Dead Reckoning

The target was a former tenement that Hezbollah had purchased from its slumlord owner for a song, assisted by the standard offer he couldn’t refuse, then remodeled into two-bedroom apartments with a storefront office at street level, serving double duty as a mosque and faith-based charity soliciting donations on behalf of Middle Eastern refugees. The mosque preached war against the West; the money donated for displaced persons went, in fact, to Hezbollah’s war chest. As for the eighteen apartments, six to a floor, they housed members of Hezbollah and anyone they favored with accommodations for a stopover.

How many gunmen could a two-bedroom apartment hold? Plenty.

Say, four on average, and the total was over seventy. If they were really crowded in, it could be double that, without counting the mosque and office space downstairs.

A simple way would be to bring the whole place down. Strategic high-explosive charges, detonated simultaneously or in swift succession, could collapse the building with all hands inside, ensuring that they didn’t live to fight another day. It was effective but completely indiscriminate.

And Bolan needed to be sure that certain targets were included when he made his sweep.

Three names, three faces were to be scratched off Bolan’s list. But first, he needed further leads to their associates, directions to wherever they had burrowed in, waiting to surface once the present storm had passed.

None of the men he hunted would be likely to cooperate. Bolan took that for granted and had come prepared—both physically and mentally—to do whatever might be necessary. Torture wasn’t something he condoned or trusted, having seen men lie outrageously to stop the pain, say anything their tormentors desired to make it end.

But the flip side of that was his determination not to take “no” for an answer.

“Ready?” Bolan asked.

Grimaldi nodded, then answered, “As I’ll ever be.”

* * *

GRIMALDI WAS READY for damn near anything. He hadn’t flown forty-seven hundred miles to sit on the sidelines and watch Bolan do all the work, or to gripe about odds that were stacked against them. That was the name of the game as he’d learned years ago, when Bolan had snatched him out of his old life—long story—and set Grimaldi on a new path unexpectedly.

For the better, sure, but not without risks.

And what was life without risk?

Their plan was relatively simple when they’d sketched it: breeze in through the building’s office space and make their way upstairs from there, in broad daylight, three specific faces foremost in their minds while they were taking out the trash. Spare one or more of those until they could be squeezed for information, preferably at another site, removed from what was bound to be a bloodbath. When a plan like that was put into practice, though, there was a tendency for things to go to hell.

The good news: everyone inside the building should be hard-core Hezbollah, except the trio at the top of Bolan’s hit list. Once they got inside, it was a free-fire zone, no quarter asked or offered, and their sole constraint was time. How long before police arrived to intervene, assuming that they came at all?

The Paraguayan National Police had roughly 22,000 officers nationwide, spread over 157,000 square miles of city and jungle, riding herd on nearly seven million citizens, plus tourists, drifters and the like. Police might show up at a crime scene late or not at all, depending on the victims’ status in society.

With Hezbollah involved, who knew what might go down?

Grimaldi double-checked his submachine gun, with its casket magazine containing fifty 9 mm Parabellum rounds. The Spectre M4 had a double-action trigger, which allowed the safety to be disengaged without a risk of accidental firing under any normal circumstances, and a shrouded barrel to facilitate cooling. He’d have to watch it, or the cyclic rate of fourteen rounds per second would devour a magazine in nothing flat. But Grimaldi had used the gun before and liked its feel, its firepower and its reliability. The suppressor he had screwed on to its threaded muzzle would prevent the gun from climbing in full-auto mode, as well as muffling the racket that it made.

Rain had begun to drizzle, which was normal for the tropics, handy for the lightweight raincoats Grimaldi and Bolan wore to hide their weapons as they moved along the sidewalk toward their target. Hezbollah had no men on the street that the Stony Man pilot could see, and there was no sign of surveillance cameras around the entrance to their ground-floor offices.

Apparently, they felt secure enough in Paraguay to drop their guard a bit.

Strike one.

The door, all glass, allowed a clear view of the office—or at least its front reception area—from where Grimaldi stood outside. There was a young guy sitting at a desk, directly opposite the door, with no one else in sight. He might be armed, but at the moment he was busy talking on the phone, half turned in profile to the street, oblivious.

Strike two.

When Bolan gave the door a push, it opened at his touch.

Strike three.

A little chime went off as Bolan entered, with Grimaldi on his heels. No doubt it was supposed to warn whoever occupied the office that they had a walk-in, and it brought the young guy’s frowning face around in time to see two silenced weapons pointed at him. Blurting something in Arabic, he dropped the phone and shoved a hand into the knee well of his desk, maybe for a weapon or a panic button hidden under there.

He never made it.

