Dead Reckoning

by Don Pendleton

  And what if someone happened by to steal it first?

  The person would be in for a surprise if he or she attempted to unwrap the van’s cargo.

  Sanea took a pistol with him onto the funicular, a Heckler & Koch P30 in 9 mm Parabellum. It amused him that the depot had no real security in place, not even a metal detector for passengers boarding the train. Were the Swiss so naive that they believed neutrality protected them from contact with the world beyond their borders? In any case, it worked to his advantage now, and would allow the other members of his team to reach their vehicles at the appointed time, with no untoward incidents.

  The terminal in Täsch boasted twenty-one-hundred parking spaces, acres of asphalt and steel, but Sanea knew precisely where to find his hired Renault Twingo, its parking pass still on the dashboard. He paid dutifully at the depot—there was no point in courting trouble now, of all times—and was soon back on the winding mountain highway that would take him through its many tunnels to Geneva, in about four hours.

  That was ample time to think of what lay waiting for him when he reached the city. Still not pleased with his assignment, even though it offered him a fair chance of surviving the attack, Sanea wondered if it had been rigged in some way to deceive him. Why would Saleh Kabeer not take the prime position for their raid, with a potential for escaping to reconstitute the movement if his last troops fell in battle?

  Could it be some kind of trick? If so, what kind?

  Sanea had already racked his brain in search of answers to that question and had come up empty. He saw no way in which Kabeer could profit from a leading role in the attack, where he was almost certain to be slain. A martyr’s death would certainly enhance his reputation with the faithful, but despite his lectures on God, Sanea found Kabeer more commonly concerned with earthly matters than with things divine.

  The riddle stumped him, so Sanea concentrated on his driving as another mountain tunnel loomed ahead. The Twingo had daylight running lights and thus required no action on Sanea’s part as he drove in and out of darkness on the path back to Geneva. He was troubled more by other drivers, speeding past him in a manner that reminded him of motorists in Riyadh, where he’d come from, heedless of their own safety and anybody else’s.

  He could match their speed, but what then, if he caught the eye of a policeman with a quota of citations to be met? Sanea’s driver’s license was a forgery, and not the best at that. If he was ordered from the car and he resisted, pulled his pistol, it would end in death for someone, and the outcome worked against him either way. Dead, he was useless to his comrades. Hunted by police for killing one of them, he posed a greater danger to the cause than if he was shot down.

  So he made sure to watch the speed limit, his rearview mirror and the dashboard clock that told him time was slipping past. However this night closed, Mohammed Sanea knew his life would never be the same.

  Zermatt

  FROM STREET LEVEL, the target looked like any other building on the block. Its front door was a vibrant red, while those of neighbors had been painted other party colors, and the flowers in its window boxes gave a spark of individuality. Otherwise it had a steep roof, its ground floor walls were made of bricks, the upper stories constructed out of wood, same as the others lining both sides of the street. A small brass plaque beside the door labeled it as a Familiengästehaus or Pension de Famille.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Family guesthouse,” Bolan said.

  “Could be trouble,” the pilot observed.

  “We’re after seven men,” Bolan replied. “I don’t see any landlord in Zermatt packing them all into one room.”

  “Seven could nearly fill a place this size,” Grimaldi estimated.

  “Or, they could be spread all over town.”

  “But if the sat phone’s here...”

  “We’ve likely got Kabeer, at least.”

  “I don’t suppose we can just call him up and see who’s home.”

  “So we just drop in.”

  “Looks like it.”

  Bolan had already cocked his carbine in their room, and it was ready for whatever waited on the far side of the red door facing him. The question now was how to get inside without alerting any targets on the premises before he had them lined up in his sights.

  The guesthouse was a place of business, but did that mean anyone could walk in off the street to ask about a room? He saw a doorbell, but if Bolan raised the landlord, what was his next step? Kabeer and company would not be registered under their own names, surely, and Brognola’s files had not provided any likely pseudonyms.

  “Cold call?” he asked Grimaldi.

  “I’m with you,” his partner replied, reaching beneath his coat and switching off his carbine’s safety.

  The doorknob turned when Bolan tried it, well-oiled hinges giving off no sound, but then a bell mounted inside, above the door, jangled to warn the landlord of a new arrival in his foyer. Bolan reached up overhead to still it, but a man’s voice was already calling out from somewhere to his left.

  “Guten tag! Wilkommen!”

  The landlord had a thin halo of white hair and well-waxed handlebar mustache that compensated for whatever thinning he’d suffered on top. His ruddy cheeks bespoke a cheerful disposition or perhaps a love of alcohol.

  Bolan decided it was worth a gamble. “You speak English?”

  “But of course, my friend. How may I help you this fine day?”

  “We were supposed to meet some friends here,” Bolan told him. “Middle Eastern fellows, six or seven of them.”

  “Certainly! They are my guests. May I— But wait! Here comes one of them now!”

  Bolan followed the landlord’s sweeping gesture toward a nearby staircase, where his eyes locked on to those of Faisal Mousa, one of the Jordanians still unaccounted for. Mousa froze on the stairs, then started to retreat, reaching for something that could only be a weapon.

