Raw Fury

The Executioner was only too aware of the civilian traffic filling the busy city street. This was no place for a firefight. They were near an alley, the space between two large colonial-style buildings. He ran and reached into the open passenger door, grabbed Rosli—who was still behind the steering wheel crouched as low as he could get—and dragged him by his shirt through the opening, to the street.

“Back! Back!” Bolan shouted. Rosli got the idea fast enough and, with his revolver in his fist, traded fire with the drive-by gunners while Bolan dragged him into the alley.

“It will not take them long to—”

“No, it won’t,” Bolan said, cutting the man off. He was already holstering the Desert Eagle and drawing his Beretta 93-R machine pistol. He slapped the 20-round magazine to be sure of its fit and extended the weapon’s small forward grip, flicking the selector switch to three-round burst.

Bolan brought the Beretta up. The gunners weren’t terribly smart. Their unsuccessful vehicular assault had told him that much. The enemy cars had outnumbered Rosli’s taxi and were of at least equal power and weight. It should have been a lot harder to defeat them than it had been. The shooters inside the car had been too slow on the mark, as well, or he’d never have been able to stop them all before they could effectively return or preempt his fire. He didn’t know who the enemy was, though Brognola’s warning about the Padan Muka kept rolling around in his brain. If these were the best Prime Minister Fahzal could field for brownshirts, the Executioner wasn’t very impressed so far.

He raised his mental estimation of them a moment later when the first of the gunners entered the alley, one high, one low, already shooting. He realized they were armed with mini-Uzis. The deadly automatic weapons spat tongues of flame in the relative shadow of the alley. The sound of the brass spilling onto the pavement was lost in the roar of the guns.

Pressing himself against the wall of the alley, Bolan gave Rosli a helpful shove to push the man against the opposite wall. Rosli was smart enough to crouch low and take careful aim with his revolver. He picked off one of the shooters as Bolan extended his right arm, back against the wall, and took aim at another of them, feeling the automatic gunfire whistle past his face mere inches from his flesh.

The Executioner triggered a tri-burst that stitched the second man center-of-mass. The gunner fell without a sound, dead before he hit the ground. Bolan began to back up, sliding along the wall, aware that his movement would give him away and that he would have to be ready for that.

Two more gunners ducked into the alley, first firing blindly around the corner with their Uzis, then following the guns and rounding the corner. Rosli fired but missed. Bolan caught one man in the face with a three-round burst, then tracked and shot the next man. A grenade pinged off the far wall, thrown from the alley mouth, and bounced down the narrow space toward them.

Rosli was closer. He saw the grenade and, without hesitating, stepped forward and planted a firm toe-kick with impeccable accuracy. The grenade whipped back the way it came.

“Down!” Bolan ordered.

The grenade exploded in the alley mouth. Bolan counted to three, his ears ringing from the blast, and popped up with the Beretta 93-R in both hands.

He was concerned about shrapnel, about any civilians nearby who might have caught that grenade blast. He couldn’t fault Rosli for his fast action; the man had saved their lives. Had Bolan been closer he would have tried to direct the grenade farther up the alley rather than toward the open street, but he would not criticize the CIA operative; there was no point in second-guessing life-or-death combat decisions made in the heat of battle, done and over.

He advanced on the alley mouth. The bodies of the shooters he and Rosli had already killed were splayed in gruesome wreckage, torn by the explosion. Bolan had seen enough carnage in his lengthy personal war that the sight did not unnerve him, but he would never truly be used to it. The Executioner simply did what he had to do, and took in measured stride the dead men he left in his wake—men who had tried to take his life, or the lives of good men, women and even children.

He saw the third car before its occupants saw him. The four men within carried more submachine guns, Uzis all. Bolan braced himself against one wall of the alley, leveling the Beretta and letting his eyes flick left, then right, to check the immediate area for civilians. The streets of Kuala Lumpur were densely traveled and much traffic still sped by, but he saw no pedestrians nearby. There were only the shooters, still unidentified.

Bolan figured they were agents of Fahzal’s unfriendly government, determined to prevent an outside interest from interfering in the nation’s affairs.

