Assassin's Tripwire

Yenni surged ahead of him by a pace, then three. He opened his mouth to warn her.

She disappeared.

Bolan dropped in behind her. The almost invisible hole she’d fallen into was nearly as deep as he was tall. He landed heavily on his combat boots, crouching in the dirt. He couldn’t see her in the darkness.

“I’m all right,” she said without prompting. “You could have warned me.”

“You could have waited,” he said.

The “hole” extended in either direction in a straight line. It was five feet wide and five feet deep. In the darkness, against the sky above, Bolan could see Yenni moving to one knee.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Leftovers,” he said. “Satellite imaging says these trenches crisscross the area for miles. Immediately after the Arab Spring unrest, when civil war first broke out, the network was dug out by the first rebel forces. From the tactical reports we received—”

“We?” Yenni asked.

“From the reports my government received,” Bolan said, ignoring her attempt to pry, “that group of rebels was wiped out before they got a chance to fall back to their trenches. Outdated tactics, used in the wrong context. There’s a right way and a wrong way to make war.”

“And so the trenches remained.”

“Yes.” Bolan took out his tablet and brought up the overlaid map grid of their location. “The last time this area was imaged from space, the leading strip of trench went on for several hundred yards. There are cross trenches branching off along its length. The entire area has been dug out.”

“We must hurry, Cooper,” Yenni said. The chopper was almost on top of them now.

“Do you have an e-tool in your pack?”

“Yes,” she said, sounding confused. “Why would you—”

“Give it to me,” Bolan said. “And your RPG. And then run that way,” he told her, pointing.

She handed over the folding entrenching tool and unslung the RPG tube. “I have only one round,” she said.

“It will have to be enough.” Bolan took the rocket-propelled grenade from her and slung the tube over his shoulder, jamming the folding e-tool as far as he could into the outer slash pocket of his jacket. He tucked the RPG round inside the coat, making the garment sag heavily. “I’m heading in the opposite direction,” he said. “Draw them off me, but don’t do too good a job. When I open up on them I want that chopper coming at me.”

“You’ll be killed.”

“Sooner or later,” Bolan said, “we all are. Now scram.”

Yenni looked as if she might ask a question, but instead she closed her mouth, turned and ran without another word. Bolan did the same, fleeing through the rough-hewn trench, increasing the distance between them. The folding e-tool and the rocket-propelled grenade battered his flanks as his coat moved against his body.

The helicopter roared past.

He looked up just in time to see the chopper cut through the rectangle of sky delineated by the trench walls. He caught only a glimpse, but there was no mistaking that silhouette. He’d seen it many times before.

It was definitely a Mil Mi-24, designated the Hind by NATO. Introduced in the early seventies by the Soviets, the Hind was called the “flying tank.” With twin turboshaft engines driving a midmounted five-blade rotor, not to mention a pair of stub wings that served as three-station weapon hardpoints, the flying beast could carry a Gryazev-Shipunov twin-barreled autocannon, AT-2 “Swatter” antitank missiles, and a rocket pod or pods bearing S-8 rockets.

He pressed himself against the wall of the trench. Voices were coming closer, and the helicopter’s buzzing was receding. Sound echoed strangely inside the old trench network, but as near as Bolan could tell, that meant the chopper was circling around the target site as the ground troops closed in.

Mack Bolan stopped running. He cocked his head to one side.

A man fell into the trench at his feet.

Bolan had time to step back before two more enemy soldiers, both wearing the black armbands of the Wolf, tumbled into the trench. The enemy gunners had obviously been running in pursuit and encountered the trench network as abruptly as Yenni had. Bolan didn’t wait for them to recover, didn’t wait for them to shout a warning. He simply swept the suppressor-equipped barrel of his Beretta across the fallen, scrambling men and stroked the trigger repeatedly.

The subsonic 9-mm rounds churned through the fallen soldiers. The men writhed and were still. Bolan, wary of a surprise attack should one of them be shamming, rifled through their web gear. He came up with three Kalashnikov rifles and half a dozen loaded magazines, which he quickly shoved into his war bag. Pausing to pop the cover from the first rifle, he ripped its bolt free and threw it as far along the trench as he could. Then he dumped the stripped rifle and checked the other two, pulling back the bolt far enough to verify that a round was chambered in each.

