“I brought my own,” Bolan replied as he affixed another rifle grenade to his AUG’s flash hider, raising the rifle to sight through its scope toward the corner they’d just traversed twice.
“I don’t see how—”
Before Geller could complete her thought, two SEBIN soldiers came around the corner, others calling out for them to wait and let the rest catch up.
Too late.
Bolan fired the NATO STANAG grenade from forty feet away, angling his shot into the wall beside the two pursuers he could see. Both flinched, starting to turn and bolt for cover, but they had no hope of outrunning a high-explosive round traveling at roughly half the speed of sound. Within three and a half seconds, the STANAG round met stucco, detonating on impact, enveloping the SEBIN runners in a cloud of dust and fire.
Instead of watching them go down, or up in smoke, Bolan reversed direction, catching Geller with a kind of grimace on her face, and told her, “Run like hell!”
* * *
Colonel Pérez was at the forefront of a dozen armed men, running flat-out toward the north wing of Las Palmas. They were roughly halfway there when an explosion echoed through the no-longer-luxurious resort, and wounded men beyond his line of sight began to scream.
Frightened but not about to let it show, Pérez clutched his SEBIN-issue Browning Hi-Power with its hammer cocked, the safety off, a live round in its chamber. Whatever happened in the next few moments, whether he survived or not, he meant to go down fighting like a man.
Behind him, Deputy Minister Graffe called out for Pérez to slow down, but he ignored the order. It was unthinkable for him to stop, even delay arrival at the shooting scene, and let his enemies—however many might be waiting for him—lead him on another merry chase.
Graffe called out again. “Colonel, I said—”
Pérez silenced him with a shouted, “No, sir!” Understanding that he might well be at the end of his career, perhaps even his life, he added, “Turn back to safety if you must, wherever that might be. I won’t let these bastards slip away from me again.”
“But I insist that you—”
“No, sir!” the colonel said again. “Go find somewhere to hide or fly away. Take Major Khosa with you. I have work to do.”
An unfamiliar feeling—maybe liberation—stirred inside the colonel’s chest.
It hardly mattered to him now, if he was racing toward his death or premature retirement ending in a prison cell. At least he would have done his best, and no one could deny it without lying through their teeth.
* * *
Geller could not say exactly how she had been separated from Cooper as they fled a group of men intent on killing them.
One moment, she was running almost on the American’s heels, but then he turned a corner and she’d followed him to find another group of SEBIN gunmen waiting for them, their complexions looking sickly in the amber glow from halogen light fixtures.
Geller estimated there were five or six of them. But she may have been mistaken, since the whole group opened fire as one with automatic weapons, knocking divots in the stucco wall beside her, other rounds chipping the sidewalk, peppering her legs with jagged concrete shards.
In front of her, Cooper ducked into another service alcove, this one with a pair of snack dispensers.
There was no room for two of them inside the lighted niche, so Geller veered off to her right, across a strip of grass between beds of chrysanthemums in white, yellow and pink. In other circumstances, Geller might have found the layout soothing, even lovely, but the thought of sudden death eclipsed appreciation of natural beauty.
Lilies for a funeral, she thought, would be more appropriate.
Firing a short burst from her M4A1 carbine on the run, Geller chose the only option fate presented to her, pounding up a metal staircase to a landing that gave access to a row of second-story suites. She tried the first door on her right, but it was locked—at least until she hit it with a flying kick that smashed it open to admit her, bullets peppering the wall and door frame at her back.
Nobody home.
She judged the suite’s appearance at a glance, assuming that no delegates had been assigned to occupy it. What she badly needed now was an escape hatch from the rear or either side.
Before her adversaries could advance downstairs, trapping Cooper in his alcove or ascending to the suite Geller had invaded, she passed through a well-appointed kitchen to a pair of stylish bedrooms at the rear. The bathroom had a window facing onto empty space behind the building, and she estimated that it should admit her slender form, albeit awkwardly, to make an exit unobserved by enemies out front.
But first, she had to check it out.
The Israeli agent cranked the window open, drew her Lotar Kobra combat knife and slit the screen on all four edges of its frame. She then peered outside to gauge the difficulty of her plan. Some fifteen feet below the window, sculpted boxwood hedges lined part of the space between two blocks of suites. With courage and a bit of luck, Geller thought they might break her fall and spare her any lasting injury.
Now, all she had to do was to take a leap of faith and pray to Yahweh that she did not fracture any bones on landing.
First, she pulled a folding chair out of the nearby shower, bracing it against the wall below the window she had cleared of screen. That much was easy, and the chair supported her weight when she stepped onto its seat instead of sitting, as its makers had intended. With the added height, she could peer out the window once again and verify that no hostiles had yet arrived to cut off her escape.
No time to waste.
It ran against her grain, leaving Cooper, but he was not her responsibility, and Geller would achieve nothing by going back for him except, perhaps, to sacrifice herself.
She still had work to do, no end of enemies to kill, and if she’d ever met a man who could escape from tight spots, Matt Cooper personified stubborn survival.