  In a flash, the jolly landlord lost his smile, and it all went to hell.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Saleh Kabeer was dozing when the battle started. He had set his traveler’s alarm clock for three-thirty before stretching out upon the sofa, fully dressed except for shoes, the gym bag that he planned on taking with him to Geneva resting on the floor beside his couch, within arm’s reach.

  The bag contained a Russian Bizon submachine gun, a unique variation on the classic Kalashnikov design chambered in 9 mm Makarov, fed from a 64-round helical magazine mounted below the hand guard in line with the weapon’s barrel. Three more magazines were also packed in the bag, with half a dozen frag grenades, although Kabeer was not convinced he would live long enough to reload when the action started in Geneva.

  He had begun to dream of something, a landscape he did not recognize immediately, when the first shots shocked him out of sleep and snapped him upright on the sofa, reaching for his pistol on the nearby coffee table. For an instant, Kabeer thought the gunfire might have been within his dream, until it was repeated and he heard one of his soldiers shouting from the corridor outside his room.

  “Crusaders! They have found us!”

  Kabeer set his pistol down and fumbled with his shoes. They were slip-ons, with elastic wedges on the sides, and only caused him to blaspheme one time as he was grappling with the left one. He rose, picked up his pistol and the bag of weapons, stood and listened to the rising gunfire for a moment, then proceeded to the nearest window with his mind set on escape.

  They had rehearsed evacuation of the guesthouse shortly after moving in, a common-sense precaution that Kabeer demanded of his men at any “safe” location. Each of his soldiers knew precisely where to go and what to do in the event of an attack, without him leading each one by the hand. They knew their mission in Geneva took priority above all else, and that they should spare no effo
rt to flee the guesthouse, flee Zermatt, if anything went wrong.

  Beyond that, they were on their own.

  More shooting echoed through the stairwell leading to Kabeer’s room on the second floor. He reached the window, freed its latch and flung it open to the cool breeze of an alpine afternoon. With the gym bag slung across his back, its strap across his chest, Kabeer secured his pistol in a pocket of his khaki cargo pants and peered out at the drop below him.

  Call it fifteen feet between the windowsill and cobblestones, closer to eight if he could manage dangling by his fingers from the sill before he dropped. A headlong fall would damage him severely, maybe break his neck and leave him dead or paralyzed, but he’d rehearsed the exit in his mind and had no fear of heights per se.

  A fear of falling, now, that was another thing entirely.

  The exit proved more awkward than he had imagined, leading with his right leg, clinging to the window frame for dear life as he turned around—his groin scraping painfully across the windowsill—and brought his left leg out over the drop. From there, he had to let his straining fingertips slide until they gripped the sill alone, bearing the full weight of his body while it dangled over empty space, the street below invisible no matter how Kabeer might crane his neck.

  He pictured tumbling down atop some hausfrau or a family of tourists passing by, and wondered whether they would break his fall. Almost smiling at the image, Kabeer loosened his grip and plummeted, remembering to tuck his legs and roll on impact with the hard, smooth cobblestones. He started rolling down the steep side street but managed to arrest the tumbling with an outflung arm, escaping from the drop with nothing more than painful bruises to his back, hips, knees and palms.

  More gunfire echoed from within the guesthouse as Kabeer rose and ran.

  * * *

  BOLAN WISHED THERE had been time to draw his silenced pistol, but Faisal Mousa was fast, allowing none. It came down to the carbine, starting with a 3-round burst that caught Mousa as he was multitasking, reaching for his gun and trying to retreat upstairs at the same time.

  One of the 5.56 mm bullets missed and chipped a handrail bolted to the wall on Mousa’s left. The other two went in on target, more or less, though slightly lower than intended, punching home above the slender gunman’s belt line, dropping him to one knee on the stairs. He grimaced at the sudden pain, but kept on groping for the weapon he was after, his teeth clenched in grim determination.

  Bolan let him have another short burst, to the chest this time, stopping his heart and turning both lungs into useless bags of blood. Mousa slumped backward on the stairs and started sliding down to meet his killer, muscles slack in death. The gun that hadn’t saved him, a Beretta, tumbled down ahead of him and struck the floor at Bolan’s feet.

  The Executioner was on the move by then, aware of pounding footsteps overhead, Kabeer’s men scrambling for their weapons, shouting warnings back and forth in Arabic. The landlord wailed out something from below, Grimaldi shoving past him, and it didn’t take a mind reader to know that he’d be howling for the police as soon as he could reach a telephone.

  Bolan pushed on upstairs, nearing the second-story landing, slowing there as it went quiet in the guesthouse, no running, the initial shouting silenced. That brought either one of two scenarios to Bolan’s mind: an ambush or escape, both fairly well rehearsed.

  “I’m going up,” he warned Grimaldi, in a whisper.

  “I got you covered,” his partner replied, his carbine raised, his voice barely audible.

  Bolan attacked the few remaining steps as if they were the last yards separating him from a decisive touchdown in the last game of a winning season. He lunged forward as he reached the landing, sliding belly-down on the carpet, which released a little puff of dust on impact. He was ready when an automatic weapon chattered at him from the far end of the hallway, through an open bedroom door, its muzzle-flashes blinking at him, then cut off as suddenly as they began.