He had just enough time to lift the barrel as a fourth soldier dived into the trench.

This man had seen the lip of the excavation coming, or perhaps he’d heard the scuffle or the cough of Bolan’s suppressed Beretta. Either way, he leaped into the ditch as if he intended to make some war.

Bolan was happy to accommodate him.

The American soldier triggered his borrowed Kalashnikov and raked the man across the chest. The enemy gunner was dead before he finished hitting the dirt. Farther along the trench, somewhere between his current position and where Yenni had been, more soldiers were piling in from above, their weapons ready. Bolan knew he couldn’t face them all. The trench walls formed a fatal funnel that could work both for him and against him. Without the element of surprise, he would be just as vulnerable to the enemy’s guns as they were to his.

He opted for distance, moving along the passage in a low crouch, headed away from the soldiers massing between him and Yenni. He could hear gunfire behind him and to his left. At this distance it was hard to tell Yenni’s chopped AK from the full-size Kalashnikovs chattering to meet it, but he thought perhaps he could. He didn’t need her to hold out long, and in fact, he’d meant it when he’d told her he didn’t want her to do too well in drawing fire. It was essential that the Hind eventually fix on him. He just needed a little time to work.

Footsteps above his head brought him up short. Two lines of the Wolf’s uniformed patrolmen were now paralleling the trench on either side. Bolan crouched low so they couldn’t see him in the darkness. By his rough count, there were five on either side. He knew what they were after, too: they were walking the trench in order to sweep it clean. No doubt there were more doing the same thing in the opposite direction.

The Hind made a closer pass and a spotlight came alive, one attached to the Hind’s nose cannon. The bright shaft played across the arid scrub and dipped in and out of the trench, back and forth, as the chopper’s pilot walked his craft sideways along the ditch.

The patrol would see Bolan any moment now. All they had to do was point a handheld light in his direction. He raised his Kalashnikov, making sure the selector was on full automatic, and spun his body in a tight arc. The soldier blasted away at ankle level, chopping down the patrolmen, continuing his spin to raze the feet of the men at his right. Unable to process what had happened, the men simply started screaming. Bolan spared them mercy rounds with the rest of his magazine, burning half his bullets on one side, half on the other. His ears were ringing from the echoes of the gunfire as he hurried on.

Above him, the Hind abruptly stopped its gliding, sideways pattern. Either its occupants had spotted him, which was unlikely, or they had seen the muzzle flashes of his short engagement.

He nearly collided with the dirt bank as the trench ended. Judging the height of the walls around him and casting one more glance at the helicopter, he estimated the trajectory he would need.

It was time.

He slung the Kalashnikov over his shoulder, where the twin loads of both rifles and the RPG tube weighed him down. The folding e-tool he’d borrowed from Yenni snapped open from either end, forming the shovel blade and a small triangular handle. He twisted the locking collar and was grateful that the unit felt solid. He’d seen plenty of collapsible shovels that were little better than toys. Now was not the time for his tool to fail him.

Furiously, he began to dig.

The shooting at the other end of the trenches was chaotic now. The Wolf’s patrolmen seemed to be firing in all directions. That made Bolan smile. Yenni was a skilled guerilla fighter. She was giving them a run for their money.

The Hind moved heavily, pausing to hover above the ground where Bolan had done his bloody work. The spotlight played over the corpses he had left behind.

The pilot, as if reading Bolan’s thoughts, brought his nose gun up. The beam of light swept the trench, headed directly for him.

The Hind’s automatic cannon opened up.

Around Bolan, the earth itself exploded as the Hind’s shells ripped apart everything in the vicinity. The pilot wasn’t really sure of his target—or Bolan would have been a cloud of meat-laden mist already—but if the barrage kept up, it wouldn’t matter. Bolan’s life expectancy amid that hail of death was not measured in minutes, but in seconds.

He lifted the RPG tube from his shoulder, aimed and pulled the trigger.

