Why bother to report the killings he had witnessed?
To alert the stranger who’d employed him and to sever their connection for all time, with an assurance that Mayardit could be trusted with a secret. Possibly, he thought, it just might be enough to save his life.
CHAPTER NINE
“How many people do you think were watching us back there?” Grimaldi asked.
Bolan pictured the cars stopped on the river frontage road, bicyclists slowing, pedestrians crouching to see the show. “A hundred, anyway,” he said. “It could be twice that.”
“How many of them do you think had cell phones?”
“Seven out of every ten,” Bolan replied, plucking his answer from an online guidebook he had skimmed in transit. Sudan ranked thirty-eighth in the world for cellular coverage, with some twenty-eight million registered phones.
“Okay,” Grimaldi said, “so seventy, eighty phones on the highway back there, minimum. How many were snapping pictures of our little hoedown?”
That could be a major problem, Bolan realized, not only for completion of their mission in Kassala, but for clearing out of Sudan once they’d finished. Bolan didn’t know where they were going next, as yet, but any flight out of the country meant returning to Khartoum, more wasted time there on the ground while members of the National Police—not brilliant, certainly, but not the dumbest in the world—broadcast a slew of photos snapped by rubberneckers at the crime scene.
“How hard would it be to leave the country from Kassala?” Bolan asked his wingman.
Grimaldi considered it while he proceeded toward their final destination in the city. “There’s no problem with the plane,” he said. “It’s fueled, ready to go. We’re fifteen miles or so from crossing over to Eritrea. Their capital’s Asmara, say a hundred miles due east of here. They have an international airport, two asphalt runways that can take the Hawker.”
“So you’ve thought about it,” Bolan said, smiling.
“That’s why I get the big bucks, Sarge. The down side is, we have to file a flight plan when we leave Kassala, and their airport isn’t international. Officially, leaving the country means we fly out of Khartoum.”
“And unofficially?”
Grimaldi shrugged. “Feed them some bullshit here and make a run for it. Make a one-eighty, heading east instead of west. We’d cross the border in under five minutes from takeoff. Fifteen minutes later, tops, we’re in Asmara.”
“But...”
Another shrug, while Grimaldi swerved to avoid a driver coming head-on in their lane, something that seemed to be a common practice in Sudan. “There’s still the flight plan that I mentioned, but I’m thinking we could get around it.”
“How?”
“Check out a map. Khartoum is due west of Kassala, which is due west of Asmara, give or take a few miles. On Asmara’s radar, eastbound flights could be arriving from Sudan, Nigeria, wherever. They don’t care, as long as you arrive with proper paperwork.”
“We’re back to the flight plan.”
“Correct. But who’s to say some clerk in Khartoum didn’t mess it up somehow? It’s simple, write the wrong name down, whatever. I’ve been brushing up on my geography,” the pilot said. “You know about the tension between Sudan and Eritrea.”
“I do,” Bolan replied.
The two countries had squabbled since the 1980s, with Eritrea complaining that Sudan supported rebels trying to topple Eritrea’s government. Diplomatic contact had been severed for a dozen years, and its tepid resumption in 2005 left many old grudges unsettled.
“So, we blame Khartoum for any mix-up on the flight plan, maybe lay a few bucks on whoever’s asking questions, and we should be good to go.”
“Should be,” Bolan echoed.
“There are no guarantees, of course,” Grimaldi said. “But overall, I’d say it’s looking better than Khartoum.”
Bolan had nothing to counter that assessment.
“Okay, that’s the plan,” he said. “Now, all we need is our next destination from Asmara.”
The next step wouldn’t happen if they were detained there, maybe busted by a Customs officer who didn’t share the widespread prejudice against Sudan, or who reacted badly to a bribe offer. A phone call to Khartoum would land them in hot water, and if photos of their skirmish with God’s Hammer were on the wire, it just might send them back for trial.
The end of everything.
