Hell Night

The smile remained on Nasab’s face. “It will be a true jihad,” he said quietly.

“For you, yes,” Davis said. “I’ve been calling it the Night of Hell. My men are already in America, so they’ll be easy enough to move to the attack sites. You have men in cells all over the country, as well. But I’d like you to start bringing in even more. Through Mexico is always a good way—you’ve proved that. And the Canadian border is still unguarded for the most part. There are dozens of back roads you can take, and no one will even know your men are here. And don’t forget the coasts—both Atlantic and Pacific. One ship pulling up to an isolated spot can off-load hundreds of Hamas operatives.” He paused for a sip of coffee. “You’ll need to bring your own small arms for the most part. If you run short, I can arm some of your men. But I don’t have enough rifles or sidearms for all of Hamas. And we’ll need as many of those suicide-bomb vests of yours as you can smuggle in.”

Nasab frowned. “Your men are going to use them?”

Davis laughed out loud. “Of course not,” he said. “Killing ourselves isn’t quite our thing. But it’s yours, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Ibrahim Nasab said slowly, “it is one of the tactics we employ when necessary, yes. And it is a path directly to Paradise.”

“In any case, suicide bombings are what you’re most famous for, aren’t they?” Davis continued. “The World Trade Center and the Pentagon? All your buddy Bin Laden missed that day was the White House with that last flight. And you’ve blown up thousands of people—including the bombers themselves—in smaller ops against Israel and other spots around the world.”

“You expect all of the suicides to come from my men?” Nasab asked.

“Like I said,” Davis replied. “It’s what you do, isn’t it?”

The Arab forced a smile. “Yes,” he said. “It is what we do. But why stop with the vests? We have small backpack nuclear bombs in our possession. One is all it would take.”

Davis shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I want this to be a surgical strike. Controllable. Besides destroying ninety percent of the United States infrastructure—which we’ll need once we step in and take the reins—a nuke would indiscriminately kill my men, as well as yours.”

An expression of loathing and disrespect curled Nasab’s lips into a frown. “So you do not mind if my men die, only your own?”

“Exactly,” Davis said. “But don’t forget it was you guys wrote the rules on suicide bombings, not us. We don’t do suicide. Or windows.”

The puzzled look returned to Nasab, the joke obviously lost on him.

A long pause followed as the men finished their coffee. Finally, seeing only tiny black grounds in the bottom of his cup, Davis said, “Then it’s decided, right? My American Rough Riders and Hamas will work together for our common goal—the attacks leading up to the big one, and then the one we’re calling the Night of Hell. I’m not kidding myself—it won’t bring the American government completely down. But it ought to drop it to its knees, and from there we may be able to pound it on into the ground.” He started to stick out his hand to shake Nasab’s, then drew it back, remembering whom he was dealing with.

Nasab had almost lifted his own hand. But now he dropped it again. “You have called it the Night of Hell. We have been referring to it simply the American jihad.”

“American jihad,” Davis said. “Night of Hell. Same thing.”

Nasab nodded. “We have one major strike planned right here, tomorrow night in France. It will come the next day after your bank robbery in America, and can serve as one of the attacks leading up to the big night.”

Davis nodded. “We’ve got a few things already planned in the U.S., too. In the meantime, start smuggling your operatives across the border.”

“It is agreed,” Nasab said. “But what are we to do once our joint mission is accomplished?”

Davis stood up, leaving several euros on the table next to his empty cup. Nasab followed him to his feet. “We’ll have to work something out between us,” he said. “But there’s no sense worrying about that now.”

Nasab nodded hesitantly.

Davis could see on the Arab’s face that they were thinking the same thing.

Once the Night of Hell was over, the alliance between them would end. And it would become time for Hamas and the Rough Riders to start killing each other. But that didn’t matter right now. And by the time it did, Benjamin Franklin Davis’s other plan—the one about which Nasab was completely unaware—would have corrected the problem.

“We’ll stay in touch by cell phone,” Davis said as the two men left the sidewalk café and began walking down the street. “My electronics expert has worked on them, and they’re all but untappable.”

“When do we begin?” Nasab asked as they passed a florist’s shop and the pleasant odor of freshly cut spring flowers filled their nostrils.

Davis glanced at his watch. The bank robbery should be well under way by now. “We already have, my friend,” he said. “We already have.”

1

The huge windowpane closest to the bank’s front doors shattered, the tiny shards glistening like snowflakes as they fell through the bright sunlight. But before they had hit the ground, the bank robber in green coveralls and navy blue ski mask dropped the 9 mm Uzi and toppled to the pavement, dead.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, crouched behind the Kia he was using as cover. Up and down the row of cars parked outside the bank in Kansas City, Missouri, SWAT operatives in dark blue BDU blouses and matching pants had their own rifles pointed toward the building.