It was an old trick the Somalis had learned, to bring down American helicopters. The back-blast from a rocket-propelled grenade launcher made it impractical to fire elevated, where the blast would hit the ground at the gunner’s feet. But dig a hole big enough to absorb that blast, and you could use a grenade launcher to take out a helicopter. The key was to strike the chopper at a point vulnerable enough to—

Bolan’s train of thought left him as he watched the RPG go wide, too wide, trailing smoke as it arced far right of the chopper. He’d been hoping to strike the Hind in the canopy. Hitting the main rotor would be ideal, but that target was too small and too far away. Only blind luck would put the round in the Hind’s relatively vulnerable tail rotor, the key to its steering and stability.

The rocket-propelled grenade exploded, obliterating the tail rotor.

Bolan would have smiled if he hadn’t anticipated what would happen next. The chopper, already listing in his direction, started to spin. As it rotated, faster and faster, its massive fuselage looming in the night sky, it began to lose altitude.

And now the Hind was coming right for him.

Bolan ran in the opposite direction. There was no time for subtlety and no time for unnecessary weight. He dropped the RPG tube and shed his extra rifles as he went, sprinting for all he was worth along the tunnel. He needed to get out of the dug ditch, or get far enough that flames from the exploding chopper wouldn’t be funneled right to him. If he paused to try to scramble up over the lip of the trench, he might not make it in time. Worse, he might become a target for any of the Wolf’s men still operative at ground level.

The few gunshots he could still hear in the distance were drowned by the electric death whine of the Hind as it spiraled to the ground.

It was going to strike the trench right behind him.

This was going to hurt.

He felt the chopper more than he heard it. The impact reverberated through his body, enveloping him in a cloud of heat and sound and pain that crushed the air from his lungs and rattled the bones of his rib cage. The darkness briefly came alive in the light of the fireball that was the Hind. For that instant, night was day.

The blood-soaked floor of the trench rushed up to smash Bolan in the face.

Then there was nothing.

3

Al Tabkah, Syria

Faces.

Bolan saw faces. They were the faces of every woman he had ever loved, every man he had ever fought beside, every innocent to whom he’d extended his protection. He remembered them all. Each and every face was etched on his brain, indelibly printed in his memories.

So many had died. Some of them had simply vanished, lost to him. Some had perished as he’d held them. Some had been tortured, reduced to gibbering wrecks for whom a bullet was the only kindness.

The litany of the dead, the rolls of the fallen, were never far from his mind. But in the heat and light and pain of the explosion, something had brought the memories flooding into the forefront of his brain.

Bolan’s eyes snapped open, his head jerking forward.

A palm against his chest stopped him. He looked down, then to his left. The surprisingly slender palm belonged to Yenni, who was driving the truck with her left hand. The Toyota Hilux bore the scars and dust of driving many miles across the Syrian terrain—or wherever it had driven from to get here. The dirt road on which they traveled was pocked and scarred with ruts of all sizes. A city, such as it was, began to open up around them.

“You were restless in your sleep,” Yenni said.

“A dream.”

“You had many dreams,” she replied.

Bolan changed the subject. “Where are we? What happened?”

“Your plan was not a good one,” Yenni said. “You should have told me you intended to have the helicopter fall on you. I would have spoken against it.”

“That wasn’t exactly… What I mean to say is—”

“So you did not intend for the helicopter to fall on you. This was an accident?”

“Not exactly,” Bolan said. “It’s complicated.”

Yenni took a pack of gum from inside her jacket, unwrapped it with one hand and popped the square of pink bubble gum into her mouth. She gestured with the pack to Bolan.

“I’m trying to quit,” he said.

She chewed, shaking her head. At no time did she slow the truck, which continued to raise a furious dust cloud behind them. The streets began to grow more congested, but Yenni was undeterred. “To answer your question,” she said, “the helicopter fell on you.”

“What?” Bolan said. “We’ve established that pretty thoroughly.”

“You asked what happened.”

“After the helicopter.”

“Which fell on you,” Yenni continued. “A horrible plan.”

