Agent of Peril

by Don Pendleton

  No, the Executioner couldn’t count on his usual run-and gun tactics, the audacious violence of action that could freeze an untrained man into paralysis. He’d have to be better than that to hope to have a chance to get to the tanks and cause them damage before fighting his way back past them. Bolan surveyed the layout, then lifted the hem of the tent he was next to, peering inside with his hand mirror.

  The tent was packed with fuel drums.

  It was a shame that the drums weren’t closer, Bolan thought for a moment. Again, Kazan and his forces were proving professional enough to keep fuel and ammo and other supplies spread far enough apart. He didn’t even think this was all the fuel for the tanks, and the other tents, spread twenty feet apart, would be able to protect their contents should one detonate.

  Bolan’s eyes narrowed.

  A detonation would attract attention, but it would put the guard on alert.

  A fire, on the other hand…

  Bolan sliced a vent in the tent and slipped inside. It reeked of fuel fumes, and the lack of breathable oxygen forced him back out of the tent. Every ounce of his strength went to keeping from gasping for breath, coughing, and attracting attention. Finally he got his lungs back in working order, breathing slowly and evenly, his brain no longer fogged by the heavy weight of diesel in the air.

  The Executioner felt in his usual combat harness and found a thermite packet with a remote detonator. With thermite to cut through the side of a fuel drum hull, and then to ignite it, the Executioner had his means of diversion.

  It was a thin chance at diversion. He’d have to get some distance between himself and the tent for his ploy to work, and even then, there was no guarantee that more guards wouldn’t be dispatched to protect the parked tanks. However, the separation of the tents and the vehicles did give Bolan the hope that the camp would only respond to the obvious disaster and its potential to damage the other fuel and ammo supplies, rather than be concerned about the fire spreading across the lane to reach the tanks.

  By touch, Bolan set the thermite against a fifty-five-gallon drum of diesel, setting the radio command detonator. He withdrew from the line of storage tents and crab walked along, the MP-5 tracking for sentries who might cast their glance his way. Each moment Bolan delayed was another chance he could be spotted. If he failed, there was always J. R. Rust ready to phone in the necessity for an Israeli air strike to smash this camp to bits, and blow any chance of finding the renegade Egyptian pushing Israel to the brink of war, and perhaps sparking the bloodshed he sought to prevent.

  Bolan being dead would only be an incidental detriment to failing, but he had long ago accepted the fact that one day he’d end up stopping a bullet, or being too close to ground zero of an explosion.

  Whatever his fate, the Executioner would meet it without flinching, and most likely still trying to accomplish his mission.

  It was do or die time.

  MOHAMMED KAZAN HADN’T heard from Faswad or Cabez since the day before, and he was getting anxious. The plan was to make the strike at the crack of dawn the following day. Consulting his watch, he realized that to make the deadline, he’d have to start fueling and stocking up the tanks so they could get on the road by three. However, he didn’t want to cause too much activity right now. He had a narrow window ahead when he knew American spy satellites and spy planes wouldn’t be watching this part of the Lebanese coast.

  It wasn’t common knowledge that America kept a close eye on the border between Lebanon and Israel, but with Syria’s occupation of the nation, it was only logical. Kazan had amateur astronomers watching the skies for him, as well as more sophisticated means from his commanders back in Damascus. Faswad was missing, and his headquarters hit, but Cabez had managed to call in. Not that the Syrian really wanted or needed the blessing of the Hezbollah. It just made things easier for him to operate against their common enemy.

  Coordination.

  Even if the Hezbollah was only good for being a line of bodies to stop Israeli bullets.

  Kazan checked his watch. The regular patrols were still overhead. It was a Briton, he’d heard, who was giving out the overflight information about the spy satellites. Whoever it was, he gave good information, and his sky watchers made double certain. The West, with its vaunted high technology, was ignorant and helpless.

  Something flickered outside his window, and Kazan immediately felt his stomach knot. He turned back and saw that flames were leaping from one of the tents.

  He threw open the window, regardless of any possibility of a sniper in the area. “Get that fire under control!”

