Dead Reckoning
Rain had begun to drizzle, which was normal for the tropics, handy for the lightweight raincoats Grimaldi and Bolan wore to hide their weapons as they moved along the sidewalk toward their target. Hezbollah had no men on the street that the Stony Man pilot could see, and there was no sign of surveillance cameras around the entrance to their ground-floor offices.
Apparently, they felt secure enough in Paraguay to drop their guard a bit.
Strike one.
The door, all glass, allowed a clear view of the office—or at least its front reception area—from where Grimaldi stood outside. There was a young guy sitting at a desk, directly opposite the door, with no one else in sight. He might be armed, but at the moment he was busy talking on the phone, half turned in profile to the street, oblivious.
Strike two.
When Bolan gave the door a push, it opened at his touch.
Strike three.
A little chime went off as Bolan entered, with Grimaldi on his heels. No doubt it was supposed to warn whoever occupied the office that they had a walk-in, and it brought the young guy’s frowning face around in time to see two silenced weapons pointed at him. Blurting something in Arabic, he dropped the phone and shoved a hand into the knee well of his desk, maybe for a weapon or a panic button hidden under there.
He never made it.
Bolan’s Steyr AUG coughed out a single round and granted the Hezbollah’s receptionist the martyrdom he may have dreamed about when he signed on to be a terrorist. The exit wound sprayed abstract art across a filing cabinet behind him, and he slithered out of sight beneath the desk.
* * *
ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS tired of being cooped up in the small apartment, only seeing sunshine through his window or on those occasions when his hosts allowed him access to the building’s roof. He understood that he and his two roommates were on every watch list in the world, their faces posted on the internet with prices on their heads, but he was sick and tired of hiding.
He was sick and tired of Paraguay.
Sitting on a sway-backed sofa in his underwear, Rajhid ticked off the things that irritated him about the country he’d been sent to as a fugitive.
The weather. He was used to heat, of course, but Paraguay’s humidity was killing him. It sapped his energy and made him feel exhausted from the moment he awoke each morning to the final hour when he dragged himself to bed.
The insects. He had lived with desert scorpions and spiders all his life, and cockroaches, but those in Paraguay were monsters, grown unnaturally large, and they could turn up anywhere. Just yesterday, he’d found a black, five-inch scorpion hiding beneath his pillow when he went to bed, a shock that left him wondering if one of his so-called protectors might have placed it there to rattle him.
And Hezbollah. That was another thing. Its members, with their clique in Paraguay, had treated Rajhid almost like a leper from the moment he arrived with Walid Khamis and Salman Farsoun. It was as if they thought their little private army was the only group entitled to make war on the Crusaders in the name of God. Rajhid wrote it off to jealousy, but he resented being forced to smile and thank them for their hospitality. The war was going on without him, and he wanted to get back to it.
The food. Now, there was one thing Rajhid did enjoy. They all avoided pork, of course, but he was very fond of pira caldo, Paraguay’s fish soup; the great asado barbecues; the kiveve made from pumpkins; and the lampreado, fried cakes made with manioc. Rajhid had put on weight since landing at the hideout, but he tried to keep it down with exercise, the only form of entertainment granted to him, other than a television set that played three channels, none of which he understood.
He hoped Khalid would reach out to them soon. Rajhid and his companions needed action, not the world’s worst-ever tropical vacation, locked up in an apartment and eaten by mosquitoes, while they never even got to glimpse the rain forest.
Khamis was snoring in one of the apartment’s two bedrooms, while Farsoun was in the small bathroom, door closed for privacy. Rajhid was field-stripping a MAC-10 machine pistol, its components spread out on a coffee table just in front of him, and watching a peculiar game show, where the losers had their heads shaved to remind them they had failed. It was pathetic, childish and—
The first shot startled Rajhid, brought him to his feet in an involuntary reflex, clutching the MAC-10’s dismantled, useless pistol grip. He waited, thought perhaps someone had fumbled with a weapon, had a stupid accident—with Hezbollah, why not?—but then a blast of automatic fire rang through the building and he heard men’s panicked voices shouting.
The police? A US Navy SEAL team, just for him?
Rajhid had no time to consider who might be attacking them. He called out to his comrades while he tried to reassemble the MAC-10, his fingers as thick and numb as sausages in his excitement.
