Rebel Force

The Executioner targeted diagonally across and down the office hall, firing his Russian assault rifle with practiced, instinctive ease. He let the recoil of the carbine shuttering in his strong grip carry him back through the doorway behind him in a tight roll. From his belly Bolan thrust the muzzle around the doorjamb and arced the weapon back and forth as he laid down quick, suppressive blasts.

The 5.45 mm rounds were deafening in the confined space and his ears rang painfully from the noise. Bolan reached up and jerked his night-vision goggles down so that they dangled from the rubber strap around his neck. He heard the bullets from his assailant’s answering burst smack into the plasterboard of the outer wall with smacks that rang louder than the muzzle-braked weapon’s own firing cycle.

From the impacts, Bolan determined the shooter was using a submachine gun and not an assault rifle, though he was hard-pressed to identify caliber with the suppressor in use. Bolan scrambled backward and rested his rifle barrel across the still-warm corpse of a dead bodyguard. If there was more than one assassin out there, and he were determined to get him, the person would either fire and maneuver to breach the room door, or possibly use grenades to clear him out.

There was silence for a long moment. Bolan’s head raced through strategies and options. If the assassin’s intent had been escape, then why had he bothered to stay behind or try to take Bolan out? If the unknown assailant was armed for a quiet kill, then that would indicate he was probably not carrying ordnance much heavier than the silenced submachine gun being used.

The main thing, Bolan’s experience told him, was getting momentum back into his possession. He quickly stripped an extra rifle from a dead bodyguard and hooked the sling over his shoulder. Conscious of how vulnerable he was, Bolan crawled back toward the door. He maneuvered the barrel of his AKS through the entrance and triggered an exploratory blast, conducting a recon by fire. Precious seconds ticked away.

Almost immediately, Bolan’s aggressive burst was answered with a tightly controlled one. Bullets tore into the wooden door frame and broke up the floor in front of his weapon. Bolan ducked back. He had what he needed. He had found a way to exploit his heavier armament.

The gunman had taken position across and two doors down the hall from the room where Bolan was trapped. From that location the gunmen controlled the fields of fire up and down the hall, preventing Bolan from leaving the office without exposing himself to withering, short-range fire.

Again, Bolan triggered a long, ragged blast. He tore apart the door of the office directly opposite him, then ran his larger caliber rounds down the hall to pour a flurry of lead through the sniper’s door. Tracer fire lit up the hallway with surrealistic strips of light like laser blasts in some low-budget science-fiction movie. Bolan could smell his own sweat and the hot oil of his AKS-74. The heavy dust hanging in the air, kicked up by the automatic weapon fire, choked him.

Bolan ducked back around as the gunman triggered an answering burst. Bolan heard the smaller caliber rounds strike the wall outside his door, saw how they failed to penetrate the building materials. It confirmed his suspicions that he was facing no more than a 9 mm caliber in the killer’s weapon.

Bolan snarled, gathering himself, and thrust his weapon out the office door a final time. He triggered the AKS and the assault rifle bucked in his hands. Bolan sprinted out through the doorway hard behind his covering fire. His rounds fell like sledgehammers around the door to the room of his ambusher. Hot gases warmed his wrists as the bolt of his weapon snapped open and shut, open and shut, as he carried his burst out to improbable length even as he raced forward.

Two steps from the office door directly opposite Garabend’s death room, Bolan’s magazine ran dry and the bolt locked open. Without hesitation, he flung down the empty weapon and dived forward. The big man’s hard shoulder struck the door. Already riddled with 5.45 mm bullets, the flimsy construction was no match for Bolan’s heavy frame and he burst through it into the room.

The Executioner went down with his forward momentum, landing on the shoulder he had used as a battering ram and somersaulting over it smoothly. He came up on one knee and swung his second AKS carbine off his shoulder, leveling it at the wall separating his position from the gunman’s. Bolan triggered his weapon from the waist, raking it back and forth in a tight, low Z-pattern. The battlefield rounds chewed through plywood, drywall and insulation with ease, bursting out the other side with terminal velocity.

Still firing, Bolan smoothly uncoiled out of his combat crouch, keeping the arc of his weapon angled downward to better catch an enemy likely pinned against the floor. His intentions were merciless. Momentum, and an attacker’s aggression, were with Bolan now, on him like a fugue. Coming to his feet, he shifted the AKS pistol grip from his right to his left hand. His magazine came up dry as he shifted his weight back toward the shattered door to the room.

The handle of Bolan’s Glock 17 filled the palm of his free hand as he fired the last rounds through the looted AKS. He was moving, lethally graceful, back out the door to the room, his feet engaged through a complicated series of steps. Out in the hall, smoke from weapons fire and dust billowed in the already gloomy hall.

Bolan stepped out long and lunged forward, sinking to one knee as he came to the edge of his ambusher’s door. He made no attempt to slow his momentum but instead let it carry him down to the floor. He breached the edge of the enemy door, letting the barrel of the Glock 17 pistol lead the way. He caught the image of a dark-clad form sprawled out on the floor of the room.

The 9 mm pistol coughed in a double tap, catching the downed figure in the shoulder and head. Blood splashed up and the figure’s skull mushroomed out, snapping rudely to the side on a slack neck. A chunk of cottage-cheeselike material splattered out and struck a section of bullet riddled wall.

Bolan popped up, returned to his feet. He moved into the room, weapon poised, ready to react to even the slightest motion or perceived movement. After the frenzied action and brutal cacophony of the gun battle, the sudden return of silence and still felt deafening, almost oppressive. Approaching the dead man, Bolan narrowed his eyes, trying to quickly take in details. Muzzle-flash had ruined his night vision.

