Assassin's Tripwire

by Don Pendleton

  Bodies fell all around them. The loyalists did not seem to care who was killed as long as Bolan and Yenni were among the victims. It was time for some drastic action.

  “I think we should do something,” Yenni said, crouched by his side. Both of them were on one knee, trying to stay below the hail of bullets.

  “I was just thinking that,” Bolan replied. “Any ideas?”

  Yenni pulled the RPG launcher from her back. Bolan’s eyes widened. In these close quarters, the weapon would be very dangerous to everyone, themselves included.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Yenni snapped the launcher to her shoulder, took aim and pulled the trigger. She was up and running almost while the grenade was still in the air. When it struck, it scattered loyalist fighters in bloody hunks of meat. She was so fast she very nearly ran through the bloody mist that lingered in the scorched bazaar.

  Bolan followed. Together the two of them ran for the truck.

  “Faster, Cooper!”

  “You drive,” he told her.

  She pushed the vehicle so hard from a standstill that they were very nearly on two wheels when she turned at the first intersection. Bolan shifted in his seat so he was facing backward, the Skorpion in his hand and hanging out the window.

  “What do I do?” Yenni demanded.

  Bolan turned to look. She was pointing forward, where a pair of sedans that Bolan swore were Soviet-era ZILs were getting into position to block the narrow alleyway. The vehicles were still moving, but the gap between them was narrowing.

  “Run it!” Bolan commanded. “Pedal to the floor!”

  Yenni, who seemed to already have a lead foot, needed no further encouragement. She slammed the accelerator to the firewall. The old truck’s engine screamed, rocketing them both back in their seats as they jounced and banged over potholes in the alley.

  “This is a very bad plan,” Yenni had time to say.

  The truck smashed through the shrinking gap between the enemy vehicles. Armed men wearing paramilitary outfits were behind the wheels of both sedans. Bolan assumed they, too, were loyalist operatives.

  Metal shrieked. The front fenders were ripped from Yenni’s truck, one completely, the other hanging by the most tenuous of tortured POP rivets. But they made it. Their truck burst through on the other side and careened around a corner, once again flirting with the idea of getting two wheels off the ground. Bolan grunted as they hit hard, coming out of the turn, bottoming out the suspension with a terrible scrape of frame on gravel.

  “Here they come,” Bolan said.

  Enemy vehicles were now pursuing. He counted three Hummer-like four-wheel drives, which he recognized as Chinese copies of the American military vehicle.

  Bolan had a few grenades left in his war bag. He hated to use them up before they’d secured more of the munitions he required for this mission, but if he didn’t, he might not live long enough for supply-chain issues to vex him later. He took out one of the baseball-size bombs and, juggling the Skorpion, pulled the pin.

  “Worse plan! Worse plan!” Yenni shouted.

  “Relax,” Bolan said. “I’m not keeping it.” He dropped the grenade out the open window.

  “What have you done?”

  “Three,” Bolan said. “Wait for it. Two. One.”

  The grenade exploded between the leading Chinese Hummer and the one behind it, ripping open the second vehicle’s engine compartment, splaying its hood across its windshield. Bolan, who’d been scanning the street from side to side to make sure there were no combatants in the cross fire, leveled his borrowed Skorpion and began spraying the magazine into the lead chase vehicle. The Czech weapon’s little bullets wouldn’t be very effective if he dumped them into the pursuing truck’s grille, but that was not his intention. He concentrated instead on the windshield, turning it into a spiderwebbed mess and causing the loyalist driver to duck behind the dash.

  In the narrow streets of Al Tabkah, the maneuver was a fatal one. The moment the enemy driver ducked, he jerked his steering wheel, causing him to nose into the stone building on his left at full speed. The hurtling Chinese truck tore a scar out of the structure three times its own length before stopping in a smoke-spewing, tire-screeching cloud.

  “Two down,” Bolan said. “One to go.”

  “We are clearing the borders of Al Tabkah,” Yenni informed him.

  “Good. Circle around. We need to head back in the way we came.” He reloaded his Skorpion and drew the Beretta 93R. Yenni looked at him as if he was insane.

  “You want to go back?” she asked. “We only just escaped.”