  His men were already in action, reacting to the billowing column of smoke flashed with fire.

  Kazan looked to the skies instinctively, knowing that while he couldn’t see the satellites above, they could probably see the fire in that tent. Someone could not have vented the tents recently enough, and something set off the fumes, causing a fire that built to a flash point. There were any number of ways that the fire could have started in the tent; he’d seen these fires start before, almost spontaneously.

  His paranoia was currently screaming otherwise. He scanned the hills around the complex, bringing up his night-vision binoculars.

  Nothing moved. He lowered the glasses, spun and picked up the phone, wondering if maybe attack helicopters were hiding below the horizon, waiting for a chance to lock their Hellfire missiles on any tank that powered up.

  They’d be too low, though, for any allied radar sources to detect.

  Kazan looked out the window. His men were reacting to the fire like a well-oiled machine, and even the guards on the scene were keeping up their patrols, despite spending spare moments glancing at the flickering insanity of the tent fire. Soldiers with shovels tossed mounds of sand onto the fire while chemical fire extinguishers pumped out clouds of ice-cold carbon dioxide. It was no good, but luckily diesel fuel lacked the explosive properties of gasoline.

  He stepped back from the window and reached for the mouthpiece of a communications uplink. “What’s the condition of our perimeter patrols?”

  Kazan frowned. He brought up his night-vision binoculars again and scanned the camp. The flare of the fire made them almost useless, and the bulk of the camouflage netting over his parked tanks made any further attempts at scanning useless.

  But still, there was that prickling on the back of his neck. Danger was near.

  BOLAN HAD FINISHED with the fourth of the M1s, taking advantage of the chaos of the fire to do his work, and started toward the fifth of the tanks. He’d developed a quick pattern, placing the SLAM mines directly on the axle, angled inward. Taking out the treads would be a delay of days. However, punching right through and into the drive train would take far longer to repair. Even popping one of the wheels that worked the treads, in addition to shattering the only means of propulsion for the tank would involve repairs that the locals didn’t have the parts or skilled labor for.

  Then there was the SLAM mounted just under the barrel, aiming inward. Bolan was intimately aware of the location of the M1’s magazine from blueprints from the trip to Lebanon. He slipped the munition under the turret. With the boxy hull of the tank acting as a backdrop, the SLAM would slice its blast up and into the turret’s relatively weak underside. If the tanks had any ammunition on board, the resulting jet of explosive force would be magnified by 120 mm shells detonating.

  Bolan paused, detecting movement behind him. Voices were calling, and the camouflage netting billowed as someone swept it aside opposite the first row of M1s.

  He hadn’t even had a chance to mine all of the M1s, and they were sending in guards to double-check on the tanks. In the darkness, they might not spot the munitions that Bolan hid behind wheels or under turrets, but there was still the risk they might. The soldier hit the dirt and crawled under the fifth tank, holding a SLAM in one hand and the radio detonator in the other.

  At least he’d wreak havoc on the armored force by setting off the charges he had planted.

  Fla
shlights pierced the shadows, sweeping along the massive tanks as they sat like dinosaurs, sleeping through the din and ruckus of desperate men putting out a fire. One spill of light splashed under the tank Bolan was nestled beneath, making him squint as it reflected off a metal tread. He looked and watched the cones of illumination continue on either side of the tank he was under.

  He’d hidden his charges well, stuffed deep into cracks his hand could fit into, and not much else. Luckily the SLAMs were no larger than his hand, despite the weight of their explosive charge and command detonation antenna.

  Bolan eased out from under the tank, looking around as he heard a cry that sounded similar to “all clear” in Arabic. He didn’t trust it and kept crouched, senses alert for the sound of boots through dirt. There could have been other sentries crawling among the tanks, without flashlights.

  So far, he noticed none, but Bolan kept his MP-5 ready as he reached under the turrets of numbers 5 and 6, placing his magazine-blasting charges.

  The Doomsday numbers were tumbling, and they were all sliding down to land on his neck.

