A voice cut through his thoughts. “Rafic, can you make out what they are saying?”
Rafic Al Din frowned, shook his head. “No, sir. I might try to get closer.”
“What?” Qabbani blinked at him. “No, don’t do anything to place yourself at risk!”
“We’re all at risk,” the traitor told him, “every day. Besides, it’s time.”
Another blink. “I don’t know what… Are you all right, Rafic?”
“I’ve never felt better,” Al Din said. And it was true. He felt as if a massive weight had lifted from his shoulders.
“You are not making sense,” Qabbani said. “If you feel ill—”
Al Din laughed at him, the sharp sound of it startling in the desert darkness. The nearby guards were turning toward him now, the traitor knew, but he was no longer concerned with them.
“I’m making perfect sense,” he told Qabbani. “Listen, I believe you are an honest man, a patriot, a good man. But your path to victory is hopeless. Surely you must see that now.”
“We’ve had a setback, but—”
“A setback! You’re still blind, in spite of everything. Your mission, this weak effort to negotiate, was never going to succeed. Allah does not permit concessions to his enemies. You must be sacrificed and serve our people as a martyr, rather than a weakling in the flesh.”
“Rafic—”
“Enough,” Al Din said, drawing his 3D-printed pistol. He cocked the clunky-looking gun and shot Qabbani in the face.
* * *
THE FIRST SHOT rang out as Bolan stood beside the Niva, suiting up. It was a crisp, sharp sound—a pistol, smaller than 9 mm, though he couldn’t peg it any more precisely from a distance. Perhaps two seconds passed, and then more weapons started firing, the distinctive stutter of AKs punctuated by the deeper thuds of several heavy machine guns.
“Sounds like they started the festivities without us,” he told Azmeh. “We’d better go and see. You ready?”
“Yes.”
They set off from the vehicle, jogging as fast as they could, given the rocky terrain. Speed was important, but not as important as reaching the camp alive and fit for battle.
Bolan saw the muzzle-flashes now, what seemed to be a serious engagement at the site where he had hoped to find the homing beacon and the wayward diplomats. The good news: if two sides were locked in battle, he could try taking advantage of the chaos to retrieve his quarry.
Bad news: by the time he reached the desert camp, the men he’d come to find and rescue could be dead.
Bolan picked up his pace, eyes shifting constantly from the dark ground before him to the battlefield ahead, now less than half a mile away. Once they arrived, they’d stay in cover long enough to gauge the situation, try to find out who was fighting whom, and then they would be in the thick of it—unless he saw immediately that the diplomats were dead.
That seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t rule it out. If he did confirm the party had been taken out for good, Bolan would have to choose between punishing those responsible himself, or leaving them to the tender mercies of the enemies they’d already engaged.
But if the team or any members of it still survived, he had no choice.
The mission was to get them out at any cost.
That was a situation he had faced before, too many times. He knew the ropes and what it took to face an overwhelming force, outnumbered and outgunned, in the defense of innocents.
Same old, same old in Bolan’s world.
Another day, another chance to die.
* * *
NASSER AL-KASSAR HAD been surprised to see how many soldiers he faced at the desert camp. He hesitated as the officers came forward, sitting in his stolen staff car, walkie-talkie raised to give the order for his men to open fire and wondering if he should try to bluff it out instead.
Then, suddenly, a shot was fired somewhere inside the camp.
Al-Kassar flinched, thinking it might be aimed at him, perhaps at his men, then he saw the officers who’d come out to confront him ducking, turning, looking for the shooter. Off to al-Kassar’s right, near one of the trucks, he saw some kind of scuffle, and then another muzzle-flash—a pistol, he guessed by its sound.
Al-Kassar seized the opportunity. “Go! Go!” he shouted into his radio, then rolled out of the vehicle, clutching his AKS carbine. Behind and above him, his APC turret gunner was already following orders, raking the camp with fire. He saw one of the regular officers fall, his legs cut from under him, blood everywhere.
