Bolan simply waited. The man on the grate writhed in pain, his face purpling, his eyes clenched shut. The scarf was pulled tighter. They might strangle him to death, and when they did, Bolan would pull the corpse free and remove the grate so he could rescue the women below. But first he was going to let them finish what they were doing.
Sooner or later, one of them would find the fallen bayonet…
The loyalist’s eyes bulged and he tried to scream through the scarf cinching his neck. He turned deathly pale.
There it was. No doubt the knife was sticking in him from below. The man thrashed and struggled, growing weaker by the second.
Bolan heard footsteps. He turned to check, but it was only Yenni, her FN braced on one shoulder, its box empty, the chamber trailing a few belted rounds. She nodded.
“The camp is clear,” she told him. “I found two men in one of the tents, tied up. They are elders from a nearby village who were taken with the women. They wait with the other prisoners you freed. The elders suggest we give them one of the trucks to carry them, their women and whatever supplies they can scrounge. They will flee for the hills.”
“They don’t want to go back to their homes?” Bolan asked.
“No. They would not speak more of it.” She nodded to the dying man on the grate. “There are prisoners below him?”
“Yes,” Bolan said. “We’ll free them and send them with the others. Your elders can take them along, keep them safe.”
“So they should.” Yenni’s eyes narrowed as she regarded the helpless loyalist. “What is happening to that man?”
“Justice,” Bolan said.
8
It was a doll.
The hand-sewn toy had been stitched together by some adult, or perhaps even a child, for the sole purpose of making another child happy. Bolan knelt, picked up the doll and held it in his hand. Once more he felt cold anger.
After wiping out the loyalist encampment, he and Yenni had followed the path on along the shore. This was not part of their mandate, although they were moving in the general direction of the next target site, according to his tablet’s mission data. No, this time they were following a hunch of Bolan’s.
He hadn’t seen any community close to the loyalist camp on their way there. That meant there was a good chance the village raided for sex slaves was farther along the road, so he and Yenni had traveled until they reached this place.
There was no doubt in Bolan’s mind that this was the village.
But it was a village no more. If it ever had a name, that name would be lost to time, swept from the map like the homes here had been.
“Always,” Yenni said. She had left the truck to come stand with him and now stared down at the doll he held.
“Always?” he asked her.
“The children. The children and the women.”
Every structure had been leveled. They saw the smoking remnants of what had been homes. The stone huts and concrete-block buildings had been blasted apart with grenades. Nothing moved. There were plenty of corpses, left in the open for the sand and the arid wind to pick at and wear down. There were animals, too. The brutes had killed even the dogs.
That this was the work of loyalists was not in doubt. Several slogans had been spray-painted on the rubble. These, Yenni translated for him, were all hymns to the previous regime or threats against Hahmir and the Wolf. There were even, she explained, a few taunts that warned residents of the village not to attempt to return or rebuild it.
“Censeo Carthaginem esse delendam,” Bolan said.
Yenni stared at him. “What are these words?”
“Cato the Elder,” he replied. “He was declaring that the city of Carthage must be destroyed. Supposedly that was the beginning of the Third Punic War. Rome destroyed Carthage and, according to the legend, plowed the earth with salt to prevent anything from growing there ever again.”
“I have studied history,” Yenni said. “I attended university in London. Before I became a fighter. Before my parents died and lost everything.”
Bolan turned to her, the doll still clenched in his hand. “All around the world,” he said, “people like the loyalists destroy whatever they touch. And the innocent suffer.” He looked around the village. “Plowed under with salt. Bullets were as effective as if they had actually done it.”
“Innocents,” Yenni said. “Women and children. Shall I tell you?”
“Tell me.”
“I was born in this country. It has always been hard here, but my parents had wealth and certain connections. I have traveled. But none of it mattered. None of it cured the ache in my heart for the women and children of my nation. I have fought here. I have fought on soil not of my birth. And always I come back to this place. Always I think of the innocents, as you say. I want to help them. I want to stop the fighting. I want to bring peace. And if I die, I die.”
“How long do you think you can do it?” Bolan asked.
“As long as I have to. Is it different for you?”
“No,” he said. “No, it is not.” He handed her the doll. She looked down at it and tears welled up in her eyes.
“I have never had a child,” she said. “I cannot. In one of my earliest battles, I was injured. Shrapnel from a grenade. The wounds were repaired, but I required surgeries that took my ability to have children of my own. And so I fight for the children of others. And for the children who will never be born. And for their parents, who suffer, as well.”
Bolan went back to the Mahindra and leaned against it. “That’s why you were willing to be ‘turned.’ Because you saw a way to help more people.”
“Yes,” Yenni said. “It is my only desire. I will die alone. I will never leave children to carry on behind me. I will never have more than I have now. And so I fight, so this will not be the fate of other women, of other young girls.”
“I’m sorry. I know what that’s like.”
“You know death, Cooper? You know loss?”
“I do.”
“You will tell me your story, yes?”
“No,” Bolan said. “Not…not here. Suffice it to say that once, long ago, people I cared about were hurt. I looked at that and I couldn’t stand the thought of nobody paying for it. So I found justice for myself. And when I was done, I couldn’t stop. So I kept fighting.”
