“Can you drive on that?” Bolan asked.
“The Audi’s got four-wheel drive,” Grimaldi replied. “It’s worth a try.”
If they got stuck somehow, it could be fatal, but Grimaldi had his full, implicit trust. He’d plucked Bolan from more hot LZs than the Executioner could count, never complaining, never flinching under fire. On wings or wheels, he got it done.
But if that waste ground turned out to be shifting sand...
The Mercedes Vaneo spit another burst of AK fire. Bolan cut loose with his own assault rifle and saw the chase car’s left headlight explode. It was too low and too far to his right, as Grimaldi dodged to avoid incoming bullets, spoiling Bolan’s aim.
“Sorry!” he offered from the driver’s seat.
“No sweat,” Bolan replied, and fired another short burst at the van, strafing its narrow grille this time, maybe the radiator. The volley wouldn’t stop the Mercedes immediately, but an overheated engine could slow them in the short run, before it locked up tight.
A good plan, if they had been running down an open desert highway. As it was, though, they had reached the last paved road before the riverbank, crossing from east to west, while north-south drivers blared their horns, shook fists and shouted curses in the Audi’s wake.
Road rage. Damn right.
The van was crossing now, pursuing them, and Bolan saw the biker trailing it, decelerating as he saw where the fight was headed. Bolan hoped he would be smart, turn back and live to see another day, but that wasn’t his call.
He had four men to kill, at least, before they finished him.
A bloody beach party.
* * *
“WE HAVE HIM NOW!” Zeinab crowed, slamming one fist on the steering wheel in triumph.
Not so fast, Asker thought, but he kept it to himself. His men needed encouragement right now, not warnings that would put them off and slow their reactions in the crunch.
A truck nearly clipped them as they crossed the final stretch of blacktop separating traffic from the riverbank. Its horn blasted a futile warning as its brakes locked, and the trailer jackknifed, spilling several hundred green-and-yellow melons on the pavement, where they shattered to reveal their pink insides.
Zeinab gave another hoot, blaring the van’s horn as a riposte to the truck’s, then they jumped the curb and came down on to desert hardpan, following the Audi’s plume of dust toward the river’s edge. Asker squeezed off another short burst, wasted, but it made him feel a little better to make noise and keep his quarry running, even when the hot brass blew back in his face.
As Asker drew his rifle back, he caught a glimpse of movement in his wing mirror. The crazy kid was still behind them on his motorcycle, hunched over the handlebars and grimacing as cars swerved to avoid him on the road. He nearly lost it when he left the pavement, airborne for an instant, then lost traction on the loose dirt as he landed, but he kept the bike upright, himself on board, and powered after the Mercedes.
Asker wished God’s Hammer had five, ten thousand warriors with that spirit. They could topple governments, make history and wipe the stain of Israel from the map for all time.
But before he let his mind traipse into fantasy, he had to overtake the two men in the Audi. Capture them alive if possible, and take them back to Nour Sarhan for questioning. Failing in that, they had to be eliminated as a message to whoever sent them, teaching infidels again that they had no right meddling in affairs beyond their understanding.
Asker’s war was not a matter of convenience, or politics or greed. It was a holy conflict—a jihad. He had no fear of losing, since no earthly army could defeat the one and only God, but he, a lowly individual, might fail and die before the final victory was won.
If so, he was determined that his sacrifice had to count for something.
If today was Kinan Asker’s day to die, then he would face it like a man.
The Audi was outrunning them, it seemed, veering away to Asker’s right, northward, running along the open riverbank. Fuming, he slapped Zeinab’s left arm and shouted, “After them! You’re letting them escape!”
“Hang on!” the driver snarled in answer, cranking hard right on the steering wheel to follow the sedan.