  “I like to think of it as the proverbial tactical withdrawal. The last thing they’ll be expecting is for us to turn around and come back at them.”

  Yenni spun their damaged truck around, causing its tires to squeal, and sent them barreling forward toward Al Tabkah with an enthusiasm that belied her expression.

  Bolan transferred his Beretta to his left hand and held the Skorpion in his right. “I’m going to put my leg over yours,” he said.

  Yenni eyed him, her incredulity written in her eyes. “Is there time for this?”

  “Not that,” Bolan said, shaking his head. He shifted his left leg over hers, careful not to stomp on the accelerator, and planted his right leg on the passenger side. Both windows were open and unobstructed. He pointed the weapons out the windows, side to side. From the shift in Yenni’s position, Bolan could tell she realized then what he was after. That was good, because she had seemed just tense enough to punch him moments earlier. No doubt her initial thought was that her crazy American passenger was trying to take certain liberties with his female liaison.

  It wasn’t that the thought hadn’t occurred to Bolan. Yenni was beautiful and fierce, proud and vital, but the soldier had a job to do. There was a time and a place for such things.

  They crossed back into Al Tabkah. Yenni was taking them at right angles back to the bazaar, tacking her way in like a sailing ship using unfavorable winds. Loyalists wearing red scarves tied around their arms or necks were soon shooting at them from passing vehicles and the windows of buildings. Bolan fired his weapons with deadly precision, one round at a time, picking off enemy gunners with a sniper’s icy accuracy.

  They reached the perimeter of the bazaar, but this time Yenni did not stop. Instead she poured on the speed, ramming through the flimsy stalls, smashing her way through the building that had served as Khasky’s headquarters, driving over the bodies of him and his deceased henchmen. The last wall to fall beneath their steaming, crumpled grille was that of Khasky’s weapons room. The space bore table after table heavily laded with modern weapons and explosives. With Khasky and his people dead, there was no one to guard it.

  They could have saved time by staying here in the first place, Bolan thought, but then, they’d needed the truck to break into this chamber. Yenni had done so with purpose. She had to have known the layout, having dealt with Khasky before. She had simply miscalculated how devoted he was to the ousted Syrian government.

  Mistakes happened.

  They could hear shouts over the truck’s dying engine. Bolan smelled coolant, thick and fishy. The radiator had to be completely smashed.

  It wouldn’t matter. They’d find another vehicle. There would be plenty left without owners or drivers in a few minutes.

  “I think every fighter in town is coming for us here,” Yenni said.

  “I’m counting on it.” From the nearby table Bolan picked up an FN Minimi belt-fed machine gun. Its box of ammunition was already in place and locked into the weapon. He hefted it, brought it close to his body, felt its weight.

  He saw the faces of the dead once again. Those who’d fallen fighting creatures exactly like these loyalists. They were predators who lived by violence and oppression. They were evil men who wanted nothing but to reestablish their totalitarian power.

  Bolan let loose with the machine gun as the first of the loyalists appeared at the perimeter of the shredded bazaar. He
leaned into the mighty weapon, feeling it vibrate in his chest, feeling it kick against his shoulder, feeling the heat from its dragon’s mouth of a muzzle. His rounds burned through the marketplace, shattering bone and shredding flesh. He barely heard the rattle of the FN as he erased loyalist after loyalist.

  Bolan walked his weapon from left to right, from right to left. He held the trigger back and let waves of heat from the FN wash back into him. Still he fired.

  Bodies fell. They fell so fast that they began to pile up, forming a wall around the bazaar. Blood ran so thick that it pooled in a liquid carpet.

  “Cooper!” Yenni was shouting at him. “Cooper!”

  Bolan let go of the trigger. When he realized how hot the FN had become, he eased it to the ground. There was no sound now. There was only the ringing in his ears.

  Al Tabkah, or at least this area within reach of Mack Bolan, had been silenced.

  The soldier blinked. His head felt thick. There was nothing but death all around them now.

  “They are all dead,” Yenni said quietly. “I think you have killed every loyalist here.”

  “I hope so,” Bolan said.

  “We have a problem.”