Bolan put that bleak picture out of mind, focusing on the here and now. Before he left Sudan, he had to see if any other fugitives from God’s Hammer were in town and take them out, while hopefully obtaining pointers to the other scattered terrorists.
Simple.
The only thing he stood to lose was life itself.
* * *
“REPEAT THAT, IF you please.” Nour Sarhan barely contained his urge to shout and curse.
“Your men are dead,” the caller answered, with a tremor in his voice. “I followed them and watched them die.”
It was the young spotter he had employed to watch Alek Nimeiry’s combination auto body shop and private arsenal. Kinan Asker had trailed two white men from the airport to that very spot, and then pursued them as they left. Since then, there had been no contact with Asker, and Sarhan’s nerves felt as if they had been flayed.
Now, this.
“How can you be sure they are—”
“Dead?” the caller interrupted him. “Because I saw their brains blown out! A hundred other people watched it happen. The police are with them now.”
“And where are you?” Sarhan inquired, trying to keep it casual.
“It makes no difference,” the voice replied. Sarhan tried to recall a face, but he had hired two dozen locals for surveillance and pursuit, too many to recall.
“We will not meet again,” the youth said. “After I hang up, I will destroy this phone. Your secrets will be safe with me, unless you try to find me.”
So, a threat. Sarhan tried an appeal to greed. “But the remainder of your payment—”
“Keep it. I’ve already spent the rest on gas, doing your work. Now—”
“Wait! Don’t hang up!”
“I know you’re tracing this,” the young man said.
“You flatter me. I have no such technology at my disposal.”
“So you say.”
“One question, then, before you go? A short one.”
Silence, then, “What is it?”
“You have seen the men who killed mine. Closely?”
“Yes.”
“Can you describe them?”
“That’s a second question.”
“Even so.”
“Two white men, as I told you, probably Americans. One taller than the other. Both looked fit. They wore billed caps and sunglasses. No beards.”
“And what about their car?”
“Ask the police. I’m going now.”
The line went dead. Sarhan resisted an impulse to fling his phone across the room.
He had to focus, before it was too late.
Somehow, these two Crusaders had traveled to Sudan from Paraguay, and knew which city they should search for Sarhan and his two compatriots—one, now that they had liquidated Asker. Sarhan had no clue how they had managed that. It was irrelevant. The fact was, they were in Kassala and had killed four of his men, including one member of God’s Hammer. Should Sarhan feel safe where he’d been hiding for the past few days, since the attack in Jordan?
It seemed impossible that the Crusaders might know where he was. And yet...
His best move was to leave, find other quarters for himself and Bahjat Libdeh at the very least. The rest could take care of themselves. They had been nothing more than hirelings from the start, no one he cared about beyond their m
omentary usefulness.
Thankful that he had not destroyed his phone, Sarhan punched in a number for Libdeh and waited while it rang through at the other end.
* * *
THE KASSALA TEACHING HOSPITAL was Bolan’s landmark, not too impressive with its rough concrete facade, two stories tall and pale gray, with a beige front door, although it seemed to be a point of pride on every city map Bolan had seen. Their target address was another half mile north and east, set on a rectangular plot of land surrounded on all sides by thorny acacia trees.
“Can’t see much from out here,” Grimaldi said on their first pass.
Advancing dusk helped foil the purpose of their drive-by, casting long shadows between the trees rimming the property. Bolan glimpsed two cars standing near a single-story house made out of something that resembled adobe. Lights were on inside the house, but there was no one visible outside.
“We need eyes on,” Bolan said.
“Right.”
It wasn’t often that Stony Man intel was inaccurate, but anything was possible. Bolan didn’t plan to blast a house he’d never seen before, unless he first confirmed some of the men he wanted were inside. He had twelve faces filed away in mind, the last surviving members of God’s Hammer who’d been identified so far, and if he couldn’t verify at least one of those fugitives in residence at the address they’d found, he meant to pull the plug on this attack.