Fear? Not yet.
As soon as he was finished with the gun, he had to get dressed. Rajhid could not go running through the streets of Ciudad del Este in his underwear, with a machine pistol. Police in Paraguay might be slow and foolish, but they would not miss a chance to get their faces in the newspapers.
The last part of his weapon finally snapped into place. More firing came from the second or third floor, below him, as Rajhid snatched up a magazine, then loaded and cocked the little SMG. Now all he needed was a pair of pants, his shoes and one of those baggy shirts that everybody seemed to wear in Paraguay, hiding a multitude of sins.
And once he’d dressed, Rajhid could figure out whether to join the fight or run and leave his hosts to save themselves.
* * *
CLEARING THE DOWNSTAIRS rooms required less than a minute. The office, mosque and two small bathrooms were the whole of it, and all unoccupied except for Hezbollah’s late greeter in the lobby. The corpse was out of sight of anybody passing on the street, positioned beneath the desk, and they were set to take the game upstairs.
And upstairs it would be, specifically between the empty mosque and office space. The building had no elevator, meaning that anyone trying to flee the upper floors had to either fight his way past Bolan and Grimaldi, or go out the nearest window.
The Stony Man duo reached the second floor without encountering a problem, but it started to unravel there. The landing faced back toward Calle Victor Hugo Norte, three apartments on each side of a narrow hallway. Three doors open, three closed. Just as Bolan reached that landing, a bearded young man in a T-shirt and khaki pants, barefooted, stepped out of the second door down, to his left.
The terrorist saw them, saw their guns,and blinked once in surprise before he turned and lunged for the open doorway just behind him. Bolan beat him to it with a 3-round burst of 5.56 mm NATO rounds, punching the rag doll figure sideways, slamming him against the doorjamb on his way down to the floor.
The AUG’s suppressor wasn’t perfect, but it reduced the sound of gunfire to a kind of stutter-sneeze. Bolan moved forward, leaving his partner to cover the closed doors behind him while he cleared the first open apartment on his left. He stepped across the dead man on the threshold, checked the other rooms in nothing flat, and found them all unoccupied.
His next step was to double back and join Grimaldi for the two apartments he had bypassed, not surprised to find them both unlocked in what the occupants would have regarded as a safe environment. He barged in unannounced and uninvited, caught two more Hezbollah terrorists sitting on a sofa, eating pita sandwiches, and shot them both before they could react to the invasion of their home away from home.
Behind him, Bolan heard the muffled stutter of Grimaldi’s SMG, ending another argument before it had a chance to start in earnest. Seconds later, the Stony Man pilot was back beside him in the hallway, nodding, turning toward the next door that stood open, on their right.
This time, they heard a shower running. Bolan went to find it, leaving Grimaldi to guard the open doorway and the last two apartments downrange. The bathroom wasn’t hard to locate in a place that small, its door ajar, and Bolan eased his way inside. Behind a semi-opaque shower curtain, he saw two forms intertwined, both men, unless the women sprouted beards in Paraguay.
To each his own, in Bolan’s view—but this was strictly business. He preferred to give an opponent a fighting chance, but in this case it was a no go.
Six rounds did it, ripping through the shower curtain to find flesh and bone, spilling two bodies on to the tiled floor. One was a man approaching middle age, the other younger, neither one concerned about embarrassment now that their time had suddenly run out.
He left the shower running—put it on Hezbollah’s tab—and met up with Grimaldi in the corridor, to clear the last two apartments. Bolan would never know what had alerted one guy in the next apartment, to their right, but he was waiting with an AK-47, ripping off a hasty burst just as his door began to open under Bolan’s touch.
The Russian rifle’s 7.62 mm rounds were more than capable of piercing flimsy drywall, driving Bolan and Grimaldi to the floor. Instead of making it a siege, Bolan unclipped one of the frag grenades he’d fastened to his belt, removed its pin and pitched the bomb through the doorway, counting five seconds on its fuse. It blew on four, a foible common to that particular model, and he waited for the shrapnel storm to pass before he checked the apartment again and found his adversary facedown in a pool of gore.