  Bolan returned fire, just to keep the shooter’s head down, while he pushed up on all fours and scuttled to his left, pressing his back against a wall papered with a complex chintzy design. It made a little whisper of its own as Bolan slid along the wall, advancing toward the shooter’s den and watching two more doors that opened off the short hallway.

  The Executioner didn’t look back to see if his partner was covering him. A Grimaldi promise was as good as gold—or body armor, as the case might be. More shooters might spring out in front of him at any second, but with Grimaldi behind him, Bolan had no fear of back shooters.

  A few more yards remained before he had an angle on the open doorway. Bolan strained his ears for any sound of movement from within the room but heard nothing. It was a death trap, obviously, but this was what he’d come for.

  Creeping, step by silent step, Bolan advanced.

  * * *

  “COME ON!” ALI DAJANI snapped at Majid Hayek.

  “Go!” the man seethed back at him. “I’m right behind you!”

  In rehearsal, it had all seemed so much easier. Of course, they had not actually leaped from any of the guesthouse windows while discussing their emergency escape plans. If the truth were told, Dajani thought the whole thing was a waste of time, preparing for a raid. How could Crusaders find them in Zermatt?

  And yet, they had.

  Now he was peering at the steep street below him from a third-story window, thinking what an idiotic plan it was to clamber out and drop through space as if he were invincible, not just a fragile thing of blood and bones wrapped up in skin. The very least Dajani could expect was broken ankles, if he landed wrong. At worst, he would be killed as surely by the fall as by a damned Crusader’s bullets, but without the chance to take someone with him.

  It was idiocy—but despite the fear inside of him, Dajani felt he had no choice.

  “Well, are you jumping out or not?” Hayek demanded, standing close behind him.

  “Yes! I’m going!”

  And he did.

  First thing, Dajani had to take the flower box some fool had bolted to the wall outside his window and dislodge it, hammering the corners with a lamp until it cracked and tumbled to the distant pavement, spilling dirt and lilies. Next, flinging the broken lamp aside, Dajani had to struggle through the window backward, Hayek helping him until he hung suspended from the windowsill, his dangling feet some eighteen feet above the cobblestones.

  And then he let go.

  The drop was giddy, terrifying, but Dajani landed on his feet, flexing his knees as he’d been taught in training, rolling backward to disperse momentum from the fall. That saved his legs, but jammed the satchel with his weapons and bellman’s disguise into his left kidney, sending a bolt of white-hot agony up from his waistline to his skull.

  Dajani barely moved in time, before Hayek crashed down on top of him, a perfect four-point landing on his toes and fingertips. The Lebanese eyed him and asked, “Are you all right?”

  “Just help me up,” Dajani answered, grimacing with fresh pain as Hayek assisted him in standing upright.

  “If you cannot walk—”

  “I can!” Dajani snapped at him. “You lead the way.”

  “All right. But if you cannot make the train—”

  “Just go!” Dajani snarled.

  Hayek set off downhill, jogging with gravity to aid him, and Dajani followed, gasping from the pain at first, then breathing more evenly as it slowly eased. He might be passing blood that night, but it was of no consequence. Unless a miracle occurred, they’d all be dead before another sunrise, anyway.

  Running to reach the railway depot—hobbling, in Dajani’s case—they met locals and tourists, none of whom seemed interested in the odd pair passing by. The locals were accustomed to outlandish visitors, Dajani thought; the tourists, meanwhile, cared for no one but themselves.

  Plodding
along, he wondered if Kabeer or any of the others would escape. And if they didn’t, should the action in Geneva still proceed? What would Mohammed Sanea say when he arrived, driving the vanload of explosives, if he found only two comrades ready to proceed? Would they go ahead or call it quits?

  They could discuss that, he decided, on the drive back to Geneva. For the moment, all Dajani cared about was getting to the depot and aboard the next funicular to Täsch.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE BEDROOM DOORWAY, Bolan dropped to all fours once again, then lay prone on the dusty carpeting. He knew the tendency of shooters cornered in a single room to fire through walls around the entrance, normally around chest height, in hopes of taking out their enemies before a hopeless final rush. It sometimes worked—Bolan had done it once or twice, himself—and he preferred to stay below the common line of fire if possible.

  That made it difficult to charge the room, but he was ready with a fair alternative. He palmed one of the small M84 flash-bang grenades, crude in appearance, like a perforated five-inch pipe bomb, and removed its double pins—one pull ring circular, the other one triangular—while keeping a tight grip around its narrow safety lever.

  A quick countdown, and then he made the sidearm pitch, immediately clamping his hands over his eyes, which were shut tightly, and turning away from the doorway in front of him. The stun grenade’s short fuse allowed his enemy no time to duck and cover before blinding light and thunder filled the small bedroom, unleashing more dust from the carpet under Bolan and the ceiling overhead.

  He hit the threshold running, no real smoke to speak of interfering with his vision in the tiny room. Before him, writhing on the carpet with a hand over his eyes, lay Kamal Bakri, one of four young Palestinians who’d pledged themselves to God’s Hammer and its war against the West.