Raw Fury

Fahzal’s internal security thugs would be among those so armed, though apparently the prime minister’s tastes ran to Israeli submachine guns as much as to Russian assault rifles. Bolan saw several knots of men in brown-and-black uniforms that could only be Padan Muka, based on what Rosli had told him. They had the dull, contemptuous look that he associated with goons of that type—people who enjoyed hurting others and who didn’t do much thinking about that, or anything. They weren’t soldiers and they certainly weren’t patriots, not in the righteous sense; they were hired muscle, and they were predators. The nearest Padan Muka triggermen eyed him hard as he passed them, giving him a cold look.

He’d dealt with their kind before, and taught more than a few of them very painful lessons. There was no time to indulge his sense of justice on nonpriority targets, however.

Brognola’s slim dossier had included the layout of the building he was now encountering. On the plane, he had formulated the most basic of plans, which left a lot to chance. He’d made his earliest incursions in his war against society’s predators perfecting his abilities at role camouflage, and what he was about to do was an aspect of that. Fixing his gaze on a point far ahead of him, he looked past everyone who noticed him, as if he were irritated, rushed and focused on getting to some point beyond each of the glaring Padan Muka fighters and police officers. He got past the first set of barriers simply by acting as if he belonged there.

He was counting on complacency. The barricade of the school, and the hostage crisis within, was in its second day. The guards outside, perhaps expecting fireworks early on, would have had plenty of reasons to get bored by this time. They’d have gone from expecting anything to expecting nothing; the human mind sought routine and pattern even when there was no rational reason to expect either.

More significantly, they’d be expecting either violent enemy action or deadly subterfuge. They were focused on the school and on stopping that enemy action from within. They would not be expecting an incursion from outside, nor would they automatically think they should prevent someone outside from going in. After all, how crazy would a man have to be to want to enter a building held by dangerous, armed terrorists willing to threaten the lives of children?

The hard part, therefore, was not getting past the cordon outside the school. As the Executioner nodded and brushed past the barricades, brazenly walking through them as if he belonged there, nobody challenged him directly. He had known it would probably work, but in the back of his mind he had been prepared to shoot his way through if necessary. There was no time to do otherwise, and no viable alternative.

When he reached the front doors of the school, a few of the Royal Malaysian Police officers began to shout at him. It was possible they hadn’t thought he’d do something so direct; perhaps they’d assumed he was simply moving toward the foremost barriers. Whatever they were shouting, he couldn’t understand it, anyway. He figured they probably wouldn’t shoot him for fear of touching off something inside the school.

Probably.

There were three sets of double doors within the front entrance. Each door was heavy, polished wood with brass fittings. The fogged glass of the doors has been starred with bullet holes, probably during the initial stage of the BR capture of the building. Bolan simply put his hand out and, ignoring the shouted protests from the men at the barricades, threw the doors open and stepped inside.

There were two men dressed in camouflage fatigues standing inside the doorway. They turned as he entered, but were apparently too baffled by his sudden appearance even to bother shooting him. They both held well-worn Kalashnikov clones, which they pointed at him.

“Hello there,” Bolan said cheerfully. “Do either of you speak English?”

The door slid shut on well-oiled hinges behind him. The click of the mechanism engaging echoed through the suddenly very quiet hallway.

The two BR men turned to look at each other, their expressions almost comical. They looked back at Bolan.

“I do,” the one on Bolan’s left said. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” His accent was heavy, but his English was excellent. He punctuated his words by jabbing the muzzle of his rifle at Bolan.

“Door was open,” Bolan answered, shrugging. “I’m the negotiator,” he said.

“Negotiator?”

“I was sent to hear your demands, make arrangements for their fulfillment,” Bolan said. “What, they didn’t tell you?”

The two men glanced at each other again, then back to Bolan. “You two are with the group called the, uh, the BR, right? Fighting for freedom for your oppressed ethnic group?”

“We fight the oppression of Fahzal!” the English speaker said proudly. His companion either knew enough English to agree, or recognized the tone; he smiled and nodded with equal pride.

“Yes, by threatening to kill children,” Bolan said. “But thanks. It would have been irresponsible of me not to check.”

