Night's Reckoning

by Don Pendleton

  * * *

  THE RAIDING PARTY reached the front of the building, the exit in sight. Through the partially opened doors they could hear the distant sounds of sirens, and of choppers converging overhead. Time was of the essence. The last thing they wanted was any kind of distraction or obstruction: which was exactly what the uniformed guard presented as he stepped out in front of them, about fifty yards ahead.

  “Hey, I’m your man, don’t shoot,” he yelled, his gun in a nonthreatening position. “I just need—”

  “Out of the fucking way,” the American yelled.

  “You don’t understand—it will look suspicious if I’m not—”

  A short-tap burst of SMG fire cut him off. Milo let his hand drop as he saw the guard stumble back, stitched from throat to crotch.

  “Good work,” the American snapped as they passed the corpse.

  Asshole, Milo thought. Both of them—it was stupid to make yourself known and stupid to call another death good work when the man was no threat.

  That, he was sure, lay outside....

  * * *

  HE COULD FEEL the sweat dripping down his back and into his eyes. Fear prickled at him. There had been the sounds of combat from inside the PIH, but presently there was only a silence from within. With the coming of this it was easier to hear the approaching sirens and choppers of the Koninklijke Marechausee. It was coming from the east mainly, but he was damn sure that they would circle to cover all the avenues of approach.

  In his mind he ran over the street map he had memorized. This was not a densely populated area, which was both blessing and curse. They wouldn’t be snarled up by people and traffic at this point, but at the same time it would enable their enemies to gain quickly on them.

  “Come on, for fuck’s sake,” he murmured as he leveled his SMG and kept an increasingly nervous eye on the streets surrounding him.

  He was so tense that he still jumped when he heard them break out of the PIH and head for the vehicles. He turned and opened the rear doors of the van. Two men bundled Grozny into the back, one of them getting in with him while the other slammed the doors shut before jumping into the cab.

  “Go, go, go,” he yelled breathlessly as the driver joined him.

  Hitting the ignition and grinding into gear, the driver said into his headset mic, “Plan Xero.” Even as the words fell from his lips the Saab and the Volvo had squealed into turns that took them in directions a hundred and eighty degrees apart. His path was a ninety-degree split, down a narrow street that seemed to take them back toward the onrushing Koninklijke vehicles.

  * * *

  “FUCK, THAT’S DUMB,” Milo breathed as he looked back over the seat of the Saab and saw the van turn and take its route.

  “Never mind them. Keep your bastard mind on what you’re doing—we’re not out of here yet,” the American snapped.

  Milo turned back, biting hard on the retort that rose to his lips. The American was right. They had to get out of here in one piece, too.

  But why send Grozny back, seemingly into the arms of his captors?

  * * *

  “WHAT THE FUCK are you doing?” yelled the man in the passenger seat as the van driver took a corner and seemed to head straight toward the oncoming sound of sirens.

  “Trust me. We worked this out.”

  “We?”

  “Me and the American. These bastards will be expecting us to head away from them, just like the cars and just like our aircraft. Fine. Let them think that. This way they won’t be able to catch up with us so easily.”

  Although not a densely populated area, some of the streets in this district were old and narrow. It took some skill to guide the van down them and take the tight corners without crashing and either causing collateral damage or drawing attention to themselves. All the time the sirens grew louder.

  “You’re fucking crazy. Turn this around now,” the passenger yelled, leveling his BXP-10.

  “You’re panicking,” the driver said, keeping his voice level and never taking his eyes off the road ahead, although the sweat dripping off him spoke of the tension within. “Put that down, don’t be an asshole, and just trust in me...now!”

  With the tires burning on the road, he took another tight turn, bringing the van into a skid before reversing it up a side street. They were on the edge of the main road into the center of Den Haag.

  “Keep low,” the driver said, sinking into his seat. With some trepidation, his passenger joined him.

  At the end of the road, a posse of police and military vehicles roared off the main highway and bore down toward the PIH. They passed the junction of the side street without pause.

  As they retreated into the distance, the driver pulled himself upright, chuckling as much with nervous relief as with amusement.

  “Shit... I didn’t think that would actually work.”

  Chapter 2

  He was waiting for them. How had he known where they were headed? Even as the blacksuit-clad figure stepped out of the shadows of a side street and into the roadway before them, Milo couldn’t figure it out. Crazy bastard was committing suicide, he thought. Must be...

  The Saab had parted company with the Volvo five minutes back. Over the roar of their engine and the vehicles that were in close pursuit, it was impossible to make out any other noises. Anything in Milo’s earpiece was a garbled wash of white noise. There had been some indistinct shouting, and that was it. Radio silence was a good thing, but as they were closing in on the man who stood in front of them, Milo had the nastiest suspicion that the noises had been far from good.

  The choppers overhead, that must be it—that could be the only way they had got in front of them. But even if that were so, how had this madman known where they were headed?

  Even as this went through his head, he heard the American next to him curse loudly and try to throw the car into a skid and spin. But there was too little distance, and the street was just too narrow. Their route, in taking smaller back streets than the usually wide avenues of the city, had backfired at a crucial moment. The car bumped the sidewalk and jolted, its perfect spin interrupted.

