It was a stalemate, and they had to break it soon, before the missing terrorists attacked the banquet hall. For all Bolan knew, they could be on the threshold even now, prepared to burst in firing, hurling hand grenades, before the diners and their muscle could react to the chaotic sounds of battle he’d ignited in the corridor serving the kitchen.
Silence fell, then Bolan heard his adversaries whispering in Arabic. He didn’t need a translator to know that they were working up a plan to sweep the hallway one last time, then make a run for their primary target when they had eliminated any opposition on that front. But would they rise to do it, or—
He got his answer seconds later, when Ali Dajani rose, snarling, arm cocked to pitch another frag grenade. Bolan and Grimaldi fired simultaneously, bullets ripping through Dajani’s face and chest, tipping him over backward with the lethal egg still in his hand. Impact took care of that, as Bolan hugged the floor once more, waiting for an explosion to his front this time.
The blast propelled both service carts toward Bolan and Grimaldi, one caroming off the Executioner’s outstretched hand and spinning to his right. The other struck it with a clang and both of them stopped dead, wheels spinning, while Bolan peered through a veil of smoke to find his enemies.
All three of them were down now, lying tangled and twisted where they’d shared their meager cover under fire. One of the three—Majid Hayek, he thought—was twitching slightly, clearly dying, while the other two lay still.
Bolan rose to his feet, reached out to help Grimaldi, but the pilot waved him off, saying, “I’m good. Let’s hit it.”
The Executioner nodded, turned back toward the banquet hall downrange and stepped around the dead.
* * *
GRIMALDI GRIMACED AS he kept pace with his partner, limping slightly, still getting it done. He felt blood trickling down the inside of his left thigh from a shrapnel wound—too close for comfort, there—but he’d been hit before, and from the feel of it, he guessed that any medic with a pair of tweezers and a sewing kit could patch him up when they were done.
He reloaded his Commando carbine on the move. He’d been through worse, much worse, and lived to talk about it over cold beers with survivors like himself, who’d walked the wild side and returned to share the tale. Survival wasn’t really much of an achievement when he thought about it—skill and luck combined to beat an enemy who came up short in one or both—but it beat hell out of the only known alternative.
Grimaldi figured that their dust-up with the three shooters would have upset the fancy diners’ appetites and sent them streaming for the nearest exit, under the direction of their bodyguards. That could be good or bad, depending on the terrorists still unaccounted for, and how they’d planned their moves, whether they’d laid an ambush with this very thing in mind, or if they’d conjured something even worse.
Like bringing down the house.
“Hold up a sec,” he called to Bolan.
“What?”
“It strikes me that our pals back there were packing light,” Grimaldi said.
Bolan took no time to connect the dots. “Another World Trade Centers deal, you think?”
“Could be.”
Not 9/11, maybe, but the first one, back in 1993, when Ramzi Yousef and his cronies from al-Qaeda parked a truck bomb underneath the North Tower with plans to bring it down. The death toll had been relatively small—six pulled out of the rubble afterward—but the explosion and resulting fires had left more than a thousand wounded. Architecture and the limitations of homemade explosives had kept the damage and the body count from being vastly worse, but if God’s Hammer had access to more powerful and more sophisticated tools...
“We’ve got no way to check it out,” Bolan replied. “No one to call, right now. If we get through this, we can hand it off to Hal.”
By which time, Grimaldi thought, it would likely be too late.
Bolan was right, though: there was nothing they could do about some hypothetical disaster, when reality was right in front of them. Three shooters down, two others still at large, including the ringleader of the plot. It would be idiotic folly to retreat before they had done everything within their power to secure the target VIPs.
Grimaldi was moving even as he spoke. “You’re right. What are we waiting for?”
Bolan looked at the pilot’s bloodstained pants, frowning. “Do you want to check that out?”
“Later,” Grimaldi said. “I’d hate to miss dessert.”
* * *
MOHAMMED SANEA WAS fed up with waiting. Sitting in the van, below ground, he had no idea what was occurring in the huge hotel above him. Had Kabeer and the others achieved their goal, or had they all been slaughtered by security before they had the chance to fire a shot? For all Sanea knew, he was alone now, with no orders to obey beyond Kabeer’s command that he get out alive, then detonate the Semtex before slipping off—to where?
Sanea clutched his cell phone, wishing he could call Kabeer and ask for his advice, some clue to what was happening upstairs, but that would be a futile exercise. Kabeer was either dead or in the midst of speaking to the media, announcing the attack to all the world at large.
The radio!
Sanea turned the van’s ignition key and switched the radio back on, tuned in to the English language news channel. The anchor’s voice droned on, emotionless, about stock prices and a ferry run aground somewhere in Asia, an airline crash in South America, nothing to indicate that the anchor had been tipped off to mayhem at the Grand Hotel Kempinksi in her own backyard.
What did it mean? Had the police moved in before Sanea’s friends could strike? None of them would surrender. He was sure of that, which meant they had to be dead if they were cornered by authorities.
To hell with this.