He tracked the first man, pressed the Beretta’s trigger and rode out the muzzle rise as the three-round burst knocked the man to the pavement. The other three shooters scattered, spraying bullets in his direction. The soldier backed off, letting the mouth of the alley shield him. Slugs chipped the concrete and sprayed him with a fine, abrasive dust. He squinted against the grit, leaned and returned fire.

He knew the Beretta’s 20-round magazine was starting to run low. He pulled in his elbow to cant the weapon, ripped the magazine free and slapped home a loaded spare from his messenger bag. The deadly snout of the weapon pushed forward once more as he extended his arms, ready for all comers.

The shooters repeated the suicidal charge the men before them had made, plunging into the alley with their guns blazing. They were firing wild, without a real idea of just where their target was, and that was the difference between them and the Executioner. Bolan didn’t fire blindly. Crouching on one knee, he aimed carefully and put a three-round burst into the center of the leading shooter.

The Beretta jammed open.

Bolan did not hesitate. He simply let gravity take the now-useless machine pistol as he dropped the gun and went for the Desert Eagle, drawing the big .44 Magnum hand-cannon in one smooth, fluid motion. The triangular muzzle of the big gun bucked as he triggered a pair of heavy slugs, taking one man in the throat and the other in the chest.

The second man kept coming.

Bolan fired again, aiming for the head. At the same moment, the wounded shooter, a giant of a man, lowered his head and charged. The slug furrowed the would-be killer’s scalp—and then he and Bolan collided.

Bolan pulled the Desert Eagle in against his side, prepared to fire from retention, to shoot the big man off of him, as they hit the pavement and the breath was squeezed from his lungs. He triggered one blast, to no visible effect, and as he did so, he felt his attacker’s arms encircle his chest. The seemingly implacable foe began to crush the life from him.

Bolan tried to shoot again, but something had jammed the Desert Eagle’s action, most likely his clothing with the gun pressed against his body. He was able to get his gun arm free and started beating the man in the head with the .44 Magnum pistol, clubbing him in the skull with all his strength.

There were shots. Though the growing gray haze encroached on his vision, Bolan registered the sound of shots. He began to feel himself losing consciousness, and some part of him understood that he was still hitting his foe in the head with his jammed weapon.

The pressure was suddenly gone. The attacker’s arms went slack, and Bolan drew in a deep, haggard breath. Then the body on top of him was rolled off and Rosli’s face appeared in the center of his field of vision. He blinked past the floating spots of light.

“There are none left,” Rosli said, offering a hand. “We must go, and go quickly. They will be here very soon.”

“Who?”

“Royal Malaysian Police,” Rosli explained. “Someone will have called them.” He looked around, as if expecting witnesses to appear by magic in the alley. They wouldn’t have to; there had been plenty of civilians on the street, and Bolan could hear screams as alarmed pedestrians came upon the carnage.

“Do you have any contacts in the police?” he asked.

“None, I am afraid,” Rosli said as he shook his head. “Most are paid off by Fahzal’s people, and those that are not are corrupt enough in other ways. We dare not be caught. It will be as if these—” he jerked his chin at the dead men littering the alley “—caught us and took us away. It would be to our deaths.”

“Who are they?” Bolan asked.

“This one,” Rosli answered, pointing with the revolver to one of the dead men. “I do not know the others, but this one I recognize. I have seen him often enough, where Fahzal’s dirty work is to be done. I think he is a lieutenant of some kind.” He pointed to the other men. All were dressed in civilian clothes—loose-fitting tunics and light slacks similar to Rosli’s own. “Many times they wear the black-and-brown uniform. Not so now, but I recognize that one all the same. These men are Padan Muka, Fahzal’s private army. I can but assume they were sent to kill me, and, of course, anyone with me.”

The Executioner paused to scoop up the jammed Beretta, throwing it into his shoulder bag. He put the Desert Eagle in there, as well. He made as if to search the closest of the dead men.

“There is no time,” Rosli urged, grabbing his shoulder. “Come.” He released Bolan’s arm and they started walking quickly.

