Agent Of Peril

Bolan poked up his head and saw the enemy was charging. He pulled both Taurus pistols and dived backward away from the rock, scrambling in frantic retreat. The pistols barked out hot 9 mm pills until the left one ran dry. A couple slugs plucked at the Executioner, and one bullet hammered into the Enfield’s stock, cracking it against the soldier’s ribs. A bullet creased Bolan’s elbow skin, not touching bone. He probably had as much accuracy as his enemy.

On the run, the enemy had no aim as they charged, a small favor to the Executioner as long as they were at a decent distance. If they got closer, though, he was hamburger.

The nearest gunman was almost at the rock that Bolan had mined.

The soldier dropped his left Taurus and slapped the radio detonator’s switch. The hill shook before him, and the shock wave nearly blew out his eardrums.

While Bolan was slammed by a pressure wave, his enemies fared far worse. The granite slab that the plastic explosives were jammed into fragmented instantly, shattering like a fine crystal goblet under the force of a sledgehammer. The shards of the slab didn’t just sit around, however. Thrown at 1500 feet per second, in a widespread cone of bloody murder, the pulverized stone became a gigantic shotgun round.

Whether the chips of granite were blunt pebbles or razor sharp, they still went through human flesh like hot knives through butter. The lead gunner, jumping onto the rock, sailed through the air over Bolan’s head, slamming into the hillside headfirst.

Where once there were men, suddenly there were ghosts, the debris wave flashing at them, then passing on, bloody stumps standing in the wake of the improvised Claymore. The whole scene was a panoramic widescreen display in Bolan’s pressure-wave-shocked brain. His perceptions warped in time and space so that he could see the pulped cores that used to be humans pouring and melting down to the ground, any pretense at being a solid long stripped by the brutal death wave that crushed through them.

Bolan felt the back of his head, scalp split, blood flowing hotly down the neck of his black BDU blouse. He sensed a concussion, but he sat up, reloading his last remaining pistol. The other Taurus had been lost, swept away in the shock wave. He looked for signs of the enemy.

Everything was still, except for one squirming figure, trying to crawl up the side of the Abrams tank. Staggering to wobbly feet, Bolan got up, feeling weak and dizzy. He had business to attend to before he could tend to his own scratches and scrapes.

Bolan pressed some gauze against the back of his head, looking around at the spread of bodies. Anyone left standing had run like hell. They had to have been convinced that missiles were raining down on this little bazaar of death. Sure, the terrorists were escaping to fight another day, but for now they were frightened.

And being frightened was three-quarters dead. Good enough for a bleeding, limping Executioner.

Bolan recognized the guy climbing the tank. It was the Hezbollah moneyman who’d lost his feet. There was something familiar about the guy who scrambled like a drunken spider. Getting to the tank, Bolan casually reached up under the man’s suit coat and grabbed his belt.

“Come here,” he growled, yanking the terrorist off the tank. The footless killer squealed as the back of his head bounced on the flattened and cracked concrete.

“Bastard…”

“That’s what they call me,” Bolan said. He knelt on the hardguy’s chest, lifted the stainless-steel Taurus and let swing with a savage stroke. Already, his brain had cleared enough to recognize Bidifah Sinbal.

“A long death or a short death,” Bolan said. “Your choice.”

“Generous offer. I give you nothing.”

Bolan looked down at Sinbal, then realized that droplets of blood were pouring onto the guy’s face with every exhalation of his own breath. The soldier put the back of his hand to his nose and came away with a glove of sticky, slick fresh blood.

“Looks like you overdid the explosives, punk.” The terrorist chuckled, lying on his back, wheezing as he finished off his laugh.

Bolan sighed. He was too dizzy and hurt to conduct a proper interrogation on Sinbal. The Hezbollah savage wasn’t going anywhere.

The Executioner got to his feet and climbed up the side of the tank, calling back to the wounded terrorist.

“Sit. Stay.”

Inside, the mystery of the first generation M1’s origins were revealed.

Outside, flags and insignias were scoured off and replaced with desert paint that broke up the graded and scaled camouflage pattern of the metallic beast. Inside, however, the writing on the controls was in Arabic.

The Executioner knew only one modern Arab military force that used the U.S.-built armored vehicle.

Egypt.

Hezbollah was in Pakistan, selling three Egyptian tanks. Bolan crawled up through the hatch once more, wiping his nose. The bleeding had stopped. He was still hurt, hammered and beaten.

But someone was moving top of the line tanks around like they were common contraband.

That was a someone the Executioner had a vested interest in shutting down—permanently.

It was time to call the Farm.

2

The flat LCD screen popped up a still image of the Executioner’s hawkish features, giving Barbara Price something to visually focus on as the satellite phone connected them vocally.

“Did I catch you after a full night’s sleep, or are you delusional from Bear’s coffee?” Bolan asked.

“Mix and match.” Price sighed. “What’s wrong?”

“Lots. I’ve got three M1 Abrams tanks. I’m thinking they’re U.S. military aid package tanks because they have the old 105 mm cannon instead of the new 120 mm tubes,” Bolan told her.

“Abrams tanks?”

“The Hezbollah operatives I followed had them transported here for the auction.”

Price summoned recent intel-footage on her second monitor. “We had three M1s roll into a Gaza Strip settlement and kill a few hundred people.”

“A tank attack on the Gaza strip? Where?”

“Nitzana.”

Bolan paused a moment. “If I remember my map of the space between Israel and Egypt well enough, it makes sense to strike there. Nitzana is far from any other major settlements. Vast expanses of empty hills, desert, and desert farmland surrounded the settlement.”

“It took twenty minutes for the Israelis to scramble aircraft.”

“A few hundred people?” Bolan asked.

“The count is 249 dead, another three hundred missing, and over twelve hundred injured. They blew up buildings…Hell, they even blew an F-16 out of the sky. That crash killed almost fifty people by itself,” Price said.

“Three hundred missing, which means that we could see the death toll get over four hundred as a conservative estimate,” Bolan said.

“Most of those missing are from a school and a hospital that the tanks shelled,” Price told him.

“Children and the infirm.”

Price knew the tone in Bolan’s voice—grim and torn. He was getting ready to revisit hell on the kind of savages who would drag the innocent and helpless into their petty political games.

“Striker, how many tanks did you say you had?”

“Three here. With Arabic writing on the controls. I’m looking for a good way to dispose of them, but I don’t have the kind of firepower needed to take them out.”