Dead Reckoning

by Don Pendleton

The kid was hurting now, and dazed, though not severely injured. Medics could have treated him for any damage to his eardrums, but it wasn’t in the cards. As Bakri crawled toward a handgun, Bolan aimed his carbine and fired.

  One more portion of the tab settled for Zarqa, with another five outstanding.

  Bolan doubled back and found Grimaldi clearing rooms along the second-story hallway. He’d done two and was emerging from the third when Bolan met him in the corridor.

  “Nobody home,” the pilot said. He nodded toward the doorway just behind him, adding, “There’s a window open here.”

  “A bug-out?” Bolan asked him.

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Okay. Third floor.”

  Bolan hated to think of anybody getting out, but his first job was to secure the rest of the guesthouse before police arrived, then worry about stragglers in the wind. He reached the final flight of stairs and started climbing once again, cursing a step that groaned beneath his weight as he ascended. Anybody waiting for him on the top floor might have heard it and be zeroed on the landing, ready to unload on any target that revealed itself.

  But no one fired as Bolan stepped into the open, facing four more rooms, two doors on either side of yet another hallway. And all four of the doors were shut.

  “Cops ought to be here anytime,” Grimaldi said.

  “Can’t help it,” Bolan replied, and stepped out toward the first door on his left.

  * * *

  SALEH KABEER SAT waiting in the railway depot, his gym bag resting on the seat beside him, his right hand resting near the unsnapped pocket of his cargo pants that held his pistol. Waiting for the train to come, unload its passengers and start back down the mountainside, he watched the street for any sign of enemies approaching.

  If they tried to take him here, his choices were to fight and surely die, or to attempt escaping down the tracks on foot, perhaps stumbling along the way and tumbling three miles down to Täsch—or meeting the funicular as it returned and being ground to bloody pulp beneath its wheels.

  So, death, in either case.

  And if the train arrived in time to carry him away...then, what? Would someone call ahead and have police waiting to seize him at the lower depot? That would also mean a firefight, doubtless ending in his death. Kabeer’s sole hope, in that event, would be to take a few Crusaders with him as he fell, sending their rotten souls to Jahannam while his flew off to Paradise.

  But if he reached one of the waiting cars and made it out of Täsch alive, Kabeer still clung to hope of pulling off his greatest move against the leading politicians who supported Israel in its war on Islam and descendants of the people it had dispossessed in 1947. He could not change history, but Kabeer reckoned he could write a new chapter in blood.

  And in that chapter, he would be the star.

  Nine endless minutes into waiting, he was startled by the sight of two familiar faces pushing through the depot’s swinging doors. Ali Dajani and Majid Hayek spotted their leader seconds later and approached him, Hayek moving briskly, while Dajani lagged behind and kept a hand pressed tight against his lower back.

  Without a word, the winded soldiers settled into seats on either side of their commander, Dajani with a sigh of sweet relief at getting off his feet. Kabeer surveyed them briefly, then turned toward the street again, to see if they had been pursued.

  “The rest?” he asked.

  Dajani shrugged and winced. Hayek said, “We don’t know. Someone was shooting in the guesthouse when we jumped.”

  “And the police?” Kabeer inquired.

  “No sign of them while we were there,” Hayek replied.

  Kabeer had heard no sirens yet. They still might have enough time to escape. “Go buy two tickets,” he told Hayek, handing him a small wad of Swiss francs.

  “How long until—?”

  “Five minutes,” Kabeer interrupted, “if the timetable is accurate.”

  “The Swiss are always accurate,” Dajani offered through clenched teeth.

  “How are you injured?” Kabeer asked him.

  “Something in my back, perhaps the kidney. When I jumped, I landed on my bag. The weapons...”

  “But you’re capable of fighting?”

  “Yes, sir.” Dajani sounded less than confident.

  “Mohammed will be waiting for us in Geneva,” Kabeer said. “Success is still within our grasp, if we but persevere.”

  Dajani nodded. “By the time we get there, I’ll feel better, certainly.”

