Blood Vortex

by Don Pendleton

  Suite 121

  “What are they using out there now?” Malik asked.

  “How should I know?” Beratha challenged. “You can see as much as I do.”

  Malik craned his neck to peer across the smoky greensward, where the first explosion had sheered through a palm tree, toppling it to pin one of the SEBIN soldiers down, his cries of pain unheeded by his comrades. Seconds later, rifle fire ripped through the shattered windows of Malik’s suite. The terrorist answered with his pistol to the best of his ability, wishing he had Beratha’s submachine gun rather than a simple sidearm.

  After two return shots, he was startled by a second blast, this one across the intervening space, inside suite 115. This time, before recoiling, Malik saw approximately where the high-explosive round had come from, and he so advised Beratha.

  “Someone down there has rifle grenades,” Malik declared. “He fired one at the SEBIN guards, and now another at the al-Shabaab party.”

  “How is that possible?” Beratha questioned him. “It makes no sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense, if someone from outside planned to disrupt the conference.”

  “But who?” Beratha asked.

  “Who knows? Americans, most likely, working with Israelis, Brits, even the Dutch. They still despise us for declaring independence from their rule seventy years ago.”

  “You mean to say we fired upon the Venezuelans for no reason?”

  “They were shooting at other delegates,” Malik reminded him.

  “After they started shooting first.”

  “Damn it!” Malik swore. “Someone has played us like a drum.”

  “What can we do about it now?” Beratha asked.

  Before Malik could answer, a rocket-shaped projectile sizzled through their window, slammed into the rear wall of their suite and detonated with a shock wave that drove both defenders to the floor.

  When Malik’s vision cleared, he saw Beratha down on hands and knees staring at him, his scalp torn, blood streaming down his face and onto the suite’s ruined carpeting.

  Malik moved forward, reaching out to help his comrade, but a portion of the ceiling chose that moment to collapse on top of him, its impact on par, he imagined, with a blackjack’s crushing blow.

  Choking on plaster dust and blood, Malik managed to cast off the rubble and lurch to his feet.

  * * *

  Adira Geller reached the north wing of Las Palmas as the gunfire escalated to explosions, rattling windows in the suites to either side of her. As she approached the battle zone, she scanned to her left and right in search of Matt Cooper, but saw nothing of him yet.

  Still, intuition told her that he had to be somewhere close at hand.

  Rounding a corner, Geller heard another blast from up ahead and saw smoke pouring from a suite to her right. Another, on her left, was already in flames, with SEBIN gunmen on the intervening greensward, some down for the count, while others fired their auto rifles toward one or another of the smoking suites.

  Whatever claim Las Palmas once possessed to luxury was literally out the window now and strewed about the grounds that had been turned into a battlefield.

  Advancing cautiously to join the fight, she suddenly caught sight of the American on the far side of the Venezuelan troops already hemmed in by a cross fire. The way it looked to Geller, their opponents in the burning rooms would soon be flushed from hiding or overcome by smoke and flames.

  Cooper, on the other hand, showed no signs of retreating or surrendering.

  Geller crouched behind the bole of a multi-stemmed cluster of spiny palms and watched her adversaries through the gap between the two plants. No one had any time to look in her direction, and she took advantage of their obvious distraction, tracking targets through her M4A1 carbine’s Tasco ProPoint red dot sight.

  The scope featured a tilted spherical mirror reflector with a red light-emitting diode at its off-axis focus, allowing pinpoint aiming without sending any telltale crimson dots downrange to warn the target of a watchful sniper’s cold intent. Testing it, Geller chose one of the SEBIN fighters still in action, pinned the LED spot on him and sent a single 5.56 mm round downrange.

  Her mark lurched forward, stumbled on his second stagger-step then dropped facedown onto the greensward’s manicured Bahia grass. A tremor rippled through his limbs, then he lay deathly still—and best of all, nobody noticed where the killing shot had come from in the chaos and cacophony surrounding them.