  He weighed the possibility of moving out from under the camouflage netting to the tent for the T-72s, but realized spending a long time among the T-72s, especially now since they were being checked over, however cursory the inspection, would be stepping into view of his enemies.

  Instead, Bolan reached in and spent a few moments activating the antennas on the remainder of his SLAMs in his war bag, leaving them there, stuffed behind the shadow of the sixth tank’s treads.

  He slipped out from under the camouflage netting after looking both ways. He primed a high-explosive grenade from off his vest and judged the distance to the chain-link fence. It was a mere forty feet, so Bolan crouched low, in case any shrapnel came back his way, then aimed on an angle until he had a spot of fence seventy-five feet or so away, and out of line of the sentries who’d passed the tanks.

  The spoon pinged as the grenade flew from Bolan’s hand and he dropped low into the dirt.

  The ground shook, the air hissing with flying bits of steel.

  In his own explosion of motion, feet pounding, Bolan crossed the distance to the hole he made big enough to drive a pickup truck through. Long strides ate the yards in a matter of moments as gunmen scrambled to see what the hell was going on. A few opened fire to rake the hill above the perimeter fence, not realizing it was someone breaking out, not breaking in.

  As soon as Bolan reached the dust cloud that obscured the hole he’d blasted, he paused and knelt. The radio detonator came to his hand, and Bolan hit the thumb stud.

  One gunman began tracking a line of AK fire toward him when the shock wave erupted from the six M1s.

  The night turned to day as the fireball licked into the sky, the shock wave tossing enemy soldiers like rag dolls.

  Bolan smiled as, for the first time in the past few days, he witnessed a massive detonation that didn’t send him knocking around the countryside like a soccer ball.

  11

  Mohammed Kazan, heading out of his barracks, was halfway to the parked M1 tanks when they went up in a staggering flash. Unprepared for the detonation, he staggered backward, tripping into a Syrian guard racing after him. The collision between the two of them was a head knocker, and Kazan was slammed to his knees.

  Even before he saw stars from his head bouncing off another man’s, he registered muzzle-flashes in the distance, swiftly following a small explosion. At first Kazan thought the blast had come from one of the barrels in the fuel tent, but his mind swiftly narrowed in on the sound of the blast originating toward the fence, on the far side of his tanks. His men started firing, and then suddenly…

  Kazan cleared his head.

  “We’ve got an intruder!” he bellowed.

  Men were still torn. Those who were fighting the fuel fire were literally floored by the sudden shock wave. One man had been tossed into the blaze and came running out, screaming, covered in the flower of flame, arms flapping like some fiery phoenix. Others were picking themselves up, their FAMAS rifles raking through a thick cloud of billowing smoke, trying to track a target that was on the other side of the immolating tanks.

  “We’ve got an intruder! Get him!” Kazan shouted, hauling a Beretta from his hip holster and charging forward. He cut around the back, vaguely aware of his men. He saw the camp’s fence and a single shadow disappearing over the top of the ridge.

  Kazan opened fire, his Beretta cracking, spitting brass and flame. His fellow gunmen cut loose too, but he knew it was already too late.

  He turned to look at the ruptured tanks that were vomiting flames. This single man had found the weakness of his mightiest weapons and torn them apart. He didn’t understand why the whole camp hadn’t been pounded into oblivion by a sudden assault of strike fighters, but he knew that if the mysterious saboteur was allowed to go free, the camp and its Syrian specialists were compromised.

  “We need to get to the trucks, now!” he barked to his men.

  BOLAN FELT THE BULLETS slicing the air over his head, an entire swarm of high-velocity slugs parting the air with their miniature sonic booms. His boots skidded in the sand as he cut down the other side. His wheels, a Volkswagen Beetle, lay waiting across a hundred-yard dash over scrub and sand. Long legs pumped, digging in on the loosely packed ground, making each step take more effort than it should, but Bolan clutched the MP-5 tightly, knowing that if he slipped and stumbled he’d lose precious moments.