Frustrated, Bolan dragged his NVGs back into position and turned on the infrared penlight. The room returned to view in the familiar monochromatic greenish tint. Bolan looked over at the dead gunman’s weapon. From the unique silhouette he recognized the subgun as a PP-19 Bizon. Built on a shortened AKS-74 receiver, it had the signature cylindrical high-capacity magazine attached under the fore grip and the AKS folding buttstock. The weapon was usually associated with Russian federal police or army troops, but international arms merchants had been turning up with them more and more as the Russian economy went through its series of shortfalls.

Bolan rolled the man over. Any hopes for identification were gone. The man’s face held all the structural integrity of mush. Bolan could easily see the man’s thick, tangled beard, however. One of Garabend’s bodyguards who had survived the attack?

Bolan knew he didn’t have a lot of time. In a city locked down under martial law, the sound of the assault rifle he had been forced to use would draw unwanted attention very quickly. Bolan patted the dead man down. He found a leather wallet filled with Russian bank notes but devoid of identification.

The soldier pulled a thin, flat-faced digital camera from one of the carriers on his harness. He clicked off the IR light and settled his goggles on his forehead. He turned the camera on and opened the lens protector. Without preamble he grabbed the doughy-fleshed hand of the dead man by his index finger. Cradling the camera securely in his palm, Bolan rolled the man’s finger across the lens facing of the camera as carefully as any police desk sergeant at a big city precinct house.

Bolan held up the camera, letting the dead killer’s hand drop unceremoniously. It struck the bare floor with a dull clap. Bolan pointed the camera at a blank stretch of wall unmarred by his penetrating gunfire. He closed his eyes against the flash and snapped a picture. Later, he would download the snapshot and send it back to Barbara Price, mission controller at Stony Man Farm, for analysis. If the shooter was a bodyguard, that was fine. If he was something else, then Bolan needed to know.

He stood and put the camera away. He grabbed his Glock. It was time to go. Past time.

4

Bolan’s forward operating station in Grozny was an old CIA operations safehouse left over from the Chechen conflicts. Maintained as part of a Global Deployment Readiness Plan by the Operations Division, the residence was little used but constantly prepped. It provided stripped down, untraceable tools for Western intelligence operatives who found themselves working outside of normal geographical station mandates.

Working outside of normal geographical station mandates was something Mack Bolan knew all about.

Upon returning to the house Bolan immediately downloaded the picture of the dead assassin’s fingerprint and e-mailed it through an encrypted, anonymous server along with a brief sitrep, to a Stony Man capable site. Aaron Kurtzman would access all federal and international databanks in an effort to find a match.

Bolan drank a beer and made himself a sandwich from the pickings in the refrigerator. He surveyed his surroundings from every window in the place, looked in closets and behind closed doors until he felt like he knew the layout of the place well enough to navigate it in the dark, under fire if need be. He’d made the decision to delay his extraction until Hal Brognola and the Stony Man team could reconfigure operational alternatives based on the changed situation.

Jack Grimaldi was poised to infiltrate Grozny from a merchant ship anchored in the Caspian. The ship was run under a triple sponsor program combining Naval Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA. All offices were coordinated by the post 9/11 Director of National Intelligence office. Task Force 280, as it was coded, provided civilian-use cover of ocean-based assets for government operations. Brognola had managed to insert the veteran Stony Man pilot into the group with a minimum of fuss.

Bolan paced, calm, but filled with a pent-up energy left over from his confrontation with the assassin. Across the room, where he had left it on the table while fixing himself something to eat, his sat phone began to buzz.

Bolan crossed the room quickly and picked it up. He instantly recognized the gruff voice of Hal Brognola on the other end of the encrypted line. The soldier walked over and looked out the window at the quiet residential street from behind the window blinds. He turned his back on the scene and stepped farther into the old house.

“Striker?” Brognola asked.

“Go ahead,” Bolan answered.

“You safe? Things quiet?”

“For now. What do you have?”

“I’ve got a whole bunch of questions and not too many answers,” the big Fed said.

“You manage to get an ID off that print I sent you?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure did. We have a situation. The DNI has reacted to the intelligence and asked me to intervene in the matter.”

“What problem would this be?”

“The print you got off the shooter came back to one Andre Nicolov, former GRU commando.”

“Okay, so he was with the Main Intelligence Directorate. Lots of ex-military types run for-profit ops these days,” Bolan said.

“Problem is, this guy is known to be the chief operator for a player known as Sable, also ex-GRU, ex-SVR and now a freelance information broker. Sable has been the source of a CIA counterintelligence operation in Grozny. A consortium of ex-Soviet physicists and various research scientists of Chechen ethnicity opened a think tank group called the Caucasus Data Institute. The SVR, among others, was hot to get their hands on what they were cooking up. The CIA approached them undercover as a private firm about security in an effort to get our fingers into the pie.”

“How does Sable fit into this?”

“She ran a surveillance and procurement operation against the institute. By all accounts, the most successful one. She was always one step ahead of Grozny Station.”

“She?” Bolan said. “Go on.”

“Last year a field officer named Sanders was put on the case. He began making some headway, running stringers, planting misinformation, that sort of thing. Apparently, about two weeks ago, Sable went to Sanders and stated she wanted to explore life in the Federal Witness Protection Program. As a millionaire.”

Bolan let a low, appreciative whistle. “Audacious. Her intel that good?”

“Langley thought so. Only there was a problem.”

“What’s new?”

“Exactly. Sanders went around his chain of command at Grozny Station to alert the agency to the deal. He used an open channel, not the secure lines at the covert house. Immediately after making the call he disappeared and is still missing.”