Dead Reckoning

by Don Pendleton

  The trick, for Bolan and Grimaldi, would be arming up without drawing undue attention to themselves, before they took on God’s Hammer. They had agreed to pose as shoppers for a group of men seeking “adventure” in the general vicinity, leaving the nature of their purpose vague enough to titillate suppliers with prospective future sales, discouraging reports to the authorities that would prevent those sales from going through. If a cop or two turned up before they’d filled their shopping list, Bolan hoped bribery would do the trick.

  Nour Sarhan had not been able to provide an address for his three comrades in Lahij, but he had a sat-phone number, which in turn let Stony Man’s team track the phone itself when it was turned on and in use. It had been operational for two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, earlier that morning, and they had an address now that might, or might not, lead them to their targets.

  Baby steps.

  “Ten minutes,” Grimaldi’s voice came to Bolan through the Hawker’s speakers. “Wakey-wakey.”

  As if there’d been any time for sleeping on the short flight from Asmara down to Aden. Bolan closed his laptop, slipped it back into its bag and folded up the table he’d been using.

  This time, their flight plan was legit, which didn’t guarantee a hassle-free arrival. Still, their paperwork would pass inspection, even if it came to checking through the embassy, and their vague cover story—assessing investment opportunities for an unnamed major American retail chain—shouldn’t logically raise any eyebrows.

  What Customs didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  But it was about to land on God’s Hammer like a ton of bricks.

  Aden International Airport

  THERE CAME A time in most protracted journeys when the traveler had to stop and double-check the local time, perhaps even the date. Mack Bolan hadn’t reached that point, exactly, in his globe-girdling pursuit of God’s Hammer, but he felt it drawing closer as he scanned the terminal at Aden International, reflecting that all Middle Eastern airports had begun to look the same.

  Aden International was not identical to Asmara International before it, or Kassala’s airport before that. There was a certain sameness, though, in the single runway, the terminal built small by Western standards and the relatively relaxed pace of passengers on the concourse. Best known for a series of crashes and hijackings in the 1970s, Aden International now had its fair share of uniformed security officers, some of them eyeballing Grimaldi and Bolan from the moment they entered, making their way toward Customs and Passport Control.

  Thanks to Grimaldi’s flight plan, there had been a stretch of tarmac waiting for the Hawker on arrival. Nothing fancy, like a hangar, but the jet could stand some desert sun, and Grimaldi had said thieves were less likely to attack it in the open, than if it were under roof and tucked away behind closed doors somewhere.

  Despite the circling soldiers with their AKMS rifles, Bolan and Grimaldi cleared their various official hurdles without setting off any alarms. Their rental car was a Toyota Yaris four-door, right-hand drive, in silver that could pass for gray. It had a spacious trunk, a 1.5-liter 1NZ-FXE engine under the hood, front-wheel drive and a five-speed manual transmission for outrunning heavies—or running them down, if they got in the way.

  It wasn’t hard to find a street where guns were sold in Aden. Once they’d cleared the airport, Bolan drove northwest to find the N1 highway and approach a sprawling plot with many trees, identified on a web search as Al-Kamasri Fun Park. At the northeast corner of that property, an open market occupied the street, with scores of stalls peddling something for everyone. Bolan paid up for parking in advance, and walked back to the gun stalls with Grimaldi.

  Unlike some cities, where he arrived unarmed and had to find the only dealer, choosing weapons from a small stash, Aden had too much on offer. Bolan counted twenty-four distinct and separate stalls, packed to the rafters with small arms of every description—and some not so small.

  He passed on a couple of mortars, the Russian 2B14 Podnos, and declined various medium and heavy machine guns, represented by samples from various nations. Bolan finally settled on a pair of AK-47s for Grimaldi and himself. He field-stripped both with the stall’s proprietor watching, found both weapons serviceable, and backed them up with a pair of twin Glock 22 pistols in .40 S&W. For heavier fireworks, he stuck with the familiar RGD-5 frag grenades that were so plentiful throughout the Middle East. The whole lot cost him one million Yemeni rials, a bit under five grand US, with extra magazines and plenty of ammo included.