  He was under no illusion that the camp wasn’t awake and ready to tear across the roads of Lebanon to hunt him down, even if they were in a section of the nation that Syria didn’t “allegedly” control. Hezbollah was known to allow the Syrian army to enter their area of control to shell civilian areas in Israel itself. After fifteen seconds, Bolan was at the VW, and he skidded to a halt, body slamming against the curved little car.

  He tore open the door and slipped in, tossing the submachine gun onto the seat next to him and firing up the engine. Sand flew as the rear wheels spun, then caught and the Volkswagen gave a momentary fishtail, pulling out onto the asphalt, revving along.

  The little car wasn’t the kind of high performance machine that the Executioner would have chosen, but it was as tough as a three-dollar steak, and it was reliable, all the things that Bolan appreciated in any piece of equipment he used. He glided the compact vehicle down the road, keeping the speed relatively low so that he wouldn’t attract attention. He glanced out the window and scanned his back trail.

  Headlights.

  A line of headlights.

  Bolan pumped the gas and worked the transmission into Fourth Gear, pushing the little Volkswagen as fast as it could go. The road began whizzing by outside and he tore along. The speedometer, set for metric measurements, told him 120 km/h. A bit over seventy miles an hour, he figured. He worked the wheel, watching the rearview mirror as much as the speed of his vehicle would allow. Dust began exploding off the asphalt behind him in a series of straight lines, the telltale puffs of bullets impacting on the ground, chewing it up. The steering wheel dragged against his knees, and steering was an exercise in banging his elbow against one door and his shoulders against the car seats. Bolan wished he had something with more legroom, but the Beetle was practically invisible in Lebanon.

  The Volkswagen was tough and reliable, but against small-arms fire it wasn’t going to be much good. Bolan was getting pressed hard, and he coaxed more speed out of the engine. Bullets pinged off the back of the VW and he winced, realizing that the rear-engined automobile was vulnerable. He spun out and hit the parking brake, doing a 180-degree turn. Bolan shifted back up into Fourth and plunged toward the pursuing trucks, Peugeot pickups by the look of them. Gunmen were trying to adjust for Bolan’s sudden swerve and change in tactics. A couple of bursts of autofire slammed into the windshield, and the slender window frame turned into a twisted mass of broken glass. Bolan swept up his MP-5 and pounded its stock through the shattered glass. He swerved between the first two Peugeots
and saw there were more behind them, two pickups and a pair of two-and-a-half-ton trucks that had their canopies pulled away, the men inside poking their rifles out hoping to be in on the kill.

  Bolan fired off short bursts, first into the oncoming pickups, then sweeping one of the big trucks with the rest of his magazine. He avoided one out-of-control enemy Peugeot by swerving out of the bigger truck’s path.

  Bolan looked for the rearview mirror, but realized that it was gone with the rest of the front windshield. Instead, he checked the side mirror and sure enough the two lead pickups were in hot pursuit. He glanced away just as he heard the smash and crash of metal plowing through metal.

  One pickup suddenly crumpled into a mass of mangled flesh and metal under the front grille and wheels of the heavy troop truck.

  Bolan hit the parking brake once more, and the Beetle spun.

  Escape wasn’t possible, not with the relatively low speed of the old Volkswagen, but right then, running wasn’t paramount on the mind of the Executioner. He’d been suckered the night before, and these punks who were set to launch an assault on helpless human beings were just the right people to feel his own fist of rage.

  MOHAMMED KAZAN FLINCHED as he watched the other Peugeot suddenly crumple like a cheap cup under the wheels of the troop truck, the screams of the dying filling the air. His face reddened with rage as he watched eight good men mangled, and the troop truck stall as it got the remains of the smaller truck caught in its front axle.

  Kazan cursed, scanning the road for the Volkswagen that had darted along behind the troop carrier. “Kill him!”

  “The truck is bouncing, we can’t get enough of an aim!” one of his men explained.

  Kazan, in a fit of fury, rammed his elbow into his impudent subordinate’s face, blood flying from a shattered nose and teeth. He winced as he pulled an incisor out of his skin, then looked around. “Where is he?”