Appointment In Baghdad

Bolan glanced quickly around to see if the occupants of any of the other nearby buildings had witnessed his climb. He saw no evidence of either them or Manning in his overwatch position and ducked into the building, leaving the door open behind him.

The Executioner descended into darkness.

CHAPTER TWO

Bolan moved down the stairs and deeper into the building. He moved past the fire door leading to the fourth-floor apartments and down toward the two levels housing the mosque.

NSA programs had intercepted calls originating in the An Bar province of western Iraq with their terminus in this area of Toronto. Official procedures had been followed and contact with Ottawa made in the offices of both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, known as CSIS.

Because the intercepted cell-phone call had been made to the twenty-seven-year-old son of a Syrian diplomat stationed in Canada’s capital, the response from the government security services had been to decline the request for mutual cooperation. Subsequent investigations made by CSIS had concluded that the foreign jihadists were not threats domestically and served only in administrative and supportive roles to insurgents operating in the Middle East, much as American representatives of the Sinn Fein had served nonviolently to facilitate IRA activities during the 1970s.

The Canadian position became an official posture of low-key overwatch. The mosque in question would remain unmolested.

To an embattled and besieged America, the Damascus-Toronto-Ramadi connection represented a treasure trove of information and a clear and present danger. The Hiba Bakr, who ran the center for Islamic studies was a known Whabbist, and the Syrian diplomat in question was a man frequently associated with the top levels in the Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawiyya, or the Syrian Air Force Intelligence known as the IMJ.

The IMJ had evolved into Syria’s most covert and ruthless intelligence agency and was, despite its moniker, not primarily concerned with gathering intelligence for the nation’s air force. Hafez al-Assad, the former president of Syria, had once commanded the air force and upon his assumption of power in 1970 had frequently turned away from the nation’s other three intelligence services in favor of one filled with men he personally knew and had in most cases appointed himself.

As Syria, like Saddam’s Iraq, was a Baathist state, IMJ’s internal operations had often involved operations against elements of Islamist opposition domestically. Externally, international operations had focused on the exportation and sponsorship of terrorist acts and causes the regime was sympathetic to, such as interference in the internal politics of Lebanon. Its agents operated from Syrian embassies and in the branch offices of Syria’s national airline. Dozens of terrorist actions had been attributed to them, including the attempted bombing of an Israeli airliner at London’s Heathrow Airport in April of 1986.

The IMJ’s position as favored attack dog had not changed with the death of Hafez al-Assad and the ascendancy of his son, Bashar.

Most importantly for Stony Man, the IMJ had been at the spearhead of the pipeline operation moving foreign fighters and equipment into western Iraq. Even if the Toronto cell was a passive operation, its communications, records and computer files could prove to be vital. Two days earlier a known courier, monitored by the CIA as an informational node between disparate jihadist cells, had disappeared after disembarking a plane in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

The runner’s face had shown up in a routine situation report filed by an Army counterintelligence unit working out of the Pentagon and in close liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The report had put him outside an extremist mosque mostly unpopular with the larger Toronto Muslim community. Stony Man had been put on alert.

Mack Bolan had once again been placed at the sharp end.

The MP-5 SD-3 was up and at the ready in his grip as he ghosted down the staircase toward the third-floor landing. Intelligence targets were worth more alive than dead. However, as had been the case with al-Qaeda-in-Iraq’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it was often more expedient to simply take them out when other means could not be readily facilitated. In this case a snatch operation under the eyes of CSIS had been deemed imprudent and traditional American assets too much of a potential political liability.

Bolan stepped softly off the staircase and stopped by the interior door on the narrow landing. From his check of the blueprints Bolan knew the third floor housed offices, a small kitchen and bedroom apartments while the second floor, directly above the grocery store, was a wide-open place of worship housing prayer mats, a lectern and screens to separate male and female faithful.

Bolan tried the knob to the fire door. It turned easily under his hand and he pulled it open, keeping the MP-5 submachine-gun up and at the ready. The door swung open smoothly, revealing a dark stretch of empty hall. Bolan stepped into the hallway and let the fire door swing shut behind him. He caught it with the heel of his boot just before it made contact with the jamb and gently eased it back into place.

