All along he had been counting in his head, measuring distance and time as he moved. He knew how long he should wait, and how far he should be able to travel.
He stopped suddenly, holding up his hand behind him to stay his companion.
“Silence,” he whispered as he heard Bhayat draw breath as though to speak. “Seven hundred yards. Our range. Theirs, too.”
Bhayat slithered up alongside the older man, staying silent. He understood. Raising the PSG1 to his shoulder, he settled himself in the sand and sighted. Through the Hensoldt he could see that the two guards were just coming into view at the far edges of his vision.
“Thirty seconds and we can take them both,” he whispered.
“Don’t be overambitious, boy.” As he spoke, Ali drew an RPG-7 that he had been carrying slung across his wiry shoulders. “First, we throw some light.”
Bhayat smiled, saying nothing. He understood.
The older man racked a grenade and counted in his head. He surveyed the horizon, even though it was little more than black. A reflex reaction, and as natural as...
“Now,” he said, as the grenade flew into the night sky.
* * *
SHADEEB WAS A cautious man, but cold and torpor can dull even the keenest of senses—can blunt even the most finely honed instincts. He had completed another circuit of the encampment, and watched as his counterpart trudged wearily toward him, head turning intermittently to the desert expanse.
Did he look like that? In the unreal green-tinged glow of the monocle, the guard looked less a guard than a sleepwalker. It wouldn’t take much to break through a defence that was this close to sleep.
The thought was barely completed before he was aware of the dull thwump that came from several hundred yards away. One suppressed fire.
What—
He screamed as the distant green glow became a white-out that burned into his eyes, searing his retinas and making him claw at the monocle.
His scream was almost—but not quite—loud enough to mask the cough of a suppressed PSG1 on short burst.
* * *
JARED GRINNED. “A myth, Matt. That’s all it’s ever been.”
“Maybe,” Bolan assented. “But even if these jokers are charlatans, they’ve got enough snake oil to fool some smart people. Can’t take risks on that. I—”
He stopped suddenly, instinct more than hearing alerting him to the distant sound of a single shot.
Without a word, he uncoiled himself from where he sat cross-legged on the floor of the tent and was halfway toward to the flap, hand reaching for the HK-G3A4 that Jared had supplied him, when the light exploded above them.
* * *
THE FLASH GRENADE starred the sky above the camp, turning night to day in an instant. It would alert those in the tents that an attack was underway, but the advantages far outweighed this drawback. The eight attackers finally had illumination to enable them to make their assault. More importantly, the two guards were immobilized by the brilliant light that amplified through the night vision monocles to a point where it blinded them.
As Ali rose from the sand in one sinuous movement and began to move forward quickly, he took in the camp in detail. No one had yet stirred from the tents, and the two guards were bent over, instinctively trying to get their eyes away from the light as they clawed at the monocles, attempting to loosen them and bring their burning retinas some relief.
Ali heard the suppressed crackling of the PSG1 from behind him, and was gratified to see one of the guards spin around and crumple to the sand.
Bhayat was learning. Shoulder and head shot. The guard’s kaffiyeh was torn and his head was missing a chunk. Even if the head shot had missed its mark, the shoulder shot would have disabled him until the attack party closed on them. Without knowing if they wore body armor, a body shot was a potentially dangerous waste.
Ali loaded another grenade from the bandolier he wore under his robes. A magazine was not right for his battle plan. And they had only the one launcher, so it would be best to use sparingly and with thought.
This one would cause collateral damage.
* * *
BOLAN EXITED THE tent, the HK ready to fire, muzzle down until an enemy was sighted. His eyes, smarting at the sudden burst of light, squinted to assess the situation. Jared and he were the first out. One guard was on his feet but disabled by his monocle, stumbling blindly and weeping as he tried to adjust his vision.
Dimly, on the periphery of the light horizon, he could see a man standing tall and aiming a grenade launcher.
If they were close enough to open fire, they were within range themselves. As he kept low and sought cover behind one of the jeeps, he raised the HK and judged range and sweep. The G3A4 had a collapsed stock that kept the Uzi copy compact as Bolan swept the horizon with a short burst of fire. As he attained cover he saw the man with the grenade launcher fall back, having taken a hit.
But not before he had managed to loose the grenade toward them. For a moment, Bolan paused with his heart in his throat. The last shot had been a flash to light up the camp—would this be the same? If not, where would it land? In the rapidly dimming light there was no way of telling.
It was with relief that he heard the roar of the exploding grenade about a hundred yards to the right. The impact of the shells that killed his enemy had also deflected his aim. The concussion from the blast was slight, but he still kept his head down and hoped that his comrades did, too—the enemy had chosen a shrapnel grenade, and the metal shards still spattered against the vehicles and tents.
If it had landed on target...
* * *
SHADEEB COULDN’T SEE. His eyes were watering and sore beyond any pain he had felt before. Yet he knew that the burst of distant fire had taken out his fellow guard. The sound of ordnance on flesh was distinctive, even without the cry that had been stifled in the throat of the dead man.