“So, move!” Geller muttered to herself.
It was an awkward move at that, propelling herself up and through the bathroom window headfirst. Then she pivoted, the metal frame gouging her buttocks through the camo fabric of her trousers as she turned around and gripped the upper frame with both hands, straining to extract her legs and let them dangle over open space.
She had a few new cuts and scrapes to show for it, but finally Geller dangled from the window by her fingertips, glanced down once more between her combat boots, and then released her hold.
The boxwoods shook and rattled, scratching her back and legs as she touched down. Geller then rolled clear of the hedge and landed in a fighting crouch, slipping the sling of the M4A1 carbine off her shoulder and bracing the assault rifle against her hip, ready to fire.
But there was no one lurking, waiting to be killed.
She had another choice to make. Either go back and try to help Cooper or move on and do the job she’d been assigned from Tel Aviv. Confronted with that choice, it was no choice at all.
Moving along the narrow strip of grass beside the decorative hedge, Geller passed into the night, seeking her enemies.
Chapter Eleven
North Wing, Las Palmas
Unlike soft drink machines with their refrigeration units, snack dispensers typically emitted no sound until a customer inserted a credit card or cash and the machine spit out its “treat.”
Bolan had no problem picking out the sounds of enemies advancing on his shallow alcove behind probing bursts of automatic fire. He guesstimated half a dozen hostiles breathing down his neck by now, and understood that simply dueling with them was the quickest way for him to die.
Explosives, on the other hand, had always been his friend.
Preparing for his breakout with survival odds at fifty-fifty was a two-step process.
First, Bolan attached another rifle grenade to his Steyr’s flash hider and set the AUG’s gas valve in the closed �
��GR” position, ready to launch a STANAG HE round. Next, he propped the AUG against his hip, unclipped an M26 frag grenade from his combat webbing, clutched it in his right hand and removed the safety pin.
He would be pitching blind, judging the distance from his service alcove to his enemies by sound alone. It was a gamble, but he trusted his ability to pull it off.
Beyond that point, it would be down to guts, experience and luck.
He judged the gap between him and his approaching would-be slayers as approximately thirty feet. That placed him twenty feet within the frag grenade’s blast radius, but if he took advantage of the cover shielding him, there was a decent chance he’d be protected from the lemon-shaped bomb’s prenotched fragmentation coil.
And after that...
He made the sidearm pitch and ducked back from the storm of bullets that immediately followed, dropping to a crouch, his back turned toward the walkway and the building where he’d seen Geller disappear inside. Downrange, one of his adversaries cried a warning, “¡Estar atento! ¡Granada!” immediately followed by a sound of running feet.
Too late.
The blast, three seconds later, echoed with the screams of wounded men and ripping sounds of shrapnel as it tore into stucco walls. Instead of giving his attackers time to catch their breath, Bolan swung out of hiding, Steyr’s butt plate at his shoulder, and dispatched another high-explosive round angled for impact with the north wing’s concrete walkway.
Braced against the second blast, more shrapnel buzzing through the night, Bolan shifted his Steyr’s gas valve to the small dot that enabled normal operation and went hunting, fire selector set for 3-round bursts.
Two SEBIN men were down and wailing, thrashing in fresh blood the walkway halogens tinted to burnt sienna. Bolan finished them up close and then swung around to catch another pair of soldiers beating feet to make their getaway.
Again, too late.
He could have let them go, but that would likely mean he’d have to face them yet again, and that struck Bolan as a sucker’s play. Instead, he dropped them both in flight, no Kevlar underneath their uniforms to save them from his 5.56 mm manglers as they dropped and shivered through their death throes.
What about Adira Geller?
If the agent from Metsada was as smart as Bolan thought, she would have cleared the building where she’d taken refuge moments earlier, and searching for her through the maze that was Las Palmas simply meant a waste of Bolan’s precious time.
For now, at least, they had reverted to the solitary roles they’d been playing at Maiquetía’s waterfront. Whether they met again was down to Fate, and Bolan put it out of mind as shouting voices told him reinforcements from SEBIN were closing fast.
* * *
Before he even glimpsed the latest skirmish site, Colonel Pérez knew he would be too late to make a difference.
And so it was, another bloody shambles left behind by whoever was running rings around his best men at Las Palmas. Four of them were down this time, all dead, their scattered weapons also left behind by whoever had slaughtered them.
“Grenades again,” Major Khosa observed.
“Thank you,” Pérez replied sarcastically. “I see that.”
Khosa wisely offered no response, but that did not dissuade the deputy minister.
“I take it,” Graffe said, “that this confirms the role of an outsider in this debacle?”
Pérez could not argue with the man’s choice of words. From where he stood, the colonel reckoned they would have to scrub the conference, remove the delegates who still remained—after disarming them—and brace themselves for the inevitable backlash.
“Well?” Graffe demanded. “Have you nothing more to say?”
“Deputy Minister,” Pérez replied, “you know as much about this matter as I do. We have at least one unknown enemy at large and no good reason to assume he’s finished with us yet.”