Asker felt the Vaneo’s tires slipping, saw loose dirt flying up on his side as Zeinab negotiated the sharp turn. An image flashed in Asker’s mind: the warning label pasted inside each sun visor set above the windshield, cautioning against abrupt turns in top-heavy vehicles. Too late, he tried to warn Zeinab, and then their vehicle was tipping over on to his side, crashing onto the hardpan with a thorny bush thrusting through Asker’s open window, stabbing at his face.
* * *
BOLAN SAW THE van roll over in his wing mirror, obscured by the Audi’s drifting cloud of dust. Grimaldi had to have seen it at the same time, as he hit the brakes, but cautiously, avoiding a nasty skid or spill. Behind the van, the trailing teenager had also stopped, sitting aside his bike in profile, well back from the action, watching it unfold.
“Be careful of the kid,” Grimaldi cautioned, before going EVA, taking his AKMS with him.
Bolan didn’t need that warning. He had been in combat zones where children were combatants, raised on revolution or resistance from the time their brains could hold a thought, ready to kill or die for causes that their parents and their older siblings had espoused. The biker didn’t have a weapon showing, but that didn’t mean he was unarmed—or that he wouldn’t phone for reinforcements to assist the shooters in the capsized van.
And they were on the move now, all of them apparently recovering in something close to record time. It hadn’t been a bad crash, as rollovers went, more dust than anything, though it would take a crane or several dozen helping hands to right the van again.
The Mercedes Vaneo was a five-door model. Two front doors opened traditionally, for the driver and the front-seat passenger. Behind those doors, on either side, two rolling doors granted access to the van’s backseat. The fifth “door,” as designers chose to call it, was a hatch that rose vertically to expose the cargo deck in back. Five exits, but the Merc was lying on its left-hand side, precluding use of two.
The shooters kept their wits and did the smart thing, bailing through the hatchback, so the van’s bulk screened them from their adversaries in the Audi. Bolan couldn’t see them bailing out from where he stood, in settling dust by the sedan, but guessed they wouldn’t waste much time before they rallied to defend themselves.
“You make it four?” he called to Grimaldi, across the car that separated them.
“That’s all I saw, except the kid,” Grimaldi answered.
“So circle them?”
“Suits me. And watch—”
“The kid. I know.”
Bolan would watch the kid, all right. So far, he was a spectator, standing apart, outside decent pistol range but well within the reach of AKMS rounds at something like two hundred yards. He’d have a clear view of the action that was coming, down the open riverbank, but couldn’t make out faces from that distance, unless he was carrying binoculars somewhere beneath the baggy shirt he wore.
Not that it mattered, since he might have been up close to Bolan and Grimaldi, at the auto body shop. If so, he hadn’t made a move against them then. Only a spotter, Bolan guessed, but he’d stuck with the chase from there, and now had stopped to watch its end, however that went down.
Bolan circled to his right, toward the roof of the Vaneo as it lay on its left side, covered with settling dust. He heard its engine running, even now, and guessed the shooters huddled by its tailgate would be sucking down exhaust fumes with the dust that swirled around them.
Good.
Whatever clouded their perception, slowed them in any way, helped Bolan. Closing in with cautious strides, not rushing it to make himself a hasty target, he ignored a line of cars
stopped on the frontage road, drivers and passengers engrossed by the enfolding drama on the riverbank. Even in wild Sudan, it wasn’t every day they saw a firefight in the flesh.
Someone would be phoning the police, he knew, whether the biker called for help or not.
No time to waste.
* * *
THE TIPPING VAN had shaken Kinan Asker. When the spiny bush had come through his window, pushing at his face, it shoved his sunglasses aside and gouged a bloody track along the left side of his nose. A second later, Zeinab had tumbled from the driver’s seat—to Asker’s right, originally, now above him—landing heavily on top of him, grinding Asker’s AKS carbine into his ribs.
When Asker had caught his breath, he’d snarled at Zeinab, “Move! Get off of me!”