  Bolan had watched for followers between the airport and the fun park, spotting none amid the traffic which, as in Sudan, appeared to follow no set rules of conduct. Bikers took their chances in a stream of vehicles, reminding Bolan of the bumper cars he’d seen at county fairs when he was young enough to think that crashing into strangers was a form of entertainment without consequences. Somehow, they avoided accidents and got back on the N1 headed north, toward Lahij and their prey.

  Three more terrorists were waiting for the Executioner, though, hopefully, they didn’t know it yet.

  Lahij, Yemen

  “BEFORE WE START AGAIN,” the interrogator said, “I give you one more chance to speak without persuasion, yes? It’s only fair, don’t you agree?”

  Naseem Damari raised his head, an effort in itself, and viewed the man through his good right eye. The left was swollen nearly shut. He said nothing but spit a little blood, missing the man’s boots and khaki trousers by a foot or more. The interrogator cocked his head and smiled.

  “We know you are police,” he said. “You asked about us at the marketplace in Aden. Very nosy of you, but you’ll say it is you job, yes?”

  Damari lowered his head, letting his chin come to rest on his chest. He was weary and hurting. His head seemed to weigh fifty pounds. Yet when his tormentor placed two fingers, sheathed in a rubber glove, underneath his chin and his sagging head again, it felt weightless.

  “What’s this?” the man asked, his free hand dangling a red plastic whistle in front of Damari, tied to a string.

  Damari thought he recognized the whistle. Was it his? Something he carried with him on a daily basis? And if so, what for?

  The man tried to help with his next question. “Do you think that if you blow this long and hard enough, your friends will come and save you?”

  When Danari said nothing, the interrogator raised the whistle to his lips, leaned forward, fingers still beneath Danari’s chin and blew a shrieking note out of the whistle, holding it until his breath ran short. When he was done, he sat and waited, his eyes rising toward the ceiling.

  “Anyone?” the man asked. “I don’t think so.”

  Damari made the only move he could, with arms and legs all tightly bound. Tipping his head, he tried to bite the man’s fingers, catching just a taste of latex as the hand whipped out of range.

  And came back as a fist, striking his swollen eye again.

  “Bad dog,” the man scolded him. “You should not bite the hand that holds your life. Now you require more discipline. What should it be? Perhaps some electricity?”

  The man left his chair and walked around somewhere behind Damari, coming back a moment later, trailing a small handcart with a car battery and thick, looping jumper cables attached. Their copper jaws resembled those of hungry moray eels. Damari could imagine how they’d feel, biting his flesh.

  He found the strength to speak, although it cost him further pain from battered ribs. “No...please.”

  “Ah, so polite now,” the monster man said. “I’m afraid it will not help you, dog. You must be punished for your rudeness. Then you’ll have another chance to answer questions, yes?”

  “I’ll tell you...whatever...you wish to know.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” the man said. “But first, you have to learn a lesson.”

  Reaching up with blue-gloved hands
, the man ripped Damari’s shirt open, baring his chest. He studied the expanse of flesh, as if deciding where to start.

  “I think one minute should be adequate,” he said at last. “I warn you, though, it may seem like an hour.”

  “Please!”

  “Hush now,” the man said, and raised the alligator clips, their jagged jaws agape.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  North of Aden

  The N1 highway started in Aden, on the gulf, and ran from there through San’a and beyond, until it turned into the P1, forty miles below the Saudi Arabian border. Bolan wasn’t traveling that far—just twenty miles, in fact—but he’d already hit a snag that was about to cost him precious time.

  He saw the oily smoke first, rising from a point about two miles ahead, and then the cars in front of him began to slow, eventually coming to a halt. By then, Bolan and Grimaldi were close enough to see the tanker truck where it had jackknifed and exploded, with a crumpled van of some description pinned beneath its flaming wreckage.

  “Good luck getting out of that alive,” Grimaldi said. His tone and face were grim.