No time to waste now, as they ran back to the stairs and stormed the third floor, ready for resistance from the Hezbollah terrorists remaining, meeting it almost at once. It was a tricky proposition, fighting for your life and watching out for three specific faces, knowing it was critical to capture one of them alive.
A challenge, right—but nothing unfamiliar to the Executioner.
CHAPTER TWO
Arlington, Virginia, Two Days Earlier
The punks were either soused or high on something, Hal Brognola guessed, noting their ruddy faces, sloppy walks and random slurring of their too-loud comments as they made obnoxious asses of themselves. They’d gotten an early start on getting wasted, since it wasn’t half past ten yet, and the four of them were well en route to being comfortably numb.
Skinheads. He knew the low-life type from long experience. They’d failed in school and couldn’t hold a job, assuming that they’d ever tried to find one, left their home or had been thrown out when Nazi tats and rants had riled their parents to the point of no return. Or maybe they’d been raised by homegrown fascists and had followed in their elders’ goose steps.
Either way, Brognola saw them as a waste of space, and not at all what he’d expected to encounter at the Ballston Common Mall, on Wilson Boulevard. All members of the public were welcome, of course, to the four-level, 580,000-square-foot mini-city with its hundreds of shops, salons, cafés and other offerings, but most of those who patronized the mall upheld a certain standard of decorum.
Not these guys.
They had a dress code, sure, all four of them in jet-black bomber jackets decorated with the symbols of their rage, from swastikas and SS lightning bolts to Celtic crosses, Rebel flags and the distinctive blood drop crosses favored by the Ku Klux Klan. Beneath the jackets, they wore suspenders over black tees decorated with more neo-Nazi “art,” tight jeans with metal-studded belts—a guy just couldn’t always trust suspenders in a street fight—and red laces in their black boots.
It was a uniform of sorts that marked them as outsiders—or, in the alternative, insiders of a small, supposedly “elite” subculture most Americans were happy to ignore until it pushed into their faces and demanded equal time.
Like now.
Brognola had been hoping they would pass him, standing alone and minding his own business at the second-level railing, near the food court. As a rule, he didn’t make a likely target for the random predators who scavenged urban landscapes. He was stocky, had an aging cop’s face and an attitude toward strangers that made most think twice about disturbing him.
Not this time.
Maybe these four punks believed the line about safety in numbers. Or maybe they were just too wasted to care.
“Hey, Grandpa,” one of them called out as they approached him. “Got a light?”
The big Fed figured silence wouldn’t be the way to go this time. He turned to face them, saw them fanning out into a semicircle as he said, “No smoking in the mall.”
“Ain’t what I asked you, is it?”
Their elected spokesman was a burly specimen whose forehead bore the inked slogan “RAHOWA”: Racial Holy War.
Brognola locked eyes with him as he answered, “No.”
“So, do you got a light, or not?”
The Justice man scanned the other grinning, slack-jawed faces, then said, “No.”
“Is that all you can say, man? ‘No?’”
The second speaker would have been a redhead if he’d let it grow a little. As it was, the stubble only made his scalp look sunburned, serving as a background for the swastika tattoo on top of his shaved pate.
“I could say, ‘Move along,’” Brognola offered.
That made two of them break out in laughter, while their leader and the almost-redhead eyed him with suspicion bleeding into fury. They were used to having people cringe before them, but it wasn’t working out that way, this time.
“There’s sumpin’ wrong wid you,” the leader said, and tapped his temple with an index finger. “Sumpin’ wrong up here.”
“Johns Hopkins, was it?” Brognola asked him. “Or maybe Georgetown? I’m surprised you found a med school that would let you in, with all that sloppy ink.”
He was pushing the limit now, but punks like these had always ranked among his top pet peeves. Bullies were made for beating down, not coddling.
“Man, you gotta have a death wish,” RAHOWA-face said. A thought surfaced inside his tiny mind. “Are you a Jew?”
“Are you a cretin?” Brognola replied. The four of them were close, but he still reckoned he could reach the Glock 23 on his hip before one of them punched him or landed a kick to his groin with a spit-polished boot. Bad news if it came down to that, but the big Fed had too much on his mind to suffer morons gladly.
“Man, you’re askin’ for it,” Red Fuzz said. “I oughta—”
But he never finished, as a deep voice just behind him asked, “Is there a problem here?”