  He turned away from the carnage in the bazaar to look at her. “What is it?”

  “We have to figure out,” Yenni said, spreading her arms to indicate Khasky’s vast remaining store of arms, “how we are going to fit all of this into one truck.”

  6

  Desolate was a word that didn’t quite describe the northern coast of Al Assad Lake. Bolan, who had traveled the world many times over, was nonetheless awed by the rugged terrain that stretched before him. Yenni was driving the “borrowed” Mahindra pickup down the faintest outline of a dirt road, a road that Yenni insisted was there and which Bolan was fairly convinced was a figment of her imagination. Still, the Mahindra was an able vehicle.

  Their haul of weaponry, stolen from Khasky and the dead loyalists of Al Tabkah, was covered by a tarp strapped over the bed of the truck. They were hauling enough explosives to make even Bolan slightly nervous when they struck the deepest ruts in the “road.” Yenni seemed unperturbed, but only because she was of the opinion that Semtex did not explode unless you wanted it to. Bolan agreed—but he wasn’t so sure about some of the vintage grenades in crates in the back.

  The soldier wore a bandolier of 40-mm grenades for the M16/M203 grenade launcher combination that would be his primary weapon. It was among the best modern assault rifles in Khasky’s inventory and he’d found many loaded 30-round magazines for it. Both Bolan and his war bag, as well as the load-bearing gear he wore, were laded with the spoils of their victory over the arms dealer.

  Yenni had been shooting sidelong glances at him since they’d pulled out of Al Tabkah. He couldn’t decide if she was worrying about him or simply impressed by the number of enemy gunners he had taken out. The FN Minimi was loaded in the back with the other weapons and would be useful for light support, equipped with its bipod. He intended to post Yenni on some spot overlooking whatever battleground they might encounter, as long as they could position her with a commanding field of fire. It would be a good support position for her and would enable Bolan to do what he did best without worrying about catching her in the cross fire.

  If Bolan were to guess, he’d say Yenni was not the worrying type. Already her quirky sense of humor and her casual attitude were having an effect on him; he liked her. And she was certainly bloodthirsty enough. He didn’t doubt that she approved of his work at Al Tabkah.

  He was, however, concerned about the fallout from that incident. Yenni had made it clear that the Wolf’s patrols were not men they could reason with. If Fafniyal’s people decided Bolan and his guide were someplace they shouldn’t be, Yenni’s status as double agent wouldn’t keep her safe. It hadn’t protected her from Khasky, who was supposed to consider her if not an ally, at least a customer with a history of dealings with his organization. It would not protect her from someone like the Wolf, per Yenni’s own descriptions of the man.

  But that wasn’t what worried Bolan. If the loyalists came to understand just who was responsible for the attack on one of their strongholds, they would come after Bolan and Yenni. Sneaking around the Syrian countryside, hitting military sites per the data provided him by the Farm, was hard enough to do without getting caught. The odds, at least, were with them; there was a lot of countryside and not many troops, numerically speaking, to cover every square mile. Drawing attention to themselves was inevitable, but it was going to make everything they did that much harder.

  The territory was growing more hilly. Bolan consulted his ruggedized tablet, checking the topographical map against those features of the terrain he could identify. The unit had a secure GPS built in, a device that was stringently controlled because of its accuracy, and to prevent enemies from using it to trace the bearer. Should Bolan’s body be recovered from Syria with the tablet on his person, tracing the tech inside would lead to some international market in Eastern Europe. That was typically how Kurtzman and his team solved such problems when plausible deniability was required.

  “That ridge up ahead,” Bolan said. “Let’s leave the truck at the base and hike up to the top. If I’m right and the intelligence is accurate, we’ll have a view of the first weapons site below.”

  Yenni nodded. She brought the Mahindra to the bottom of the slope and parked it. They both stepped out. Yenni had a camouflage net in her supplies, but she didn’t bother to deploy it. It wasn’t likely they would be here that long. Bolan slung his M16/M203 over his shoulder and got the FN Minimi with its bipod and box of ammunition out of the back.

