Plains Of Fire

There was a feeling in the air, and a more superstitious man would have attributed the eerie prickling at the back of his neck to some supernatural sense. The Executioner, however, was far more practical and realistic. It wasn’t a psychic awareness that he was being watched, but his subconscious mind picking up sensory data that his higher functions weren’t focused on. Bolan’s danger sense was an acute awareness of subliminal sensory data—a shadow in his peripheral vision, the silence of normally active rodents in their alley, or the whiff of hashish smoke still clinging to a Muslim Brotherhood warrior. Bolan’s subconscious mind processed all of this information with an uncanny ease, and the warrior’s experience and intellect were honed to pick up on these subliminal signals. The result was the Executioner’s almost omniscient understanding of any battlefield he found himself in, able to anticipate his enemy’s action even before they took it.

Forewarned was forearmed, he mentally repeated. That truly was the case for Bolan, and his arsenal of forewarning provided him with the firepower to obliterate twenty-to-one odds. He unslung the MP-5, then rushed to complete the sentry’s patrol path. Catching up to the dead African’s schedule, as observed from the night before, Bolan turned the corner and came face-to-face with a second Thunder Lion guard. Bolan expected the sentry, but the militiaman was thrown off balance by his partner’s replacement. Before the guard could react, Bolan fired a single suppressed round between his eyes, dropping the African in his tracks.

Two down and still eighteen Thunder Lions left to go, thanks to Kurtzman’s satellite reconnaissance of the hotel compound. That wasn’t counting the contingent of Muslim Brotherhood gunmen who’d been called in by Bitturumba. Bolan took the magazines of FAMAS ammo off the second corpse, adding it to his reservoir as he looped the bandolier of 25-round magazines over his neck and shoulder. He approached the back of the hotel compound, closing in on the service entrance. Bolan knew from the previous night’s recon that there were two Thunder Lions on post there, but as many as six could be on hand with a single cry of alarm. The soldier paused long enough to scoop up a rock and then hurled it with all his strength at the wrought-iron gate, raising a loud clang.

The heavy stone had accomplished its task, drawing the attention of one of the militiamen. The sentinel poked his head out around the corner, his face an easy target as he leaned off balance on the gate. Bolan fired a short burst of suppressed SMG fire, bullets tearing through the militiaman’s face. The second guard posted at the back let out a loud cry to alert the rest of the militia troopers as his partner convulsed, then collapsed in death, hanging halfway over the fence.

Everything was going according to Bolan’s plan, and the soldier turned and circled back around the way he’d come. While the Thunder Lions focused their attention on the service entrance, ready to repel the one-man assault, Bolan leaped up and grabbed the top of the eight-foot privacy wall. He powered himself to the top of the barrier and crouched. From his vantage point, he saw that a clot of six Africans were braced at the service entrance. Three of the militiamen were out of breath from racing to join their comrades in defending their post. He heard the scuff of boots in the distance as more of the African gunmen mobilized. Bolan pulled the stock of his MP-5 to his shoulder and triggered it.

Bolan’s nighttime camouflage made him into a barely visible ghost in the Thunder Lions’ peripheral vision, and their attention was directed forward, not to their flanks. The mighty warriors named for lions were more like sitting ducks as heavyweight 9 mm rounds ripped through the flank of braced gunmen, drilling tunnels through vital organs. Two of the riflemen dropped immediately, another staggering as his thighs were shredded by the salvo that had been slowed by the corpses of his partners. As the wounded guard had dropped his weapon, Bolan focused on the ones still standing as they reacted to the sudden deaths and injuries among their number. They whirled to face the Executioner, but he stepped off the privacy wall, dropping eight feet to the ground and landing in crouch. The move had dropped him beneath their focus as the riflemen fired, spearing 5.56 mm bullets through the air that Bolan had occupied a heartbeat earlier. The sudden drop had bought the big American an additional second of confusion among his foes, and he took full advantage of it by hosing down the last three Thunder Lions.

The trio convulsed as bullets punched into their faces and chests, bodies trembling under the onslaught as they tumbled dead to the ground. The injured gunman reached out for his fallen FAMAS rifle. It was a mistake, but not an immediately fatal one. Bolan triggered a burst of 9 mm bullets that forced the man to hastily withdraw his hand.

“You’ll want to bandage that,” Bolan said, gesturing to the man’s bloody thighs.

The gunman looked up at the Executioner, his eyes wide. He glanced to the FAMAS.

“I wouldn’t,” Bolan warned.