Sanea put the cell phone in his pocket, grabbed his pistol and the Semtex detonator from the passenger’s seat, and stepped out of the van, locking the driver’s door behind him. Anyone who tried to search it now would have to beat the locks, and by the time someone attempted that, their moment would have passed. He only had to walk a hundred yards, if that, before he keyed the detonator and left Switzerland a grim reminder that it could not hold the world at bay forever.
He jogged toward the exit, finally seeing streetlights illuminating traffic passing by on Rue de la Cloche. The watchmen on the entrance both had cell phones pressed against their ears, imparting or receiving information. Possibly, if Kabeer and the rest lay dead upstairs, the guards would be recalled, but that seemed doubtful to Sanea. More than likely, officers would search the hotel from top to bottom, seeking any other threats, before the staff and guests returned to any semblance of normality.
Sanea had no time to waste.
He started forward, saw the sentries notice him, the plump hotel man raising one hand as a warning gesture, calling out, “Sie müssen aufhören, mein Herr.”
To hell with stopping on demand. Sanea raised his pistol, shot the flunky twice and watched him fall. He swung his weapon toward the cop, but his second target proved more agile than expected. Dropping to a crouch, he fired a short burst from his submachine gun, followed quickly by another as he found the range.
Sanea felt the bullets ripping through him, stealing air from ruptured lungs. He hit the concrete floor facedown, gasping and twitching like a grounded fish. His outflung hands released his pistol and the Semtex detonator, each spinning beyond his reach in different directions as he fell.
Lying in blood, synapses firing and misfiring in his brain, Sanea thought the soldiers who had trained him long ago were wrong. Sometimes a man did hear the shots that killed him, after all. And what else had they lied about? Sanea closed his eyes and waited to behold the final mystery.
* * *
SALEH KABEER WAS nearly there, a few yards from the apogee of his ambition as a freedom fighter for th
e Holy Cause. Incredibly, there were no guards in evidence outside the banquet room, and he saw one door standing open halfway down the corridor, ahead of him. Had God cleared his path in aid of Kabeer’s plan to punish the Crusaders?
He would take that much on faith and strike before the opportunity was lost.
The import of this moment nearly overwhelmed him. After so much planning and so many losses, perseverance had delivered him to the precise point where his destiny demanded him to be. Six major targets awaited, if his men had not already slaughtered them, and if he’d come too late to kill the most important of them, there was still time for Kabeer to make his mark, before Sanea brought the Grand Hotel Kempinski crashing down in ruins.
He was almost to the door, and now a single guard emerged, armed with an Uzi submachine gun, glancing to his right, then freezing as he turned and saw Kabeer almost on top of him. The terrorist leader triggered a short burst, barely aiming, and he felt like cheering when the enemy collapsed, blood spraying from his face and throat. That cost Kabeer the slim advantage of surprise, but nothing mattered to him now, beyond the need to kill as many of his people’s foes as possible before he fell.
He hesitated for a moment at the open doorway, then stepped through, his Bizon leveled from the hip, prepared for anything but failure and disgrace. Incredibly, he recognized the top Crusader of them all approaching him, surrounded by a group of stone-faced men, all armed, who had be US Secret Service, since they wore no uniforms. Kabeer’s eyes met the American President’s, and while he could not hope for recognition, nonetheless Kabeer was pleased to see a kind of grim acceptance there.
He held down the Bizon’s trigger and swung the weapon’s muzzle in an arc from left to right, then back again, hosing the target’s bodyguards with Parabellum rounds, remembering to place his first shots low, in case the drones were wearing body armor under their tuxedos. They went down like weeds before a scythe, a couple of them crying out in shocked surprise and pain, before Kabeer’s next sweep ripped into skulls and faces, silencing his enemies for good.
And there he was, the man Kabeer had traveled so far from his homeland to destroy, exposed and walking backward from the smoking muzzle of the Bizon SMG. Before Kabeer could finish him, another man—too old for bodyguard material—leaped from the sidelines, tackling the President and riding him to ground, shielding the top Crusader with his body, even as he swung a small pistol around to fire at Saleh Kabeer.
And missed!
God was truly with him this day. No other answer could explain a miss from less than fifteen feet.
Kabeer stepped forward, quickly checked the ammo level in his weapon’s magazine, then leveled it, prepared to give the full remaining load to these men at his feet. It was appropriate that they should grovel for him in the final moments of their wasted lives, as judgment fell upon them from above.
* * *
BOLAN HEARD THE high-pitched canvas-ripping sound of submachine-gun fire as he approached the banquet room’s rear entrance, with Grimaldi close behind him. It was definitely coming from inside the hotel’s lavish banquet hall, but Bolan had no way of knowing whether it was triggered by attackers or some member of the VIP security detachment.
Either way meant lives at risk, including Hal Brognola’s and the President’s.
But moving in also put Bolan’s life at even greater risk. Unknown to any Secret Service agent, much less bodyguards assigned to other dignitaries at the summit, Bolan and Grimaldi would be two more strangers packing guns and nothing more, the kind of targets that attracted fire from anybody with a weapon and a boss to shield from harm.
Match that against the other choice—retreating, leaving those inside the banquet hall to live or die on someone else’s whim—and it came down to no alternative at all.