Bolan’s Steyr AUG coughed out a single round and granted the Hezbollah’s receptionist the martyrdom he may have dreamed about when he signed on to be a terrorist. The exit wound sprayed abstract art across a filing cabinet behind him, and he slithered out of sight beneath the desk.

* * *

ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS tired of being cooped up in the small apartment, only seeing sunshine through his window or on those occasions when his hosts allowed him access to the building’s roof. He understood that he and his two roommates were on every watch list in the world, their faces posted on the internet with prices on their heads, but he was sick and tired of hiding.

He was sick and tired of Paraguay.

Sitting on a sway-backed sofa in his underwear, Rajhid ticked off the things that irritated him about the country he’d been sent to as a fugitive.

The weather. He was used to heat, of course, but Paraguay’s humidity was killing him. It sapped his energy and made him feel exhausted from the moment he awoke each morning to the final hour when he dragged himself to bed.

The insects. He had lived with desert scorpions and spiders all his life, and cockroaches, but those in Paraguay were monsters, grown unnaturally large, and they could turn up anywhere. Just yesterday, he’d found a black, five-inch scorpion hiding beneath his pillow when he went to bed, a shock that left him wondering if one of his so-called protectors might have placed it there to rattle him.

And Hezbollah. That was another thing. Its members, with their clique in Paraguay, had treated Rajhid almost like a leper from the moment he arrived with Walid Khamis and Salman Farsoun. It was as if they thought their little private army was the only group entitled to make war on the Crusaders in the name of God. Rajhid wrote it off to jealousy, but he resented being forced to smile and thank them for their hospitality. The war was going on without him, and he wanted to get back to it.

The food. Now, there was one thing Rajhid did enjoy. They all avoided pork, of course, but he was very fond of pira caldo, Paraguay’s fish soup; the great asado barbecues; the kiveve made from pumpkins; and the lampreado, fried cakes made with manioc. Rajhid had put on weight since landing at the hideout, but he tried to keep it down with exercise, the only form of entertainment granted to him, other than a television set that played three channels, none of which he understood.

He hoped Khalid would reach out to them soon. Rajhid and his companions needed action, not the world’s worst-ever tropical vacation, locked up in an apartment and eaten by mosquitoes, while they never even got to glimpse the rain forest.

Khamis was snoring in one of the apartment’s two bedrooms, while Farsoun was in the small bathroom, door closed for privacy. Rajhid was field-stripping a MAC-10 machine pistol, its components spread out on a coffee table just in front of him, and watching a peculiar game show, where the losers had their heads shaved to remind them they had failed. It was pathetic, childish and—

The first shot startled Rajhid, brought him to his feet in an involuntary reflex, clutching the MAC-10’s dismantled, useless pistol grip. He waited, thought perhaps someone had fumbled with a weapon, had a stupid accident—with Hezbollah, why not?—but then a blast of automatic fire rang through the building and he heard men’s panicked voices shouting.

The police? A US Navy SEAL team, just for him?

Rajhid had no time to consider who might be attacking them. He called out to his comrades while he tried to reassemble the MAC-10, his fingers as thick and numb as sausages in his excitement.

Fear? Not yet.

As soon as he was finished with the gun, he had to get dressed. Rajhid could not go running through the streets of Ciudad del Este in his underwear, with a machine pistol. Police in Paraguay might be slow and foolish, but they would not miss a chance to get their faces in the newspapers.

The last part of his weapon finally snapped into place. More firing came from the second or third floor, below him, as Rajhid snatched up a magazine, then loaded and cocked the little SMG. Now all he needed was a pair of pants, his shoes and one of those baggy shirts that everybody seemed to wear in Paraguay, hiding a multitude of sins.

And once he’d dressed, Rajhid could figure out whether to join the fight or run and leave his hosts to save themselves.

* * *

CLEARING THE DOWNSTAIRS rooms required less than a minute. The office, mosque and two small bathrooms were the whole of it, and all unoccupied except for Hezbollah’s late greeter in the lobby. The corpse was out of sight of anybody passing on the street, positioned beneath the desk, and they were set to take the game upstairs.

And upstairs it would be, specifically between the empty mosque and office space. The building had no elevator, meaning that anyone trying to flee the upper floors had to either fight his way past Bolan and Grimaldi, or go out the nearest window.

The Stony Man duo reached the second floor without encountering a problem, but it started to unravel there. The landing faced back toward Calle Victor Hugo Norte, three apartments on each side of a narrow hallway. Three doors open, three closed. Just as Bolan reached that landing, a bearded young man in a T-shirt and khaki pants, barefooted, stepped out of the second door down, to his left.