His other men were leaping from their vehicles now, finding what cover was available, firing into the camp. The regulars, outnumbering al-Kassar’s fighters roughly two to one, were shooting back, but some of them appeared to be distracted by another skirmish inside the camp, where the first shot had gone off.
In a sudden flash of clarity, he yelled to his men, “The prisoners! Don’t shoot the prisoners!” If anyone heard him, it was not apparent from their actions. The machine gun on his APC kept sweeping death across the army’s ranks. His riflemen continued firing at their enemies.
Under the circumstances, what else could they do?
Al-Kassar himself had wriggled underneath his staff car, cringing as successive bursts of rifle fire kicked sand into his face. The NSV machine guns on the army’s two APCs were scoring hits on al-Kassar’s vehicles. One slug tore through the radiator of al-Kassar’s staff car, releasing a cascade of heated water before shattering the engine block and spilling a mix of oil and gasoline.
There went al-Kassar’s ride back to headquarters, if he was still alive to make that journey when the smoke cleared.
And his mission? It was literally being shot to hell.
He had one hope left: to get inside the camp, evading troops who wished to kill him, and find the UN prisoners. He’d still have to extricate them somehow to use them for his own ends, as originally planned.
Or might there be another way?
His plan to stage and carry out an execution to dupe the global media was obviously trashed beyond repair. He could revise that plan, however, by filming the aftermath of a supposed execution with a narration claiming that he had come upon government troops too late to save the diplomats and punished those responsible accordingly. He’d have to arrange the bodies properly, strip unit patches from the camouflage fatigues that his men wore, and guard against an errant camera angle.
But it could work.
Feeling a sudden rush of optimism, al-Kassar grinned fiercely, squeezing off a burst of fire into the camp.
* * *
IT TOOK A MOMENT for Firas Mourad to realize that he was still alive. The blood soaking into his uniform belonged to poor Raed Farzat, his aide, who lay beside him, gasping out his final breaths. Farzat’s legs had been shattered—nearly severed outright—by the initial burst of machine gun fire from the incoming vehicles.
But who had fired that first, single shot?
Mourad wasn’t particularly interested in the answer at that moment, with bullets from both sides heating the air overhead. Major Farzat’s wailing grated on the general’s ears like nails on a chalkboard. Mourad considered reaching out to strangle him, but feared that someone might observe him and remember, even in the camp’s chaotic state.
His next best option—and by far the safest choice, all things considered—was to crawl away. But where? Dumb luck had placed him on the firing line between two hostile forces. Both sides were dressed in army uniforms, fighting from army vehicles, and Mourad could be mistaken for an infiltrator. If he were killed, who could determine where the shot had come from? Was anyone likely to care?
He started crawling, slowly, trying not to draw attention, careful not to raise his head or buttocks as he wormed across the killing field, clawing with fingers that had lost their manicure, pushing with boots now scuffed and scarred. If he could reach one of the APCs and hide beneath it, he should be secure.
Unless the raiders came equipped with rocket launchers or grenades.
&nb
sp; Mourad decided he would worry over that once he found cover and felt reasonably safe. If necessary, should it seem his men were losing to the rebels, he could set off into the desert and dig a hole to hide in while they finished mopping up. It might look bad—Mourad, the sole survivor of a massacre—but he could always slant the story in his favor, maybe claim that he’d been knocked unconscious, overlooked by the rampaging enemy.
The key point was surviving. If he managed that, there would be ample time to craft a story while he waited for his rescue party to arrive. Mourad might even find a way to seem heroic when he told the final tale.
He reached the closest APC, its machine gun hammering above him, raining hot brass on to Mourad’s scalp and back. He grimaced, dragged himself under the vehicle, then cried out as a sudden, greater pain ripped through the heel of his left foot. A bullet had drilled through his boot, tearing flesh and splintering bone.
Mourad could still hear Major Farzat screaming—or were those his own cries echoing beneath the APC? He bit his tongue, still heard the screams, and started fumbling for the pistol on his Sam Browne belt. If killers came for him, at least he could defend himself.