Down the hallway, in the last room, a bar of light shone from underneath a closed door. Bolan heard indistinct voices coming from behind it, too muffled to make out clearly. Occasionally a bark of laughter punctuated the murmurs. The soldier stalked down the hall. Prudence dictated clearing each room he passed before he put those doorways at his back, but it was an unrealistic expectation for a lone operator in Bolan’s circumstance.

He eased into position beside the closed door and went down on one knee. Keeping his finger on the trigger of the MP-5, Bolan pulled a preassembled fiber-optic camera tactical display from his inside jacket pocket. He placed the coiled borescope cable on the ground and unwound it from the CDV display.

It was awkward working with only his left hand, but the voices on the other side of the door were clearly audible and speaking in what he thought was Arabic, though Bolan’s own skill in that language was low enough that it might have been Farsi. He turned on the display with an impatient tap of his thumb and then slid the cable slowly through the slight gap under the door.

The display reflected the shifting view as Bolan pushed the fiber-optic camera into position. A brilliant light filled the screen, and the display self-adjusted to compensate for the brightness. A motionless ceiling fan came into focus and Bolan twisted the cable so that the camera no longer pointed directly up at the ceiling.

A modest kitchen set twisted around on the slightly oval-shaped picture, and Bolan could clearly distinguish four men sitting around the table. All wore neutral colored clothes and sported beards, except for a younger man seated to the left, whose facial hair was dark but sparse and whispery.

Bolan was able to identify all of the men by the photographs that had been included in his mission workups. One man was Hiba Bakr, the imam of the Toronto mosque, a radical Whabbist cleric with ties to the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. Sixty-three years old, veteran of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan where he had served as spiritual adviser to the mujahideen, Bakr was a man intimately plugged into the international jihadist network, and had been for decades. His fiery rhetoric and extreme interpretation of the Koran had earned him followers among the disaffected Muslim youth of the area and the interest, albeit passively, of the RCMP.

The next man at the table was the youth with the wispy beard. Bolan identified him as Aram Mohammed Hadayet. It was his cell-phone calls that had been intercepted. An automatic pistol sat on the kitchen table in front of the youth. He listened as the cleric spoke, but his eyes kept shifting to the pistol on the table.

Next to Hadayet sat the man who had so excited the DIA—Walid Sourouri. A known graduate of al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sourouri had impressed his trainers with his nondescript demeanor and language capabilities. No glorious death by suicide for this warrior. Instead he was employed to help the networks circumvent the technical superiority of Western intelligence agencies by keeping things primitively simple. Sitting at the imam’s kitchen table was the foot messenger of al Qaeda.

The third man was Raneen Ogedi, a blunt-featured man with a large reputation within the intelligence community. It was a gruesome reputation that had somehow failed to capture the attention of the news media for one reason or another. Despite this, Bolan realized he had stumbled upon a killer from the Iraqi A-list of wanted men.

Ogedi was a former cell commander of Saddam’s fedayeen, and an operator who had exploited his Syrian intelligence contacts to funnel in foreign fighters during the earlier stages of the American occupation and to later on target Iraqi consensus government Shiite officials in hopes of exacerbating a civil war. He had been a virulent Baathist until the fall of Saddam, after which he had suddenly found his Muslim faith again, most specifically its very radical and extreme fringe elements.

The man was almost never accompanied by less than a squad of Syrian-trained bodyguards, but Bolan saw no evidence of them in the kitchen. Like the youth Hadayet, Ogedi had a weapon positioned in front on him on the kitchen table. The wire-stock of the Skorpion machine pistol had been collapsed, and the automatic weapon was barely larger than a regular handgun.

The resolution on the borescope was state-of-the-art, and Bolan was able to make out several books on the table as well as the weapons. One was a copy of the Koran, another a modern arms book and the third a U.S. Army munitions manual.

