Agent of Peril

by Don Pendleton

  “Turn that off,” he grumbled.

  Cabez nodded to one of his underlings and the radio clicked off with the abruptness of a gunshot.

  “Al Askari lives up to his reputation,” Cabez said.

  “I knew I should have brought the girl along instead of leaving her there.” Faswad cursed himself and looked sideways to Cabez. “What did she have in her camera?”

  “It was empty. She hadn’t taken any pictures, or she purged the memory,” Cabez explained, holding out the camera.

  Faswad examined the device for a moment. “It has a removable flash memory card.”

  Cabez blinked.

  “She switched out whatever useful information she got for a blank chip.”

  “Well, our men will find it on her,” Cabez said.

  Faswad shook his head. “Two people escaped from the compound. One was a woman.”

  “It might not have been her,” Cabez tried to explain.

  “Of course not. It was James Bond and one of his beautiful assistants, perhaps Halle Berry, no?”

  Cabez hit the floor, his cheek stinging. Faswad rubbed his sore palm and then slipped his hands into his pockets.

  “No need to get sarcastic,” Cabez said, slowly getting up. Off balance, he wasn’t able to dodge the tip of Faswad’s boot smashing into his shin, knocking him sprawling onto his face, the carpet ripping his cheek and chin raw.

  Since the fool was bald, Faswad bent over and dug his fingers into Cabez’s collar and yanked him upright. Jerked to his feet, and beyond, Cabez kicked empty air before he was dropped, staggering against the wall.

  “Kazan is still ready to move with his tanks?” Faswad asked.

  Cabez nodded, his eyes lit with the terror of a panicked animal.

  “Then get out of my sight, you bloody fool. I’m sick of you!”

  Cabez spun and got out of the room.

  It was going to be one of those nights, Faswad knew. He went to his desk and pulled out a Browning Hi-Power, checked its load and slipped it into his waistband.

  Whatever storm was coming was going to be greeted by lightning and thunder.

  THE EXECUTIONER LOWERED the M-16 and let out his breath. His finger relaxed on the trigger, and he looked left and right. Alex Kalid and Tera Geren were with him, in the shadows of an empty apartment, looking across the street toward Imal Faswad in his protected home. The building they were in had seen better decades, the balcony having long since been shorn away by constant shock waves from shelling.

  The Hezbollah commander made no secret of his hideout, and no bones about the fact that he was well protected. Bolan didn’t think that his M-16 could penetrate the mesh that covered the terrorist’s window anyway. He didn’t think anything short of a .50-caliber weapon or a rocket launcher could have cut through it. Faswad had a breeze, even if it did have to whisper through impenetrable steel mesh.

  Geren looked at him as if to ask why he didn’t take the shot to remove Faswad, the moment he was alone. She didn’t say it out loud; they were just a dozen yards from Faswad’s apartment complex.

  Bolan sequenced the MP3 player hooked to his M-16’s snooper microphone, then handed her the earpiece. He played the mention of Kazan and the tanks. Geren’s face darkened for a moment.

  At the door to the apartment, Kalid did his best pigeon coo.

  Bolan and Geren clung to the shadows, staying still as the blazing spill of a flashlight swept through the hall. The guard passed, and the Executioner relaxed again, looking out the window.

  “He was talking about someone with tanks, wasn’t he?” Bolan whispered to Geren.

  She nodded. “Faswad asked if someone named Kazan was ready to move with his tanks.”

  “So that means someone else is going to get attacked. We have to get to Faswad.”

  “Or we can listen in on his communications,” Kalid suggested. “That guard obviously has something to get his orders from.”

  Bolan weighed his options for a moment.

  Getting into the abandoned apartment building had taken some stealth, and so far they had avoided sending any more terrorists out of this world. The Executioner was here for intel, not for a clean sweep, and any enemy contact drastically increased the odds that the bad guys would shut up and let their guns do the talking instead.

  “Quick and quiet.”

  Kalid’s smile gleamed in the dark. “I’ll just give our friend a gold star.”

  Geren looked confused as the ex-blacksuit slipped into the corridor.

  Bolan returned to his crouch near the window, still keeping to the shadows.