“I’m going in,” Bolan said. “You should stay out here.”
“Fat chance,” Grimaldi retorted.
And that was it. Bolan edged through the doorway, checking out the room that had become a battlefield. All doors were standing open now, a party of Italians slipping through the one farthest to Bolan’s right without a backward glance, the way Carabinieri were drilled to cover their principal first and forget about stragglers. Bolan couldn’t tell the other milling individuals apart—French, English, German or Israeli—without hearing someone speak, and at the moment they were all focused on action, rather than discussion. Plans made in advance were being carried out with varied levels of precision, with a dash of chaos added now that terrorists had breached the banquet hall.
Make that one terrorist.
Bolan picked out the boss of God’s Hammer, Saleh Kabeer, directly opposite the doorway where the Executioner stood with Jack Grimaldi. Wreathed in gun smoke, bodies scattered at his feet, Kabeer had cut a swath through Secret Service agents ringed around the President. When Bolan spotted him, Kabeer was about to make the top score of his life—before Brognola threw himself in harm’s way, bringing down the Man beneath him, while he fired a wild shot from a handgun, on the fly.
It was a miss, but Brognola shot off another round as he hit the floor, hitting Kabeer’s left bicep. Blood spurted from the wound, rocking Kabeer off balance for a heartbeat, but he steadied short of falling, brought his SMG back into line and wore a hungry shark’s smile as he poised to make the double kill.
Bolan shot him from eighty feet away, one round to stagger him, and then a long full-auto burst when he’d confirmed the first hit. Kabeer took it all, successive impacts lifting him completely off his feet, driving him backward through the doorway where he’d entered on his killing errand moments earlier.
Brognola glanced up from his place atop the President, ready to fire again, and saw no adversary waiting for him. Turning in the opposite direction, he saw Bolan and Grimaldi, gave the pair of them a nod and waved them off with his gun hand.
Time to get out of there.
Bolan and Grimaldi dropped their Commando carbines where they stood, keeping their pistols under cover for emergencies and left to find the nearest exit from the Grand Hotel Kempinski. Bolan figured they had minutes left before the first wave of police arrived in full SWAT mode, likely with soldiers close behind. Someone would find the Jetta parked downstairs, in time, and after fruitless searching for its driver, would return it to the rental agency.
For now, he and Grimaldi were walking. They could hail a cab after they’d put some ground between themselves and the hotel, decide if they should head back to the airport or locate a small hotel somewhere, to hide out for the interim.
Mohammed Sanea was still missing, to the best of Bolan’s knowledge, hadn’t joined the final action in the banquet hall—and what did that mean? If he hadn’t moved by now...
They came out of the hotel on to Rue de la Cloche, taking their time without appearing to be hurried as they passed the entrance to the underground garage. A white-and-orange patrol car with Police stenciled in blue across its doors sat blocking off the entry ramp, two officers standing over two bodies on the pavement. Farther back, inside, fluorescent lights picked out a third corpse lying on its side, facing the street and freedom that had proved impossible to reach.
“The odd man out,” Grimaldi said.
“Looks like it,” Bolan agreed, and felt a sense of relaxation overtake him.
Endgame. For this round of play, at least.
EPILOGUE
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“He just wants to thank you in person,” Hal Brognola said. “I already explained that a medal was out of the question.”
“You know we don’t do meet-and-greets,” Bolan replied.
“Yeah, yeah. But it’s the President.”
“Who ought to know the rules as well as anyone.”
“He’s grateful,” the big Fed said.
“Not a problem,” Bolan answered. “You’re the one who ne
arly took a bullet for him, and you winged the shooter, too. Without that shot, he likely would have been too quick for me to stop in time.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Brognola admitted.
“That’s what makes a hero,” Bolan said. “And since you’re in the public eye already, he could pin a medal on you in the Rose Garden. Nobody would think twice about it. Maybe even put a little something extra in your next pay envelope.”
“As if.” But Brognola was thinking now, maybe seeing the ceremony in his mind’s eye, Helen and the kids at his side for one hell of a photo op.
Bolan changed the subject, asking, “So, they had no trouble with the Semtex?”
Brognola came back to Earth and answered, “None. Sanea dropped the detonator when he did his face-plant. The responding officers were smart enough to let it be until the techs showed up and told them what it was. From there, they didn’t have much trouble tracking down the van.”
“With fifty pounds of Semtex,” Bolan said.
The big Fed nodded. “Plenty to remodel the Kempinski, if it wasn’t flattened like a pancake.”
Bolan didn’t like to think about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of employees, guests and visitors who might have been annihilated in the time it took for shock waves to drive upward through eight floors, collapsing concrete walls on every side. Rescuers would have been extracting bodies or their remnants from the wreckage for a week or more.
“And God’s Hammer?” he inquired.
“Kaput,” Brognola answered. “If they’ve got any members outstanding, no one’s been able to identify them so far.”
“So, a clean sweep, then,” Barbara Price said. She had been sitting on the sidelines, watching Brognola and Bolan spar over the White House issue. “We ought to get some time off, don’t you think?”
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