* * *
“I HAD IT COVERED,” Brognola said. “They weren’t going anywhere.”
“I saw that,” Bolan granted. “But I thought about the paperwork, the wasted time.”
Brognola mulled that over, frowning, then agreed. “Who needs it?”
“Right.”
They’d gone to Charley’s Grilled Subs, once the four skinheads had gotten a glimpse of Bolan’s graveyard eyes and figured out that two-on-four wasn’t such inviting odds. He had a deli sub in front of him, with fries, while Hal was working on a Philly chicken hero.
“So, the mission,” Bolan prompted.
“Right,” Brognola said again. “I guess you’ve heard about the consulate in Jordan?”
“It’s been hard to miss.”
“Behind the politics, what hasn’t been on CNN or Fox is the ID on those responsible.”
“Already?” Bolan was impressed. “That’s quick work.”
“They left tracks—and two dead at the scene. The consulate’s Marines got in a few licks.”
“Semper fi,” Bolan replied. “Who were they?”
“Members of a relatively new group,” Brognola replied, chewing around the words. “It’s called Allah Qadum in Arabic, or ‘God’s Hammer’ to the likes of us. It split off from the AQAP roughly eighteen months ago.”
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, that was, a splinter group itself, founded in January 2009 by defectors from the group that had masterminded 9/11 and assorted other horrors. One thing that predictably retarded global terrorism was the tendency of psychopaths to quarrel among themselves and storm out in a huff to form their own demented fragments of a parent group.
“So, it was organized?” Bolan asked. “All I’ve heard has been the stuff about that yokel burning the Koran.”
“They saw an opening,” Brognola answered, “thanks to Reverend Redneck. They’d have turned up somewhere, someday, but his sideshow gave them the jump start they needed. Nothing on par with the World Trade Centers, of course, but it put them on the map. They’ll be looking to build on it, make a name for themselves and claim a seat at the table.”
“What table?”
“Wherever the nuts meet and greet,” Brognola replied.
“You said a couple of them didn’t make it out.”
“Correct. Jordan’s General Security Directorate identified them from their rap sheets and drew up a list of known associates. CIA and Saudi intelligence put their two cents in, and some files turned up at Interpol. We now have sixteen names confirmed as God’s Hammer members still at large.”
“All present at the consulate?” Bolan asked.
“Hard to say, but probable. The whole bunch was in Jordan before the raid, and now they’ve scattered. Globally, we think.”
“You think.”
The big Fed took another bite of Philly chicken, chewed it, swallowed part of it and said, “You know how that goes. Whispers in the wind from NSA and anybody else who’s listening. As of two days ago, we know three members of the gang are in Paraguay.”
“That’s some commute,” Bolan observed.
“It’s relatively safe,” Brognola said. “We’ve had an extradition treaty with the government there since March 2001, but you know how that goes in South America. They talk tough on terrorism, and they crack down hard on anyone who threatens their control, but when it comes to foreign groups, they’ve got no statutes on the books. Their courts are as crooked as they come. We need chapter and verse to push an extradition through on narco-trafficking, much less something they view as foreign politics.”
Bolan trimmed it to the bottom line. “They need retrieving, or elimination.”
“Either one suits me, but here’s the problem. When I say we have a fix on three, that means the other thirteen goons are in the wind. They could be anywhere from Marrakesh to Malibu by now, and burrowed deep. We figure their three pals in Paraguay will have some means of reaching out, but if they all go down without a chance to talk...”
Brognola left it hanging there.
Bolan saw the problem now, and it was not a pretty one.
“I’ll take it,” he told the big Fed. “But I need more intel.”
Brognola slid a thumb drive in a paper sleeve across their little table. “That’s got everything we know, so far, but we can run it down right now.”
Bolan reached out and made the thumb drive disappear. “Okay,” he said. “Before you start, though, if we’re going global, I may need some backup.”
“Anyone in mind?” Brognola asked.
“Just Jack.”
Miami, Florida
THE CELL PHONE’S buzzing caught Jack Grimaldi with a pint of Guinness at his lips, a plate of fish and chips in front of him, inside an Irish pub on South Miami Avenue. He recognized the number, took a sip and let it ring once more, then picked up.
“Hey, what’s happening?” he asked.