  “And then—”

  Kabeer stopped short at sight of Habis Elyan just entering the depot. Calling out to Hayek, halfway to the ticket window, he said, “Majid! Make it three.”

  Hayek glanced back, saw Elyan and signaled understanding as he hurried toward the window.

  And he had to hurry now, because he heard the funicular approaching, still concealed within its tunnel as it labored up the mountainside, but drawing nearer by the moment.

  We can make it, he decided. We can still succeed.

  And drown the top Crusaders of the world in their own blood.

  * * *

  BOLAN CLEARED THE last room on the third floor of the guesthouse, stepping out to find Grimaldi in the hallway with a glum expression on his face. “Two out of seven sucks,” the pilot said.

  “The only place the rest of them can go from here is down,” Bolan replied. “That means the depot.”

  “Right.”

  They stormed downstairs through silence tinged with gun smoke. On the ground floor, almost at the exit with its tinkling bell, the red-faced landlord shouted after them, “Die police kommt! Sie warten dort!”

  “Halt die klappe!” Grimaldi replied, before the door slammed shut behind them.

  Jogging down the sloping street toward downtown, weapons stowed, Bolan asked, “When did you learn German?”

  “I can say ‘shut up’ in six or seven languages,” Grimaldi answered.

  Bolan focused on the streets in front of them, watching for cruisers or a foot patrol in uniform, his ears straining for the sound of sirens racing toward the guesthouse. Nothing yet, but what did that prove? They were in a mountain town, cut off completely from the outside world except by two railways, one running down to Täsch, the other headed up to Sunnegga, a ski resort at higher altitude.

  Going that way would only place Bolan and Grimaldi a few miles farther from their rented car, while Saleh Kabeer and his survivors made a run for it—and likely for Geneva, to complete their mission. Whatever else was said about Kabeer, no one had yet called him a quitter. Bolan thought the man would try his best to see the job through, even if he had to do it on his own; and with another four members of God’s Hammer unaccounted for, they still might do sufficient damage for a grim footnote in history.

  They reached the railway depot just in time to see the train pull out and disappear into the tunnel’s maw. Grimaldi cursed, while Bolan did the mental calculations. Twenty minutes down, another ten or so for disembarking passengers and loading new ones, twenty minutes back up to Zermatt, more unloading and loading, then another twenty back to Täsch. Kabeer and company, assuming they were on the train, had gained more than an hour’s head start toward Geneva, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.

  Nothing, that was, but attempting to avoid arrest.

  Bolan dismissed the image of his quarry hiding somewhere in Zermatt. It would be risky to the point of sheer insanity, once the police began to search for Arabs whom the guesthouse landlord could identify. And if the local cops followed Bolan’s logic, would they not be headed for the depot, once they’d heard the landlord’s story blurted out in breathless bits and pieces?

  “Let’s go shopping,” Bolan said.

  “Say what?”

  “We have the best part of an hour to kill, befo
re the train comes back,” Bolan explained. “We’re sitting ducks in here. The least we can do is hit some shops and change our look a little. Drift back here with five or ten to spare, and come in solo, so we don’t stand out.”

  “I get it,” Grimaldi said. “Going tourist.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, let’s do it. Shopping till we drop.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Grand Hotel Kempinski, Geneva

  Brognola caught a break after the meet-and-greet broke up, two hours wasted in his estimation, but the VIPs seemed to enjoy grazing at the buffet while they were warming up for dinner. He had glimpsed some famous faces and been introduced to no one, thereby signaling his status on the diplomatic totem pole.

  What am I doing here? he wondered, not for the first time, as he was waiting for the silent elevator to deposit him on the hotel’s fourth floor. He still had no idea what he’d been added to the roster at the Man’s direct command, but curiosity was leading him along dark mental corridors as he tried working through the riddle, looking for a clue.