Bolan had used up most of his 30-round magazine from the M-16 A-2 in taking out the window and the would-be bank robber, and now he shoved a fresh box mag into the rifle. The robbers still inside the bank and the cops behind the cars exchanged gunfire. If the gunfire continued long enough, Bolan knew it would accomplish nothing except getting the hostages inside the building killed.

Turning to the ruddy-complexioned SWAT captain next to him, the Executioner yelled, “Tell your men to cease-fire, Tom! If we don’t establish some kind of dialogue fast, the good guys still inside are going to get killed.”

“Cease-fire!” the captain screamed. Leaning his chin toward the microphone clipped to the epaulet on his left shoulder, he flipped a switch on his nylon utility belt and repeated the order. “Cease-fire!”

As the roar of the gunshots died down, Bolan thought about the strange situation in which he now found himself. He had been at Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorist command post and training grounds. In addition to fielding top-notch assault teams like Able Team and Phoenix Force, Stony Man handpicked exceptional soldiers and police officers from the U.S. and friendly nations for advanced combat training. These men were flown to the Farm blindfolded, then left the same way—never knowing exactly where they’d been or who had trained them. What they did know was that they’d never received such pragmatic or intense instruction anywhere else in the world.

Tom Glasser, the sturdily built Kansas City captain next to the Executioner, had just completed a Stony Man session. When a local snitch informed the Kansas City PD of the upcoming bank robbery planned by the Rough Riders—a faction of the American Nazi Party—Glasser and Bolan had been flown straight from Stony Man Farm.

Bolan let the bolt on his M-16 slide home, chambering a round. The air seemed eerily quiet now. He watched quietly as a uniformed officer, hunkered low beneath the vehicles, approached Glasser’s other side. When he was near enough, the uniform whisper-shouted a phone number.

Glasser wasted no time pulling a cell phone from a nylon carrier on his belt and tapping in the number. A second later, he had one of the bank robbers on the line.

“All right,” he said into the instrument. “Let’s cut the formalities. What do you want in exchange for the hostages?” He thumbed another button and activated the speakerphone so Bolan could hear the other end of the conversation, too.

The raspy cough of a heavy cigarette smoker sounded over the speakerphone. “Every damn penny we’ll be hauling out of this bank,” the bank robber declared. “And five million more for the inconvenience you’ve caused us.” The voice paused and took in a hacking breath. “After that, the usual. A chopper big enough to take thirty people—that’ll include some of the hostages—to the airport, a plane full of fuel ready to take off and a pilot who isn’t a disguised cop.” The man coughed again. “We find a weapon of any kind on him, or anything else that makes us think the flyboy’s a pig, and we’ll blow his head off.”

Glasser looked toward Bolan. Even though he was technically in charge of this operation, the SWAT commander had just spent a month enduring the most rigorous cutting-edge training he’d had in his career, and Bolan had taught several of those classes. Hostage negotiation had been one of them.

Bolan answered the unasked question by silently mouthing the words, “You know what to do. Stall.”

“I don’t have the authority to meet your demands,” Glasser said into the cell phone. “It can be done. But it’s going to take time.”

“You’ve got time,” the man across the street rasped. “Twenty minutes.”

“I can’t even get clearance for the chopper and plane in that length of time,” Glasser said. “Let alone raise five million bucks for you.”

“Well, you’d better try,” the gravelly voice snapped. “Because each minute you’re late means another dead hostage.” There was a pause, then a low, phlegm-sounding chuckle. “I’ll just shoot them, then toss them out the front window you guys blew out so you can see them.” He finished with, “You’ve now got nineteen minutes.” The line clicked dead.

Glasser cut the call at his end and turned once again toward the Executioner. He had known Bolan as Matt Cooper while training at the Farm, and still did. “Any suggestions, Cooper?” he said.

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Get on the phone and start trying to get clearance for the chopper and plane. And check with the local Secret Service field office. See how much counterfeit money they’ve got on hand.” He looked the burly man in the eye. “These guys aren’t going to have the time or the equipment to check out good fakes, and it’ll be a lot easier than trying to talk any other bank or rich individual into gambling with five million real dollars.”

Glasser nodded and began tapping numbers into his phone.

Rising to his feet, the Executioner stayed low, bending over to whisper into Glasser’s ear. “You’re never going to make the twenty-minute deadline,” he said.

Glasser had just hung up the phone. “I know,” he said.

“And if the guys inside are from the Rough Riders, they aren’t bluffing,” Bolan said just as quietly. He remembered a recent intelligence report that Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman—Stony Man Farm’s chief computer expert—had put together about this militant faction of the American Nazi Party. The Rough Riders were suspected in several murders and—like so many homegrown American terrorist groups—relied on bank robbery as their primary means of support.