Dead Reckoning

“Bastard!” Khamis spit back at him.

“Alas, my mother is deceased, but she would not have joined in any such activity were she still living. Now, your jackal of a father, on the other hand—”

Khamis lunged for him, hands formed into claws, but someone struck him from behind, and suddenly the lights went out.

* * *

“IT DOESN’T LOOK like much,” Grimaldi said, as they rolled past the target.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Bolan said. “Low profile. Trying to fit in.”

“And Bear was clear about the address?”

“Crystal,” Bolan said. “He’s never steered me wrong.”

“Okay.”

It was still daylight as they drove down Avenida San José, but dusk was closing in on Ciudad del Este after one hellacious afternoon. Bolan knew crime was rampant all along the Triple Frontier, but he had no idea what the average daily murder rate might be for any of the district’s top three border cities. The number was totally irrelevant, but he and Grimaldi had bumped the day’s statistics.

And they were about to give the stats another nudge.

The rain had passed but might return at any time. Both warriors left on their raincoats, concealment for the weapons hanging from their shoulder slings, pistols in armpit leather, frag grenades attached to belts. Even in Ciudad del Este, those accoutrements would raise eyebrows and have observers reaching for their cell phones to alert police.

Their Bluetooth headsets, on the other hand, were normal.

On the drive across town, Grimaldi had scanned the neighborhood on Google Earth, getting the layout and an aerial of the Hezbollah safe house. It was on the small side, maybe four bedrooms, although he couldn’t judge the floor plan from a snapshot of the roof, taken from outer space. The last snap hadn’t captured any dogs roaming the fenced backyard, which faced a narrow alley at the rear. There’d been no guards outside, either, and Bolan wasn’t sure exactly what to think of that.

It could go either way, he knew, after their hit on Calle Victor Hugo Norte. If the Hezbollah hardmen were hurt and spooked badly enough, they might have fled the city, but he didn’t think so. It was more likely, to Bolan’s mind, that they would go to ground at their alternate hideout, pull the blinds and disconnect the phones, hoping the storm blew past them and moved on.

If he was wrong, this second stop-off was a waste of time. They should be airborne, winging out of Paraguay and toward their next meeting with God’s Hammer, on the far side of the world.

But Bolan wasn’t often wrong. He had a feel for what his enemies were thinking, how they’d play it in a given situation. Even dealing with fanatics hyped on hatred and religion, he could get inside most predators’ minds and guess what to expect, at least in generalities.

Because at bottom, where it mattered, they were all the same.

“You want the front or back?” Bolan asked.

“Front,” Grimaldi said. “I know enough Spanish to confuse them and get a foot in the door.”

“As long as they don’t chop it off,” Bolan said.

“No problemo, señor.”

“Okay, you convinced me.”

The back door could go either way, once Grimaldi dropped in around in front. The men they wanted could come boiling out the back or plaster Grimaldi with everything they had to keep him out. If it went down that way, Bolan would be a rude surprise for them, another drop-in they were not expecting.

Watching curtained windows as he made his move, he steeled himself for anything.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_5ddbf374-6341-5cb5-8532-d231520997e5)

Jack Grimaldi felt like Avon calling, but with nothing anyone inside the target house would want to buy. The treatment he prescribed wouldn’t improve their health or make them more attractive, but at least, if he applied it properly, the world would be a better place when he was done.

And would he still be living in it?

Doorbells hadn’t caught on yet, it seemed, in Ciudad del Este, though the door did have a peephole set at about eye level for a person five foot four or five. Whoever answered to his knocking wouldn’t see the Spectre M4 held against Grimaldi’s hip, ready to rise and shine the moment that the door was opened, but they’d have a fish-eyed view of the Stony Man pilot’s face underneath a faded baseball cap.

Just for the hell of it, he smiled.

Footsteps approached the door. Grimaldi willed himself to stay relaxed, at least to all outward appearances. A shadow blocked the peephole and a man’s voice called out to him through the door, “Quién es?”

They were speaking Spanish. Great. Grimaldi didn’t know how long the Hezbollah team had been in Paraguay or how much of the native language they had learned, but he could only bluff it out. Dropping his voice a notch to make the doorman strain his ears, he answered back.

“Es mi amigo en su casa hoy?”

Grimaldi had no friends in town, and if he had, they wouldn’t have been here, but what the hell.

“Que estás diciendo?”

Good question. What was he saying, standing there and waiting for a storm of bullets to rip through the door at any second? Broadening his smile, he tried again, pure gibberish this time.

“Mi perro es loco ahora por dias.”

The doorman wasn’t loving it. “Usted tiene la casa equivocada. Vete!”

But Grimaldi didn’t have the wrong house, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Mi elefante está enfermo,” he said, almost whispering, forcing the doorman to lean in closer to hear him.

“Que?”

Instead of answering that time, Grimaldi raised his SMG and fired a short burst through the door, approximately were the greeter’s torso ought to be, eyes slitted against any blowback from the flimsy paneling. A swift kick to the lock forced the door open, and it caught the Hezbollah gunner inside as he was falling, shoving him away to clear the threshold.

A hallway stretched in front of Grimaldi, rooms branching off to either side, the home’s back door facing the pilot from the far end of the corridor. In Dixie, once upon a time, they called homes with that simple layout shotgun houses, meaning you could fire a weapon through the front door, down the hall, into the yard out back, and never hit an intervening wall.

Somewhere inside the house, from some room to his left, a man called out a question. This one spoke in Arabic, not trusting Spanish, and Grimaldi didn’t bother answering. He ducked into the first room on his right and found a parlor, unoccupied, a TV set playing without an audience. Contestants on a game show looked excited, but Grimaldi didn’t have a clue what they were doing.

Two male voices called down the hallway now, first curious, then shouting when they saw their buddy stretched out in the foyer, marinating in a pool of blood. More voices answered from the back, all Arabic, and Grimaldi heard automatic weapons being primed.

The doorman he had taken down was not Walid Khamis. As for the rest, he’d have to meet the lot of them head-on and see what he could see. Grimaldi smiled ferociously and went to meet his enemies.

* * *

ASHRAF TANNOUS HAD watched while others rolled Walid Khamis up in a plastic tarp, secured at each end by black zip ties. Perhaps, he thought, the worthless slug would suffocate in there while they transported him to a disposal site, and save Tannous a bullet. They would have to check him, though, and not risk leaving him to struggle free once they had left

Another problem, courtesy of the strangers whom he had been ordered to accept as guests, providing shelter until it was safe for them to leave. Now, they were never leaving Paraguay, and neither were a dozen of his soldiers who had died in vain, protecting them.

Stupid.