The guard lunged anyway, tugging the butt of his rifle to his left shoulder. Bolan was ready for the resulting firestorm, taking one step to the side to avoid the initial trigger pull. The FAMAS was a sturdy, reliable assault rifle, and its bullpup configuration kept the black weapon compact by placing the trigger guard and handle well forward of the firing mechanism. This way, a twenty-inch barrel could be put on a weapon that was only slightly longer than thirty inches, maintaining full power while improving maneuverability. Unfortunately for the African rifleman, the FAMAS was an older generation bullpup, which meant that the ejector port threw blistering-hot empty casings out of a breech right at the face of the shooter if he used it in the wrong hand.

While the FAMAS was great for a right-handed gunman, spitting its shells out over his shoulder, when the rifle was fired from a left-hander’s stance, as the guard tried to now, his head was right in the path of a stream of superheated cartridges. The brass tore at the rifleman’s left eye and cheek, slicing flesh. The guard screamed and dropped his rifle. Blinded and lacerated, the sentry curled up into a ball, harmless and whimpering in agony. Bolan reversed his MP-5 and slammed the steel stock into the side of the wounded man’s head, knocking him out cold.

“Told you,” Bolan said. He tucked the MP-5 behind his back and transferred to the fully loaded FAMAS he’d taken from his first victim. The scuff of boots announced that two more Thunder Lion militiamen were rushing toward his position. As they turned the corner, almost as if they were on a preset schedule, Bolan had his rifle ready for their anticipated approach. The FAMAS snarled two rapid bursts, bullets punching through the militiamen’s chests.

A loud crack filled the air, the passage of a supersonic bullet across several rooftops. Waves of air displaced by the high-caliber sniper round bounced off nearby surfaces. It was James’s warning to Bolan that the Muslim Brotherhood was making its move. James’s first shot from his Israeli M-89-SR, a silenced 7.62 mm sniper rifle, had the power to obliterate a human skull in a fountain of bone fragments and vaporized brain tissue, even at five hundred yards. There were cries of dismay as Egyptian terrorists watched their friend’s head explode. The semiauto rifle had launched two more rounds in the time it took for the first bullet to reach the renegade Egyptian. Multiple shouts of alarm, warnings against a sniper attack, were suddenly cut off as James’s subsequent shots struck their targets.

Thumps filled the air as 40 mm grenades landed two hundred yards from the wall. Bolan knew full well that Encizo’s grenade launcher had a 350-meter maximum effective range, so he could guess that the stocky Cuban was firing on Muslim Brotherhood forces who were staging closer to their sniper’s roost. Encizo’s salvo of grenades spit up columns of smoke and debris that Bolan could see over the service-entrance gate, the first shot landing in a street. Bolan also caught a glimpse of a rooftop erupting, bodies backlit by an explosion, the length of a mangled machine gun twisting in front of the blossoming fireball.

The Brotherhood had its own sniper roosts spread throughout the surrounding rooftops, but the Cuban disrupted them with 40 mm packets of steel and fire. He had a second M-89-SR to back up James, but for now he was relying on the effective Russian RG-6 revolver-style grenade launcher to pour devastation on the heads of the carefully laid ambush.

“Enemy force engaged,” Encizo announced over Bolan’s earpiece. “I have movement heading for the wall you just scaled. No clean shot. Be advised.”

“On it,” the Executioner replied. He grabbed a second FAMAS rifle in his off hand and tucked himself behind a low planter wall filled with decorative ferns. As the wall itself was made of thick stone and filled with densely packed dirt, it shielded the Executioner as the Brotherhood blew open the wall with a pair of RPG-7 rocket grenades. Exploding masonry bounced all around Bolan as he braced himself against the dynamic entry. He fired the FAMAS in his left hand as if it were a pistol, keeping the ejector port well away from his face to avoid an injury similar to the one suffered by the unconscious African lying next to him. He emptied the French rifle’s 25-round magazine through the breach, eliciting howls of agony. The thump of two corpses sprawling across the bottom of the blasted hole in the wall let the Executioner know that his suppressive fire was more effective than he’d counted on.

In response to Bolan’s salvo, the Muslim Brotherhood cut loose with their AKs. Wild autofire slashed through the night, proving ineffective in dislodging the Executioner from behind the low wall. The sheer volume of autofire was deafening, informing Bolan that his opposition had been thrown off its game.

