Dead Reckoning

CHAPTER THREE

Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

Bolan had reached the fourth floor and still had not seen any of the God’s Hammer fugitives among the men he and Grimaldi had put down so far. This was the last floor left to check, and he’d begun to worry that they might have slipped the net—or, at the very least, gone shopping, out to get a meal, whatever, and eluded him by sheer coincidence.

Not good.

Before they rushed the final set of apartments, Bolan huddled with Grimaldi on the stairwell. Just above and to their left, he heard the last defenders talking excitedly and priming their weapons, maybe trying to decide if they should rush the stairs or dig in for a last-ditch fight.

“It’s getting dicey now,” he told Grimaldi, almost whispering. “The guys we’re after could be here, but if they’re not—”

The Stony Man pilot saw where he was going and finished for him. “Then we need to bag somebody who can tell us when they left and where they went.”

“Right,” Bolan said. “I’d like to take one down but leave him breathing so we can question him, but don’t take any chances. Still take care of Number One.”

Grimaldi flashed a grin. “Which one of us is Number One?”

“Ready?” Bolan asked him.

“Set.”

Bolan eased up and pitched the frag grenade that he’d been holding while they talked, a blind toss down the narrow hallway. Four-point-something seconds later it exploded, filling the corridor with smoke and dust.

One guy was down and out, sprawled in the middle of the hallway, leaking from at least a dozen shrapnel wounds. A couple others staggered through the battle mist, approaching Bolan in a daze, but neither of their faces rang a bell from Brognola’s portfolio of God’s Hammer fugitives. The Executioner dropped both of them with one round each and moved on, searching.

First door on his left, ajar. He ducked and nudged it open, ready for a burst of autofire, but it was vacant, no one hiding underneath the bed or in the tiny bathroom. Doubling back, he heard Grimaldi’s muffled SMG responding to a challenge from the Hezbollah gunners and went to join him on the firing line.

Grimaldi had already cleared the rooms directly opposite, then run into a roadblock from the second flat in line, off to the right. At least one terroriat was battened down in there, firing short bursts from a Kalashnikov without putting much effort into aiming. So far, he had strafed the ceiling and the walls to either side, while Grimaldi lay prone out in the hallway, waiting for a shot.

Bolan got there ahead of him, his different perspective granting him an early crack at the defender. Three rounds from the Steyr chewed his adversary’s face off—not a face he recognized—and dumped him back across the threshold of the last room he would ever occupy.

Grimaldi bolted to his feet and cleared the apartment, while Bolan took the next one on his left. He saw no further movement in the hallway, no signs of continuing resistance, but they’d have to go the whole route, checking every room and closet, just in case.

Unless...

There was no one in the apartment, but on a whim, he checked the window, the first one he’d seen standing open yet, despite the building’s air-conditioning. A fire escape was bolted to the wall outside, and down below, three men were running toward the far end of an alley lined with garbage bins. One of them paused long enough to glance back at the room he’d lately vacated, and Bolan made his face.

Salman Farsoun, one of the three he’d come to find in Ciudad del Este.

“Jack!” he shouted, through the empty rooms. “Outside! They’re bailing!”

The Stony Man pilot was in the doorway, following, when Bolan clambered through the window and began his steep rush down the fire escape.

* * *

ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS SLOWING, almost at the alley’s mouth with cars and foot traffic beyond, when Salman Farsoun overtook him, blurting out, “I’ve seen them!”

“Seen who?” Rajhid asked him without stopping, without looking backward.

“The Crusaders! One of them, at least.”

“Then he’s seen you,” Rajhid replied. “Come on!”

Walid Khamis was already ahead of them, shoving his Micro Uzi underneath his baggy shirt. Rajhid did likewise with his MAC-10, hoping Farsoun could do something with the larger MP-5 K submachine gun he carried. The sounds of battle from the building they’d abandoned were already drawing notice. Rajhid did not fancy jogging down the boulevard with military weapons on display, alerting passersby to summon the police.

“He was a white man,” Farsoun said, still going on about the fellow he’d seen or had imagined. “An American, perhaps.”

Rahjid would never fully understand these Palestinians. Although himself a Saudi, he was well aware of how the Arab residents of Palestine had suffered since the state of Israel was created by outsiders from the West. Indeed, that had been the spark that lit the fuse on Rahjid’s own jihad, but there was still something peculiar about soldiers such as Khamis and Farsoun. They suffered from excitability, erratic moods, and Rajhid found them easily distracted at important moments of an operation.

Now, for instance, when his mind was focused on escape, Farsoun wanted to talk about some man he’d seen—but why? To what result?

“Come on!” Rajhid repeated. “We can talk about it later.”

“But—”

“Enough! Now hide that gun or leave it here!”

Farsoun lifted his shirt and shoved the MP-5 K underneath one armpit, lowering his arm to keep the weapon clamped against his side. Rajhid hoped he could keep it there, but had no plans to stay behind and help Farsoun if he got careless, drawing notice to himself.