And then, what? Nothing.
If he lost the contact address, there was no Plan B.
It defied logic that Kinan Asker would wind up in Kassala on his own, after the consular attack in Jordan, but that conviction wasn’t getting Bolan anywhere. If other God’s Hammer members were in town, hiding at some other address, he had no way of tracking them. And if they’d been where he was now but fled after the riverside firefight, they might as well be smoke, tattered and blown away on desert winds.
“Looks like a place to stash the car, up here,” Grimaldi said.
More waste ground to their right, on the pilot’s side of the Audi, with a scattering of thick, top-heavy baobab trees and more acacias. There was no curb or sidewalk, no streetlights, where Grimaldi pulled off the pavement, cut the Audi’s lights and waited while they listened to the ticking of its engine cooling down.
They sat that way for close to fifteen minutes, Bolan watching through a pair of small binoculars while young men ferried bags and boxes to the waiting cars. “They’re bugging out,” he said, and then, “We’ve got one. Bahjat Libdeh in the doorway.”
“Rock and roll,” Grimaldi replied.
Bolan switched off the Audi’s dome light before he opened his door. They were already dressed for battle, more or less, but there were still refinements to be made. Both men plugged a compact Bluetooth headpiece into one ear, granting hands-free communication once they separated for the strike. They slipped on bandoliers of extra magazines for their assault rifles and verified that every gun they carried had a full magazine, with a live round in the firing chamber.
Finally, Bolan hefted the RPG-7, fifteen pounds without a rocket in its launching tube, its canvas strap dangling. He chose a PG-7VL HEAT projectile—short for high-explosive anti-tank, designed to penetrate five hundred millimeters of rolled homogenous armor—and loaded it, adding twelve inches to the launcher’s length and six pounds to its weight. For backup, he picked two slender OG-7V fragmentation rounds, tipping the scales at four pounds each, slipped them into a canvas pouch designed to carry them, and slung the pouch over his left shoulder.
“Ready,” he told Grimaldi.
At a nod from his partner, they left their shadowed lair to cross the street.
* * *
“I DON’T SEE why we’re leaving,” Bahjat Libdeh said.
Idiot, Nour Sarhan thought, but said, “We have lost Kinan. Security dictates that we must go.”
“But no one knows we’re here,” Libdeh protested.
“No one?” Sarhan shot a glance toward two young mercenaries lugging boxes from the room where he and Libdeh stood, taking them to the vehicles outside. “We have five of those men remaining, if you have forgotten,” he told Libdeh. “And the spotters, still out there somewhere, with our cell phones.”
“Untraceable,” Libdeh replied. “Cheap throwaways.”
Sarhan nodded, as if suddenly infused with wisdom. “All right, then,” he said. “You stay behind and wait to see whoever turns up next. But as for me, I’m leaving with the men and weapons. Good luck with your vigil.”
“I didn’t say I was not coming with you,” Libdeh whined. “It simply seems...extreme.”
“Tell that to Kinan and the three who died with him.”
“You win, Nour,” Libdeh conceded. Then he asked, “Where are we going?”
“To Khartoum,” Sarhan replied. “There are more people there. We’ll find a place to stay while the Crusaders run around Kassala, chasing ghosts.”
“But we were ordered to avoid the capital after arriving. Saleh chose Kassala for security.”
“And does it feel secure to you, Bahjat?”
“Well...”
“I thought not. Are your things prepared?”
“Already in the car,” Libdeh stated, sour-faced.
“Good. We’re nearly ready, then.”
“And what about the hired men?” Libdeh asked him. “Since they worry you, why take them with us to a new place that we have not found yet? Won’t they still be dangerous?”
Sarhan glanced toward the doorway, verified they were alone, then dropped his voice and said, “They would, if they were still alive.”
Libdeh stood blinking at him. Almost whispering, he asked, “You mean to kill them?”
“When they’ve finished serving as our beasts of burden,” Sarhan answered, smiling. “What else are they good for, now?”