“I’m trying,” Zeinab had replied, and managed finally to scramble clear, into the backseat, after further bruising Asker with his elbows, knees and feet. Asker crawled after him, aware of passing time and his helplessness as long as he was trapped inside the van. Their enemies could riddle it with bullets, set the vehicle on fire, and those within when it exploded would die screaming.
It wasn’t a death that Asker craved.
From the backseat, he saw that someone had already opened the Vaneo’s hatchback, exiting that way instead of through the right side’s rolling door, now pointed toward the sky. Taking the high route would have made them sitting targets as they poised to drop and run around behind the van—a gift to men who might be moving in to kill them, even now.
Asker had lost sight of the Audi when his van rolled, shaken as he was, nothing but dust immediately visible beyond the van’s windshield. Emerging from the rear hatch with his team intact—one bloody nose, some minor scrapes and cuts—he seized the opportunity to look around the van and found the car they had been chasing fifty yards in front of them, immobile, both doors standing open like an elephant’s ears where its two occupants had stepped out.
They were advancing now, on foot, both armed with variations of Kalashnikov rifles. He registered grim faces that he recognized from the airport, thinking how odd and wrong it seemed that they had turned into the hunters, while Asker became the prey.
He was not helpless, though. His side had four guns, to the white men’s two, and they had cover, while his enemies were out on open ground. Killing them should be easy.
His eyes strayed to the spotter on his dusty motorcycle, then moved on, back toward the road where Asker’s van had nearly been broadsided by the melon truck. Up there, he saw cars stopped, some people gawking, others stooped over the pavement, grabbing melons for themselves.
Bastards, he thought. If they had stopped to watch him die and make a picnic of it, Asker planned to disappoint them.
“You and you,” he told the backseat gunners, unfamiliar names deserting him in his excitement, “watch around the right here. Take the Westerners when you have a clear shot. Try to wound one of them if you can.”
“Wound?” one of them asked, incredulous.
“To hold for questioning.”
“Hold where?” the other asked. “We have no car to carry away a prisoner.”
“Do as you’re told!” Asker gritted back at them. “Kill only as a last resort.” Then, to Zeinab, he said, “You come with me, around the left, to meet the other one.”
It was a poor plan, Asker realized, but it was all he had.
One final chance to carry out his orders before he lost everything.
* * *
BOLAN HAD COVERED nearly half the distance from the Audi to the Mercedes van when the shooting started. The incoming rounds were low at first, and not well aimed. He dropped and rolled across the hardpan, wound up prone and facing the van, peering along the barrel of his AKMS carbine.
Was it an illusion, or had they been firing low deliberately, trying to disable him and Grimaldi without inflicting fatal wounds? There might have been some logic to it, if they’d had a vehicle to carry off a wounded prisoner, but as it was, he wrote it off to shaken gunners wasting rounds before they aimed.
Bolan saw a head poke out around the van. Squeezing off a 3-round burst, he watched the head explode and pitch back out of sight, one adversary down and out for starters. Whether that would slow the others was anybody’s guess, but Bolan hoped so, rising suddenly and sprinting forward, as he heard staccato gunfire from the far side of the van. Grimaldi had engaged the enemy, as well, and they were going at it, his friend’s 7.62 mm rounds distinct and separate from lighter-caliber answering fire, some 5.45 mm and what sounded like a Parabellum submachine gun.
Bolan wished his partner luck and focused on his own objective, closing on the capsized van. He saw the nearly headless body of his first mark being hauled back out of sight, before another rifleman popped out, firing before he got a fix on anyone or anything. Bolan dropped flat again, firing before he hit the ground this time, catching his would-be killer with a rising burst that gutted him and dropped him on his backside.
In a heartbeat Bolan was up and running toward the sounds of gunfire, recognizing his second kill as Kinan Asker, one more of the God’s Hammer crew. The faceless body dragged aside short moments earlier could have been anyone.
And that left two.