“There is little we can do in Malaysia without the government knowing. There are many spies within our ranks. I trust a few, but not many. Too many of those I don’t are well aware of everything that occurs within the intelligence network here,” Bolan’s contact said.

They were moving swiftly to the opposite end of the alley, and Bolan could hear the distinctive horns of what could only be police vehicles approaching in the distance. Rosli tucked away his revolver, arranging his shirt to cover the weapon in his waistband.

“I’ve got to get to the school,” Bolan said. “We’re already burning time those kids don’t have.”

“I know,” Rosli agreed and nodded. “It is not much farther. We go.”

They emerged at the opposite end of the alley. The police sirens were growing louder, echoing after them. Rosli went to a line of small cars parked nearby and, without hesitation, smashed the window of the nearest one with the butt of his revolver. He reached in, hit the door locks and beckoned for Bolan to join him. The soldier slid into the passenger seat.

Rosli wasted no words. He hammered the steering-column collar loose and began muttering to himself as he reached inside with both hands. The engine began to stutter and then finally caught. Rosli shook one hand absently as if he had been cut or shocked. He hit the accelerator and pushed them out into the traffic that was moving past. It had seemed to Bolan that no one passing by had given them a second glance as the CIA operative stole the car in broad daylight.

“They will be calling the police,” Rosli said, as if reading his mind. “But they would not risk confronting us directly. Why do you think I used the gun? People are not anxious to be heroes here, Mr. Cooper, but neither do they tolerate wanton crime. We will not be able to use this car for long. The police will be given the license plate and description, I have no doubt. It does not matter. We need not go far.”

Bolan nodded.

As Rosli drove, Bolan opened the messenger bag over his shoulder and removed the Desert Eagle. The slide had not gone fully into battery; a round was half in and half out of the chamber. He yanked the big magazine, shucked the unfired round and put the loose round in his pocket, not trusting that it might not be deformed in some way. He racked the slide a few times, making sure nothing was amiss. Then he inserted a fresh magazine and chambered a cartridge before holstering the big pistol.

He was more concerned about the Beretta. There had been no time to get a package to him before he reached the school. Brognola had transmitted to his secure satellite phone several files breaking down the details of the operation, which Bolan had read on the flight to Kuala Lumpur. In those files, he had noted that a care package full of special toys from Stony Man Farm was on its way.

If things went down as they should, it wouldn’t matter for the incursion at the school. The action would be long over before the Farm’s courier reached Bolan in Malaysia.

The slide of the Beretta was jammed. He removed the magazine and discovered that the feed lips were bent, something he hadn’t noticed in the very brief time he’d had to inspect the gear. He tested the top round in the magazine while he was looking, and decided that the spring felt weak, too. He dropped the magazine to the floor of the car. His prints weren’t on file anywhere, and the weapons Rosli had provided would not be traceable to any operation run by the Farm; if some overzealous Royal Malaysian Police officer decided to claim the magazine as evidence, he was free to do so and feel good about himself.

He quickly removed the slide of the 93-R. This was harder to do than normal because Rosli was sliding in and out of traffic like a man possessed. The smell of abused brake pads filled the compact car’s cabin and the engine screamed in protest.

He’d been able to travel with a small tactical flashlight. He took it from the pocket of his cargo pants and used its bright beam to illuminate the barrel and chamber from the muzzle end of the weapon. All seemed to be in order. He was intimately familiar with how the machine pistol should look and operate when properly functional. The finish had been badly scuffed by impact with the pavement, but nothing seemed damaged.

He reassembled the weapon, worked the slide a few times and, satisfied, started checking magazines. When he checked the spring tension and the feed lips of all of them, carefully, he inserted one and chambered the first round, setting the weapon’s safety and holstering it in his shoulder rig.

“It is my fault,” Rosli said. “I obtained the weaponry specified at your request. I should have been more meticulous.”

“It happens,” the Executioner said. “If gear has flaws, combat exposes them, without fail. And at the worst possible time.”

“Yes, this is true. Your philosophy is wise.”

“Not mine,” Bolan said. “Murphy’s Law.”

“Just so. You are ready?”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “How long?”

“Now,” Rosli said. “We are here.”

