Final Coup

They were roughly 150 yards from the aircraft when it finally exploded.

Bolan set Grimaldi on the tarmac and turned back toward the plane. Flames and smoke rose high enough to hide them no matter how skilled, how well-armed the snipers were—or how many of them were out there.

“So much for our low-profile entry into the country,” Lareby said. Bolan watched him as he stared back at the flames jumping from what was quickly beginning to look like a fiery dinosaur skeleton in a museum. The fire had spread to all parts of the plane.

Lareby knelt next to where Grimaldi sat. “Better check you out, sport,” he said. “Hold still. I’m a physician, after all.”

“Then get to work and prove it,” Grimaldi came back. “But I’m okay, seriously.”

“You’re okay for the moment,” Lareby said. “But in about ten minutes the adrenaline is going to wear off, and you’ll feel like someone jammed a hot branding iron through you.”

“I’ve lived through worse than this before,” the pilot said.

Bolan had been too busy to notice Lareby’s black leather bag. But he watched as the man pulled out a stethoscope, a hypodermic needle and a small vial. “What are you giving him?” he asked in a stern voice.

“Morphine,” Lareby said. “He’s right—his wounds aren’t life-threatening. The material in the ballistic siding slowed the bullets, and you couldn’t have asked for cleaner shots. Upper chest, then on out the back. Missed the lung. Worse-case scenario, it may have chipped a shoulder blade.”

“How about the leg wound?” Bolan pressed.

“He won’t be running any marathons for a while,” the CIA man said. “But it’s nothing. The blood’s already starting to coagulate.”

“I said I was all right,” Grimaldi said as the tried to get up off the ground. This time Bolan helped Lareby hold him back down, twisting him onto his back.

Only then did Bolan see how much pain there actually was in his old friend’s eyes. But the eyes were the only place it showed. His face looked more angry than hurt.

“They had to be loaded up with armor-piercing rounds,” Lareby said as he probed further at the pilot below him. “The wound channel is so straight you could stick a pencil through it. Hardly any tissue damage to the sides of the bullet’s path.” The CIA doctor pulled off the cap on the hypodermic needle with his teeth, spit it to the side, then punctured the top of the tiny vial with the needle. Holding it upward, he injected Grimaldi’s arm with the morphine and, one by one, Bolan watched the wrinkles in the Stony Man pilot’s face smooth out as the drug hit his system.

Grimaldi finally grinned. “You know,” he said. “On second thought, I think the adrenaline is wearing off. You wouldn’t by any chance have a six-pack of that stuff you can leave with me?” His tongue suddenly loosened, Grimaldi continued with, “They got any flowers around here?” he asked jokingly. “I’m getting this uncontrollable urge to wear flowers in my hair and go to San Francisco.”

Bolan and Lareby hauled Grimaldi to his feet. “Sorry, Flower Child,” Bolan said. “But Timothy Leary’s dead and the Age of Aquarius is long gone.”

“Maybe for you, Sarge.” Grimaldi laughed. He was standing on his own now, but his feet were still wobbly. “But I’ve got all of Janice Joplin, Blind Faith and Cream on CDs back in my car. It’s to drown out the ‘rap’ I have to endure at stop-lights.” He frowned for a moment, scratching his chin. “Or they might be in my room back at the main house. But I’m gonna look until I find them and—”

Bolan cleared his throat. “Jack?” he said.

“Yeah?” the pilot said.

“No more morphine-speak, okay? Just shut up.”

Grimaldi lost his grin. “Gotcha,” he said.

A moment later, Bolan had taken him by the arm and was moving him backward, farther away from the fiery plane. When he had gotten the pilot out of earshot of the other men, Bolan turned to look at them.

They all stared back. And unless he missed his guess, they were all wondering just what the “main house” was.

Jack Grimaldi had realized his mistake even before Bolan spoke, and he said, “Sorry, Sarge. I guess I could blame it on the morphine, but that’s no excuse.”

Bolan turned his back to the rest of the men in case any of them read lips. “It’s no big deal, Jack,” he said. “But these guys are paid to be suspicious of anybody and everybody. Look at it from their point of view for a moment. We suddenly appear, seemingly out of nowhere, and they get orders directly from the White House that we’re in charge. And while we know all about them, they know nothing about us. We’ve got to be cautious.”

Grimaldi nodded. “Rest assured it won’t happen again, big guy,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to get checked out by some hospital here. But from now on my only topic of conversation around strangers will be my health.”

The Executioner smiled. “One slipup in…how many years have we been working together?”

“More than I’d like to count,” Grimaldi said.

Bolan chuckled under his breath. “It’s time to regroup and replan.” He took Grimaldi by the arm and guided him back toward the rest of the Americans.

