Assassin's Tripwire

He slung the Kalashnikov over his shoulder, where the twin loads of both rifles and the RPG tube weighed him down. The folding e-tool he’d borrowed from Yenni snapped open from either end, forming the shovel blade and a small triangular handle. He twisted the locking collar and was grateful that the unit felt solid. He’d seen plenty of collapsible shovels that were little better than toys. Now was not the time for his tool to fail him.

Furiously, he began to dig.

The shooting at the other end of the trenches was chaotic now. The Wolf’s patrolmen seemed to be firing in all directions. That made Bolan smile. Yenni was a skilled guerilla fighter. She was giving them a run for their money.

The Hind moved heavily, pausing to hover above the ground where Bolan had done his bloody work. The spotlight played over the corpses he had left behind.

The pilot, as if reading Bolan’s thoughts, brought his nose gun up. The beam of light swept the trench, headed directly for him.

The Hind’s automatic cannon opened up.

Around Bolan, the earth itself exploded as the Hind’s shells ripped apart everything in the vicinity. The pilot wasn’t really sure of his target—or Bolan would have been a cloud of meat-laden mist already—but if the barrage kept up, it wouldn’t matter. Bolan’s life expectancy amid that hail of death was not measured in minutes, but in seconds.

He lifted the RPG tube from his shoulder, aimed and pulled the trigger.

It was an old trick the Somalis had learned, to bring down American helicopters. The back-blast from a rocket-propelled grenade launcher made it impractical to fire elevated, where the blast would hit the ground at the gunner’s feet. But dig a hole big enough to absorb that blast, and you could use a grenade launcher to take out a helicopter. The key was to strike the chopper at a point vulnerable enough to—

Bolan’s train of thought left him as he watched the RPG go wide, too wide, trailing smoke as it arced far right of the chopper. He’d been hoping to strike the Hind in the canopy. Hitting the main rotor would be ideal, but that target was too small and too far away. Only blind luck would put the round in the Hind’s relatively vulnerable tail rotor, the key to its steering and stability.

The rocket-propelled grenade exploded, obliterating the tail rotor.

Bolan would have smiled if he hadn’t anticipated what would happen next. The chopper, already listing in his direction, started to spin. As it rotated, faster and faster, its massive fuselage looming in the night sky, it began to lose altitude.

And now the Hind was coming right for him.

Bolan ran in the opposite direction. There was no time for subtlety and no time for unnecessary weight. He dropped the RPG tube and shed his extra rifles as he went, sprinting for all he was worth along the tunnel. He needed to get out of the dug ditch, or get far enough that flames from the exploding chopper wouldn’t be funneled right to him. If he paused to try to scramble up over the lip of the trench, he might not make it in time. Worse, he might become a target for any of the Wolf’s men still operative at ground level.

The few gunshots he could still hear in the distance were drowned by the electric death whine of the Hind as it spiraled to the ground.

It was going to strike the trench right behind him.

This was going to hurt.

He felt the chopper more than he heard it. The impact reverberated through his body, enveloping him in a cloud of heat and sound and pain that crushed the air from his lungs and rattled the bones of his rib cage. The darkness briefly came alive in the light of the fireball that was the Hind. For that instant, night was day.

The blood-soaked floor of the trench rushed up to smash Bolan in the face.

Then there was nothing.

3 (#ulink_7aa8c1fd-f5df-5f60-ae54-fea49cd352a6)

Al Tabkah, Syria

Faces.

Bolan saw faces. They were the faces of every woman he had ever loved, every man he had ever fought beside, every innocent to whom he’d extended his protection. He remembered them all. Each and every face was etched on his brain, indelibly printed in his memories.

So many had died. Some of them had simply vanished, lost to him. Some had perished as he’d held them. Some had been tortured, reduced to gibbering wrecks for whom a bullet was the only kindness.

The litany of the dead, the rolls of the fallen, were never far from his mind. But in the heat and light and pain of the explosion, something had brought the memories flooding into the forefront of his brain.

Bolan’s eyes snapped open, his head jerking forward.

A palm against his chest stopped him. He looked down, then to his left. The surprisingly slender palm belonged to Yenni, who was driving the truck with her left hand. The Toyota Hilux bore the scars and dust of driving many miles across the Syrian terrain—or wherever it had driven from to get here. The dirt road on which they traveled was pocked and scarred with ruts of all sizes. A city, such as it was, began to open up around them.

“You were restless in your sleep,” Yenni said.

“A dream.”

“You had many dreams,” she replied.

Bolan changed the subject. “Where are we? What happened?”

“Your plan was not a good one,” Yenni said. “You should have told me you intended to have the helicopter fall on you. I would have spoken against it.”

“That wasn’t exactly… What I mean to say is—”

“So you did not intend for the helicopter to fall on you. This was an accident?”

“Not exactly,” Bolan said. “It’s complicated.”

Yenni took a pack of gum from inside her jacket, unwrapped it with one hand and popped the square of pink bubble gum into her mouth. She gestured with the pack to Bolan.

“I’m trying to quit,” he said.

She chewed, shaking her head. At no time did she slow the truck, which continued to raise a furious dust cloud behind them. The streets began to grow more congested, but Yenni was undeterred. “To answer your question,” she said, “the helicopter fell on you.”

“What?” Bolan said. “We’ve established that pretty thoroughly.”

“You asked what happened.”

“After the helicopter.”

“Which fell on you,” Yenni continued. “A horrible plan.”

Bolan told himself not to sigh. “Right,” he said. “So stipulated.”

She looked at him with a slight frown, as if she didn’t know the word, then went on anyway. “Your wounds were not severe. I am concerned you may have a concussion, however. The windows of your eyes are not quite the same size.”

“The windows of my…” Bolan realized she meant his pupils. Leaning forward, he examined them in the rear-view mirror. If one was slightly blown, he couldn’t really tell. His head felt a bit thick, but that was normal after absorbing an explosion. “I feel fine,” he said. “Although I could really use some coffee.”

“Here, there are many Star-pokes,” Yenni said and laughed at her own joke.

“That’s not actually what they’re called.”

“We have none of the others, either,” she stated. “We are in Al Tabkah. There is an arms bazaar here that will have the weapons you require. Had you not dropped a Hind gunship on the Wolf’s patrol, we might have scavenged more than enough arms from the enemy soldiers.”

“I’m particular about my hardware,” Bolan said. “Besides, we need serious explosives if we’re going to be ready to neutralize the missing weapons systems. A couple of rounds from my Beretta won’t do it. And I think it’s time we moved on, philosophically speaking, when it comes to the Hind.”