Bolan told himself not to sigh. “Right,” he said. “So stipulated.”

She looked at him with a slight frown, as if she didn’t know the word, then went on anyway. “Your wounds were not severe. I am concerned you may have a concussion, however. The windows of your eyes are not quite the same size.”

“The windows of my…” Bolan realized she meant his pupils. Leaning forward, he examined them in the rear-view mirror. If one was slightly blown, he couldn’t really tell. His head felt a bit thick, but that was normal after absorbing an explosion. “I feel fine,” he said. “Although I could really use some coffee.”

“Here, there are many Star-pokes,” Yenni said and laughed at her own joke.

“That’s not actually what they’re called.”

“We have none of the others, either,” she stated. “We are in Al Tabkah. There is an arms bazaar here that will have the weapons you require. Had you not dropped a Hind gunship on the Wolf’s patrol, we might have scavenged more than enough arms from the enemy soldiers.”

“I’m particular about my hardware,” Bolan said. “Besides, we need serious explosives if we’re going to be ready to neutralize the missing weapons systems. A couple of rounds from my Beretta won’t do it. And I think it’s time we moved on, philosophically speaking, when it comes to the Hind.”

Yenni blew a big pink bubble, popped it and pulled it back into her mouth. “We should buy you a helmet,” she said. “Your head is not as thick as it looks, I think.”

Bolan made no reply. The air outside was surprisingly cool despite the time of day and the bright sun beating down. Al Tabkah was typical of Syrian towns in that multiple layers of architecture sprawled among one another. Soviet housing blocks and French flats, relics of the 1970s, reared their heads above modern twentieth-century prefabricated concrete and old Ottoman and French Colonial structures. No building was untouched by concrete rubble and holes from artillery or small-arms fire.

Yenni was eyeing him curiously, spending too much time staring at him and not enough—as far as he was concerned—watching the road. She reached behind her seat with one hand and offered him a dented metal canteen. Bolan thought it looked like 1980s Soviet-era issue. He uncapped it and took a swallow, surprised to find the water cool and delicious.

“Drink well,” she said. “You look dry, Cooper. Death can sneak up on a dry man.”

“Death has been sneaking after me for a while,” he answered. “We’re old friends.”

“I’m not surprised.” She took the canteen when he handed it back, drank some water herself, then stowed it away again. “We are almost to the bazaar. The man we want is named Khasky. He is well-known in Al Tabkah, with many allies. Do not antagonize him.”

“I’ll do my best,” Bolan said.

Traffic picked up as Yenni navigated the streets. There was no real order to the pedestrians, bicycles and motor vehicles they passed, or which surged around them at break-neck speeds. People walked wherever they pleased and seemed to trust that the motorbike and truck drivers would shoot behind or in front of them. At least once, Bolan saw a rust-eaten sedan snap the mirror from an equally aged flatbed truck. The sedan’s driver kept going. The truck driver didn’t even bother to waste an angry gesture from his open window.

They were entering the oldest quarter of the city. The bazaar Yenni had mentioned was covered with cloth tarps that stretched from the nearest buildings to create an on-again, off-again fabric roof, offering some protection against direct sunlight. There were many gaps in the canopy, which followed as little plan as the traffic.

The surrounding structures were a mixture of ramshackle stone huts and a handful of more modern concrete blocks. There were plenty of rubble piles, and an equal number of craters and gaping holes in the buildings. Bolan thought he could pick out individual mortar and artillery scores amid the pockmarks from small-arms fire. None of the damage seemed recent.

Yenni parked the truck in a nearby alley. The narrow passageway smelled of garbage and urine and was littered with debris. Wrapping her scarf more tightly around her face, she beckoned for him to follow. Bolan made sure his weapons were concealed beneath his jacket and jogged along after her.

He still felt slightly lightheaded. She might be right; he might have a mild concussion. The thought did not worry him overmuch. His body was a mass of scar tissue from previous dances with fate. There was no reason today should be any different.

The crowd was thick at the bazaar’s perimeter, but thinned as Yenni led him on toward the rear of the canopied space.

