Raw Fury

The Executioner didn’t intend to let him get that far.

The foyer, opening up from the double doors, had a small door set at the far end. Bolan cautiously checked this and found a storage closet with a floor buffer inside. He dragged the two bodies into the closet, throwing the now useless Kalashnikov in after them. He paused a moment, then placed the functional Kalashnikov with its magazines in a corner of the storage room, under the mop and bucket standing next to the buffer. Much as the firepower might be needed, he could not risk going full-auto, and he needed to be able to travel fast and light. He eased the door shut. Then he paused and simply listened.

It was eerily quiet inside. He could hear voices amplified through bullhorns outside, probably the police or Padan Muka throwing demands at the terrorists or at the Westerner who had just blundered into their midst. Given that Fahzal’s people, or at least those at the upper levels, knew the CIA had brought in a troubleshooter they didn’t want, the soldier was a little surprised no one had taken a shot at him at some point. Bureaucracy seemed to be working in his favor; even a despotic regime like Fahzal’s had many tentacles, and the dozens or hundreds of right hands didn’t know what the dozens or hundreds of left hands were doing at any given moment.

The sound of the bullhorns was faint through the heavy front doors. Even if they had no reason to want to shoot him on sight, Bolan knew that walking so boldly into the midst of this hostage crisis might prompt a reaction from the police and troops outside. He was, however, gambling hard that it wouldn’t. He could smell politics here. He was going to bet his life that the armed men outside would stay right where they were until Fahzal was ready to move—and not before.

Bolan consulted the intelligence files in his secure satellite phone. On the small color screen he called up the floor plan of the building. It might or might not be completely accurate; the plans were those originally filed for the construction of the structure a few years before. Had those plans been altered during construction, or had the building been renovated subsequently, the information in the soldier’s phone could be flawed. That did not matter. He would work with what he had. This was why Brognola and the Man had chosen him for a seat-of-the-pants, near-suicidal mission of this type. Bolan gave the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group plausible deniability if things got ugly. He could be dismissed as a rogue operative for whom the United States would claim no responsibility. Much more important, he was the type of flexible, veteran combat operative who could roll with a fluid situation and come out on top, trusting his guts, his guns and his sense of intuition to get the job done.

According to the floor plan, the classrooms were located on the second and third floors. The main floor was used for administrative facilities and consisted of small offices. The fourth floor boasted a large auditorium with skylights and roof access.

Bolan put himself in the position of Fahzal’s forces. That roof would almost certainly be covered by snipers, and unless the skylights could be blocked somehow, there would be a clear line of sight to anyone in the auditorium. That would mean the BR terrorists wouldn’t set up in the auditorium, despite the convenience of having a large, open space to keep their hostages corralled. That is, they wouldn’t set up in the auditorium unless they were profoundly stupid. Bolan had no reason to think they would be.

He was left, then, with the classrooms on the middle two floors, and that would make things more difficult. He would have to search room by room, eliminating resistance as we he went, doing it as quietly as he could to avoid alerting the others. The closer he got to the BR troops and their hostages, the more danger there was that he could tip off all of them to his presence. To succeed, he had to retain the element of surprise, but each guard, each terrorist he eliminated along the way, increased the odds of his detection.

Attaching the sound-suppressor to the Beretta 93-R, he made a cursory, hurried sweep of the ground floor, moving quietly heel-and-toe with the weapon held in both hands before him.

There was, according to the plans, another ground-floor entrance ahead and to the right, at the side of the building. Bolan made his way to the middle of the hallway, his civilian hiking boots quiet enough on the polished marble floor. Some part of his brain took note of the extensively carved moldings and ceiling art that decorated the interior of the school. No expense had been spared. The elaborately worked and padded benches that occasionally dotted the walls, outside of the administration offices, appeared to be very expensive, too, though Bolan was no expert on furniture.

He found the access hallway to the side entrance, opposite the metal doors of an elevator that he ignored. Approaching the access hallway, he risked a glance around the corner. There was a fatigue-clad man standing there with his back to Bolan. The Executioner thought it odd that the noise of his conversation with the guards at the front entrance had not brought this one to investigate. Then he heard the tinny sound of music, coming faintly from the guard’s head.

The man was wearing a portable music player. An AK-47 was slung over his shoulder. While he did seem intent on the view through the windows set on either side of the doorway, as if expecting a police raid at any moment, he certainly wasn’t listening for trouble.

Wondering if this really was amateur night after all, Bolan raised his Beretta and pointed the sound-suppressor at the back of the sentry’s head.

“Hey,” he said softly, as he nudged the man with the barrel.

The sentry’s head whipped around. He gasped, sucked in a breath to scream and grabbed for his rifle.

