Agent of Peril

by Don Pendleton

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill you, and we’re already burying one buddy.”

  “That buddy wouldn’t happen to be part of Unit 777, would he? A guy gone AWOL?”

  Rust held his tongue. He, too, was stung at the loss of the brave, young Egyptian. “You have my handle? Or do I ask elsewhere?”

  “If the Brotherhood finds out that we gave up one of their locations…”

  “Quit pussyfooting, Jake.”

  “All right,” he answered. The embassy Marine spilled all.

  BOLAN WINCED AS GEREN finished taping his hip wound. His body was covered in various patches of tape. Antiseptic gel was squeezed over his scrapes and into the furrow a bullet had slashed through his flesh.

  At any other time, Geren would have been amazed at the rippling muscles under the sleekness of his skin. He was supple and limber, despite a face that showed the toll of years she never wanted to see. It didn’t detract from his handsomeness. In a way, the crisscross of old battle wounds added to his appeal as a man who kept going despite countless injuries. The bullet crease on Bolan’s hip would be just another streak on the road map of his skin.

  “So you slept with Alex?” Bolan asked her.

  Geren leaned back. “I’m that obvious?”

  “I recognized the brittleness in your voice when you were making J.R. back down,” Bolan explained.

  “You’re not passing judgment?” Geren asked, slipping off the bed they were using as an impromptu first-aid station.

  “I’ve been guilty of worse.”

  Geren’s jaw dropped.

  “We all have moments when we reach out to others,” Bolan said, standing and pulling on a fresh pair of jeans.

  “I’ll understand if you want me to sit on the sidelines. I might not be thinking clearly,” Geren said.

  Bolan set his jaw firmly, regarding her. “You unraveled just for a little bit, but you recovered quickly.”

  Geren bent and fished under the bed, coming free with a case full of guns. She was trying to dismiss the image of Anwar’s sad eyes burrowing into her soul. “Where did J.R. get this firepower?”

  “We picked this dive for a reason,” Bolan explained.

  Rust entered the room. “Yeah. It’s a safehouse. When we put operatives in the area, we try to set them here. Not too many tourist dollars go into a joint like this, so the Egyptian army doesn’t place a group of squatters on hand. We have our own squatters here, and they keep a supply of specialized equipment.”

  Geren pulled out a MAC-10 and loaded it with a magazine of 9 mm manglers. “Especially if that specialty happens to be blowing people away?” She grabbed some spare magazines and put them on the bed, pulling out a hip pouch to carry them all in.

  “A Glock.” Geren picked out the polymer Austrian pistol. “I’ll take this over these cheapo Helwans, thank you.”

  “My current gear is good enough. I will take that M-16 though,” Bolan said.

  “Here you go,” Geren replied. “Isn’t that long for indoor action?”

  “You’re right. Grab an M-16 for yourself, just in case, and hand me that MP-5.”

  “Too bad the M-16s don’t have grenade launchers,” Geren stated, complying with the big man’s wishes.

  Bolan checked the feel of the weapon against his shoulder, then slung it. “I’ll make do. You have places for us to see, people to do, J.R.?”

  “Perceptive as always, Striker.”

  “Great. Hold down the fort?” Bolan asked.

  Rust nodded. “Just phone in your location.”

  “You got it.”

  Bolan regarded Geren with his steely gaze. “Ready to raise hell?”

  “Let’s turn this town on its ear,” Geren snapped.

  ALEX KALID FELT THE PAIN first. His whole body ached as he hung by his wrists. Chains dug into his forearms, and his chest was on fire as his own weight made it difficult to breathe. That difficulty had shocked him from unconsciousness, and he could feel his feet pushing, trying to keep him from strangling himself. His eyes opened and he saw a hawk-faced Egyptian man, rubbing his goateed chin. The face was familiar, and it took only a few more heartbeats to pump enough blood into his brain to give him the sentience to recognize Major Pedal Tofo.

  “You have awakened, Sleeping Beauty,” Tofo greeted him.