  The stink of burning gasoline pervaded everything, but underneath it, Bolan caught a whiff of something else, like roasting flesh. Whoever was responsible for the collision and explosion wasn’t about to walk away from it.

  “How long, do you think?” Grimaldi asked.

  “The fire brigade will likely come from Aden,” Bolan answered. “We’re ten minutes out, but you can see the cars lined up behind us. Even with the lights and sirens, call it twenty, twenty-five minutes to get here, minimum.”

  “Then another thirty, if they’re packing foam,” Grimaldi said.

  Water would only spread a gasoline fire far and wide, perhaps involving other vehicles now stopped on either side of the flaming roadblock. They’d be very lucky if the fire was doused in only half an hour, once the trucks arrived.

  And then, they could start waiting for a crane to shift the wreckage, letting traffic start to flow again. Call that another hour, minimum, once all the heavy gear and personnel arrived from Aden. Two hours, at the very least, before the wreckage of the truck and van were hauled aside and traffic cleared to move again.

  “You think this is an omen?” Grimaldi asked.

  Bolan shook his head. He had no faith in omens, signs or portents of the future. While he’d had some pointed out to him with earnest warnings in the past, they’d never interfered with anything he planned to do. If someone had deliberately caused this wreck—to stage an ambush, for example—that would mean something. Most of the time, though, accidents were simply that, resulting from a human’s negligence or an equipment failure.

  “If they got wind of a problem,” Grimaldi pressed on, “this mess could hurt us, time-wise.”

  “Could,” Bolan agreed. “Or they could be long gone by now, a wasted stop as far as we’re concerned.”

  “And how do we bounce back from that?”

  “Zermatt,” Bolan replied. “We have an address from the phone trace there.”

  “And what if they’ve cleared out?”

  To that, there was no answer but another head shake. If they lost the Swiss connection, he had no idea where they should look next for the remnants of God’s Hammer. The group had left Jordan with sixteen men, and six of those were dead now, leaving ten. The world—even the Middle East—was large enough to hide ten men forever if they did the smart thing, went to ground with new identities and kept their heads down, found some other way to occupy their time than murdering Americans.

  But could they stop?

  Based on his hard-earned knowledge of fanatics, Bolan didn’t think so. If their only motivation had been money, say a ransom kidnapping, they might have walked away and thanked their lucky stars for still being alive. Fanatics, on the other hand—whether religious zealots or political extremists dedicated to a bloody cause—had different wiring in their heads. They would proceed until somebody stopped them cold.

  And that was Bolan’s field of expertise.

  Lahij

  “THIS IS NOT WORKING,” Khalid Kamel said.

  “You question me?” Tareq Talhouni heard the sharp edge in his own voice.

  “It was not a question,” Kamel answered back. “I said—”

  “And do you have a better plan?” Talhouni challenged. He was sweaty, and his skin itched, both sensations he had felt before when handling an interrogation. It disturbed him in a way, and yet, if he was honest with himself, he drew a sense of pleasure from inflicting pain.

  “My plan would be to kill him and be done with it,” Kamel said.

  “And the information he possesses?”

  “He has said nothing because he knows nothing, Tareq. He’s a policeman. All they do is question people and solicit bribes.”

  “He asked about God’s Hammer specifically,” Talhouni said.

  “Because we’re in the news. The whole world talks about our mission in Zarqa, which makes it a success. He also asked about al-Qaeda, yes?”

  “I have no interest in them,” Talhouni said.

  “And he had no real interest in us, as long as he could go back to his masters at day’s end and tell them he’d been asking questions in the marketplace. We made him dangerous by snatching him and bringing him back here. He’s seen our faces now, and where we hide. He needs to die.”

  Talhouni bristled at the challenge. He had been appointed leader of their three-man team by Saleh Kabeer, their founder. It was not Kamel’s place to debate or second-guess his orders.

  “He will die when I am finished with him,” Talhouni said. “Not a moment sooner.”