As he said the words, Bolan knew both men’s brains would be focused on the dialogue he had created with them, and not immediately on his actions. They had already, thanks to his assertion, formed an opinion in their minds as to his purpose there.

The six-inch blade of the stiletto snapped open in his hand. He swung the knife up and slashed out across both of their throats in turn. Bolan sidestepped to his right, his right hand completing the arc. He elbowed the closest man in the back of the head to drive him to the floor. The other terrorist, the man who had spoken, fell to his knees clutching at his throat. He died with his eyes wide, trying and failing to say something with his last breath.

Bolan bent, picked up the better-looking of the two assault rifles and checked it. He grabbed the spare magazines the terrorists had carried, then took a moment to pop open the second rifle, pull the bolt and drop that bolt into his bag. There was no point in leaving functioning weapons behind him if he could help it.

It was time to get down to business, before those two were missed.

Neither man appeared to have a wireless phone or a walkie-talkie. That meant that either the terrorists were operating according to a preset plan, or they were using runners to transmit messages to the different teams securing the building. Either way, Bolan had just opened a gaping hole in their perimeter at the school’s front door. He had to make sure they were too busy with him to realize that fact. And he’d have to hope that the forces outside didn’t discover it, blunder in and make everything a lot more complicated. They were already going to be agitated, knowing that an unknown quantity had waltzed right past their roadblocks.

He considered the situation as he assessed his immediate environment for more threats. Brognola’s briefing had included some notes on the political climate surrounding the events of the past day and a half in Kuala Lumpur. Ostensibly, Fahzal’s government wasn’t mounting a counterterrorist operation to retake the school for fear of what would happen to Fahzal’s son, Jawan, and to the other hostages. Realistically, if Fahzal was the sort of man who was willing to use his son’s kidnapping as an excuse to carry out a genocide, it wouldn’t be out of the question that he might be prolonging the episode deliberately. Every moment of bad press the BR got was a nail in the coffin of both that group and the Chinese-Indian ghetto between Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya.

Bolan knew it was a standard policy of such regimes. First, you used a common enemy to generate support for your cause, even if that enemy was contrived. Then, you herded all of your supposed enemies into a centralized location, where you could control and monitor them. And finally, you solved the contrived problem by killing the enemies you’d rounded up.

Bolan couldn’t help but think that was the real motive here. Fahzal may not have anticipated his own boy being caught in the cross fire, but the soldier figured the Malaysian prime minister would have found another excuse to raze the ghetto if this one hadn’t come up. If the BR’s brutal activities could be used to paint all of the members of that ghetto neighborhood with the label of child-killing terrorists, it was likely Fahzal would be able to justify his actions with at least some of the international community. He most certainly would be able to use it as an excuse, a rationale, for his brutal tactics at home.

The Executioner didn’t intend to let him get that far.

The foyer, opening up from the double doors, had a small door set at the far end. Bolan cautiously checked this and found a storage closet with a floor buffer inside. He dragged the two bodies into the closet, throwing the now useless Kalashnikov in after them. He paused a moment, then placed the functional Kalashnikov with its magazines in a corner of the storage room, under the mop and bucket standing next to the buffer. Much as the firepower might be needed, he could not risk going full-auto, and he needed to be able to travel fast and light. He eased the door shut. Then he paused and simply listened.

It was eerily quiet inside. He could hear voices amplified through bullhorns outside, probably the police or Padan Muka throwing demands at the terrorists or at the Westerner who had just blundered into their midst. Given that Fahzal’s people, or at least those at the upper levels, knew the CIA had brought in a troubleshooter they didn’t want, the soldier was a little surprised no one had taken a shot at him at some point. Bureaucracy seemed to be working in his favor; even a despotic regime like Fahzal’s had many tentacles, and the dozens or hundreds of right hands didn’t know what the dozens or hundreds of left hands were doing at any given moment.

The sound of the bullhorns was faint through the heavy front doors. Even if they had no reason to want to shoot him on sight, Bolan knew that walking so boldly into the midst of this hostage crisis might prompt a reaction from the police and troops outside. He was, however, gambling hard that it wouldn’t. He could smell politics here. He was going to bet his life that the armed men outside would stay right where they were until Fahzal was ready to move—and not before.