  From the edge of his vision Milo could see the guy in the blacksuit standing—just standing. And then he raised a firearm. Milo didn’t know what it was, but the American mercenary beside him, yelling as the car coughed and refused to yield, knew exactly what it was. An RPG7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The man in the blacksuit, as calmly as though he was on a range, took aim and squeezed the trigger.

  The front of the car was filled with smoke, fire and heat. Milo felt his bones crumple as he was thrust through a door that was mercifully already coming off its hinges. Mercifully because this made it just that bit less painful to be blown through the gap: a pain that returned briefly as he jarred heavily against the cobbles of the street. He tried to scream with the pain—at least gasp—but even that was denied him as the air was driven out of his body as his ribs creaked and cracked in protest.

  The very air in front of him was stained red. This was partly the concussion and the blood that streamed from the wounds on his scalp. But it was also because of the fire that came from the front of the car, turning the air around it red in the glow.

  It seemed to him as though the man walked down the street toward the car in slow motion, slinging the RPG over his shoulder with a Desert Eagle .357 Magnum suddenly appearing in his grasp. Seeming to ignore the flames that licked around the Saab, the man in the blacksuit looked in the back of the car, and then in the front seat. He prodded the American mercenary with the muzzle of the Desert Eagle and grimaced in disgust.

  He left the vehicle and walked toward Milo. Desperate, determined to go down fighting, Milo tried to grasp around him for any weapon that may have fallen nearby. It was a futile gesture, as he had no idea whether or not his gun had been separat
ed from him in the impact. He also discovered that the impact had paralyzed him, at least temporarily, as his arms refused to move no matter how hard he tried.

  The big man wearing the blacksuit stopped, standing almost directly over him, humiliating him in the fact of his proximity and Milo’s inability to do anything about it. Milo could hear that the pursuit cars had stopped behind him, though he could not twist his head to see. He could hear footsteps on the cobbles behind him—three or four men. Despite the damage wreaked by this stranger, who was no way one of them, the Koninklijke men seemed unfazed by his presence.

  “Grozny?” one of them asked. He then swore. The man in the blacksuit must have shaken his head.

  “He wasn’t in the other car,” a heavily accented Dutch voice said. It was an accent Milo knew he could place, and this was confirmed when the voice continued. “They’ve been taken care of, no worries. And your intel was right. I recognize the driver. Been after him for some time, now—nothing worse than one of your own going rogue.”

  Milo felt like laughing, but all that emerged was an almost soundless gurgle of blood and bile in his throat. He felt like shouting that they had been triumphant. Grozny was still free, and the decoy had worked. He would remain that way. By this time the virals and the press material would be out there. People would know why.

  It was a comforting thought. He would die very soon, he knew that—the red air was narrowing into a tunnel edged by black that closed in on him, and the voices became more and more distant, more and more indistinct. He would die, but the cause would live on, and would be triumphant.

  As Milo left this world, a sense of satisfaction swelled to fill out what little life was left in him.

  It was just a shame that he did not hear the rest of the conversation that was going on above him.

  * * *

  “MY PILOT TOOK out the other car from the air. I don’t like showboating, but you left me with little choice.”

  “We couldn’t move before we knew for certain. There were too many variables,” the Koninklijke operations commander blustered.

  “And there are too many men—your men, and good ones—dead because of that. I had to show our hand to stop further stupidity. But now I think I know what they’ve done—Kowalski was always kind of predictable like that. Everyone has an Achilles, and that was his. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get this cleaned up before it gets further out of hand.”

  “You can’t just leave with...this,” the Koninklijke commander said, gesturing helplessly around him.

  “Don’t try and stop me,” the man in the blacksuit replied with a hard edge to his voice. “This was supposed to be routine. It should have been,” he added pointedly. Then, into his headset: “You get that, Jack?”

  “Loud and clear, Sarge,” he heard in his ear.

  “Then what the hell are you doing still up there. Pick me up, on the double,” he snapped.

  “Sure thing. Just grab the dangly thing when it comes near...like now...” The pilot’s voice was lost in the rhythmic thump of rotor blades as they settled overhead.

  Despite the fact that his mood was dark, the soldier couldn’t help but smile as Jack Grimaldi dropped the rope ladder right in front of his face with a nonchalant and almost impertinent ease. He grabbed it and started to climb.

  “Get me out of here, Jack.”

  * * *

  THE FORD VAN trundled into the flow of traffic headed toward Den Haag. In the cab, the driver and passenger had secreted all firearms out of sight. The passenger was still eyeing the traffic passing them on either side of the road with suspicion, though the driver could see from his posture that he had relaxed a little.

  “There’s nothing to worry about now, man. We are home free. All we’ve got to do is get that asshole in the back to the safe house, and we’re sorted. You should have trust in the plan.”

  “It would have helped if I’d known the plan, asshole. If any of us had known the plan, come to that.”

  The driver shrugged. “I kind of figured that you did. I thought he would have told more than just me. But then again, I guess it’s a need-to-know thing, really.”

  “Yeah, sure,” the passenger said sourly. “It’s just that you would have thought those of us in the vehicle would have known where it was going.”