Bolan put a single round quietly through the man’s face. The terrorist folded in on himself and was still.

That was another hole in the perimeter security. Bolan could hear the ticking of the clock deep in his mind, constantly aware of the mission’s time constraints.

He kept going, finishing his sweep, quickly checking for stragglers or hidden shooters among the offices. As he neared the door at the far end of the corridor, which led to the stairwell, he caught a glimpse of movement through the small reinforced glass window set within the fire door.

He crouched low and pressed himself against the wall next to the door. The heavy door prevented him from hearing whomever was on the other side, but it could only be a sentry. Transferring the machine pistol to his left hand, he used the knuckles of his right to rap on the metal door. He knocked quietly but insistently.

The dark-skinned man who pushed the door open was wearing camouflage fatigues and aiming a Makarov pistol. Bolan fired, putting a single 9-mm round through the man’s head. He dropped like a stone.

The Executioner scooped up the Makarov and tucked it into his belt behind his left hip. He had to move; there was no time to worry about the sentry’s body. He had to keep up his pace in order to take the second, then the third floors.

Things had already gotten bloody. They were, he knew, about to get much, much worse.

4

Bolan crept up to the second floor and cautiously opened the fire door leading to the corridor beyond. There was no one waiting. The hallway was as impressive as the ground floor in its furnishings and decoration, but there were subtle differences. Bulletin boards lined the walls, and artwork obviously made by the students was on display. Brognola’s files had said the school catered to children aged roughly seven to twelve; Fahzal’s boy Jawan was twelve years old. The art on the walls was the usual fare produced by children in that age range the world over. Seeing it there, and knowing that BR was threatening those children with death, brought a hard gleam to the Executioner’s eyes. He’d seen far too many innocents caught in the cross fire of power plays like these.

He began working his way down the hall. The layout was simple: there were half a dozen classrooms on each side, spaced exactly opposite each other, with more of the benches he had seen downstairs to break up the monotony. At the center of the hallway was an elevator on one side and a pair of doors leading to the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms opposite that.

He checked each classroom in turn. Each was empty. Satisfied that the second floor was all but deserted, he went back to the stairwell.

On the third floor, there were two guards waiting in the hallway. They were Indian Malaysians, from the look of them, and they wore the same camouflage uniforms Bolan had seen on the BR terrorists to this point. Both men had assault rifles. They were engaged in a heated conversation that Bolan could just barely hear from his side of the fire door. It sounded like Manglish, the curious version of English that the locals spoke.

One of the men turned and apparently caught a glimpse of Bolan peering out through the small reinforced window of the fire door.

Bolan didn’t hesitate. As their weapons came up, he was already throwing open the door. The two were close enough that the heavy metal door slammed into the first of the pair, knocking him into his partner and sending them both sprawling. Bolan stomped, hard, pinning one of them to the floor with a heel to his groin. The man doubled over, still clutching his rifle.

The other sentry was recovering and the muzzle of his weapon was tracking up to Bolan as if in slow motion.

The Executioner was faster. The sound-suppressed Beretta clapped once, punching a single slug through the center of the man’s forehead. He fell back and was still. Bolan turned his weapon on the other sentry, who was looking up at him in wild-eyed terror mixed with pain.

Bolan put his finger to his lips, gesturing for quiet.

A snarl of defiance was the sentry’s response. He jerked his rifle, ready to fire from his back.

Bolan’s Beretta silenced him forever.

He left the bodies. He repeated the sweep pattern he used on the floor below, checking each room in turn, expecting at any moment to find a huddled group of students surrounded by armed BR thugs.

He found nothing.

Once again he checked each room directly, looking for anyone who might be hidden. There was no one. That meant that, in defiance of any logical, rational tactical analysis, the students would be on the fourth floor, almost certainly in the auditorium that dominated that floor. But why? It made no sense.

Bolan reentered the stairwell, careful to check for trip wires or other booby traps. Something wasn’t right.

He emerged from the stairs to the fourth floor. The corridor there was wide and included an outlet for the elevator. Ahead of him, the doors to the auditorium waited. They were stained wood, very tall, with the most elaborate carvings he’d yet seen in this ornate building.

There were no guards. Bolan moved quietly to the doorway, performing a tactical magazine change in the Beretta, dropping the partial in an outer pocket of his messenger bag and inserting a fresh one. There was a very slight gap between the two doors. Mindful that he would be visible from the other side as a sudden shadow if he were at all back-lit, he peered through the gap with one eye, the Beretta held low against his body.

What he saw explained a great deal, and made the situation that much more complicated.

The BR terrorists were indeed gathered in the auditorium. He couldn’t see the skylights from his vantage point, but he now understood why Fahzal’s men weren’t using snipers to shoot the killers inside.