  It took a few moments to register his surroundings. It was mostly dark, but a vat of coals glowed in one corner. The harsh light of a naked lightbulb rained down on the room, throwing things in stark contrast. They weren’t alone. At least three men were visible, and Kalid wasn’t sure who was behind him, but his back tingled with the presence of an unseen body.

  Kalid looked down at his chest and realized it was bare. As he tried to shift position, he felt himself dangling, bare to the world.

  “No wonder you called me Sleeping Beauty,” Kalid answered. “You’ve seen perfection.”

  “Defiance? These men can peel the skin from your body for a week and leave you awake and screaming every moment of it,” Tofo said, stepping closer.

  “You want me to scream, keep breathing in my face,” Kalid answered. “Ever hear of the concept called breath mint?”

  The punch to the stomach came with sudden violence, making him gag. Bile rose in his throat, and he teetered backward on the chains.

  “What do you know?” Tofo asked.

  Kalid caught the motion of Tofo’s spin kick in time to tense up. The Egyptian’s shin smashed hard into Kalid’s tightened abdominal muscles, and he was left breathless a second time, tasting the acid of his own digestive juices in his nose. He breathed out heavily through his nostrils, making himself look like he was suffering more than he was.

  Tofo leaned in close again. He brought up his knee, catching Kalid in the crotch.

  This time, Kalid vomited, chunks of his last meal pouring over his lower lip and spilling onto his chest.

  “This is going to be a very long, very bad day for you,” Tofo whispered in his ear.

  THE EXECUTIONER CHECKED the load on his machine pistol, then began a countdown with his fingers. Geren watched his hand while keeping an eye on their back trail. When Bolan’s fingers descended into a fist, he swung around and opened the door to the back of the restaurant. Sunset was drawing a blanket of deep blue across the sky outside. By all rights, if the restaurant were legitimate, it should have been packed by now.

  Instead, the two men in the kitchen, smoking lazily, jerked up with surprise at the sight of two armed people racing toward them. One of them reached for a knife while the other clawed for a pistol tucked into his waistband.

  Bolan breathed an internal sigh of relief—this was a legitimate hardsite. He directed his MP-5 toward the guy attempting a fast-draw. The machine pistol burped as Parabellum rounds exited the foot-long Gem-Tech suppressor. The handgunner did more than burp as his body was kicked across a tabletop of pots and pans, metal clamoring and clanging on the floor before he crashed atop them.

  The other figure was a blur of motion, knife slashing toward Bolan’s chest. The Executioner was barely able to bring up the frame of his machine pistol to block the descending edge, metal singing off metal. The point bounced, but not far enough to spare Bolan a wicked welt along the back of his hand. Shock made him drop the weapon, only its sling keeping him from losing it.

  The knife fighter took another step forward and Bolan was ready to block and counterattack when Geren screamed, “Drop!”

  Bolan instinctively curled up into a ball, halving his height. The knife fighter’s slash missed him, but not by much as he felt his hair brushed by the razor edge of the butcher knife. More of the strangled burping sounds filled the kitchen, blood raining down on Bolan’s head and back. He looked up, seeing the Egyptian knife man staggering backward, most of his chest and face gone. He seemed to hang for a moment, then the strings of life that kept his body erect let go, spilling the marionette to the floor.

  “It’s about time you got out of my line of fire,” Geren told Bolan. “You okay?”<
br />
  Bolan looked at his hand, grimaced, and then looked over his machine pistol to see if it was in operating condition.

  “You’re bleeding again.”

  “It’s far from my heart,” Bolan answered. “Watch the door. We lost the element of surprise.”

  Geren nodded, and Bolan drew a roll of duct tape. Wiping off most of the blood with a dish towel, he ripped a tattered rag loose, packed it over the cut and taped down the improvised pressure pad. Flexing his fingers for a moment, he decided he passed the test of manual dexterity.

  A couple of tentative voices called through the waiter swing doors.

  “Ready?” Geren asked.

  Bolan nodded. “I’ve wasted enough time.”

  “No rest for the wicked.”

  No rest, no mercy and nowhere to hide, Bolan thought, shouldering from the kitchen to the dining area, MP-5 up and tracking.