  The President had claimed he wanted Brognola close by to “keep his operators in the field on track,” but that was bull. The Man knew Brognola was an administrator these days, that he had no more to do with a specific action on the firing line than an army general would have with privates in a combat rifle company. It had to be something else, and all Brognola could come up with was a not-so-subtle warning that whatever happened to the President while he was in Geneva would be happening to him, as well.

  Which begged the question: If the Man was doubting his ability to lead, what was awaiting Brognola in Washington if all of them survived their present jaunt? Brognola wasn’t worried about being canned. He had his twenty in, and then some, with a decent pension waiting for him come what may. Getting the boot would be an insult, sure, departing Justice on the worst of sour notes, but he could definitely live with that.

  What troubled him was the idea of being sucked into the blame game, if the summit fell apart and any of the bigwigs came to harm. Brognola had nothing to do with site security, but there were ways of twisting things, as he had learned while working for the FBI, and later at the helm of Stony Man. Before he knew it, a congressional committee could be asking him exactly why in hell he’d let a pack of rabid terrorists go through the summit meeting like a dose of salts—and while they plastered him across Fox News, what would be happening to all his people at the Farm?

  Exposure was the kiss of death to Stony Man and every member of its team. Brognola was prepared to take the hit alone, rather than sacrifice a single member of that tight-knit family. But would that be his choice?

  He let himself into his room facing the lake, and saw that someone had come calling in his absence. The big Fed’s go-bag did not include a tux, but now he found one laid out on his bed: Joseph A. Bank, immaculate inside its sheath of plastic. Someone on the Man’s team prepping him for dinner in the banquet hall downstairs, assuming—rightly—that he’d turned up on short notice, unprepared.

  Brognola’s first reaction, as an old campaigner, was to search his room for any other signs of tampering while he was out. His go-bag had a combination lock, four digits, still set on the number where he’d left it, but he opened it and checked its contents, anyway. When he found nothing out of place, his only other thought was that someone might try to bug his room—but why, when he was staying on his own? To eavesdrop if he called room service in the middle of the night?

  There was the sat phone, but he’d already decided any call he made to Stony Man would be made on the move, outside his room, to frustrate uninvited listeners. Besides which, he regarded “checking in” for no good reason as a sign of weakness and avoided it whenever possible, letting the team he trusted work without his hot breath on their necks.

  Brognola needed sleep before the evening’s big do, but first, his curiosity was nagging at him. He would have to try the tux for size, and if it fit, decide whether he should be pissed that some smug stranger had correctly guessed his height and weight.

  Zermatt

  GRIMALDI CAME BACK to the train station with five minutes to spare. He’d bought a gray felt alpine hat, complete with perky little feather in the band, and backed it up with shades resembling those favored by the late Ray Charles. His scarf, bright red, was decorated with a hundred mini-Matterhorns, each likeness of the killer mountain showing different shaded contours. He’d swapped his jacket for a royal blue hoodie, carrying the jacket and his carbine in a spacious shopping bag displaying the national colors.

  All in all, he was a tourist who would set most locals’ teeth on edge.

  Grimaldi went directly to the depot’s ticket counter for a one-way ticket down to Täsch. He’d ditched his round-trip ticket, now potentially incriminating, while he shopped for his disguise—as if a piece of cardboard could be more accusatory than the weapons he was carrying. Police were on the prowl downtown, but none of them had stopped him as he moved from one shop to another, likely looking for a shifty duo act, rather than one geek seeming casual.

  If he could jet get on the train...

  Grimaldi didn’t look for Bolan until he had the ticket in his hand. Turning, as if to scan the depot for an empty seat, he spotted Bolan in a corner near the door, from all appearances reading a true-crime magazine printed in German. Bolan wore a long-billed cap, bearing a red cross on its front panel, above a pair of sunglasses with iridescent lenses. The jacket he’d been wearing was reversible, its lining inside-out now, for a look the guesthouse owner likely wouldn’t recognize. The canvas shopping bag he’d chosen to conceal his hardware was jet-black, bearing a red-and-white logo that read: I ♥ ZERMATT.