The Makarov felt reassuring in his hand.
* * *
BOLAN AND AZMEH skirted the small convoy, giving it a wide berth. They wouldn’t stand a chance charging the skirmish line directly, but with an oblique approach they might manage to penetrate the camp and find the men they had come looking for.
Or find their corpses, anyway.
Each moment that the fight went on decreased the odds of all six diplomats emerging safe and sound. If those who held the prisoners viewed the attack as an attempt to free—or steal—them, they might well be executed on the spot. The flip side of that brutal coin was accidental death, considering all the bullets flying through the camp.
Bolan had no idea which side the two groups of combatants represented, and he didn’t care. They were all dressed alike, with standard-issue arms and vehicles. All of them would, presumably, be glad to kill two interlopers from the darkness. Bolan’s aim was to slip past them with as little fuss as possible and extract his targets from the melee. Failing that, he’d have to fight his way out, using any means at his disposal.
Like an APC, for instance, if it came to that.
Azmeh was keeping up so far, not hampered by his wound. Bolan admired his spirit, hoped it didn’t get the warrior killed, but had no time to focus on him now. A hundred yards and closing on the camp, he saw what seemed to be the weak spot he was looking for and angled toward four trucks sitting in a tidy row.
When no one spotted them at fifty yards, he was encouraged.
By the time they’d closed to twenty yards, he figured they were in. Not home and dry by any means, but that much closer to a resolution of their quest. The fight still raged to their left, but he also heard gunfire within the camp itself, almost an echo of the main event.
And what did that mean?
Internal fighting might work out to his advantage—anything that thinned the hostile ranks was good—but it might also keep him from reaching the diplomats.
He reached the tailgate of a hulking army truck and paused there for a moment, crouching while the battle sputtered on, some thirty yards away. Azmeh was close enough that Bolan felt him at his back. Bolan led them to the narrow gap between this truck and the one parallel to it.
“Ready?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Ready,” Azmeh whispered back.
12
In spite of everything, Rafic Al Din had been surprised by the effect of his first gunshot. It had been quite effective on Muhammad Qabbani, drilling his left cheek just below the startled eye and snuffing out his life as if someone had flipped a light switch. That, Al Din had expected. But the rest…
Before the echo of his shot had reached the camp’s outskirts, Al Din rounded on the nearest guard assigned to watch his party, caught the young and slack-jawed soldier turning toward him, and immediately fired the second barrel of his Liberator pepperbox into the guard’s forehead. His target crumpled, and Al Din was quick enough to snatch the dying man’s Kalashnikov before it hit the ground—and that was when his plan imploded.
All along the camp’s southern edge, automatic weapons blazed to life, their thunder shattering the desert night. Al Din saw men falling, had no time to mourn the ones who might be rebels like himself. He dropped his clunky 3D-printed pistol, made sure the Kalashnikov was cocked, and bolted for the nearest BTR-152.
The turret gunner seemed to think the first shots had been fired by someone in the late-arriving party, an assumption shared by nearly all the man’s comrades on the skirmish line. His NSV machine gun was the loudest weapon in the grim cacophony, its muzzle-flashes blazing out three feet from the barrel like lightning strikes.
Before Al Din could reach the vehicle, a guard who had seen the traitor kill his colleague raised his AKM to fire from fifteen feet, but Al Din had spent the whole night rehearsing his attack and did not hesitate. He stitched the soldier with a short burst, bullets ripping through the young man’s heart and lungs, and turned away without watching him fall.
He stole a quick glance toward the nearby battle zone and picked out the target that preoccupied him now. General Firas Mourad was in the midst of it, not yet fighting himself, but caught up in the middle of the storm. Al Din hoped nobody else would finish the general before he had a chance to do it, and the thought helped speed him toward the nearby army APC.
Two men were crouched behind it, popping up to fire short bursts, then ducking back again to safety. Neither of them saw Al Din coming up behind them, focused as they were on keeping out invaders. When he shot each of them in the back, the best and cleanest way to put them down, they both dropped into bloody heaps with no idea of who had finished them.