The sidewalk they emerged on to was crowded, some people already slowing, peering down the alley toward the sounds of battle echoing along its length. Rajhid pushed through and past them. He might have warned Khamis to slow his pace a bit, attempted to act more normal, but he didn’t want the strangers passing by to put the two of them together.

One less thing for them to tell the police when they finally arrived.

And the police could turn up any moment, Rajhid realized. Then there could be gunfire, explosions, smoke and flames, for all he knew. The residents of Ciudad del Este were well acquainted with crime, but not with pitched battles fought in their midst.

Putting distance between himself and the scene, Rajhid spared a thought for whoever had raided the complex. Unlike Farsoun, he’d seen none of the raiders, therefore had no clue if they were locals or some kind of special unit from outside. The charm of Paraguay, for freedom fighters on the run, lay in its curious interpretation of what constituted terrorism. Any opposition to the ruling party was suppressed, but what a man did elsewhere—most particularly if his actions were directed against Jews and their supporters—might be overlooked, especially if cash changed hands.

But if the raid had been conducted by Crusaders, as Farsoun surmised, that would be something else.

Bin Laden had been slaughtered a US Navy SEAL team, at his lair in Pakistan, without a by-your-leave to the legitimate authorities. How many other heroes had been slain by rockets from a clear blue sky, triggered by hunters sitting in a bunker somewhere, half a world away?

Watching the traffic pass, alert for military or police vehicles, Rajhid wondered how the damned Crusaders could have found him here.

No matter.

For the moment, all he had to focus on was getting out alive.

* * *

THE ALLEY STANK, but that was par for any urban landscape in the tropics, where the seasons ranged from hot and damp to hot and soaking wet. The blacktop under Bolan’s feet was old, but still felt tacky from the heat, as if it had been freshly laid. He was halfway to the alley’s intersection with the street when Grimaldi dropped from the fire escape and started after him.

The runners he had glimpsed were gone, but they had turned left when they reached the street and Bolan went from there, tucking the AUG back underneath his raincoat, pausing long enough to let Grimaldi overtake him on the sidewalk.

“Farsoun was the one I recognized,” he said. “That makes the others Khamis and Rajhid. Two wearing white shirts, one in red, all three in khaki trousers.”

“Packing?” Grimaldi asked, while his eyes swept both sides of the street.

“Farsoun had something like an Ingram or a Micro Uzi. It was hard to tell. Assume they’re loaded.”

“There!” Grimaldi said, pointing as Bolan’s eyes locked on to a red shirt, retreating through the flow of window shoppers. Even as he spoke, the man in the red shirt glanced backward, seeming to meet Bolan’s gaze.

“Farsoun,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Before they’d covered half a block, he saw the other two, moving ahead of Farsoun on the same side of the street. Rajhid and Khamis wasted no time looking back, perhaps afraid of what was gaining on them, maybe just intent on getting clear and finding someplace new to hide. Whatever, Bolan had them spotted now, and he was bent on stopping them before they had a chance to disappear.

That thought had barely formed when one of them, wearing a white shirt, separated from the others, darting into traffic like a kamikaze bent on suicide, ducking and dodging as he ran to reach the far side of the street.

“I’m on him,” Grimaldi said, launching from the curb into a stream of steel and chrome, ignoring angry bleats from auto horns.

Instead of watching the pilot’s progress, Bolan pursued the targets dressed in red and white. They weren’t exactly running yet, but they were picking up the pace, anxious to clear the neighborhood before it swarmed with uniforms. Bolan had much the same idea himself, but couldn’t bail before he’d caught at least one of the fugitives.

Or done his best to catch them, anyway.

In a scene like this, he knew there was a chance he could lose both of them, or else be forced to take them down without a chance to ask the vital questions. Given that choice, Bolan would prefer dead terrorists to killers still at large and plotting their next move.

Ahead of him, the runners reached a cross street; one of them said something to the other, then they broke in opposite directions. One guy peeled away to Bolan’s left and out of sight around the corner, while his comrade bolted to the right, crossing against the light and nearly getting flattened by a taxi just before he reached the other curb.

There was no way to take the farthest runner down without endangering civilians and revealing he was armed. Bolan turned left and started running hard after the red shirt as its owner put on speed.

* * *

GRIMALDI WASN’T BIG, but he was fast. A mad dash through traffic with horns blaring at him, brakes screeching, had gotten his heart pumping. The shoulder-slung Spectre M4 slapped his ribs as he ran, until the Stony Man pilot clamped his right arm against it to stop the drumbeat. Every footfall sent a jolt along his spine and urged him to run faster.

Up ahead, his target—leaner, younger, desperate—had gained a lead on him and wasn’t slowing. The guy had glanced back once, treating Grimaldi to a glimpse of a familiar bearded face, then started running as if his life depended on it.

Which, in fact, it did.