Bolan’s next trick was going to put it into sudden death. He reached into his thigh pouch and pulled a fragmentation grenade. Knowing the distance and the angle he needed to make the shot, he sailed the orb through the hole in the wall, right into the knot of Brotherhood gunmen on the outside the hotel compound. Six-and-a-half ounces of plastic explosive detonated, hurling splinters of razor-sharp wire at high velocity through vulnerable flesh, inducing crippling lacerations that tore apart skin, muscles and internal organs. It was a brutal, devastating maneuver, as likely to produce painful, slowly lethal injuries as it was instant death. The Executioner couldn’t spare time or mercy for the mangled and mortally wounded. He was outnumbered and living in the space between the hammer and the anvil.

The Executioner whirled and drove deeper into the Thunder Lions’ headquarters, drawing the Brotherhood forces after him into the compound. This night was going to be a message heard across the underworld of radical fanatics.

The message was that extremist groups had someone to fear.

“MACK’S INSIDE,” Rafael Encizo told Calvin James as the Phoenix Force medic triggered his silenced sniper rifle.

James’s shot hit another of the Brotherhood’s fighters who had noticed their position. The Egyptian was on the parapet of a roof and was in the process of turning his RPK light machine gun when James punched a 7.62 mm NATO bullet through the bridge of the gunner’s nose.

“The troops are paying too much attention to us now to do more than spot for him,” James said. “All the rooftops are crowded with snipers and machine-gun nests. This is almost as bad as when the Russians came after us at Gary’s place in Montana.”

“There were twice as many of those guys,” Encizo reminded his friend. “And we were all deployed in one general fortification because we only had to defend one approach. This time, we’ve got them surrounded.”

James glanced over his shoulder, then swung his rifle around, popping a suppressed bullet into the chest of another rooftop gunman. “You think?”

“Well, we’re fighting them on two fronts, instead of just one,” Encizo corrected. He punctuated his argument by triggering his reloaded RG-6, lancing a clot of armed Egyptians coming up the street with a 40 mm fragmentation shell. Bodies scattered as the round detonated, hurling heads and limbs from torn torsos in a grisly testimony to the launcher’s fearsome power. Encizo scanned for more targets, then caught the sound of boots and bodies rattling the ladder of the fire escape that had brought them to the roof. “Company’s coming.”

The Cuban set down the RG-6 next to James, trading it in for his Heckler & Koch USP. The 9 mm pistol didn’t have quite the same devastating ability as the other weapons, but Encizo wanted to err on the side of weapon retention. It was easier to hang on to a handgun in close-quarters combat than it was to retain a long arm, which provided an attacker with more leverage. An angry face topped the ladder and Encizo aimed and fired in a split second. Two rounds from the 9 mm H & K struck the Brotherhood assailant within an inch of each other, one coring an eye socket into a smear of punctured cornea, the other cracking against the forehead, the wide mouth of his hollowpoint round snagging the bone and breaking it, but not penetrating to the brain beneath. The bullet through the eye, however, took care of the right hemisphere of the Egyptian’s brain, and his head snapped back, fountaining gore.

Encizo rushed to the top of the ladder now that the Brotherhood attacker’s brainless corpse surrendered to the embrace of gravity, pulling it out of the way between him and the rest of the climbers. Egyptian faces looked up in a mixture of anger, fear, determination and resignation. Encizo shouted an order in Arabic. “Turn back or die!”

A handgun barked from lower on the ladder, but the climber had to shoot one-handed and off balance on a rung while aiming around a higher climber. The topmost Egyptian hugged the side of the ladder, giving Encizo a clean shot at the Muslim Brotherhood aggressor. The Phoenix Force commando took it, drilling the feisty terrorist through the top of his head. The 9 mm slug fractured the bone at the top of the Egyptian’s head, cracking down between his right and left lobes to peel him off the ladder and dump his lifeless corpse to the floor of the alley, thirty feet below.

Three of the other Egyptians had slid back down the fire escape as fast as they could, realizing that they were sitting ducks for the Cuban warrior on the roof. A rifleman who was at the base of the ladder opened up, trying to tag Encizo at the edge of the roof. The Brotherhood trooper who had elected to sit out the fight on a ladder rung screamed in pain as two AK-47 bullets slashed through his right leg.