By now, the flames and smoke from the jet were dying down, and they’d soon be visible targets again. With absolutely no cover or concealment on the vast, wide-open runway. The sounds of gunfire from the terminal had all but vanished, but Bolan didn’t kid himself.

The snipers had not fled the area. They, like Bolan himself, were waiting for the smoke to clear before they resumed fire. And as he half-carried Grimaldi farther from the inferno, the fog began to disperse.

And the soldier saw a half-dozen Cameroonian army jeeps racing toward them.

That was the greeting he’d been briefed to expect, but he’d had no advance intel that it would be during a pitched gun battle.

For a brief moment, the Executioner glanced back at the skeletal aircraft. The fire and smoke was close to burning itself out, which meant that he had to get all his men away from what was about to become a disaster zone.

The smoke continued to float apart in the air as they advanced, allowing Bolan a better view of where they were headed. But it was a mixed blessing. The clearing air also allowed the snipers to pick out their targets again, and the blasts from the rifles in the windows of the terminal building came back with a vengeance.

The fog had all but been left behind them when Bolan spotted the corrugated steel shack between the runways. It stood at an angle that would be difficult to shoot at from the terminal and, with the wounded men, it appeared to be their best objective. It would not stop high-powered rifle rounds but if they could get behind its walls, it would at least keep the enemy from locking in on specific targets.

Specific targets meaning human beings.

Them.

Bolan began to run toward the small building as the bullets from the snipers’ scoped rifles spit past him. With Grimaldi still in tow, he utilized a “serpentine” tactic, running an S pattern that changed in speed, shape and size so that it became no true pattern at all. Behind him, he could hear the other men following.

The soldier dropped Grimaldi to the grass as soon as he was behind the shack. And then, just as suddenly as it had started, the rifle-fire ceased. Bolan glanced around the corner of the building and saw why.

On both sides, as well as behind the terminal, stood a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. Topped with coil after coil of rolled razor-wire, it was meant to stop or slow anyone trying to transverse it. It would be easy to scale the fence. But passing through the razor-wire without getting shredded to pieces—or at least tangled and providing an easy, stationary target for the sharpshooters in the terminal—would be all but impossible.

But the fence and wire didn’t do a very good job of retarding the tank that was pushing slowly through it to the left of the runway where the jet’s remains still stood. The armored vehicle began snapping the fence and the steel poles between, which it stretched as if they were dry wooden matchsticks.

Bolan stared at the tank for a moment. An older-model Chieftain, it was of British design and had obviously been left behind when Great Britain moved out of Cameroon. Originally meant for use by a legitimate new government, it had, not surprisingly, fallen into the hands of terrorists instead. Bolan knew that the Chieftain had been created as a result of Britain’s World War II warfare experience. It was built to give priority to both firepower and armored protection.

The soldier felt the muscles in his face tighten. Earlier, he had had a brief moment of regret that his team’s rifles, grenades, extra ammo, clothes and other gear had been left on the jet and were now either in ashes or otherwise useless. But watching the tank roll forward undeterred, he realized they had carried nothing that would stop the British Chieftain.

No, Bolan thought, as the jeeps arrived and their occupants began scooting closer to make room for the Americans. Until more firepower could arrive via diplomatic pouches, he and the other men would have only the weapons they had carried on them and anything they could beg, borrow, or steal from the Cameroonians.

Taking a seat next to the dark-skinned sergeant in one of the jeeps, Bolan held on to the top of his door as the man cut a sharp U-turn and picked up speed again. A 60 mm machine gun was mounted in each jeep, but they would be of little more use against the Chieftain than his .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. They led the convoy of jeeps to escape the inevitable aim of the tank’s antitank rounds or machine gun— either of which could turn the jeeps into fiery infernos like the jet.

Bolan had learned many truths during his career as a warrior. And one of them was that when you were outgunned and unable to go toe-to-toe with a superior weapon itself, the only plan of action that had any chance of succeeding was to take out the man whose finger was on the trigger.

The soldier’s eyebrows furrowed in concentration as a head suddenly rose through the hatch on top of the tank. All Bolan could see was the man’s hair and eyes.

The men inside would not be expecting any significant return fire from the Americans’ pistols or the AK-47s carried by the Cameroonian regulars in the jeeps. So as soon as their speed had leveled off, Bolan twisted and rested the Desert Eagle on the side of the jeep. Aiming high, he lined up the front and rear sights of the big .44 Magnum pistol just above the head sticking out of the tank’s hatch.

But before he could squeeze the trigger, he heard the boom of the Chieftain’s gun and saw the tank literally thrown backward with the recoil.