“But there are five of them.”
“Surprise is critical. They are expecting payment, yes? They shall receive it, only not as they anticipate.”
He had already attached a sound suppressor to his Helwan Super semiautomatic pistol, an Egyptian licensed copy of the famed Beretta Model 92. It presently held sixteen Parabellum rounds, more than enough in Sarhan’s estimation for five lackeys who would be expecting cash rather than bullets in their heads.
“Are they not armed, as well?”
“That’s why I need your help,” Sarhan replied. “You have your weapon?”
Libdeh touched his shirt, above one hip, as if he had to check. “I do.”
“And do you have a silencer?”
His shoulders slumping, Libdeh shook his head.
“No matter,” Sarhan said, holding his temper. “We are fairly isolated here. The shots won’t carry far beyond these walls. I will begin it. You be ready if they prove more capable than I expect.”
“Yes,” Libdeh answered, with a jerky little nod.
“And wipe that grim look off your face, before you give the game away.”
Libdeh tried to invert his frown. The new expression made him look as if he had to use the restroom urgently.
Was he this bad at Zarqa? Sarhan wondered. Busy with his own tasks when they struck the consulate, he had not monitored the other members of the team during the fight. Those who emerged alive had been adequate. He took that for granted. But now he wondered whether that judgment had been mistaken.
Was Bahjat Libdeh a weakling, masquerading as a warrior? Should Sarhan eliminate him with the hirelings and be done with it? That would mean leaving half their gear behind, since he could only drive one car, but if Libdeh was unraveling, it might be preferable to continuing with an unstable comrade.
No. That call belonged to Saleh Kabeer, and Sarhan did not feel like phoning him to ask whether Kabeer would mind losing another soldier on this day when one had already been
slain.
He heard the local flunkies coming back, talking among themselves. He called them to the parlor where he stood with Libdeh, waiting until all of them were present. Reaching casually for the pistol wedged beneath his belt in back, he said, “Just one thing before we—”
With a crash of thunder, something struck the house, exploded, and immediately filled the room with smoke.
* * *
GRIMALDI WAITED FOR the RPG blast, crouching in darkness near the north side of the house while Bolan took the south, or front. He didn’t see the rocket fly, streaming its tail of fire, but there was no doubt when it struck, a clap of thunder rolling out beneath a clear and starry sky.
There was a broad glass sliding door on his side of the dwelling, light behind it, even though the drapes were closed. He saw them ripple with the shock wave from the blast, approaching swiftly with his AKMS at the ready, finger on the trigger, even though they taught you otherwise in boot camp. Why waste half a second when it meant the difference between surviving and a cold hole in the ground?
Grimaldi reached the sliding door and tried it, crouching lower just in case someone was waiting on the other side. It moved, rolling along its tracks without a hitch, and he allowed himself a feral grin before he slipped inside, letting his carbine’s muzzle part the drapes ahead of him.
It was supposed to be a rec room, he supposed, though it contained no evidence of any games: no billiard table, table tennis, barely any furniture at all. Wires dangled listlessly from one wall, where faded paint revealed the outline of a flat-screen television hanging, once upon a time.
“Clear,” Grimaldi advised himself from force of habit, not quite whispering. He headed for a doorway opposite the sliding glass behind him, where he heard men’s frightened, angry voices, separated from him by a wall or two.
Grimaldi had the face shots of their targets memorized, had pictured Bahjat Libdeh with his patchy beard as soon as Bolan spoke the killer’s name. If there were other members of God’s Hammer inside the house, he’d know them, too, as soon as he laid eyes on them.
And he was hoping that he saw them first.
Grimaldi edged into the hall, turned toward the voices, then picked up his pace as gunfire echoed through the house. Was Bolan inside now, or were the occupants firing at phantoms? Either way, the noise marked their position for Grimaldi as he closed in, going for the kill, just as a second detonation shook the house.
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