What looked like a dozen adults—probably the school’s faculty and support staff, anyone who was caught in the building when the BR took control—were grouped in a section of the auditorium seating at the center of the room. On the stage, maybe forty students representing every age range of the school’s student body were seated cross-legged on the polished wooden platform. There were plenty of students and teachers not accounted for, because the BR had—again, according to Brognola’s files—hit the school early in the morning, before everyone was scheduled to arrive. It made good tactical sense; they had plenty of hostages and had nabbed Jawan, their primary target, but didn’t have scores of extraneous students and teachers getting in their way.

The BR terrorists moved up and down the aisles, walking off nervous energy, or they loitered about in what were probably assigned sections of the auditorium. Bolan counted at least ten of them, though he knew there might be more he couldn’t see from where he stood.

Several of the BR terrorists wore devices strapped to their chests.

Too small to be suicide bombs, the packages on each man’s chest were just large enough to be transmitters. Bolan eased his secure satellite phone out of his pocket, positioned the lens of the camera built into the phone and snapped a silent photograph of one of the men. He transmitted the image to Stony Man Farm with a single line of text: Urgent, ID.

What concerned Bolan more than anything, and what made the devices on the terrorists’ chests so important, was that several of the huddled faculty members wore what looked like explosive belts.

He did not have to wait long. His phone began to vibrate quietly and he hit the answer button, placing the phone to his ear.

“Striker, this is Price,” Barbara Price said without waiting for him to speak. Stony Man Farm’s honey-blonde, model-beautiful mission controller would be fully aware of just what Bolan was doing, and she would know he was not necessarily free to speak aloud. “I’m transferring you to Akira now.” The voice of Akira Tokaido, the Farm’s resident electronics and computer genius, came on the line.

“Striker, Akira,” he said. He, too, knew not to waste time, or expect an answer verbally. “I enhanced the image you sent us and I believe I have an identification. Those are Iranian-made dead-man’s switches. They’re designed to monitor heartbeat. It is very likely that if one of those men is killed, his transmitter will activate. Effective range is not far, perhaps fifty yards. Are there explosives nearby? If so, they are very likely to be rigged to those transmitters. One other thing—that particular model is very primitive. It is not fail-safe. It can be jammed easily enough, and if it is damaged, it does not transmit. In its normal state it is off, unlike some suicide switches that transmit until the wearer dies or the mechanism is damaged, with the signal loss being the trigger.”

Price came back on the line. “That’s all there is, Striker. We stand ready to assist you.”

Bolan mashed the keys and sent a quick string of text gibberish by way of acknowledgment; Price and the team at the Farm would know what he meant. He closed the connection and put his phone away.

Well, that was that, then. Obviously the terrorists had informed Fahzal’s government of just what would happen if any of their people in the auditorium died. No doubt the transmitters were connected to the explosive belts on the teachers. It was a particularly cowardly act, using innocent men and women as human shields, threatening to blow them apart if the BR came under attack.

Tokaido had obviously known what Bolan would have in mind, to have mentioned the vulnerability of the transmitters. He was hindered only by logistics. He was one man, facing many, and he would have to be very, very precise. Fortunately for those trapped within, there were very few men more skilled with a firearm than Mack Bolan.

This would not be the first time he had done something of this type, testing his marksmanship against multiple targets that required exact placement of his shots. There were far more targets this time, though. Those targets might be in motion and shooting back at him the entire time, and some might be hidden. He would need to identify the transmitter-wearing terrorists while in the heat of battle, and he would have to be very careful to miss none of them.

What he was about to do would require all of his skill and all of his concentration. He would have to rely on years of experience assessing threats, identifying and differentiating targets. He would need every ounce of ability he possessed in terms of his reflexes, his speed, his resolve.

He was ready.

Bolan removed the suppressor from the 93-R. He did not need the added factor of firing through the device, which could cause shots to angle in unpredictable ways. As it was, he knew this particular Beretta fired high low and left; he could compensate for that. Flicking the weapon’s selector to single shot, he drew the Desert Eagle and made sure it was cocked, safety off.

He placed his fingers against the door and tested it. It gave slightly; it wasn’t locked. He backed up, braced himself and drew a deep breath.

His foot pistoned forward and he smashed the door inward with a powerful front kick.

The Executioner threw himself into the auditorium, already picking his targets. He fired the Beretta in his right hand. The slug punched through the transmitter of the nearest terrorist, boring through the device and the heart of the man who wore it.

With his left hand he pressed the trigger of the Desert Eagle, tracking a different terrorist. He fired the big hand-cannon, and the .44 Magnum slug blew the transmitter apart as it punched a massive exit would out the man’s back.

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