They were under attack and it was imperative that he take cover. Both for his own safety and if he was to be of any use. He tried to orient himself and make for the cover of the vehicles or the tents. He was still stumbling when he felt himself grabbed by the arm and hauled down behind a vehicle, jarring a shoulder painfully against the wing of the vehicle.
He blinked. The light overhead was fading rapidly to dark, and this helped his streaming eyes. A blur in front of him was identified by his voice as Jared.
“We’re one down and they’ve got the drop. How many of them and from what direction?”
“I—”
“Never mind, why should you know? Can you see?”
“Barely.”
“Okay. Muster the rest. We must assume all points. Got that?”
Shadeeb nodded. He moved toward the tents. Even through his blurred vision he could see that the other men in the encampment were already out of their bivouacs and poised for action. If the fog of sleep had not been shaken by the blasts of fire, then the sudden roar and concussion of a grenade exploding nearby fulfilled the task. As Shadeeb barked at them to fan out and keep down, he felt as though his words were unnecessary. He hunkered down as far toward the center of the camp as he could.
He could defend himself at close range, but that was all. Any attempt to take the offensive would be doomed—he could hardly tell his own men from the enemy. He could easily take out one of his own in error.
Jared was wrong. They were two men down.
* * *
BHAYAT WATCHED ALI fall with a mixture of horror and hubris that made for a queasy feeling. He knew the older man thought he was an idiot, but who was still breathing? On the other hand, what the hell should he do next? The soldier who had fired in their direction was in cover. Bhayat sighted through the Hensoldt and got nothing beyond the wing of a jeep. Sweeping the PSG1 around, he got the second guard, presently without his monocle bu
t still stumbling around blindly. He fired a short burst, missing as the man stumbled at a fortuitous moment. The grenade—Ali’s last wasted act—had been counterproductive. Instead of being decimated, the enemy had merely been awakened.
Bhayat cursed and lowered the PSG1. The other three attack duos would be moving, and so must he. If nothing else he had to get his hands on the walkie-talkie that Ali still had in his robes. Without it, he was isolated.
Isolated, and with at least one dead shot waiting for him to raise his head.
* * *
BOLAN WAITED. ALL around him was chaos as the attack continued from each point of the compass. The chatter of SMG and automatic rifle fire ripped the silence of the desert night. He could hear his people—stirred fully at this point by the near-miss grenade blast—take positions and return the fire that came from out of the night. It was hard to separate the overlapping noise of firearms, but it didn’t sound to him as though the attacking force was a large one. At a guess, he’d say four teams of two, one for each compass point, with one of the two due east—and ahead—presently out of the game.
Hassim knew how to pick a team, notwithstanding that his guards had been caught out. Bolan knew that he could trust them to hold down their ends. His primary task was to take out the second man dead ahead, to ensure that he was immobilized, and was indeed the only other target.
A burst of fire that was wide of him, and missed its intended target, told Bhayat that his opponent was rattled.
In contrast to the firing around the rest of the camp, the silence from dead ahead was overwhelming. A few yards away, just out of cover, Bolan could see the monocle discarded by Shadeeb.
Sighting the direction he had located when the second burst had fired wide, he laid a brief covering fire and darted out, recovering the monocle. Back in cover, he slipped on the night vision equipment; the darkness became greenish, the sand and night sky more clearly delineated. As was the corpse of the man he had taken out—the grenade launcher beside him.
Scanning further back, Bolan could see nothing. If he emerged, he would be exposed. If his opponent was on edge, then perhaps he would make the first move, particularly if he felt the need to back up his compatriots, whose skirmishes lay at Bolan’s back. There was urgency there for the soldier—but also for his opponent.
Focusing on the black expanse before him, he used the monocle to scan the horizon. It was no surprise to him when, after a much shorter waiting time than he had feared, a figure rose slowly from out of cover and began to move with stealth toward the prone figure of the soldier Bolan had cut down.
* * *
BHAYAT KNEW HE had to move, but fear gripped his bowels and turned them to water. This was his first real taste of combat—the rest had been training, albeit taken seriously enough to kill some—and it was nothing like he had imagined when he had been back home in the First World. He was scared, but he knew that he could not stay immobile. Ali’s corpse had the walkie-talkie. Bhayat would need this to keep contact and link up with his fellows.
If any of them were left. The sound of a firefight from the camp was confusing, but it sounded to him like a hell of a lot more slugs were coming out than going in. And there were no more grenades. Part of the battle plan had been to pepper the camp with CS and shrapnel. Losing Ali had put them down to one grenade launcher—should he try and recover that, as well as the walkie-talkie, then fire one or two in and create some confusion and cover? Where was the other grenade launcher and why wasn’t it firing?
Hey, if he did that, then maybe, Bhayat figured, he could even come out of this as something of a hero, and not the scared boy he felt at this moment?