  Well satisfied so far, Geller bent back to her carbine’s sight and sought another target by the light of pale peach-tinted halogens.

  * * *

  Major Khosa, never one who relished close-quarters combat, feared that he was on the verge of panic now.

  The cross fire pinning down his SEBIN troops was bad enough, proof positive this gathering of terrorists was ill conceived at best, but now Khosa had literally suffered his nose being rubbed in it. Gasping, he used a shaky hand to wipe the warm blood from his face, revolted by the salty taste inside his mouth.

  The blood was not Khosa’s, which made it even worse somehow.

  The ISI major was huddled under cover of some decorative shrubbery, species unknown, when a young SEBIN rifleman had crouched beside him, firing short bursts toward the pair of terrorists holed up in suite 121. The man—whose name Khosa had never learned and never would—had squeezed off half a magazine from his assault rifle when someone shot him from behind, the single bullet drilling through his back and exiting through his rib cage while rupturing a lung.

  The dying man’s next exhalation was a gagging, retching wheeze, expelling thick, warm blood directly into Khosa’s face as he collapsed. Startled, completely unprepared for the crimson baptism, Khosa recoiled, choking on gore and spitting out as much of it as he could manage to defeat his autonomic gag reflex.

  It almost worked, but now, on hands and knees, the major felt his supper coming back to haunt him in a greasy rush. Cursing in Pashto between spasms, Khosa felt as if his body was intent on turning inside out, the worst feeling that he’d experienced since drinking too much Johnnie Walker Double Black on his fortieth birthday and regretting it for several days.

  Except, of course, the nausea that gripped him now had been preceded by no pleasure that made any of the later suffering worthwhile.

  The spasm passed, and Khosa knew what he had to do. Regardless of the cost to his career, whether he was demoted or cashiered from Inter-Services Intelligence, he felt an urgent, almost crippling, need to get away right now and find someplace to hide.

  Without stopping to think through that decision, Khosa lumbered to his feet, turned from the firefight raging only yards in front of him, and broke into a loping run. He had no destination fixed in mind, beyond a vague impression that he might conceal himself inside the office block where most decisions governing Las Palmas had been thrashed out in the past.

  Under a desk, perhaps, or huddled in a stationery closet—anywhere at all, in fact, where he might be forgotten and ignored by men intent on killing him.

  Khosa had barely traveled fifteen feet when he beheld a figure clad in camouflage, rising before him from a clump of palms. The uniform did not match SEBIN’s black, and the major realized the lurker was a woman, grim-faced, with her hair tied back.

  And she was leveling an automatic rifle at him, hesitating only for a moment as he closed the gap between them.

  When she fired, he saw the weapon’s muzzle-flash before a hammer stroke impacted on his chest and punched him backward, landing on his back with grass beneath him. There was more blood in his throat and mouth, but this time Khosa had no doubt it was his own.

  His last thought was a curse directed to the stars above and to whatever lay beyond them, then the major’s eyes glazed over, staring into nothingness.

  * * *

  Colonel Pérez missed watching Major Khosa die, not that he w
ould have cared in any case.

  Upon arriving at the north wing battle site, he found most of the SEBIN troops that had accompanied the Pakistani major either dead or pinned down by a cross fire from two delegations housed in suites 121 and 115. That wouldn’t last much longer in his estimation, from the way flames were devouring those luxury apartments, spreading to their neighbors, but the loss of men that he could not replace still galled him.

  And there was also someone else involved. At least one hostile fighter at ground level, though the colonel had not glimpsed him yet. Whoever that was, he—or she—had to be the one armed with grenades and wreaking havoc at Las Palmas for the past couple of hours now.

  Pérez was dedicated to destroying him or her—and maybe them—but he was losing soldiers now at an alarming rate. Before he could accomplish anything, he had to stanch that steady loss and mitigate the damage done so far.

