of commotion. Most of the demonstrators had retreated back toward the tent city, but a handful of men stood just off the shoulder, hunched in a tight circle like football players huddling to discuss their next play. Something about their demeanor—they way they’d turned their backs on the pandemonium around them—put Muhtar on alert.

His suspicions were borne out when, a few seconds later, the men suddenly turned away from each other, eyes on the governor’s car. Remaining in a tight formation, they strode purposefully out onto the road, heading toward the vehicle. Muhtar could see that they were making an effort to shield one man in particular. When he saw the man reaching under the folds of his loose shirt, adrenaline spiked through his veins, giving him the strength to let out a plaintive cry.

“Ashar!” Muhtar shouted to his brother. “Behind you! They have a bomb!”

ASHAR YEILAM WHIRLED at the sound of his brother’s voice. Muhtar had managed to get a shot off before blacking out, and one of the men approaching the governor’s car dropped to the road. The others continued forward, closing ranks to protect the man in the middle of the formation. Shelby Ferstera had also been alerted by Muhtar’s cry and two more men went down when the Aussie cut loose with his M-16. Ashar took out a fourth with the last round in his weapon. That left three men, however, including the one fumbling with the bomb concealed beneath his loose shirt. They reached the car and pressed themselves against the passenger side of the vehicle.

There was no time for Ashar to reload. Casting the gun aside, he raised one foot onto the front bumper of the car, then pushed off with the other and leapt up onto the hood. As his forward momentum carried him toward the three demonstrators, Ashar extended his arms. The other men were crowded together enough that he was able to collide with all three of them, knocking them away from the car. As he fell to road, the young police officer managed to drag down two of the men, including the bomber.

But it wasn’t enough.

Though shaken and lying on his back, the bomber quickly regained his wits and grabbed at the detonator wired to the sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. With a malignant grin, he eyed Ashar, who was an arm’s length away, preparing to lunge..

“Praise Allah!” the bomber cried out, triggering the detonator.

THE EXECUTIONER and his colleagues were thirty yards from the partially built home the JI snipers were firing from. “Try to hot-wire the bulldozer and put it to use!” Bolan shouted to Grimaldi.

The pilot nodded and was headed toward the earthmover when a violent explosion shook the ground under his feet, throwing him off balance. Bolan felt it, too. He crouched behind a Jeep, M-16 at the ready, and glanced over his shoulder, just in time to see the governor’s car fly into the air and slam back onto the road, landing on its roof.. There was a small crater in the road where the bomb had gone off. Nearby, a fresh heap of corpses lay in mangled ruin.

“Suicide bomber,” John Kissinger murmured, hunched next to Bolan behind the Jeep.

Bolan nodded gravely, ears ringing from the explosion. One side of the governor’s car had been caved in by the bomb’s force, but he thought there was a chance the governor might have survived the blast. If so, Zailik would have to wait to be rescued. Shelby Ferstera’s surviving commandos had their hands full contending with snipers on the hill behind the tent city, and when gunfire coming from a second house peppered his Jeep, Bolan knew that he was locked into his own battlefield.

Daud Umar, the Densus 88 member rounding out Bolan’s crew, had taken cover behind a stack of lumber just to the right of the Jeep. He fired at the enemy gunners in the second house, then pulled back when a return volley splintered the two-by-fours.

“Give ’em a grenade!” Bolan shouted.

Umar nodded, grabbing for an M6 clipped to his ammo belt. He waited out another round from the JI gunners, then thumbed the pin free and twisted his body, heaving the grenade. His aim was off, but not by much. The grenade exploded as it struck the loose dirt just in front of the house where the sniper was embedded.

The front door flew off its hinges and a dust cloud bloomed into the air, mixing with smoke given off by the blast. Bolan doubted the enemy inside the house had been taken out, but he figured they’d at least been distracted.

“Now!” he called out, breaking clear of the Jeep.

Together, Bolan and Kissinger rushed the house, using the dust cloud to mask their approach. Kissinger, like Bolan, had been issued an M-16, but his assault rifle came equipped with an under-barrel M-203 grenade launcher. As the dust began to settle, he stopped and planted himself behind a bulky, two-wheeled rototiller, shifting his trigger finger from the carbine to the launcher.

“Go wide!” he shouted to Bolan, waving to his left.

The Executioner veered away from Kissinger, following the dust cloud as it began to drift. Kissinger took aim at the house, peering through the haze. Once he could make out the framework of the ground-floor window, he fired. A 40 mm grenade whooshed from the launcher and finished off the job Daud Umar had started, penetrating the house before it detonated.