Bakr was speaking directly to Hadayet, his words impassioned. The youth nodded in agreement and muttered something in a low voice. The cleric’s blunt finger tapped the worn copy of the Koran for emphasis, and Sourouri nodded in enthusiastic agreement. His bulky parka fell open when he did, and Bolan got a flash of the nylon strap supporting the man’s shoulder holster.

Out of the jumble of conversation Bolan suddenly heard several words he recognized from his intel briefings at Stony Man Farm. Someone said Monzer al-Kassar’s name, which he’d already known. Then Hadayet said a different name: Scimitar.

The code name was cliché but iconic and was used as the calling card of a man believed to be at the center of the web of an international network of violent jihadist and criminal enterprises that stretched across the Middle East and southwest Asia.

Bolan slowly pulled his borescope out from under the lip of the door. He coiled the fiber-optic camera cable back up into a tight loop and attached it behind the heads-up display with a little Velcro strap designed for the purpose. He slid the device into the inside pocket of his jacket and shifted the H&K MP-5 SD-3 around.

Gary Manning’s deep voice came across the com-link. His voice remained calm but his urgency was obvious.

“We’ve got trouble,” Manning said. “There was nothing across the scanner, but I got an unmarked sedan with a dashboard light that just pulled into the alley.”

“Roger,” Bolan whispered.

“Get out!” Manning’s voice suddenly gritted. “Get out, they just rushed the door and a request for backup call just went out over the scanner. My boys had a surveillance operation. Get out.”

At that moment Bolan heard the downstairs door break open and the shouts of men as they entered the stairway on the first floor.

“Get Jack into the air and over the rally point,” Bolan ordered.

“Roger,” Manning acknowledged.

Then everything began to fall apart.

The voices in the kitchen went silent then burst into frantic curses, and in the distance Bolan heard the wail of police sirens. He knew with sudden intuition that a storm had just arrived in Toronto.

CHAPTER THREE

Bolan heard chairs scrape across the floor from inside the mosque’s kitchen and backpedaled from the door as it was thrown open. Light spilled into the gloomy hallway like dawn rising, and Bolan dropped to one knee and swung up the MP-5.

The first of the kitchen cabal rushed into the hallway. Raneen Ogedi held his Skorpion machine pistol at hip height as he emerged from the cramped room, his head already turning toward the far end of the hall where the footsteps of numerous men could be clearly heard thundering up the fire stairs. He looked stunned to see the black-clad Bolan crouched in the hallway. Ogedi leveled his weapon. The chugging sound of the silenced MP-5 was eerie as Bolan pulled down on the terrorist. His spent shells were caught in the cloth-and-wire brass catcher attached to the weapon’s ejection port. A 3-round burst of 9 mm Parabellum slugs ripped into the Iraqi’s face with brutal effect.

Blood splashed like paint onto the wood of the door and stood out vividly against the pale linoleum of the kitchen floor behind the man. Ogedi turned in a sloppy half circle and bounced off the kitchen door before dropping onto the ancient carpet of the hallway.

The next figure in the frantic line stumbled into the door frame. Bolan cut loose again and put a tight burst into the chest of the pistol wielding Sourouri, who had raced into the hallway directly behind the Iraqi killer. The man’s eyes were locked on the fallen form of his jihadist brother, and they lifted in shock as Bolan’s rounds punched up under his sternum, mangling his lungs and heart.

Blood gushed in a waterfall over the lips of the man’s gaping mouth and he tripped up in Ogedi’s legs and went down face-first. Bolan saw Bakr frozen at the edge of the kitchen door, hands held out and empty, his eyes locked on the grim specter of the Executioner.

Down the hallway the fire door burst open and Bolan glimpsed three men in suits, pistols drawn, as they raced into the hall. The lead man had a leather wallet open in his left hand and Bolan caught the dim flash of an RCMP badge.

Bolan rushed forward, hurtling the tangled mass of the two fallen terrorists. He slammed his shoulder into Bakr and knocked him out of the way. The old man grunted under the impact and spun off Bolan, stumbling backward over a chair and falling heavily to the kitchen floor. Something in Bolan, some sense of mercy or propriety, kept him from killing the man.