  Kamel stepped in closer, lowering his voice. “He knows nothing, Tareq. At least, until we brought him here, he knew nothing. Each moment that he spends among us places us in greater danger, to no purpose. We are jeopardizing our next mission for...what is it? Personal amusement?”

  Shivering with anger now, Talhouni kept his clenched fists at his sides, fighting the urge to strike Kamel and keep on striking him until he begged for mercy. “You forget yourself,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “You forget our purpose,” Kamel retorted. “Yemen was meant to be our refuge, not another battleground. Instead of keeping quiet and avoiding notice, now we have a cop screaming in the back room.”

  “He is gagged.”

  “And squealing like a pig at slaughter. It was a mistake to bring him here, a worse mistake to let him live this long.”

  Kamel was making sense, but that meant nothing to Talhouni at the moment. He responded to a challenge as his father had, with rage that prompted actions he regretted later. To be called out in the midst of an interrogation and chastised by a subordinate was galling. No, it was intolerable.

  “Saleh placed me in charge,” Talhouni said.

  “Even the greatest of us makes mistakes,” Kamel replied, with something like a smirk lifting one corner of his mouth.

  “You wish to challenge me for leadership?”

  “I wish to reason with you. Is that possible?”

  “You have insulted me.”

  Kamel blinked once, then dipped his head a fraction of an inch. “If so, Tareq, then I apologize. My first and only interest is in our greater mission.”

  “If police are hunting us—”

  “They hunt us everywhere, from Jordan to Hong Kong and Montreal. One raid, and we’ve become a legend. We are jeopardizing that by keeping this pig in the house.”

  Talhouni felt his anger start to fade, although the sweaty itch remained. “I only have a few more things to ask him,” he replied.

  Kamel nodded and said, “All right, then. But for our security’s sake, be quick about it.”

  Zermatt, Switzerland

  SALEH KABEER THOUGHT he could learn to love t
he mountains, with their snowcaps, evergreens and skirts of bright wildflowers. All his life, the desert had surrounded him, demanding Kabeer’s loyalty, but Switzerland had given him a taste of something different. It suited him, and yet...

  He had been watching the Al Jazeera news channel when the report came from Sudan. Police believed three members of God’s Hamme had been killed in Kassala, with some local hangers-on. No names had been released yet, but Kabeer knew who they were and what their deaths meant to his mission. He and the survivors of God’s Hammer were being hunted down and killed like animals.

  Kabeer did not intend to die that way, without a fight.

  Without leaving his mark.

  The mission in Geneva could not be advanced, as his targets held the cards in that respect, but Kabeer wondered if he might call in his last survivors from outside, a day or two ahead of time. They could be perspicacious, leave the hunters sniffing after cold trails far away from where the next great blow would fall. And after that...

  In truth, Kabeer had not thought far beyond Geneva while he planned the strike. Part of him hoped he would survive to fight again, of course, but martyrdom held no terrors for him. A death in battle—or in prison, for that matter—guaranteed his place in Paradise for all eternity. His Lord would smile on him, if he could only kill enough high-ranking leaders of the enemy before he fell.

  Weapons were not difficult to find in Switzerland, boasting the world’s third-highest civilian gun ownership rate, with some eight hundred thousand SIG SG 550 assault rifles kept in private homes and others circulating on the street via black market dealers. Neutrality had spawned a militia culture, with young men subjected to mandatory marksmanship training, many of them then allowed to store their military arms at home in case of an emergency. Explosives were more difficult to come by, naturally, but Kabeer had found a source for Semtex and expected fifty pounds to be delivered well in time for the triumphant day ahead.

  The problem now was when to call the remnant of his troops from Yemen to join him in Switzerland for the attack. The flight alone, he knew, was sixteen hundred miles—four hours on a plane, including delays for takeoff from Aden and landing in Geneva—then a hundred fifty miles by car over unfamiliar roads to reach Zermatt for final preparations. Call it seven or eight hours total, to be generous, followed by final planning sessions, then the relatively short return trip to Geneva for the main event, in three days’ time.