Crossing the street in mid-block took them to another alley and more stinking garbage bins, rats the size of puppies scurrying where trash had overflowed or simply been discarded carelessly. The ground beneath their feet was asphalt, not concrete, almost spongy in the heat with soft rain pattering. Grimaldi knew that they were eastbound, headed for another street crowded with traffic and pedestrians, cars parked at crazy angles, people shopping under awnings that, for some reason he couldn’t grasp, were mostly blue.

It was the last place he would have chosen for a firefight.

If there was going to be gunplay—and Grimaldi didn’t doubt it for a second—he would rather keep it in the alley, where he didn’t have to fret about civilians wandering into the line of fire. The alley’s distant mouth was problematic, open to the street for any shots downrange that missed their mark, but it was better than a dose of Wild Bunch action on a teeming thoroughfare.

The runner had to have thought so, too, because he stopped abruptly, jerked some kind of stubby automatic weapon from his waistband, and cut loose at his pursuer from thirty yards. Grimaldi dodged behind a large garbage bin to his left, heard slugs plowing through blacktop and a few more rattling off the far end of the bin.

Whatever his intended mark was carrying, it had a rapid rate of fire—one of the MACs, perhaps, or one of the homegrown knock-offs. Whatever, it could slice and dice a man in nothing flat, the down side being that it burned through magazines like there was no tomorrow.

And if the Stony Man pilot’s intended target blew his load on random fire, there wouldn’t be.

At least, for him.

Grimaldi risked a peek around the bin, and his enemy unleashed another burst, cut short as he ran out of ammunition. Switching magazines took time—not much, but possibly enough—and Grimaldi broke toward the spot where he had seen his man duck out of sight, behind another rusty bin marked with gang graffiti.

It was going to be close, but if his luck held...

He was halfway to his destination when the wiry runner popped back into view, his weapon leveled from the hip. Grimaldi fired without a break in stride, a short burst meant to wound, but that was tricky from a stationary post, much less while sprinting. He saw bullets strike the target’s shirt, crimson erupting through the white fabric, and then his guy was going down, wasting his fresh mag on a slash of open sky above the alley.

Grimaldi reached him, kicked his little SMG aside and crouched beside the dying terrorist. The pilot spoke English, Italian and a little Spanish, so he went with English first.

“You’re dying,” he informed the fallen gunman. “Do your soul a favor while you can. Tell me where I can find your buddies from the raid in Jordan.”

The shooter’s eyes were fading in and out of focus with the pulse of blood from open lips. Grimaldi wasn’t sure the guy could speak at all, but something came out, sounding like “Elif air ab tizak!” The way he smirked, despite his pain, told Grimaldi it hadn’t been a compliment.

And then, he died.

* * *

ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS WINDED, but he could not stop to catch his breath. Two men had chased him from the four-story apartment building, along with Khamis and Farsoun. One of them had pursued Farsoun when he broke ranks and fled across the street, a panicked move that nonetheless had helped Rajhid by splitting up their enemies. He’d tried to do the same again—and save himself—by sending Khamis east while he turned west at the next intersection, but the ploy had failed.

He was alone now, with an enemy behind him, closing in.

The MAC-10 underneath his belt was chafing, gouging Rajhid, but he could not pull it out in public, running down the sidewalk with the weapon in his hand. That would be desperate, a last resort, and only useful if he had a chance to kill his adversary with the first rounds from his small machine pistol.

If he was forced to use the gun with witnesses around, it did not matter who else fell, as long as Rajhid dropped his man and ended the insane pursuit. Beyond that, if his past experience was any guide, a blaze of gunfire on a busy street would shock and terrorize most workaday pedestrians and buy Rajhid enough time to escape on foot.

Where would he go?

There was another place in Ciudad del Este, operated by Hezbollah, though his brethren might not be pleased to see him after what had just occurred at their so-called secure facility. Police were probably swarming around the shooting scene by now, exposing things that Rajhid’s hosts would not appreciate.

It could be death, returning to their company—but at the moment, in this foreign land, he had no other choice.

Kill first, he thought. Then run and hide.

But first, if possible, he had to spot a likely murder site.

Not murder, he corrected. Self-defense.

He needed cover. Not a lot, but ample for a brief exchange of fire in case his first shots failed to do the trick. A drawn-out duel would be the death of him, no matter what his adversary’s fate. With cell phones all around him, someone—many someones—would alert police, bringing them down on top of him with sirens whoop-whoop-whooping like demented banshees.

That would be the end. A martyr’s death, of course, but not the one Rajhid envisioned for himself.

He still had plans for the jihad.

The cross street he had chosen was a kind of outdoor market, with stalls under awnings positioned outside stores. Its barely orchestrated chaos made him feel at home, reminding him of marketplaces where his mother used to shop, where he had run and played in childhood, still oblivious to all the perils of the world. Rajhid could pick out any stall and duck behind it for a moment, turn and—