Smells, both exotic and mundane, enticing and foul, assailed his nostrils. A booth of sorts offered what he thought might be Turkish coffee…or something more narcotic in nature, judging from the glazed faces of the men within the enclosure. Other stalls featured dry goods and foodstuffs. Some slightly more illicit booths were offering everything from knockoff designer sunglasses to what Bolan thought might be stolen cell phones.

The crowd was predominantly male, although he saw several women wearing black abayas—long, loose-fitting robes. Their heads and faces were covered, showing only their eyes. The men generally opted for head scarves and the didashah, a loose, one-piece robe. There were also several men wearing a variety of fatigues and other paramilitary garb.

What surprised Bolan was that he saw no military-police patrols. None of Hahmir’s regular army and none of the Wolf’s men were in evidence. He had gotten the impression, from his intelligence briefing, that the new Syrian government was busily asserting its authority over those areas in its control.

That might mean Al Tabkah was a pocket of loyalist resistance, dominated by fighters who supported the previous regime. The farther they traveled without evidence of government presence, the more likely that seemed.

Bolan was mildly surprised when they stopped not at a booth but at the door of a stone building that faced the bazaar at the far end. The female guerilla fighter rapped on the rough-hewn wooden door with her knuckles, waited, then rapped again. Finally, the door opened. A man in a white robe and red-checkered head scarf, with a Skorpion machine pistol hanging from his right shoulder on a leather strap, glared at them both.

Yenni spoke a few words Bolan could not understand. Her tone was urgent, her pace quick. The guard—for that was most certainly what he was, and Bolan had met the type countless times—squinted at them. He hesitated, but finally stepped back, gesturing impatiently for them to follow.

Bolan entered the building behind Yenni. The guard slammed the door shut behind them and waved with his Skorpion toward the narrow hallway ahead. The cloying smell of hashish was almost overpowering. At the guard’s glowering encouragement, they made their way down a narrow stone-walled hallway and through a beaded curtain.

The room they entered was vast. Bolan scanned the ceiling and walls and, from the marks on them, assumed this chamber had been made by removing interior walls. At an immense octagonal poker table, of all things, a fat man in a bright white robe and matching head scarf sprawled on a brown leather recliner. The poker table was gray with age and matched the enormous man’s skin.

The fat man smiled. Three of his teeth were gold. His face was covered in a few days of stubble and a sheen of perspiration. He wore multiple gold and gem-studded rings on his thick fingers. On the table before him, he was shuffling an oversize deck of playing cards. Bolan did not let the motion draw his eyes. The man cut the deck, shuffled and riffled the cards in a practiced motion. He wore a diamond-studded gold watch on one thick wrist. A hookah stood on a shabby ottoman next to him, while a plate of dates sat on the poker table amid several greasy paper wrappers. Bolan assumed these were from whatever passed for take-out food in this place.

The pearl grip of a revolver jutted from the fat man’s armpit. He wore his shoulder holster over his robe. A pair of designer sunglasses, probably counterfeit, was perched on his forehead.

The guard with the Skorpion was joined by two others. One of the newcomers held a machete. The other had no weapon visible, but he was easily the biggest of the three, with hands that looked as if they could crack walnuts. Unlike the man at the poker table, nothing about the big guard looked soft or fat.

“How curious,” the fat man said in excellent English, “that you would bring a stranger, a Westerner, here to this place, Yenni.”

“Khasky,” Yenni said, offering a slight bow from the waist. “We have money. We come to buy weapons.”

Khasky squinted at them. He had one lazy eye. Bolan was careful to make no sudden movements. This man was a predator. There was no mistaking the hollow look in his eyes. He would order their deaths the second he thought it would profit him.

“What is it you require?” he asked.

Yenni glanced at Bolan. “Heavy weapons,” he said. “An assault rifle and grenade launcher combination. Explosives, preferably Semtex or something similar. Light enough to be portable, powerful enough to be effective. Detonators. Loaded magazines for the rifle. Grenade rounds for the launcher.”

“Hmm,” Khasky said. “You sound like a man who is preparing for war. What war do you fight here, American? And what makes you think I will help you fight it?”