  15

  The scene as Mack Bolan plunged into the restaurant’s main dining area was one he was familiar with from countless such raids, the particulars changed only due to decor and nation. Four men, armed with rifles, were still reacting to their impression that something was wrong.

  Even with a moment’s advance warning, the gunmen in the room were still caught off guard by the explosion of flesh that hammered through the door, 9 mm autobursts ripping from the submachine gun. Bolan wasn’t aiming for flesh, only for disorientation. Tabletops exploded as he swept them while he kept two steps ahead of any possible reactive fire.

  One step behind him, moving at the same breakneck pace, was Tera Geren, her MAC-10 making a sound like an extended rip roar as the weapon cycled through the remains of its magazine. The two warriors had crossed half the restaurant, getting behind the cover of a buffet made of heavy oak. Finally the enemy started opening up, but by then, the thick buffet table absorbed the return autofire like a sponge, letting none through to harm Bolan or Geren.

  Bolan reached into his combat harness and pulled a canister from one pouch, then showed Geren the label. He pulled the pin, sailing the bomb over the buffet.

  Geren and Bolan both opened their mouths to equalize the pressure in their eardrums just as the restaurant sounded like Thor himself was striking the Earth. The blazing flash of the stun-shock grenade flickered brightly, but not enough to impair Bolan’s vision. They popped up and spotted their adversaries, sprawled dazedly.

  “Be gentle with them,” Bolan advised Geren, bounding to the stairwell that led to the second floor.

  Halfway up, he heard grunts of pain as Geren kicked and herded the blinded and deafened terrorists into one corner of the room. Reloading on the run, Bolan shook his head.

  Reaching the first landing, HK cocked and primed, he looked up in time to spot a couple of newcomers to the fight. They were close, and Bolan could see clearly down the barrels of their submachine guns. At barely ten feet, Bolan had no tricks to take the men alive, so he gave up more potential prisoners, bringing up the MP-5. The sizzling little machine pistol hissed out a slaughtering wave of slugs that ripped a bloody swath through the two men.

  Without stopping, the Executioner vaulted their lifeless forms before they came completely to a halt, landing in a half crouch, scanning the second story of the restaurant. Down the hall, a gun barked, belching missiles at him one at a time.

  Bolan hit the ground with a grunt, slugs whizzing over his head. It took a moment for realization to kick in. Someone else had a Desert Eagle, and they were hammering heavyweight hollowpoints at him. A .44 Magnum round gouged out a massive scratch in the floor near Bolan’s face and he threw himself hard to one side, barely avoiding the next geyser of splinters from the hardwood floor. He ripped off a couple of bursts, and lunged to the other side of the hall on instinct. A chunk of plaster blew out of the wall where his head had been.

  Even as he was cursing the irony of the situation, Bolan was raking the doorway with his MP-5, bullets hammering away mercilessly at the barricaded opponent.

  The enemy fire stopped, and Bolan let the machine pistol drop on its sling, smoothly drawing his own Desert Eagle to replace the emptied weapon. He advanced slowly, fully aware that each step might be his last.

  The sound of a magazine being rammed home and the slide being racked on a big pistol brought that fact into stark reality, and Bolan charged forward, cutting the distance between himself and the doorway. The terrorist with the Desert Eagle swung around again, bringing up the big .44 when Bolan was right in his face, left forearm deflecting the gun skyward. The Executioner swung around the muzzle of his own weapon, the heavy, reinforced barrel striking jawbone solidly.

  The terrorist’s head bounced off the doorjamb. The impact forced a reflexive trigger pull, the muzzle-blast crashing across the Executioner’s senses like the wrath of God. Blind and deaf for an instant, Bolan didn’t give up his fight. With a powerful surge of one leg, he kneed the terrorist between his legs and grabbed a fistful of hair. With a savage twist, he sidestepped across the hall, his shoulder striking a wall. Bolan kept dragging his opponent headfirst to meet the plaster, feeling hair rip free in his hands. The soldier yanked hard again, feeling more scalp tear away with the second skull-bash.

  A fist arced weakly into Bolan’s rock-hard stomach. He took the hit and stomped his combat boot hard on the man’s instep. His vision was clearing quickly. Bolan twisted and slashed his elbow into the neck of the Muslim Brotherhood gunman like an ax.