“You busy?” Mack Bolan inquired.
“Just having lunch.”
“I mean the next few days.”
Grimaldi smiled. “I’ve got a window, if there’s something going on.”
“There is.”
“Details?”
“We’d have to scramble it.”
“Wait one,” Grimaldi said. He had a special app to handle that, engaged with one keystroke while Bolan set up on his end.
“Okay,” Grimaldi said. “Ready.”
Bolan ran down the basic details, adding new twists to the foreign news that had been dominating every channel on the TV in Grimaldi’s hotel room for the past week. The Stony Man pilot felt his pulse rate quicken. He took another sip of beer, then set down his glass.
“So, Paraguay,” he said, when the Executioner was done.
“It’s all we’ve got right now,” Bolan replied.
“Someplace I’ve never been. Still Nazis down there, are they?”
“That was Stroessner. He was overthrown a while ago, but his party still runs things. They impeached a president in 2012 for not cracking down hard enough on the Left. Replaced him with a guy who spent ten years running a soccer club. The DEA claims he’s connected to the drug trade.”
“Sounds like they could use a visit,” Grimaldi said.
“Only for the fugitives, this time around,” Bolan reminded him.
“Too bad. Three guys, you said?”
“Hopefully giving us directions to the rest.”
“You know me. I can be persuasive.”
“So, you’re in?”
“I wouldn’t miss it. What’s our estimated time of departure?”
“As soon as you can get up here to Arlington.”
Grimaldi did the calculations in his head. There was drive time from the pub to Opa-locka Executive Airport, eleven miles north of downtown Miami, then the prep and clearance for takeoff. He guesstimated flight time from OEA to Arlington in his Piper Seneca, cruising speed 216 miles per hour, then the rituals of landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport.
“Six hours, minimum. I’ll call you if they tie me up too long with paperwork.”
“That’s Reagan?”
“Right.”
“I’ll see you there,” Bolan replied, and he was gone.
The Sarge had never been the chatty type, a trait Grimaldi had appreciated from the day they met. Their hookup had been strange, perhaps unique—a kidnapping, in fact, Grimaldi on the hostage end of it—but it had given the pilot a new life. Maybe saved his life, although the new one was a hectic roller-coaster ride of peril.
Fun, though, in a demented kind of way, once you had settled in and got into the spirit of the thing.
The bonus, in Grimaldi’s case, was knowing that he sometimes made a difference. He’d gone from being part of the problem—a see-nothing, hear-nothing syndicate flyboy—to playing on the side of the angels.
No, scratch that. He would never be an angel, and the jobs he did for Stony Man, with or without Mack Bolan, sure as hell wouldn’t strike most folks as angelic. He was still outside the law, but with a twist, pursuing bad guys who had been above the law so long, they thought they were invincible. He’d hated bullies from the time he was the shortest kid in kindergarten class, until he’d learned to take a punch and give back three or four for every one received.
Grimaldi thought about the next few days, unsure when he would have another chance to eat, and finished off the plate in front of him. He quaffed the beer and pushed his empty back. “Another?” the barkeep asked.
“Wish I could,” Grimaldi told him, lifting off his bar stool. “But I have to fly.”
Ronald Reagan National Airport
WAITING FOR JACK GRIMALDI, with nowhere else to go, Bolan picked out a reasonably isolated seat in Terminal A and settled in to review Hal Brognola’s files. The thumb drive held a total of nineteen, one titled “AQ/AH,” the remainder bearing what he took for Arabic surnames.
Bolan started with the file on God’s Hammer, skimming over what he’d already learned from the big Fed about the group’s roots and creation. It was a splinter of a splinter, descended from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda by way of the “subordinate” AQAP, active mainly in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The parent organizations were dominated by Salafi Muslims—also called Wahhabis—who, in turn, comprised a subdivision of the Sunni sect. Bolan wasn’t interested in Islam’s doctrinal rifts, any more than he was by the multitude of self-styled Christian denominations, but he focused on Salafist jihadism preached by al-Qaeda and its descendants.
Bottom line: they were at war with Israel and the “decadent” West, especially that “Great Satan,” Uncle Sam. Whatever they could do to hurt their enemies, from bombing navy ships in port to 9/11, Salafist jihadists were ready to go.