Bolan didn’t wait to see if the blast had neutralized the enemy. Cutting toward the house, he set his sights on the front door, ready to finish the job.

FIFTY YARDS AWAY, Grimaldi had already scrambled past the dead man next to the bulldozer and climbed up to the driver’s compartment. There was blood on the seat and when Grimaldi glanced down to his right, he spotted another slain worker sprawled on the ground near the treads. The man had apparently been gunned down while at the controls, because there were keys in the ignition, saving Grimaldi the need to hot-wire the engine.

“We’ll take our breaks where we get them,” the pilot muttered as he cranked the ignition. White smoke belched from the exhaust and the gears meshed noisily as he worked the clutch and maneuvered the front plow off the ground, giving himself just enough clearance to proceed.

The bulldozer rumbled and groaned as its tanklike treads clawed at the ground, pulling it forward. Grimaldi had seen the damage Umar and Kissinger had inflicted on the second house being used by the JI, and as they joined the Executioner in storming the house, he wrestled with the controls, moving down the unpaved street toward the structure from which the enemy had fired the missile rounds that had brought down the two choppers. Grimaldi could only hope they didn’t have a rocket left with his name on it.

NOORDIN ZAILIK WAS DISORIENTED when he regained consciousness. The last thing he remembered was one of the motorcycle officers tackling some demonstrators who’d rushed his car. Now, partly deaf, his face bleeding and his shoulder throbbing with raw pain, he found himself staring up at the backseat of the car. It made no sense. It was only after he’d turned slightly and found himself staring at bits of flaming debris on the road that he realized the car had flipped over. The passenger side of the vehicle was caved in and the windows had all shattered.

A bomb, Zailik thought.

Still dazed, the politician groaned, trying to move. He let out a cry as he shifted his weight onto his injured shoulder. Another shout leapt from his bleeding lips when a hand reached out and grabbed hold of him. He whirled and saw his chauffeur staring at him from a space between his headrest and the collapsed rooftop.

“Don’t move, sir.”

Zailik could barely hear the man, but he understood what was being said. He stayed put, grimacing, as the chauffeur contorted and slowly wriggled through what was left of the window frame next to him. Once he was out on the road, the driver crawled over and looked in at Zailik.

“Stay put,” he told the governor. “I’ll get—”

The chauffeur’s voice trailed off suddenly and his eyes went blank as blood and gore erupted from his chest and sprayed Zailik. The driver fell to the ground, dead.

Terrified, Zailik stared past the chauffeur’s body and caught a glimpse of one of the houses in the partially built development set just off the road. There was movement in one of the upper windows, and when he looked closer, Zailik saw a man taking aim at him through a high-powered rifle. He knew that even if he wasn’t injured, there would be no time for him to avoid the sniper’s next round….

6

Crouched next to the two spent rocket launchers he’d used to take down the Densus 88 Huey as well as the smaller police chopper, Yorvit Varung propped his elbows on the windowsill of the partially built house and grinned as he peered through the scope of his sniper rife, drawing a bead on Zailik. For Varung, it had already been a glorious day. Besides those in the chopper, he’d also taken out an enemy ground soldier. And now he had a chance to put a bullet through the skull of a despised nemesis who regularly denounced Jemaah Islamiyah and the notion of clerical rule in Indonesia.

Life was good.

“Take care of him!” snapped Freper Lorten, the sniper’s older colleague. He was in a dark mood after witnessing a handful of recruits gunned down and blown to bits on the roadway below. He’d come to know most of the men during their long months of training at a JI encampment outside Calang, and while he understood the need for martyrdom in the name of a greater cause, he was not the sort to gloss over casualties incurred on the battlefield.

“I’ll take care of him once I have a clear shot!” Varung retorted without taking his eye off the scope. “If I’d rushed earlier, I wouldn’t have brought down the helicopters.”

Lorten knew it was pointless to argue with the younger man. Instead, clutching his AK-47, he stared across the road, where surviving members of Densus 88 were caught in a firefight with JI assailants in the foothills behind the tent city. Lorten doubted he could do much to help, so he instead shifted his gaze to the road, looking for a closer target. In front of the overturned car, one of the motorcycle officers was crawling toward the remains of the man who’d nearly thwarted the suicide bomber. The officer was clearly wounded and seemed to pose little threat, but he was still the enemy, so Lorten raised his assault rifle into firing position, ready to finish the man off.