  Below, in the street, cars were arranged so that they provided a maze against anyone who would try to drive up to the front door. Unless they had a tank of their own, there was no way to rapidly pull up or maneuver down this street. The Hezbollah had learned that suicide bombs could take them as well as their enemies.

  Car bombs weren’t the Executioner’s weapon of choice. There was too much of a chance of hitting a stray passerby with the backwash of an explosion. Cleansing flame was not meant for civilians to suffer. His war was with those who considered a bystander killed to be an acceptable loss. While he knew that as long as there was war, there would be civilian casualties, deep within his own warrior’s heart, he vowed never to add another to that fire.

  He scanned the building some more, trying to figure out how to make his strike with what he had and with a minimum of loss. Bolan knew that he was going to be leaving at least Geren behind under the pretense of supplying cover fire, and he was also contemplating doing the same for Kalid.

  The Executioner was a realist, knowing he couldn’t fight the entire world by himself, but he was also a man loath to let harm befall anyone else on his crusade. He’d been one man, fighting against the odds for so long, that the prospect of going alone against an entire complex full of Hezbollah guards and terrorists didn’t make him flinch.

  He did flinch from the mental image of Kalid and Geren, their chests ripped apart by gunfire, bodies flopping to the floor in pools of their own blood.

  Too many beloved friends had met the same fate.

  Bolan set his jaw and tore himself from his reverie. It was time for work.

  Time to do his job and stop some madmen from sending a squadron of tanks to destroy some helpless settlement.

  Shadows moved among the maze of cars below, catching his attention. Bolan snapped the M-16 to his shoulder, peering through its 4x scope. Shadows, in black, armed with suppressed Uzi submachine guns.

  Bolan gave Geren a tap and she looked down, seeing them as well. She studied them quickly through the scope on her own VEPR rifle. “They’re not ours. We don’t use Uzis for black ops.”

  “I figured as much,” Bolan answered. “Someone is looking to take out Faswad and make it look like the Israelis.”

  “To cover up their own dirty deeds?” Geren asked.

  Bolan nodded. He wanted to call out to Kalid to tell him to forget the sentry. They had a chance to take a prisoner from the conspirators involved in the tank trading. However, making a noise would betray the fact that Kalid was on the prowl, it might even get the young fighting man killed.

  He glanced back down and saw a guard crucified by inaudible spurts of gunfire, a second one tumbling lifelessly at the door to the apartment building.

  The strangers in black were moving in.

  Then the gunfire in the hall erupted.

  ALESSANDRO KALID NEVER believed he had the secrets of ninja invisibility, despite the quartet of throwing stars wrapped around his forearms. After all, ninja movies were as realistic as action movies. He paused to restrain a smile, remembering exactly who he was teaming with.

  Okay, maybe some people lived the impossible and implausible every day through sheer force of will. But Kalid wasn’t fooling himself with the concept of being an invisible, noiseless, mystical ninja capable of killing a man with a single tap of his finger. He did, however, understand the principles of stealth intimately.

 
Unlike the sentry, who produced enough sound to alert the cockroaches in the next building. Kalid moved in conjunction with the guy’s foot stomps and belabored breathing as he sucked on a cigarette to calm jittery nerves. The disgusting slurping and wheezing of his enjoyment of the cigarette reminded Kalid of why he had given up the filthy habit after only a few months.

  The sentry stopped, and Kalid paused, keeping beyond the sloppy halo of luminescence from his flashlight. He took a quick glance over his shoulder, to make sure nobody else was around, and that movement saved his life. In the darkness, he would have never seen the ribbon of steel lashing like lightning at his throat. The knife glinted off the reflected flashlight glow, however, and Kalid dropped to the ground, steel embedding in drywall where his throat was moments ago.

  He snapped out a hard kick to the mass hidden in the shadows, foot striking thigh and causing a grunt to explode from the throat of the would-be killer. Suddenly something dropped behind him, and Kalid was immersed in light, seeing his antagonist. A man in black was armed with a sound-suppressed Uzi that he was scrambling to pull up on its sling and fire.