Rosli guided the little car to a halt a block away from where the action was, from what the soldier could see. The two men stepped out of the vehicle.

“Where will you be?” Bolan asked Rosli.

“I thought I would be coming with you.”

“No,” Bolan said, shaking his head. “I work alone for this part. Stay out of sight, but stay close. I may need what or who you know before this is over.”

Without another word, the Executioner strode forward, toward the danger.

3

The school reflected the fact that it catered to the progeny of the wealthy and powerful. The building was an impressive neocolonial structure, four stories, with an elaborate entranceway and a sizable property around it—especially by the standards of a densely packed city like Kuala Lumpur. A parking lot, with a ramp leading to further underground parking, was located at the west side of the building. The cars parked in it were almost all very expensive.

Uniformed Royal Malaysian Police had set up a cordon half a block from the school. From what Bolan could see, coupled with the intelligence data Brognola had provided, every road leading to the school was blocked off. Wooden barricades had been erected and there were plenty of weapons in evidence, mostly Kalashnikov rifles. The intelligence files had included the fact that Fahzal’s regime was a regular purchaser of the Russian surplus arms, and that the first thing the Nationalist Party had done after sweeping to power was to authorize heavy expenditures upgrading or simply multiplying the weaponry used by both the military and law enforcement in the nation.

Fahzal’s internal security thugs would be among those so armed, though apparently the prime minister’s tastes ran to Israeli submachine guns as much as to Russian assault rifles. Bolan saw several knots of men in brown-and-black uniforms that could only be Padan Muka, based on what Rosli had told him. They had the dull, contemptuous look that he associated with goons of that type—people who enjoyed hurting others and who didn’t do much thinking about that, or anything. They weren’t soldiers and they certainly weren’t patriots, not in the righteous sense; they were hired muscle, and they were predators. The nearest Padan Muka triggermen eyed him hard as he passed them, giving him a cold look.

He’d dealt with their kind before, and taught more than a few of them very painful lessons. There was no time to indulge his sense of justice on nonpriority targets, however.

Brognola’s slim dossier had included the layout of the building he was now encountering. On the plane, he had formulated the most basic of plans, which left a lot to chance. He’d made his earliest incursions in his war against society’s predators perfecting his abilities at role camouflage, and what he was about to do was an aspect of that. Fixing his gaze on a point far ahead of him, he looked past everyone who noticed him, as if he were irritated, rushed and focused on getting to some point beyond each of the glaring Padan Muka fighters and police officers. He got past the first set of barriers simply by acting as if he belonged there.

He was counting on complacency. The barricade of the school, and the hostage crisis within, was in its second day. The guards outside, perhaps expecting fireworks early on, would have had plenty of reasons to get bored by this time. They’d have gone from expecting anything to expecting nothing; the human mind sought routine and pattern even when there was no rational reason to expect either.

More significantly, they’d be expecting either violent enemy action or deadly subterfuge. They were focused on the school and on stopping that enemy action from within. They would not be expecting an incursion from outside, nor would they automatically think they should prevent someone outside from going in. After all, how crazy would a man have to be to want to enter a building held by dangerous, armed terrorists willing to threaten the lives of children?

The hard part, therefore, was not getting past the cordon outside the school. As the Executioner nodded and brushed past the barricades, brazenly walking through them as if he belonged there, nobody challenged him directly. He had known it would probably work, but in the back of his mind he had been prepared to shoot his way through if necessary. There was no time to do otherwise, and no viable alternative.

When he reached the front doors of the school, a few of the Royal Malaysian Police officers began to shout at him. It was possible they hadn’t thought he’d do something so direct; perhaps they’d assumed he was simply moving toward the foremost barriers. Whatever they were shouting, he couldn’t understand it, anyway. He figured they probably wouldn’t shoot him for fear of touching off something inside the school.

Probably.

There were three sets of double doors within the front entrance. Each door was heavy, polished wood with brass fittings. The fogged glass of the doors has been starred with bullet holes, probably during the initial stage of the BR capture of the building. Bolan simply put his hand out and, ignoring the shouted protests from the men at the barricades, threw the doors open and stepped inside.