  They hiked up the ridge, casting wary glances about them. It was midmorning and the sun was bright, but a cold wind howled across the Syrian landscape. Bolan would have preferred the cover of night for this or any of the operation to come, but there was no time to wait. Every day they delayed attacking and neutralizing the weapons placements was another day for whoever had stolen them to figure out how to deploy them.

  At the top of the outcropping, Bolan and Yenni went prone. He took the compact monocular from his war bag and scoped out the target site below. There were trucks here, some of them local troop vehicles and even commercial passenger ones. There was also a mottled desert-camouflage mobile rocket launcher with a digital pattern Bolan recognized as American military.

  They had found it. This was the first of the missing weapons emplacements.

  “Do you recognize that uniform?” Bolan asked Yenni, who was looking through binoculars of her own. The troops swarming around the launching vehicle wore a tiger-striped camouflage pattern Bolan had never seen before. He assumed it was a local variant. There were no colors or flags evident, nothing to tie the troops to one of the many players in this cluttered field of combatants.

  “No. The Wolf’s men do not use it, nor do Hahmir’s regular military. They would show blue, which is Hahmir’s symbol. Royal blue for the man who would be king.”

  Bolan glanced at her and then back to his monocular. “Whoever’s down there doesn’t want observers to know who’s currently in possession of the weapons, then,” he said.

  “That is very possible.”

  “Set up here with the machine gun,” he told her. “I’m going to need you to provide cover when it starts going to hell down there.”

  “How will I know when this hell happens?”

  “Things will start exploding.”

  “This is not unusual for you,” he heard her say as he made his way from where she was now stationed behind the machine gun. He pulled back the plunger on the M16 and chambered a 5.56-mm round. As he moved, keeping low and to what little cover there was amid the scrub and rough terrain, he tried to keep the distant vehicles between himself and the largest knot of camouflage-uniformed men milling among them.

  The sun had baked the earth for decades in this place, or so it looked to Mack Bolan. Giant crags had formed, creating cracks in the ground that afforded him some
means of concealing himself as he approached. He stayed to the deepest of these, gliding heel to toe in a combat crouch. He stopped when he was within grenade-launcher reach of the enemy encampment.

  One of his goals was to determine who was behind the disappearance of the weapons shipment. Primary among all his objectives, however, was to make sure these unsecured weapons were not used by anyone but Hahmir’s authorized government, in a manner approved of by the Man’s administration. Bolan was not going to learn who was behind all this by engaging the enemy in combat unless he could secure a prisoner, and that seemed unlikely. It also didn’t matter. He was going to smash this emplacement and keep smashing the ones he found. He was going to burn Syria clean of this threat…and then, when the wreckage was smoldering behind him, then he would worry about who was pointing fingers at whom.

  Brognola would have no illusions about that; the big Fed had worked with Bolan long enough to understand this was how the soldier worked. He knew that unleashing the Executioner on any battlefield was like flicking a lighted match into a room soaked in gasoline. The fire would burn and it would destroy whatever was in the way. Only Mack Samuel Bolan would walk away, scorched but alive, ready to fight again.

  He triggered his grenade launcher.

  The thump of the weapon was almost anticlimactic. The grenade soared through the air, struck the nearest of the civilian pickup trucks and blew it apart at the junction of the cabin and the bed. Flaming-hot shrapnel tore through the bodies of the men closest to it.

  The FN opened up above. Its bullets raised lines of dust as Yenni walked them across the field of battle, targeting the soldiers around the launching vehicle. Bolan made everything worse for them, shucking the grenade launcher open and loading up another 40-mm explosive surprise. He fired it, and the moment it left the tube he loaded another and fired that, as well.

  One of the men in Bolan’s sights had managed to make it to a military half ton on the perimeter of the encampment. As that truck started to move, Bolan targeted it, first firing a grenade that blew apart the rear of the vehicle, then triggering the assault rifle. His rounds perforated the cabin, starred its windshield and shredded the man inside. Using the rocky soil beneath him as a partial rest, Bolan spread himself flatter, snugged the stock of the rifle against his shoulder and took careful aim. The iron sights were not as versatile as, say, red-dot optics might have been, but there was no assault rifle made today with which Bolan was not intimately familiar. He knew the sights as well as he knew his own face in the mirror.