  Enough of that. Kalid lunged, hands outstretched, grasping the Uzi and forcing all his weight on it. The enemy gunman struggled to maneuver his weapon as Kalid shoved the weapon between them. The Uzi slammed into soft flesh and clunked hard against pelvic bone and hard pouches on the gunman’s belt. The impact set off the submachine gun, quiet rounds ripping off in its muted roar. The impact of the bullets on drywall was louder, and the cone of light from the flashlight clouded with splinters, dust and debris.

  Kalid pushed forward, going down to his knees and ducking low as another struggle sounded behind him. He didn’t want to make a large target for whatever gun muzzle was at his back. So far, it was a three-way fight, and two sides were set to kill anyone who got in their way.

  Kalid and his opponent slammed into the floor with a hard thud, and the guy beneath him screamed as the muzzle-blast from his weapon scorched his hip. The Uzi finally locked empty, and with a surge of energy Kalid pushed up onto one hand and brought his elbow down with crushing force between the newcomer’s legs. Another blistering howl of pain split the air and in Egyptian-accented Arabic, a voice cried out behind him.

  “Zimal! Are you—”

  “Don’t shoot!” Kalid answered quickly, praying he had every inflection of his father’s Egyptian accent.

  The other gunman froze for a moment, and Kalid rolled out of the way, ripping the P-226 from its thigh holster.

  The Egyptian gunman brought up his weapon, trying to track him as he disappeared into the shadows beyond the spill of the flashlight. Kalid was able to see where he was by the muted red glow of his suppressed weapon, the muzzle-flash dimmed, but not dismissed, as the brutal burns on Zimal’s hip attested to. Kalid locked the glowing nightsights of his pistol just above the flickering muzzle-flash and fired as fast and hard as he could. The SIG-Sauer created a flashing thunderstorm in the confines of the hallway, muzzle-blast overpressure hammering his head.

  The Uzi-packing Egyptian, however, was suffering more than a headache from the noise. His chest, slammed by 9 mm slugs, puffed out spurts of blood that misted in the glare of the flashlight. Kalid’s target went down, groaning and clutching at wounds.

  Zimal, however, picked up his second wind and tried to grab Kalid’s wrist. The ex-blacksuit flipped his pistol across his chest, not wanting to get his own muzzle rammed into his belly. The mysterious Egyptian commando pulled on Kalid’s arm, trying to break it since he couldn’t pry the gun loose. Kalid instead twisted his arm and brought his other hand, filled with the steel of the SIG-Sauer, hard into Zimal’s face.

  Flesh tore and blood flew from the impact. Kalid hauled back and brought his gun down again, feeling bone crush as more flesh pulped. He stopped counting the impacts after ten, prying his trapped wrist free and using both hands to keep bringing down the handgun to continue to crush the head of the guy who tried to kill him.

  “Alex!” a voice cut through his haze.

  He looked up, and Bolan stepped into the light, concern softening his hawkish features.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sorry about the noise,” Kalid said. He stuffed the bloody pistol into his hip holster and grabbed for his shoulder-slung rifle. “They’re Egyptian. I heard one speak.”

  “And they’re moving on Faswad.”

  Kalid bent and pulled a pistol off the Egyptian he’d beaten to death. Unleathering the P-226, he placed his adversary’s pistol in the holster and stuffed the SIG-Sauer into his butt pack. He didn’t want to have to use the handgun until he checked it for damage from multiple impacts with a human skull.

  “Then we’d better get to Faswad first,” Kalid surmised.

  “That’s the plan, Alex,” Bolan answered.

  Kalid was hot on the big man’s heels.

  7

  Major Pedal Tofo heard the gunfire in the abandoned apartment building behind him as he was storming through the entrance of Imal Faswad’s building. Gripping his Uzi tighter, he cursed Zimal and Orund for allowing someone to get off gunshots to raise alarm. He’d personally break the fingers of their left hands for this.

  He and the rest of the cleanup crew were going to have to make do with what little surprise that they had managed. The lobby of the apartment building was filled with Hezbollah agents who had been trying to relax despite a palpable edge of fear in the air. At the sight of six shadowy wraiths entering, packing automatic weapons, the terrorists froze in disbelief. Tofo held down the trigger of his Uzi, sweeping his sixth of the room. The other members of the Egyptian commando team were cutting the room into slices, hammering muffled Parabellum slugs into whoever they saw. It was a simultaneous sweep as the eight clueless terrorists were just too slow to get a good grip on their stashed weaponry.