“How long?”
“Forever. So long that it’s my only life.” He rubbed his forehead. The dull ache in his skull had become a constant throb. “I’ve lost people I cared about. Good people who deserved better than what they got. But they died for the best cause there is. They died for freedom. It’s an ideal I still believe in. It’s the same one you fight for.”
Yenni looked at him. She unwrapped the scarf she wore, revealing her face. She was achingly beautiful. She stepped to him and put one hand on his chest, leaning up to meet his gaze.
“We fight the same fight, yes,” she said. Her lips parted.
Bolan leaned down…
A bullet punched a hole in the driver’s window of the Mahindra. Bolan shoved Yenni down and away, out of the line of fire, and threw himself to the ground. He drew the Desert Eagle and sent a trio of .44 Magnum rounds in the direction from which the random shot had come.
He could see two jeeps, each painted in mottled camouflage with red stripes. It was definitely a loyalist patrol. They were either pursuing Bolan along the shore of the lake, after his assault on the camp, or they’d simply been in the area, perhaps making sure none of the residents of this village actually came back.
The Executioner was not going to let these bastards get away.
He stood and walked away from the truck, deliberately making himself a target, drawing the attention of the patrol. The two trucks were still quite distant, men leaning out the windows firing Kalashnikovs in his direction. The bullets were striking nowhere near him. These men, these loyalists, were not good shots. They were not particularly well trained.
They were not warriors like the Executioner.
/> Bolan planted his feet. He raised the triangular snout of the Desert Eagle. The hammer was back, the safety off. The weapon was action-tuned to be deadly accurate and reliable with the loads provided. Those Magnum rounds were hollow points, expanding into ashtrays when they struck flesh, ripping massive holes in whatever pliable targets they found.
They were also great at punching holes through windshields and the faces behind them.
Bolan took careful aim. He no longer heard the enemy gunfire. He didn’t hear the rounds tearing up the ground around him, didn’t hear the roaring of the enemy jeeps, didn’t see anything except the nearest vehicle and the man behind the wheel.
The soldier’s finger squeezed. The Desert Eagle fired, rocketing its payload downrange, smashing effortlessly through the lead truck’s windshield and through the open mouth of the driver. His brains painted the backseat. With a dead man behind the wheel, the truck, still accelerating under the weight of the man’s boot, surged forward and hard left. It smashed into the rubble of a wrecked structure and flipped on its side. Glass shattered. The jeep’s engine roared and then subsided to a sickly idling.
The second truck was coming. Bolan shot it, shot it again and shot it a third time, walking rounds across the windshield and causing the driver to swerve as he ducked behind the dash. The jeep turned, under control of its operator, and slipped between two more ruined structures, one of them still sending a plume of black smoke into the air. They would be back in the time it took to circle around and find a vector they thought would be hidden from his view. He looked over his shoulder.
Yenni was gone. He wasn’t worried about that. She and her Krinkov would be stalking through the wreckage of the dead village, looking for any enemies still mobile, backing up Bolan with uncanny accuracy. In the short time they’d fought together, he knew he could expect that from her. It felt good to have a partner he could count on.
Bolan walked to the overturned jeep.
Loyalists were crawling from the vehicle. They were bloody and dazed. Bolan reached the first of them and kicked him in the ribs. The man rolled onto his back and went for a pistol in a holster under his left arm.
Bolan stepped on his neck. The man’s reflexes prompted him to stop going for the pistol and claw at the ankle of Bolan’s combat boot.
“You came to this place and did whatever you wanted,” Bolan said. He looked up. Two other loyalists had survived the wreckage of the jeep. They were trying to pull themselves to their feet and bring their weapons up. He paused long enough to shoot one through the neck and the other through the face. Then, with the barrel of the Desert Eagle smoking slightly, he trained the weapon back on the man underfoot.
“Please,” the man said. “Please, American. Do not kill me. I was not involved. I did not do this. It was not me. It was others.”
Bolan’s grip on the Desert Eagle did not waver. “You talk like someone with a guilty conscience. You and your friends razed this town for no reason. You butchered women and children. You raped the innocent. And you told them they couldn’t have their town back. You wanted your humiliation, your subjugation, to be total.”
“It is war!” the man said suddenly. “It is war!”
“This isn’t war,” Bolan said. “What you did to this village? It was slaughter. And what I’m about to do to you? That’s war. But it’s also justice.”
The loyalist narrowed his eyes and grabbed for his pistol again. Bolan shot him in the head.
One more predator for the fires the Executioner would leave behind him.
The other jeep was coming back now. He heard it. Surveying the piles of rubble that had once been the houses of this village, he tracked the vehicle as it blew past one after another, through clouds of black smoke from the wooden beams that still burned. The driver was overthinking it. You didn’t have to put that kind of planning into gunning down a single man. Bolan was not superhuman. His flesh would be torn apart by bullets as easily as that of any other man.
But so far no one had been able to do it.
And as far as Mack Bolan was concerned, as long as his cause remained righteous, no foe would do so until it was finally time for him to stop fighting.