  The terrorist finally collapsed to the ground.

  “Drop the guns!” a voice called from one side.

  Bolan blinked away the last of the flash hovering in his eyes. He was aware of a slender figure aiming a weapon at him.

  “I said drop the guns!” she shouted.

  Bolan looked at her, letting the Desert Eagle fall to the floor. “Why didn’t you shoot when you had the chance?”

  The gun in the young girl’s hands shook. “The other guns too.”

  “I’m not here to kill you. I’m here looking for answers.”

  “What about the others?” she asked.

  “They were going to kill me.”

  The gun was wavering now. Bolan took a step forward. The muzzle exploded, but the shot was far and wide, and the girl, in pure shock, took a step back, nearly dropping the weapon. Instead, the Executioner lunged in and chopped the weapon from her shaking fingers.

  “You, however, weren’t,” Bolan told the girl as she massaged her shocked hand.

  “What do you want?”

  “The Muslim Brotherhood took a friend of mine. I want to know where he is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Bolan looked the young woman up and down, then bent, picking up her weapon. “I didn’t think you did.”

  The girl nodded at the boneless lump, face leaking blood into the carpeting. “He knows.”

  “He’s not looking too talkative,” Bolan said. “But you are.”

  “Because I am not of the Brotherhood. I don’t have the right parts to be a brother. Even if I did, I wouldn’t care except that they have a knife to my throat,” she said.

  “But I’m still stuck with no information to stop these bastards,” Bolan growled.

  “He has a phone. It records numbers.”

  Mack Bolan smiled.

  TERA GEREN HUNG ON TO the whirlwind as they followed the list of phone numbers they got from the Muslim Brotherhood restaurant. It was at the second stop that they saw the familiar, bullet-pocked black van. It was parked in front of a small house, and the majority of the damage was being covered with tape as Bolan and Geren pulled up in the Audi. The guy doing the bodywork started to reach for his gun, but Geren was out of the car, swinging the stock of her MAC-10 into the man’s face. His head bounced off the back of the van, and Geren nailed him in the stomach with the stock again. He crumpled to the ground.

  Bolan was moving to the front door. He stopped halfway. He drew and primed two stun-shock grenades from his harness and whipped them like major league fastballs through the front windo
w of the little house. Glass shattered instants before the atmosphere inside rocked with thunder and light.

  Geren was hot on the Executioner’s heels as they burst through the front door.

  They hit the house fast and hard. Bolan swept the side of the hallway away from the living room with the unblinking eye of his machine pistol while Geren made an immediate hook to get to the men who’d taken the full force of the shock grenades. One man was starting to move and she gave him a full-force punt right under his chin, feeling his jaw break from the toe of her steel-reinforced boot. The guy flopped like a landed fish and stopped squirming on his back, eyes half open but unfocused.

  “Nobody else make a move!” Geren shouted. She fired off a burst that landed between the splayed legs of one stunned Egyptian, and he scurried back to the wall.

  “Your van was used to take my man,” she continued. “I have twenty-seven shots. There’s only five of you, so I can take my time killing you.”

  A blast of autofire sounded to one side, but she wasn’t distracted. The man she knew as Colonel Brandon Stone was ripping through the house on a rampage. Nobody would come to blindside her. Suppressed submachine-gun fire answered the blast, and a body hit the floor heavily.

  “Your backup is dead,” Geren announced. “You’re next.”

  “Go to hell, Jew,” one Egyptian began before his knee exploded into a volcano of bone and blood. He twisted and screamed. Geren stomped on the shattered joint, ramming the burning muzzle of her suppressor into his neck. All she could think of was Alex Kalid, and what was being done to him right then. This time, she wasn’t holding back on her anger. She needed every ounce of force she could get to convince these men that she meant business.

  She accepted that things were going to get bloody.

  “Shut the hell up,” Geren ordered. “I don’t care how slow you die. And I have my knife set to take your nuts off and feed them to a pig.”

  Fear now showed on the faces of the men present, even before the Executioner’s tall, impassive frame blocked the light from the hallway.

  “Is everything under control here?” Bolan asked.