  And that demanded that the colonel remain alive.

  He scanned the battleground in front of him, trying to pick out Major Khosa in the midst of carnage, finally discovering what seemed to be a rumpled suit of clothes. The suit resembled what Khosa had been wearing when they’d last stood face-to-face, allowing for bloodstains, which turned his suit coat a rusty color, gleaming wetly underneath the walkway’s halogens.

  Too late for Khosa, then. And if the truth be told, that came as a relief.

  Whoever had dispatched the Pakistani agent might have done a favor for Pérez, eliminating one stone from his shoe.

  If there was time and opportunity, Pérez hoped he could thank the killer for that favor.

  Just before he put a bullet through his adversary’s head.

  * * *

  Bolan had decided that he had only two options in his present situation.

  He could either fight his enemies until he wiped them out or killed him first. Or he could disengage and seek another contact point, inflict more damage on the meeting’s scattered delegates before they could elude him and escape from the resort.

  Whichever choice he made, Bolan hoped he could reconnect with the Metsada fighter he had met first at Maiquetía, perhaps team up with her again to finish off the job they had begun together.

  He had Geller spotted now, a huddled shape across the body-littered greensward from his own position, twenty, maybe thirty, yards. Close enough to shout at, if the gunfire slackened off enough to make speech possible, but oh so far away.

  To remedy that problem, Bolan rose and ghosted from his sniper’s nest, jogging along a path designed to let service personnel maintain air-conditioners and plumbing for a block of north wing suites immediately to his left. He picked up speed while circling the cluster of six suites—three upstairs, three on the ground floor—and found a second access route exactly where he’d hoped it would be.

  No opposition there so far, a lane of forty feet or so lying between Bolan and where he’d spotted Geller on the other side of chaos. Moving cautiously along that path behind his Steyr AUG, he reached its end and checked again for the Israeli, just as she squeezed off a short burst from her M4A1 carbine toward the enemy.

  That must have finished off a magazine, because she dropped the empty and replaced it with another from one of the pouches on her tac vest. Bolan whistled softly to her while she managed that, Geller glancing toward him in surprise. She expressed a silent question to him, with one hand slightly raised, and Bolan waved for her to join him in the service passage if she thought that was a manageable option.

  Geller nodded, made another scan for any enemies encroaching on her, and then bolted out of cover, sliding to a stop beside him while a few stray rounds passed by, too late to matter.

  “How’s it going?” Bolan asked her.

  “Could be worse,” she said just as another storm of auto fire erupted from the greensward, out of sight around the corner.

  They were both in time to see a pair of terrorists emerge from suite 121, firing at the SEBIN troops, then dodging out of range. A second later, all of the remaining men in uniform cut loose as one, blasting the two bedraggled, coughing delegates with half a dozen streams of fire converging on their twitching, reeling forms.

  “Looks like our cue,” Bolan advised, and sprinted back along the service passageway with Geller close behind him, running on his heels.

  Chapter Fourteen

  North Wing, Las Palmas

  Colonel Pérez surveyed the bodies sprawled around the concrete walkway and Bahia grass dividing two halves of the north wing from each other. Roughly half his men were down, four others wounded in the firefight that had concluded for the moment.

  Along with his SEBIN soldiers, four terrorist delegates were dead, their corpses ventilated by so many bullets or torn asunder by grenade blasts that they barely passed for human. As for the infiltrators who had wreaked such havoc on the troops who’d come with Major Khosa to evacuate the foreign visitors, both had managed to escape in the confusion.

  “Spawn of whores!” he snarled at the newly dead then caught some of his men watching him, skittish eyes evasive when he turned to face them. Rather than apologize, he told them, “We must find the perpetrators of these horrendous attacks. Take them alive, if possible, but stop them at all costs.”

  Pérez’s second-in-command, Captain Romulo Zavala, recently arrived with half a dozen reinforcements, asked him, “You saw them, Colonel? Which way did they go?”