“Come on,” he said to the distant jeep. “Come get me. Come face me.”
The throbbing in his head was growing worse. He felt as if his brain was trying to escape.
He moved farther out into what had been the main street. Calmly, he dropped the magazine from his Desert Eagle, took a fresh one from his war bag and slammed the rounds into the butt of the pistol. There was still a round chambered. All he had to do was send the weapon’s high-caliber inventory toward the enemy.
He raised the gun.
“I’m right here,” he told the oncoming jeep. “Come get me. Face someone who can actually fight back, you spineless cowards.”
The jeep started picking up speed. But a speeding car was something you couldn’t turn easily. Spin the wheel too hard and fast and you would lose control of the vehicle. He could move out of its path faster than the driver could correct to tag him. He bent his knees, coiling his body for action.
Not yet. Not just yet… Wait until they’re as close as possible. Wait until you can see the fear on the driver’s face. The man behind the wheel would be expecting that bullet, would be expecting to eat lead as he neared his bipedal target.
Bolan was not going to disappoint him. He was just going to make him wait for it.
The jeep was very close now. Bolan felt his finger clench on the trigger, felt the finely tuned action of the Desert Eagle start to give. He knew every millimeter of this machine, knew its capabilities, knew its tolerances, knew its limits. It was part of him. It was a chrome extension of his hand, an avenging sword whose blade could reach for hundreds of yards to cleave the skulls of the wicked.
The windows of the Jeep exploded inward. Suddenly Yenni was there at his right flank, pouring fire from her Krinkov into the jeep from the side, spraying the men within all over each other. Bolan ducked aside just as the jeep flashed past him. He felt the mirror on the passenger side ruffle the fabric of his sleeve. Then the jeep was crashing into the remains of a concrete block building, its only passengers the corpses Yenni had made with her rifle.
She walked over to him. “You,” she said. “You I do not understand. You are here in the middle of the street begging to be run over. How does this help us?”
“I have my own way of doing things.”
“I think you were lucky,” she said.
“Lucky?”
“One time,” she answered. “One time I have liked your plans. The rest of the time they are bad.”
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” Bolan said.
“This is you. You are a broken clock.”
The sound of boots on the gravel caused them both to turn and point their guns.
A bearded man dressed like a private military contractor stood there holding an M4 carbine. He had what appeared to be a tomahawk on his belt. He wore a pair of black-on-black sunglasses, of a type popular in the 1980s.
“We better get the hell outta here,” he said. “There’s more loyalist patrols coming up the road. I saw the dust cloud through my binocs.”
Bolan and Yenni looked at each other, then back at the armed man.
“Do you know this man?” Yenni asked.
“No.”
“Seriously,” the bearded guy said. “Let’s beat feet, or we’re all gonna get dead.”
9
The Mahindra’s cab was crowded as Bolan drove the truck from the doomed village as fast as it would carry them. Yenni sat between the men, her eyes annoyed behind her head scarf, which she’d wrapped tightly around herself when this newcomer appeared.
It hadn’t taken long for the patrols to acquire them. Now they were trying to stay ahead of the enemy vehicles. It was hard to get an accurate count in the rearview mirror, because of the plume of dust the trucks were all raising.
“You’d be Striker, right?” t
he bearded man asked.
Bolan raised an eyebrow. “Who are you, exactly?”
“A friend of a friend sent me.”
“Keep talking,” Bolan said.
“J. P. Wolski,” the man continued. “Folks call me Ski. Military contractor out of Iraq. It’s been pretty nuts in the region for a while now. Plenty of work for folks like me. You know the Middle East. The gift that keeps on giving, if you like war.”
“So our mutual friend…”
“How do you think I got your code name?” Ski chuckled. “‘Striker.’ Cheese, man, pure cheese. Although with a name like Ski I guess I can’t complain.”
“And how do you know our mutual friend?” Bolan asked.
“I’ve done contract work for a lot of people in the past, through CIA and No Such Agency,” Ski said. “I’m a specialist. Don’t work and play well with others, no, not me. I’m only happy when people are shooting at me. So as you can imagine, when I got the call to come find you here in Syria, I was freaking ecstatic.”
“How did you find us?”
“Well, that’s a funny story,” Ski said. He propped his M4 between his legs and made sure a round was chambered. “They gave me a list of places they thought you might go. Didn’t say why. I didn’t ask. I’ve been hot on your trail for a little while now. Saw the work you folks did on that missile truck, or whatever it was. Now, that was interesting. Hard to say from all that wreckage, but Mama Ski didn’t raise no dummy. Tell me that wasn’t an American launcher. Probably had American rockets on it before it blew to sky highness.”
“Do tell,” Bolan said.
“And then there was what used to be a camp,” Ski said. “Lotta bodies there. Those particularly nasty loyalist types. Although there’s plenty of nasty to go around in these parts. Was that you two? You have an army with you I don’t know about? Pretty impressive work. Oh, but I’m forgetting how somebody punched a hole in the middle of a town called Al Tabkah. You’d think a tiny tactical nuke went off. Whatever Special Forces team did that deserves a medal.”
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