A new sense of determination gripped him. He could do this. He considered laying down some covering fire, then realized that this would do little more than reveal his position to the enemy. Feeling as if he had learned something out of all this, he looked to where Ali lay, and taking a deep breath broke his cover, moving across the sand toward the dead man with an awkward slithering shuffle.
He didn’t think of his opponent using a monocle. He did not sight through the Hensoldt to take stock of the situation.
Thoughts of glory and victory filled his head. This was not part of the jihad, but the money it would bring would take them one small step further. He was part of that. That was why he had journeyed so far.
He was still thinking of this when he heard a rapid burst of SMG fire that was louder than the rest, and felt almost simultaneously the stitching of pain and liquid fire that blotted out all else.
* * *
BOLAN WATCHED HIS man emerge from cover and clumsily move over the sand toward the corpse. It was an easy shot. There was no time to wonder who these people were and how they had located the camp. That could come later. The threat had be be neutralized.
Bolan flexed his trigger finger, a short burst issued from the HK G3A4. Through the infrared monocle he could see the figure jolt on the surface of the sand then lay still.
He scanned the horizon. All was silent and still. There were two-man parties at each compass point, then, and this sector was secured.
Bolan turned back to the interior of the camp. The tents and vehicles had been tightly clustered. Hassim had questioned why they had pitched fifteen clicks from the oasis itself. The idea had been that they could reach it easily in daylight, but that they would maintain better security at this distance.
That remained to be seen, after this.
There had been fourteen men in their party. One was dead and Shadeeb could be considered inoperative. Twelve men before any other casualties—outnumbering the opposition, if his belief was correct. But the enemy, the cover.
Bolan moved among the men, making a head count as he went. So one man was dead, a head shot having accounted for him. Two more were injured, one in the left leg below the knee, and the other in the right thigh. But both were still firing intermittently.
Bolan came across Hassim, who was hurriedly yelling commands above the noise, directing one of his men to fire a flare above the area to the north in which he had pinpointed enemy fire.
“A little of their own to light the matter up, eh?” Hassim finished as Bolan clapped him on the shoulder.
“Take it to them,” Bolan affirmed before briefly outlining what he had gleaned and what he could deduce from the action he had taken. Finishing up, he added, “They either have someone in camp or they have better intel tech than any group around here can easily afford.”
Hassim breathed hard. “Never be certain, but I can’t see any of these men stooling,” he said and then grinned, “like we used to say—good intel, then. If there’s as much money and power as you say behind this, then it would be simple to equip more hired hands.”
“Hoping you’d say that. C’mon, what’s the holdup?” he asked the soldier with the flare.
The response was immediate—a flare shot up into the night, a visible trail tracking its path until it exploded over the northern sector of the desert, lighting it up as though it were day.
Bolan spotted a man with a grenade launcher on his knees. To one side of him, another man with an SMG laid down covering fire. A short tap burst took him out of the equation immediately. The man with the grenade launcher knew that he was as good as dead, but this did not stop him from his task. He pulled the trigger as a barrage of fire cut him down. The grenade may not be true, but his aim was steady enough to ensure that it would still fall within range of the camp.
“Not again,” Bolan murmured, unconsciously tensing himself for impact. If it was another shrapnel grenade, or even a Willie Pete, they were in trouble.
But failure was not an option. Not on this night. Not so close to his objective....
Chapter 3
A few days earlier
Washington had never been Bolan’s favorite place. The seat of a government that ser
ved the country he loved, and yet it seemed so often to be going against the best interests of the masses. He had found himself in disagreement and conflict so often with government over the years, that he maintained an uneasy truce, looking only to his work on behalf of the people. Trouble was, the government didn’t always see it that way—and that had been the cause of a lot of friction over time.
So, if the seat of government was not his favorite place, and he also sought to distance himself physically from Stony Man Farm for many reasons, then where was he supposed to meet with Hal Brognola? True, it was not often that the two had to be in the same physical space to meet and discuss assignments and issues, but still, when the call came they had to meet somewhere.
If nothing else, the big Fed’s phone call had been intriguing. First, it had been from an unscrambled and unregistered cell. Second, it had been terse. “We need to meet. Dave Penney’s, ten-thirty tonight.”
That was all. Bolan’s simple query— “Problem?” —had been met with a negative, and then the connection was dead.
It was an interesting call. Rarely would Brognola meet with Bolan outside the Mall when they were both in Washington. And to make it for “Dave Penney’s” suggested that Brognola wanted to keep things low-key—for Dave Penney’s no longer existed. Once, a long time ago, Penney had owned a junk shop on a remote corner that had fronted for stolen goods and firearms. Bolan had used it back in the day, when he had been forced by circumstance to fly under the radar. Back when Brognola had first known him, and the strong bond but sometimes uneasy alliance between the men had first been forged.
Penney, an Englishman from the north who was hearty, bluff and as hard as a masonry nail, had long since been dispatched to the great beyond by a dissatisfied customer. The lot had been vacant for some years, and then when one of the occasional programs of urban regeneration had taken place, it had been bought, stripped down and refashioned as a diner.
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