Bolan had nearly reached the corner where he’d have to turn and face his enemies, when more firing erupted just beyond his line of sight. That had to be Grimaldi closing in, dueling with the survivors, drawing automatic fire in answer to his own.
The Executioner took full advantage of the moment, scuttling forward in a half crouch, ready with his AKMS carbine. Both of the remaining shooters had their backs to him, firing around what used to be the gray van’s right-rear bumper, when a slug caught one of them and spun him on his heels, blood spraying from a wound high in his chest. The falling gunman just had time to notice Bolan, before the Executioner’s carbine stuttered, chopping ragged vents across his chest, then tracking on to ventilate his comrade from behind.
The last man standing never knew what hit him, as the bullets punctured vital organs, slamming him face-first against the van’s body. He slumped, legs folding, sagging toward the open hatchback, but a dead man couldn’t resist the pull of gravity. He slithered down to earth, muscles relaxing for the last time as he left a trail of blood behind.
Another second, and Grimaldi peeked around the van’s undercarriage, counting bodies. “I don’t know these two,” he observed.
“We’ve got one from the hot sheet over here,” Bolan advised.
“Okay. We’d better split,” Grimaldi said, his gaze drifting to his left. “Unless you want the kid.”
Bolan glanced back in time to see the biker peeling out, hunched low over his handlebars and revving hell-for-leather out of there, away from all that death. It would have been a long shot for the carbine at a moving target, but still feasible.
He let it go.
“They know we’re here now,” he stated. “We’d better get a move on.”
“Right,” Grimaldi said, and joined him on the run back to their vehicle.
* * *
MANDOUR MAYARDIT WAS running for his life. Not literally, since it seemed no one was chasing him, but he had panicked in the final moments of the firefight by the riverside and totally disgraced himself, abandoning the others as they died.
He would not get his full pay for the mission now, and that was fine.
At least he was escaping with his skin intact.
He had pursued the Audi and the van in search of some excitement, thinking in some abstract way that he might join the fight if necessary, and impress his sponsors with some act of heroism done on their behalf. Nothing in his imagination had prepared him for the absolute reversal of what seemed to be a sure thing, with the marks killed or captured by a hunting party twice their strength.
The motorcycle was rattling, and he
slowed a little for the straining engine’s sake, when he had put the best part of a mile between himself and the massacre sight. It was important to seem normal now, and not attract attention, since a hundred witnesses or more had seen him fleeing from the riverbank in broad daylight.
Mayardit pulled into an alley, parked beside an industrial garbage bin older than he was and sat astride his motorcycle, trembling. Life was cheap in Sudan, where beggars died on the streets every day and were picked up like trash. Most of the noteworthy mayhem occurred in South Sudan, but Kassala had its share of muggings, robberies and such, sometimes ending in murder.
Still, this was the first time Mayardit had witnessed bloody death himself, and it had chilled him.
He heard sirens rising from the west, no doubt responding to a rash of calls about the shooting. Thankfully, most law enforcement officers were lazy and incompetent, unlikely to pursue vague eyewitness descriptions of a boy riding a motorcycle in a city jammed with two-wheel transport of all kinds. The odds were good that he would never be identified—but that did not mean Mayardit was safe.
He still had one more duty to perform. It wasn’t something he’d been paid for, strictly speaking, but a debt of honor that was weighing on his shoulders. Or, if you preferred, call it a way to free himself from future contact with the man who had employed him for a simple job of watching that had turned into a nightmare.
Just forget it, said a small voice in his head. They’ll never find you.
But they might, and Mayardit did not want that threat hanging over him. He had to be rid of them, once and for all.
He pulled the cell phone he’d been given from a pocket of his khaki trousers, opened it and pressed a button to contact the only number programmed in its memory. The man who’d hired him had furnished the phone, with orders to call him if Mayardit saw any foreigners shopping at Alek Nimeiry’s supposedly secret gun shop. Mayardit had done that job, and now he wished fervently that he’d let it go at that.
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