Bolan consulted the intelligence files in his secure satellite phone. On the small color screen he called up the floor plan of the building. It might or might not be completely accurate; the plans were those originally filed for the construction of the structure a few years before. Had those plans been altered during construction, or had the building been renovated subsequently, the information in the soldier’s phone could be flawed. That did not matter. He would work with what he had. This was why Brognola and the Man had chosen him for a seat-of-the-pants, near-suicidal mission of this type. Bolan gave the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group plausible deniability if things got ugly. He could be dismissed as a rogue operative for whom the United States would claim no responsibility. Much more important, he was the type of flexible, veteran combat operative who could roll with a fluid situation and come out on top, trusting his guts, his guns and his sense of intuition to get the job done.

According to the floor plan, the classrooms were located on the second and third floors. The main floor was used for administrative facilities and consisted of small offices. The fourth floor boasted a large auditorium with skylights and roof access.

Bolan put himself in the position of Fahzal’s forces. That roof would almost certainly be covered by snipers, and unless the skylights could be blocked somehow, there would be a clear line of sight to anyone in the auditorium. That would mean the BR terrorists wouldn’t set up in the auditorium, despite the convenience of having a large, open space to keep their hostages corralled. That is, they wouldn’t set up in the auditorium unless they were profoundly stupid. Bolan had no reason to think they would be.

He was left, then, with the classrooms on the middle two floors, and that would make things more difficult. He would have to search room by room, eliminating resistance as we he went, doing it as quietly as he could to avoid alerting the others. The closer he got to the BR troops and their hostages, the more danger there was that he could tip off all of them to his presence. To succeed, he had to retain the element of surprise, but each guard, each terrorist he eliminated along the way, increased the odds of his detection.

Attaching the sound-suppressor to the Beretta 93-R, he made a cursory, hurried sweep of the ground floor, moving quietly heel-and-toe with the weapon held in both hands before him.

There was, according to the plans, another ground-floor entrance ahead and to the right, at the side of the building. Bolan made his way to the middle of the hallway, his civilian hiking boots quiet enough on the polished marble floor. Some part of his brain took note of the extensively carved moldings and ceiling art that decorated the interior of the school. No expense had been spared. The elaborately worked and padded benches that occasionally dotted the walls, outside of the administration offices, appeared to be very expensive, too, though Bolan was no expert on furniture.

He found the access hallway to the side entrance, opposite the metal doors of an elevator that he ignored. Approaching the access hallway, he risked a glance around the corner. There was a fatigue-clad man standing there with his back to Bolan. The Executioner thought it odd that the noise of his conversation with the guards at the front entrance had not brought this one to investigate. Then he heard the tinny sound of music, coming faintly from the guard’s head.

The man was wearing a portable music player. An AK-47 was slung over his shoulder. While he did seem intent on the view through the windows set on either side of the doorway, as if expecting a police raid at any moment, he certainly wasn’t listening for trouble.

Wondering if this really was amateur night after all, Bolan raised his Beretta and pointed the sound-suppressor at the back of the sentry’s head.

“Hey,” he said softly, as he nudged the man with the barrel.

The sentry’s head whipped around. He gasped, sucked in a breath to scream and grabbed for his rifle.

Bolan put a single round quietly through the man’s face. The terrorist folded in on himself and was still.

That was another hole in the perimeter security. Bolan could hear the ticking of the clock deep in his mind, constantly aware of the mission’s time constraints.

He kept going, finishing his sweep, quickly checking for stragglers or hidden shooters among the offices. As he neared the door at the far end of the corridor, which led to the stairwell, he caught a glimpse of movement through the small reinforced glass window set within the fire door.

He crouched low and pressed himself against the wall next to the door. The heavy door prevented him from hearing whomever was on the other side, but it could only be a sentry. Transferring the machine pistol to his left hand, he used the knuckles of his right to rap on the metal door. He knocked quietly but insistently.

The dark-skinned man who pushed the door open was wearing camouflage fatigues and aiming a Makarov pistol. Bolan fired, putting a single 9-mm round through the man’s head. He dropped like a stone.

The Executioner scooped up the Makarov and tucked it into his belt behind his left hip. He had to move; there was no time to worry about the sentry’s body. He had to keep up his pace in order to take the second, then the third floors.

Things had already gotten bloody. They were, he knew, about to get much, much worse.