Encizo pulled a fragmentation grenade from his harness and dumped it over the side. Screams of dismay filled the alley as the terrorists recognized the egg-shaped envelope of death spiraling down into their midst. The rifle salvo ended as the terrorist chose to run, rather than be blown to smithereens. It was too late. Thunder boomed, grounded gunmen smashed into greasy pulps of crushed flesh and bone, destroyed by the high-powered blast. Encizo reached down to the injured Egyptian and took his hand. There was a moment of doubt on the Brotherhood prisoner’s part, but he let the Cuban haul him onto the roof. Encizo’s powerful upper body strength made lifting the slender Arab as easy as hoisting a child.

“They shot me,” the man whimpered in broken English, voice trembling from a mixture of pain and betrayal.

“Cal, we have wounded!” Encizo called out.

“Busy!” James responded. The Phoenix Force medic had transferred to his Beretta and was in the process of stitching a line of 9 mm rounds into a gunman on the next rooftop over. The M-89-SR lay at James’s feet, action locked open, the magazine well empty.

Encizo caught movement on another rooftop and whirled, spotting three gunmen rushing up in James’s blind spot. He snapped up the USP and let them have it with a salvo of rapid-fire rounds, drilling two of the terrorists when he heard the crack of another pistol firing. The Egyptian he’d rescued emptied half the magazine of his 9 mm Helwan into the third attacker.

“They shot me,” the ex-Brotherhood gunman growled, having shaken off his moment of shock. Betrayal still burned in his eyes as he reloaded the Egyptian Beretta copy. “I don’t owe those traitorous dogs more than goat shit and death.”

Encizo gave him a friendly smirk. “That’s the spirit.”

He went back to searching for more rooftop enemies, but the Phoenix Force pair and their newfound ally had depleted their ranks.

“Clear for now,” James said, rushing over with his first-aid kit. “I’ll look after our buddy’s leg. Rafe…”

“I’ve got Striker’s back,” Encizo replied. He scooped up the sniper rifle and fed it a fresh magazine. “Take good care of him. Hearts and minds.”

“You know it,” James responded.

The Cuban warrior nestled behind the sniper rifle and set to work thinning out the crowd of Muslim Brotherhood soldiers who were trying to rush the rear of the hotel’s compound. There was still work to be done.

CHAPTER SIX

Captain Fial Aflaq had been prepared for the coming of the nameless crusader for a full day. It was common knowledge among even African militiamen trained by the radical Islamic clerics of the Middle East that there was an American commando who stalked those who fought for the cause of converting the world to their ways. This one man, almost mythic in strength, prowess and the sheer number of kills attributed to him, was unknown, other than for the effects he had left behind him.

Aflaq jolted as he heard the rattle of a lone FAMAS preceding the rolling thunder of a multigrenade barrage. Shock gripped the Thunder Lion leader.

“Only ten men are reporting in,” Lieutenant Anid told him, looking up from his radio.

Ten men? Aflaq’s stomach churned as he processed his nephew’s words. He realized that his fighting force had been halved in a matter of seconds. He was about to give the evacuation order when a powerful concussion shook the small hotel. Aflaq looked out the window and saw a column of smoke billowing upward from a corner of the compound. Rifles exchanged blistering salvos through the breach in the hotel grounds before the firefight was terminated by the bellow of a hand grenade.

“He’s in here with us,” Aflaq said, stunned.

Anid’s eyes were wide with horror. “He told us not to side with Bitturumba any longer.”

Aflaq’s lips drew into a tight, bloodless scar across his face. “Run.”

“But, Uncle—” Anid began to protest.

Aflaq gave the young man a hard push. “I ordered you to run!”

Anid nodded and spun, racing into the hallway. Even as Aflaq’s door swung open, the Thunder Lion officer heard the blazing chatter of French FAMAS rifles, snarling in a vicious two-way cross fire. Anid whirled in the doorway, his shoulder blown into a bloody mess by a snap shot from down the hallway. Aflaq leaped across the office and pulled his nephew back to cover behind his desk. Was it too late for his sister’s son?

“Fall back! Fall back!” Aflaq bellowed into Anid’s walkie-talkie. “It’s not worth dying for! Retreat!”

“Listen to your boss,” Bolan’s chilling voice agreed over the radio. The Executioner’s Arabic was thickly accented, and by no means fluent, but where his words were slightly halting, the tone of voice conveyed a message easily understood. “The Thunder Lions will be extinct inside of a week. Why join Bitturumba all the way to the bitter end?”

“God,” Aflaq prayed.

“No,” Bolan responded, returning to his native English. “Not God. Just your judgment, Captain. It takes a lot more to earn my forgiveness.”