There were two men dressed in camouflage fatigues standing inside the doorway. They turned as he entered, but were apparently too baffled by his sudden appearance even to bother shooting him. They both held well-worn Kalashnikov clones, which they pointed at him.

“Hello there,” Bolan said cheerfully. “Do either of you speak English?”

The door slid shut on well-oiled hinges behind him. The click of the mechanism engaging echoed through the suddenly very quiet hallway.

The two BR men turned to look at each other, their expressions almost comical. They looked back at Bolan.

“I do,” the one on Bolan’s left said. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” His accent was heavy, but his English was excellent. He punctuated his words by jabbing the muzzle of his rifle at Bolan.

“Door was open,” Bolan answered, shrugging. “I’m the negotiator,” he said.

“Negotiator?”

“I was sent to hear your demands, make arrangements for their fulfillment,” Bolan said. “What, they didn’t tell you?”

The two men glanced at each other again, then back to Bolan. “You two are with the group called the, uh, the BR, right? Fighting for freedom for your oppressed ethnic group?”

“We fight the oppression of Fahzal!” the English speaker said proudly. His companion either knew enough English to agree, or recognized the tone; he smiled and nodded with equal pride.

“Yes, by threatening to kill children,” Bolan said. “But thanks. It would have been irresponsible of me not to check.”

As he said the words, Bolan knew both men’s brains would be focused on the dialogue he had created with them, and not immediately on his actions. They had already, thanks to his assertion, formed an opinion in their minds as to his purpose there.

The six-inch blade of the stiletto snapped open in his hand. He swung the knife up and slashed out across both of their throats in turn. Bolan sidestepped to his right, his right hand completing the arc. He elbowed the closest man in the back of the head to drive him to the floor. The other terrorist, the man who had spoken, fell to his knees clutching at his throat. He died with his eyes wide, trying and failing to say something with his last breath.

Bolan bent, picked up the better-looking of the two assault rifles and checked it. He grabbed the spare magazines the terrorists had carried, then took a moment to pop open the second rifle, pull the bolt and drop that bolt into his bag. There was no point in leaving functioning weapons behind him if he could help it.

It was time to get down to business, before those two were missed.

Neither man appeared to have a wireless phone or a walkie-talkie. That meant that either the terrorists were operating according to a preset plan, or they were using runners to transmit messages to the different teams securing the building. Either way, Bolan had just opened a gaping hole in their perimeter at the school’s front door. He had to make sure they were too busy with him to realize that fact. And he’d have to hope that the forces outside didn’t discover it, blunder in and make everything a lot more complicated. They were already going to be agitated, knowing that an unknown quantity had waltzed right past their roadblocks.

He considered the situation as he assessed his immediate environment for more threats. Brognola’s briefing had included some notes on the political climate surrounding the events of the past day and a half in Kuala Lumpur. Ostensibly, Fahzal’s government wasn’t mounting a counterterrorist operation to retake the school for fear of what would happen to Fahzal’s son, Jawan, and to the other hostages. Realistically, if Fahzal was the sort of man who was willing to use his son’s kidnapping as an excuse to carry out a genocide, it wouldn’t be out of the question that he might be prolonging the episode deliberately. Every moment of bad press the BR got was a nail in the coffin of both that group and the Chinese-Indian ghetto between Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya.

Bolan knew it was a standard policy of such regimes. First, you used a common enemy to generate support for your cause, even if that enemy was contrived. Then, you herded all of your supposed enemies into a centralized location, where you could control and monitor them. And finally, you solved the contrived problem by killing the enemies you’d rounded up.

Bolan couldn’t help but think that was the real motive here. Fahzal may not have anticipated his own boy being caught in the cross fire, but the soldier figured the Malaysian prime minister would have found another excuse to raze the ghetto if this one hadn’t come up. If the BR’s brutal activities could be used to paint all of the members of that ghetto neighborhood with the label of child-killing terrorists, it was likely Fahzal would be able to justify his actions with at least some of the international community. He most certainly would be able to use it as an excuse, a rationale, for his brutal tactics at home.