“At least one?” Graffe echoed. “How do you conclude that, Colonel?”
“From looking at the evidence, sir.”
“Kindly explain, if you don’t mind.”
“Gladly. Notice the evidence of gunfire from my men before they were eliminated. Do you see the bullet holes around this alcove with the food dispensers?”
“It’s quite obvious, I’d say,” Graffe answered.
“Now, see the building opposite.” Pérez pointed his Browning like a symphony conductor’s wand. “Notice the impact damage all around the stairwell and around the nearest second-story door.”
“You mean—”
“While they survived, my men were firing on at least two targets simultaneously. One of those employed grenades and rifle fire to stop them.”
“And the other?” Khosa interjected.
“We should search the suites in case one of our enemies is hidden there, although I think that it will prove to be a waste of time.”
“Why so, Colonel?” Graffe inquired.
“The simplest reason is that we are still alive, sir. Why would an enemy lurking upstairs refrain from firing on us while we stand here, offering such easy targets?”
Pérez noted Graffe and the others swiveling their heads around, shifting their bodies nervously, his armed men raising weapons as they braced for an attack. He let them suffer for a moment then advised, “That is the good news, gentlemen, if we may call it that.”
“What of the bad news, then?” the deputy minister prodded.
“Only the obvious. At least two enemies remain to be discovered and eliminated. Whether there are more than two—” Pérez allowed himself a shrug “—well, who can say?”
“It seems you need more men, Colonel,” Graffe advised. “Or do they need a new commanding officer?”
Pérez regarded his superior with thinly veiled disdain, weighing his next words in the knowledge they might be his last. “Do what you must,” he told Graffe. “But while you’re making up your mind, I still have work to do.”
Suite 411, South Wing
The delegates from ETA and Revolutionary Struggle were together once again after a fruitless search for more armaments, this time indoors. Mario Lekka had invited the two Basques to join him and Georgios Xenakis in suite 411 to discuss their options as the summit meeting called by the Venezuelan president fell apart before their eyes.
“What now?” Lekka inquired, to get them started.
“It seems obvious we must evacuate this death trap,” Xabier Biscailuz answered him.
“We have a helicopter,” Lekka observed.
“But no one who can fly it,” Sabino Urkullu stated. “Unless...?”
“No,” Lekka said. “We’d be required to take the pilot with us, either as a volunteer or as a hostage.”
“And then, where would we go?” Urkullu asked. “After its flight here from Caracas, how far can the helicopter fly without refueling? Anyone? My guess would be around two hundred fifty miles at best. That means we’d have to land again on Venezuelan soil, and with its built-in trackers, military forces would be there ahead of us. I don’t care to imagine how we’d be received.”
“I have considered that,” Lekka replied, “and find your fears to be well founded.”
Urkullu bristled at that, replying tartly, “I did not say that I was afraid.”
“Semantics,” Lekka countered, “but it is not my intention to offend you. That is why I think our only hope is liberation of a vehicle with fuel enough to carry us beyond this state and farther from Caracas.”
“There is still the matter of SEBIN tracking whichever vehicle we take,” Biscailuz pointed out.
“And for that reason,” Lekka answered, “I suggest we drive no farther than the nearest settlement of any size, where we can leave the first car and acquire a second with no tracker or alarms on board. From there, we can proceed to rent a boat or travel to Colombia and cross the border
there.”
“By that time,” Biscailuz said, “we shall all be wanted men.”
“I cannot speak for you,” Lekka replied, “but Georgios and I have travel papers under false names that secured safe passage for us halfway ’round the world. I’d be surprised if they could not deceive a rural border guard, but in that case, we have our weapons in reserve.”
The two ETA terrorists traded cautious glances, then Biscailuz said, “All right, then. When should we start?”
Las Palmas, Northwest Parking Lot
Geller had a plan in mind. It might not work, of course, but charging blindly from one shootout to the next showed no sign of advancing her assignment.
Granted, a number of the invited terrorists she’d hoped to kill were dead now, plus an uncertain number of SEBIN guards she could only estimate, but Tel Aviv would not be satisfied if any of her assigned targets survived and slipped away to kill again.
The new scheme offered her an edge of sorts, although she would remain outnumbered thirty, maybe forty, guns or more to one. The plan required audacity—a quality of which she had no shortage—and a willingness to risk her life without a guarantee of positive reward.
And what else did her whole career amount to, if she thought about it honestly?
Geller counted fifteen vehicles standing together in two tidy rows, lined up with their rear bumpers nearly touching, well positioned for a hasty getaway. No guards were posted in the parking lot, or else they had been called away to deal with raids on three of the resort’s four wings, and she supposed at least a few of them were dead now, whittling down the hostile odds.
Her plan was simple. She would disable all vehicles in front of her, as rapidly and efficaciously as possible. Deflating two tires on each car or SUV should do the trick. Geller did not plan to waste time letting air out through their valve stems. Rather, she would use her combat knife, lacerating rubber as she went, always on guard in case a sentry turned up to surprise her.
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