  “Man, Milo was supposed to be with us. The Yank only switched at the last minute. I don’t think he figured Milo was up to it.”

  “Right, so that’s supposed to make me feel better, yeah?” He snorted. “We haven’t even switched plates, for fuck’s sake.”

  “No need. Wastes precious time. You see those cameras?” the driver queried, indicating the CCTV ahead of them and above the road. “Can’t pick up plates, no matter what they say. Glare, shit and dirt on the metal. Better we get to the safe house. Turn the radio on.”

  The passenger frowned. “You want music? Now, that is just a little too laid-back.”

  The driver laughed. “Look at the time. The statements were released. I want to see if they’re broadcasting them yet.”

  They sat in silence, moving lazily through the traffic, listening to the hourly news bulletin. The driver was careful not to break the speed limit or do anything else to draw attention to his vehicle. But as the news bulletin progressed, his knuckles became whiter on the wheel, and his jaw set heavy. When the bulletin drew to a close, the passenger leaned over and turned off the radio.

  “Nothing,” the driver said heavily.

  “Perhaps it is too soon.”

  “How can it be too soon? We have Grozny, that is enough, surely? They do not have him. They do not have him. They must therefore know we are serious, and can back up our claims.”

  The passenger smiled wryly. “Maybe. But maybe it just means they’ve got a news blackout on because they think they can still catch up with us.”

  “Then we should make sure they can’t,” the driver intoned grimly.

  * * *

  “USING A .30 MM SMG TO take out a saloon car is a bit close to showboating, Jack,” Bolan said with a ghost of a grin as he took the seat next to Grimaldi.

  “Ah, c’mon, Sarge.” Jack shrugged. “What else could I do? It’s not like this baby is designed to do little jobs. The way they were crammed in there, our boy couldn’t have fitted in. And if they’d carried on driving like that, Lord alone knows who else would have got hurt. Anyway, we shouldn’t have had to deal with it at all. That’s what those Koninklijke guys get paid for. You ask me, the guy in charge of the operation was a jerk who was out of his depth.”

  “Maybe,” Bolan mused. “I get the feeling that he had pressure on him. Maybe someone wanted us to fail. Wanted Grozny to get out. Maybe even to get killed in the breakout.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘ifs,’ Sarge. You really think it’s that convoluted?”

  Bolan snorted back a laugh and raised an eyebrow mockingly. “Hell, Jack, what do you think? Hal gets me in here and it ruffles a lot of feathers. Why do I need to get in here? What has this got to do with the homeland? There was a lot of crap that went down in the Balkans, but I’m not aware of anything that was either too much of an embarrassment or could be a threat now.”

  Grimaldi sniffed. “Kowalski didn’t get involved for nothing. The only thing that made him ever tick was the cash, and a lot of it.”

  “Yeah, but who’s throwing it around? I’m just here for some guy from two decades back who was in what was really just a local skirmish, looked at from our perspective. Why does he need to stand trial so bad? Why the hell does anyone want to go to this trouble to get hold of him? What makes him so important?”

  “Jesus, Sarge, that is one hell of a lot of questions.”

  “I’d rather have answers, Jack.”

  He fell silent as the chopper cut through the skies. The police and military choppers that had taken fl
ight after those that had carried the raiding party to the PIH were presently down, having failed to run those craft to ground. Dragonslayer was the only craft in the skies, and both men knew this would make them conspicuous to their prey.

  “So where do you reckon they’re headed, Sarge?” Grimaldi asked eventually.

  “Back into the Hague,” Bolan said softly. “I know what Kowalski was like. Bear sent me enough files so that I feel like I know the man. He was good. Greedy, but good—except that he had these little patterns of behavior, these little tricks that he liked to use again and again. You can get away with that if no one knows who you are or that you’re on the case. But once they do, then you give yourself away. So he sends the decoy cars off in one direction, and ships the merchandise off in the opposite. Simple, works every time if no one knows you’re the man behind it. But once they do...”

  “Which is why we’re going back this way,” Grimaldi muttered with a tight grin.

  “Exactly,” Bolan answered. “Where better to hide a van and a man than in an area where such things wouldn’t even be noticed? A blue-collar area where there are a lot of vans, and a lot of middle-aged guys who look like our friend Grozny.”

  “Which is why we’re heading for the southeast of the city,” Grimaldi affirmed. “Why this district?”

  “Duindorp? It’s on the coast. If they want to arrange a quick movement then they can use the port and not get caught up in roadblocks. It’s run-down and there’s a lot of empty property to hide in. And there’s that local dialect. Hard to get the hang of, and my Dutch isn’t too bad. Grozny could pass for a transient local at a push.”

  “The Haganezen and their plat Haags...” Grimaldi shook his head. “Had an interesting time in a bar round the dock a couple of nights back—”

  “Interests of research, naturally,” Bolan murmured.

  Grimaldi shrugged. “Gotta know your territory, Sarge. Tight people, though. Stick together. Getting anything out of them will be hard.”

  “Well, that’s not necessarily such a bad thing, Jack. You’ve got to love a sense of community, even though it might be a little misguided.”