Al Din seized the moment, scrambling up the APC’s tailgate and over its fat spare tire, one top hatch closed, the other open to accommodate the turret gunner. The traitor leaned across the armored roof and fired into the shooter’s back and neck.
The dead machine-gunner slid down inside the APC and Al Din followed him, stepping on one of his twitching legs. He grabbed the NSV’s grips, still sweaty from the palms of the man he’d killed a heartbeat earlier.
Al Din rose through the hatch and swung the captured weapon to his left, seeking Firas Mourad—and could not find him.
Where had the sick bastard gone?
* * *
MACK BOLAN PAUSED between the front ends of the two trucks and scanned the camp for any sign of those he’d come to rescue. What he saw first was a soldier sprawled on the ground about ten feet in front of him, his face blown off, and then another a few feet beyond that who’d taken several bullets to the chest. Neither had died within direct view of the main battle, and even in the semidarkness, Bolan could tell the face shot had been fired at extremely close range.
The pistol he’d heard before the other shooting started?
Fired by whom, and why?
He crept into the open, Azmeh close behind him. Bolan turned to his right and came upon four members of the UN party huddling nearly within arm’s reach. The line of trucks had blocked them from view when he’d done his recon of the camp.
Four out of six accounted for…then he saw that it was five. Muhammad Qabbani was down and out, another close-range shot to the face, likely dead before he hit the hardpan. That left one still missing from the mix.
Before approaching them, Bolan ticked off the names and faces of the team. Segrest and Walton, check. Sani Bakole and Tareq Eleyan, check. That meant Rafic Al Din was missing, and an ugly image of betrayal formed in Bolan’s mind. He didn’t know the details, but they hardly mattered.
All that counted now was getting out alive.
The prisoners cringed at first sight of Bolan and Azmeh through the drift of battle smoke. He headed off their questions. “We’ve come to get you out of here. There’s no time for discussion. You’ve already lost two men, and if you wan
t to live, we have to move right now. Agreed?”
Segrest and the Nigerian UN official shared a glance, both frowning, then nodded in unison. Their aides joined in a second later, making it unanimous.
“Okay,” Bolan pressed on. “We’ll have to leave Mr. Qabbani and—”
Two soldiers captured his attention, jogging toward them with rifles held across their chests. Bolan raised his AKMS and triggered two short bursts that knocked them into the sand, then turned back to the gaping diplomats.
“As I was saying—time to go.”
The how of it was something else. He and Azmeh had hiked in unobserved, but six men exiting the camp on foot were bound to draw attention, even in the middle of a firefight. They were likely to be shot or overtaken long before they reached the Niva SUV, or the vehicle itself would be riddled with bullets if someone managed to get airborne in the gunship parked at the north edge of the camp.
Which gave Bolan a new idea.
“One small diversion coming up,” he told Azmeh and the diplomats as he slipped the RPG off of its shoulder sling. “As soon as this pops, we’ll be heading for the nearest APC to hitch a ride.”
* * *
FIRAS MOURAD THOUGHT he must be hallucinating when he heard a loud voice cursing him by name, somewhere atop the BTR-152 that sheltered him. Was he delirious from pain caused by his bullet wound? Was it the voice of Allah, scolding him for his sins now that his death seemed imminent?
No to the latter, anyway. Mourad did not think Allah would employ such language, even while condemning damned souls to the fires of hell.
“Come out, Mourad, you filthy bastard,” the voice called. “You pathetic coward! You butcher! Face me like a man.”
Mourad had no intention of emerging from his dusty lair. Whoever was raving overhead, his insults punctuated with machine-gun bursts, the very last thing Mourad would do was show himself, inviting lethal fire.
“I knew you were a fucking coward!” the shouter continued. “Scum!”
Mourad’s cheeks flamed at the abuse, but he was not an idiot. He would remain in hiding, safe from the machine gun blasting overhead, and force the screaming maniac to climb down from his high perch if he planned to kill him.
Syrian Rescue Page 11