  The lobby was easy.

  Tofo was going to have to work for everything else.

  He turned to his men. Two were to take the elevator, while he and the rest were going to hoof it up the main stairs, dealing with any resistance along the way. With audacity and violence of action, the two men sent ahead would be able to form an anvil against which any resistance would be smashed.

  With the team split further, Tofo led the charge up the stairs, immediately spotting a half-dressed Hezbollah gunman stumbling onto the stairs, rifle held at waist level. Tofo’s Uzi chattered mutedly and ripped open the gunner. Without a second thought, the major sidestepped the corpse and continued upward, one of his commandos kneeling on the landing behind him and opening fire into a hallway.

  Autofire finally erupted in full throaty volume in the quiet apartment complex, and Tofo took the stairs three at a time. His black BDUs were soaked with sweat as he continued upward at a breakneck pace. A grenade thundered below him, and Tofo knew his commandos were in for a fight.

  The Egyptian major was a professional. Slamming against a wall, he looked up and spotted a trio of gunners scrambling to take up a defensive position at the top of the stairs. One of them screamed as he was stitched from behind, and Tofo swept the other two with his submachine gun.

  He looked down, and saw all three of his men coming up, only one man showing signs of slowing down with a gunshot wound drenching his pant leg with dark, sticky blood.

  “Hold the stairwell,” Tofo ordered him, handing him a couple spare fragmentation grenades. The Egyptian commando, Anwar, nodded. Tofo recognized the sweat glistening on his face as a sign of shock and blood loss, but surrounded by enemies, there was no way they could stop to give him even minor medical assistance. He continued into the depths of the hallway for his date with Faswad.

  THE EXECUTIONER HAD crossed the street and reached the dead Hezbollah guards at the entrance to the apartment building when he heard the first grenade explode and automatic weapons hammering incessantly inside. Faswad had a hardsite here, but the men striking into the depths of a terrorist head shed were consummate professionals. Entering the lobby, he saw it was filled w
ith dead bodies, but the destruction from autofire was minimal. The intruders could aim swiftly, and put their lead on target with precision and lightning quickness.

  Trained commandos, dressed in black, hitting an enemy so hard they didn’t even have time to react. It would have given Mack Bolan pause if he weren’t in a rush to rescue Imal Faswad. He’d started for the stairs when a couple of gunners appeared from the back of the lobby, brandishing a handgun and a rifle, a look of confusion on each face. Bolan paused in midstep, bringing around his M-16 and triggering a short burst that took out the rifleman. Two VEPR rifles blasted simultaneously from the entrance as Geren and Kalid opened fire on the handgunner, blowing him into so much stew meat.

  “Stay here and guard the lobby. Don’t engage the Hezbollah agents if you don’t have to, but watch out for the guys in black. They’re hard core,” Bolan told them.

  Bolan could tell that Alex Kalid was ready to follow him to the gates of Hades armed with a spoon if the Executioner only gave the word, and was frustrated to be relegated to rear security. The look of frustration disappeared after only a heartbeat, however.

  “Stay hard!” Kalid called out.

  Geren and Kalid separated to take cover and Bolan turned, continuing up the stairs, finding the corpse of a gunman ahead of him. He looked at the landing, smoke billowing yet from that first grenade detonation. He looked into a hallway and saw a group of armed men and women, cut down by autofire. Distantly, he could hear the cries of frightened children. A head poked around the corner, holding a weapon, looking at the Executioner.

  The soldier checked his fire, seeing a teenaged girl, armed with a pistol, peering with bloodshot, tear-filled eyes. This was a full-fledged homestead, as Bolan had feared it would be. The Egyptian commandos were here to make sure Faswad and anyone in the same building would never speak again.

  A roaring gun battle sounded a couple floors above, the thunder spilling down the stairs in a waterfall of noise.

  Bolan put his finger to his lips and waved the girl back behind cover.