Aflaq looked down to Anid, who was clutching his wounded limb. “I have a wounded boy in here with me. Spare him. I ordered him to stay with me here.”

Bolan strode into view, his tall frame filling the doorway. Clad all in black, bristling with weaponry, the grim figure of the Executioner turned Aflaq’s bowels to ice water with his fearsome visage.

“No!” Anid shouted, almost deliriously. Somehow the eager youngster had twisted his left hand around and had pried his South African Vektor pistol from his hip holster. The sleek black Beretta clone filled his fist as Anid rose to confront the ferocious wraith looking across the desk.

Aflaq lunged and crashed into the wounded lad, knocking the pistol from his grasp. Its metal frame clattered on the floor of the office.

Bolan glared at Aflaq, who was certain that he had doomed himself.

Then the wraith spoke. “Make sure the kid behaves.”

Aflaq kicked the weapon across the floor to Bolan. “I will.”

“Good call.” Bolan glanced out into the hallway. “Keep behind the desk. It’s going to get a hell of a lot hairier in here.”

Bolan fired three swift bursts down the hall, tagging targets in the distance. Satisfied that he’d bought himself a few moments, the Executioner reached into his battle harness, opening a pouch and taking out a small packet. He turned and lobbed it to Aflaq. “It’s something to make the blood clot. Pour it on his shoulder wound, and it’ll stop the bleeding.”

Aflaq tore open the packet. “Peace be unto you, soldier.”

Bolan was taken aback by the militiaman’s gratitude. “Let’s hope not too soon. I’ve got some aggression to extinguish.”

The Executioner turned and fired another long burst from his FAMAS, targeting enemy gunmen making another approach to the office. He disappeared from Aflaq’s sight, and the former militiaman did his best to be a healer.

THE THUNDER LION RESISTANCE had been shattered to pieces in almost record time. It didn’t hurt that Bolan had destroyed half their fighting force in the space of ten seconds, but the conversion of Fial Aflaq and his nephew was an unexpected bonus. Now the Executioner was free to focus on the Muslim Brotherhood contingent who had foolishly dealt themselves into this battle. He keyed his throat mike. “Pushed back a fire team from the Egyptians. Any other advancement on my position?”

“Movement around the lobby at the front of the hotel,” Encizo explained. “I don’t have the range on my launcher and no straight shot with my rifle. Can’t help you with them.”

“Approximate numbers?” Bolan inquired.

“Eight to ten,” Encizo answered. “I’m holding off another group, but they’re retreating to try another approach.”

“Let them through and just concentrate on your side of the hotel. They’ve only got one path to get to me, and if I know my back’s covered, I can deal with their pressure,” Bolan returned. “I’ve got my battlefield set up, and they’re just being funneled into a slaughterhouse.”

“Cattle don’t usually bring AK-47s and RPGs into a slaughterhouse, Striker,” James admonished.

Bolan plucked a fragmentation grenade from his thigh-mounted pouch and bowled the minibomb down the hallway heading toward the lobby. As the fragger’s momentum petered out, the tip of the first Muslim Brotherhood assault team lurched into view. Bolan could see three sets of eyes widen with horror as they looked down at the smooth-skinned green egg of damnation that skittered toward them at head level as they rushed to the top of the steps. A moment later the grenade detonated and the three terrorists disappeared behind a cloud of flame, smoke and dust, their death cries swallowed in the throaty roar of the explosion.

The wall of fragmented razor wire wrapped around the grenade’s explosive core didn’t have the velocity to reach back to the Executioner as he crouched in a doorway twenty-five yards from ground zero. On the other hand, the renegade Egyptians were well within the ten-meter total kill radius of the rocketing, flesh-shredding shrapnel. Meat and skin were pulled from the Brotherhood’s skulls, ripped away as the high-powered sheet of concussive energy struck them like an invisible guillotine blade, shearing through neck bones and ripping the dead men’s heads clean off.

Killed twice over, the mutilated masses of flesh toppled backward onto their overpressure-stunned compatriots, throwing the Brotherhood’s charge even further off balance. Bolan knew he’d only given himself a small window of opportunity against the Egyptian militia, so he charged to the end of the hallway as fast as he could. He fed the FAMAS a full kill-load while he was still on the run, charging a live round into the chamber as he put on the brakes. Bolan’s momentum glided him across the smooth tile floor as if he were ice skating, slowing to a halt at the grenade-crumpled top step. He looked down the stairway and into the dazed opposition as they struggled to free themselves from beneath the tangled limbs of their three decapitated comrades.