  “I glimpsed one only briefly,” Pérez answered. “As suggested earlier, it was a woman.”

  Muttering among his men tipped the colonel to the fact that none of them had seen her and at least some were inclined to doubt his words, perhaps his judgment overall. He stared them down, adding, “She did not use grenades, that one. We seek at least two enemies, responsible for much of what has happened here tonight.”

  Zavala bobbed his head, either accepting what Pérez said or pretending to. Instead of speaking to that point, he said, “The telephones are still not functioning, sir. We have no link to the outside.”

  Stating the obvious, Pérez cautioned, “We may expect no aid, then, until someone in Caracas realizes we are out of touch and sends a party to investigate. Given the secrecy surrounding this endeavor, that could be tomorrow or the next day.”

  Glancing at his watch, Zavala said, “It is tomorrow, Colonel. What shall we do now?”

  “Continue gathering the delegates if possible, with all due caution,” Pérez told him. “Be ready to explain what’s happening but spare them details. Simply say outsiders are involved, and we must gather all remaining delegates, seeking safety in numbers.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall we divide our force to cover the remaining wings?”

  “An excellent idea,” Pérez agreed. Raising his voice, he added, “Walking wounded, make your way to the administration building and avail yourself of any medical supplies you may find there. As to the rest of you, divide as evenly as possible. One group will come with me to the east wing, the other with Captain Zavala to the west. When finished there, we’ll meet again and finish with the south.”

  More muttering, but when he asked for any urgent questions, no one raised his hand or voice to be acknowledged.

  “All right, then. We have no more time to waste. Move out.”

  Clinging to his CAVIM Orinoco submachine gun, Pérez led his group, barely a dozen troops remaining, off toward the east wing. Zavala and his complement of soldiers headed in the opposite direction.

  When he thought of meeting the invaders who had decimated his guard force, the colonel could not decide whether he should be eager or afraid.

  East Wing

  “What are we looking for?” Geller asked.

  “Bodies in motion,” Bolan answered. “Anybody going anywhere. We don’t have time to waste going from door to door.”

  “And when we find them?”

  “Take them out,” he said. “There are no friendlie
s here.”

  From what he’d seen so far, the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service had taken over all staff duties at Las Palmas for the outlaw gathering’s duration, thus eliminating maids, custodians, administrative personnel and kitchen help from any risk of injury if trouble should erupt. That made the whole resort a free-fire zone, no one but Geller backing Bolan’s play and all the rest against him, everybody armed.

  How long until the president’s people started landing reinforcements from Caracas or some closer military base? It was impossible to guess, but Bolan reckoned they might not arrive until noon, if then.

  And if they beat that estimate, he’d have a choice of leaving early, with his blitz unfinished, or remaining to complete it against longer odds. The upside of departure was near certain knowledge that the groups invited to the sit-down would be fuming over what appeared to be betrayal by their hosts, leaders unstable at the best of times seeking revenge against the Venezuelan government they’d blame for the fiasco. The president’s press flacks couldn’t very well deny it—couldn’t let on that the meeting had been planned and sanctioned by their leader in the first place—so the violence of more than two dozen terror groups worldwide would likely focus on Caracas first, before they started seeking other enemies.

  Not an ideal solution, but at least it felt like chickens coming home to roost.

  Or was that birds of prey?

  Whatever plumage he imagined, Bolan’s goal remained the same: take down as many of the targets at Las Palmas as he could, in certain knowledge that the clock was winding down.

  Adira Geller could be helpful, but he would not hold himself responsible if standing orders or some personal intention put the two of them at odds. Bolan could not compel her to abide by his decisions, and if she embarked upon some tangent of her own, he wasn’t prepared to challenge her.

  And when he reckoned it was time to leave Las Palmas, if Geller didn’t wish to come along...well, that would be her choice, as an experienced professional.