  Grimaldi picked a seat as far away from Bolan as the depot’s layout would allow. He’d brought nothing to read, so he pulled his hat down and pretended to be snoozing, all the time watching for cops through the dark screen of his eyelashes. Just as he heard the train approaching, groaning on the last leg of its uphill run, a young lieutenant stopped outside the depot, speaking briefly to the officers on duty there, heads shaking as he questioned them and then moved on.

  Grimaldi didn’t dawdle when it came to boarding, but he let Bolan go first, then chose another car. He wound up sitting on the aisle, beside a dark-skinned older man wearing a turban, maybe Sikh or Hindu, who looked worn out from whatever job had drawn him to Zermatt. Behind them, two Japanese girls chattered, punctuated with ecstatic giggles, while the train reversed and started chugging back downhill.

  We made it, the pilot thought, then winced at the thought of cursing their escape. They would be clear when they were on the highway to Geneva, not before. And after that, God only knew what was awaiting them.

  On the A40 Motorway, Westbound

  SALEH KABEER WAS starting to relax. An hour from Zermatt, with no sign of police behind them yet, told him that they were not being pursued. It was a temporary fix, of course—the men he’d lost in the resort town soon would be identified and linked to God’s Hammer, which in turn would launch a nationwide manhunt—but he would take advantage of the time remaining to them, pushing toward their goal.

  Their hired car was a Volvo XC90 midsize SUV crossover, gray, with a five-speed automatic transmission and a 2.5 L 210 hp turbocharged engine. Majid Hayek had the wheel, with Kabeer in the shotgun seat, Elyan and Dajani riding in the back. Dajani, thankfully, had ceased complaining about his discomfort once he’d settled in his seat, and now sat with his eyes closed, his head against the padded pillar next to him, as if asleep. The others had been hyped up, chattering, until Kabeer had silenced them at last, a few miles outside Täsch.

  He needed time to think, and silence to accomplish it. Kabeer had tried to call Mohammed Sanea on his sat phone, once they had a head start on the motorway, but it had gone to voice mail and he’d left a cryptic order for a callback. As it stood, he didn’t know whether Sanea
had been able to retrieve the van, or if he had decided to forsake them, driving off to parts unknown.

  Kabeer wanted to trust Sanea, but they had not parted on the best of terms. He knew Sanea questioned his assignment to the van carrying the explosives, although he claimed it was because he did not want to be the last man standing when the smoke cleared in Geneva, much less the commander of a new God’s Hammer; but might that disaffection lead Sanea to desert the cause entirely?

  If the van was not in place when they arrived, the raid would come down to four men—one of them injured—facing scores of bodyguards and soldiers, armed with nothing but the small arms they had salvaged from Zermatt. The massacre resulting would most likely be of his men, rather than the targets Kabeer intended. If that turned out to be the end of his grand enterprise, would he be wiser to forget the whole thing, drive out of Switzerland and find a place to hole up while they made new plans from scratch?

  No.

  He could wait a lifetime for another opportunity like this, and in the meantime, how many more Palestinians would die or suffer at Israeli hands, cut down by bombs and bullets paid for by America? How could he think of safety for himself, when his Islamic brothers lived in daily fear of death, displacement and the loss of everything they owned, such as it was?

  Kabeer glanced at his watch. He’d cracked its face while leaping from his bedroom window at the guesthouse, but it still kept time. They had three hours left, perhaps a little more, before they reached Geneva and approached their target. Based on the agenda broadcast by the media, he thought the top Crusaders should be sitting down to dinner in the Grand Hotel Kempinski’s banquet hall when he arrived, with or without Mohammed Sanea and the van. Perhaps they would be on the appetizer course, or salad.

  Unknown to the men who ruled the world, a late addition to the menu would be sudden death.

  * * *

  “THEY’VE GOT AN hour’s lead, I figure,” Grimaldi said.

  “Sounds right,” Bolan agreed, pushing the Jetta west on the A40 Motorway. The same parade of mountain tunnels lay in front of them, seen from the other side this time, no changes since they’d passed that way a few short hours earlier.