Lethal Tribute

Bolan turned to Makhdoom. “You do have extraction?”

“Helicopters will come if I call for them, but I was maintaining silence until you broke into our channel. Our primary extraction point was the plateau above your position.”

Bolan gazed out into the dark. “I think the djinns can hear you.”

Makhdoom nodded unhappily. “I believe you are correct.”

Bolan considered the plateau he had crossed earlier in the evening. It was three hundred yards upslope, and an ugly climb. The only alternative was to stay where they were and wait. “Do it.”

Makhdoom spoke rapid Sind into his radio. Bolan could feel invisible ears pricking up and taking notice of the transmission.

The Pakistani nodded. “The chopper is coming, with gunship escort.”

Bolan took out his two white-phosphorous grenades and pulled the pins. “Go!”

Makhdoom bolted from cover and began to claw his way up the rock slope. Bolan hurled his grenades off to the right and left. The grenades detonated and the incandescent flare of magnesium was replaced by hellish heat of burning phosphorous that shot up into the sky in streamers trailing white smoke. Bolan burned a magazine in an arc in front of him and began loping up the hill. He clicked in a fresh magazine and pounded up the mountainside.

Makhdoom’s voice boomed. “Down!”

Bolan went flat into the rocks as a grenade sailed over his head and detonated with the whipcrack of high-explosive driving razor-sharp bits of metal at supersonic speeds. The fragmentation hissed and sparked off the rocks. Bolan leaped back up and climbed for the plateau. He passed the Pakistani and clawed on upward.

“Allah Akhbar!” The man from Musa Company roared in religious defiance against the unseen. He rose up and began unloading his pistol in rapid double taps in an arc across the way they had come. No cries rang out. No answering fire came back. Makhdoom was firing at shadows.

The shadows were closing in.

Makhdoom’s pistol racked open on a smoking empty chamber. Bolan whirled. “Go! Go! Go!”

The captain turned and ran, reloading his pistol as Bolan pumped covering fire into the trail behind him. The big American searched for flaming figures, unnatural shadows, any break in the landscape, any movement at all.

There was nothing.

Every fiber of Bolan’s being screamed at him that time was running out.

“Go!” Makhdoom roared. “I will cover.”

Bolan and the Pakistani leapfrogged positions up the mountainside. Bolan clambered up beside the captain and stopped. “I think they’re waiting for us up top.”

Makhdoom’s commando knife rasped out into his left hand. “Inshallah.”

God willing.

Bolan smiled grimly. The man from Musa Company wanted payback. Voices spoke in Bolan’s ear in Sind. Translator 2 spoke from Washington. “The helicopters say ETA five minutes.”

The Pakistani spoke. “The helicopters will be here in—”

“Five minutes, I know.”

An eyebrow rose above the captain’s goggles. It was very clear that just about everyone had compromised his communications. “I see.”

Bolan clicked his last rifle grenade onto the muzzle of his rifle. He had one hand grenade left, and he was nearly out of ammo for his rifle. Bolan ground the butt of his gun into the sand and pointed the muzzle skyward. The rifle boomed and the antipersonnel round shot skyward. Bolan took out his last hand grenade. Somewhere up in the dark the rifle grenade lost its upward impetus and nosed over and arced back down toward the plateau like a mortar round.

The rim of the plateau above flashed orange as the grenade detonated. Bolan hurled his last grenade up and over, and Makhdoom followed suit. The two grenades cracked and sent shrapnel hissing across the open ground. Bolan slapped leather. He filled his right hand with his .50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol and his left with a Beretta 93-R machine pistol.

The two men charged up the side of the mountain and went over the top to the plateau. The plateau wasn’t really flat, but just an area of rolling rocky terrain rather than vertically falling hillside. Nothing moved other than a summer-dried shrub that one of the grenades had set on fire. Bolan and Makhdoom went back-to-back as they walked across the open ground.

Rotor blades thumped in the distance.

Something scraped on rock thirty yards to Bolan’s left.

The Executioner tracked his pistols like a twin gun turret and flame shot from both muzzles as he extended them. Makhdoom showed his professionalism by covering the rear.

“Anything?”

Bolan scanned the darkness with his night-vision goggles.

Nothing moved.

“No.”

Translator 2 spoke. “They say ETA one minute.”

The hammering of rotors shook the night sky.

Kurtzman came online. “Striker, your fireworks have been noticed. Satellite imaging shows Indian army gunships are taking off five miles east of your position.”

“Affirmative, Bear, I—”

God’s own flashlight speared the plateau with light as the Pakistani helicopter swept the broken ground with its searchlight. Bolan kept his eyes on the terrain around him. The light suddenly blasted him and the captain, and the sound of rotors slowed as the Mi-8 Hip helicopter descended to just a few feet above the ground.

Makhdoom jerked his head. “Go!”

Bolan didn’t argue. He turned to board the helicopter.

Something flashed in his vision. It was for but an instant, but in the clouds of dust there was a flash of something. More a flash of nothing. There was a moment of totally incongruent space where the dust fluttered and coalesced against the rotor wind.

As if it were striking something that wasn’t there.

Bolan fired both pistols as rapidly as he could squeeze the triggers. The Pakistani door gunner leaning out of the helicopter couldn’t see what Bolan was shooting at but his PKT light machine gun ripped into life and green tracers streamed into the seemingly empty space.

Bolan stopped firing and strained to see through the whirling dust storm.

“What was it?” Makhdoom slapped a hand on Bolan’s shoulder and roared in his ear over the rotor noise. “What did you see?”

“I don’t know.” Bolan kept his guns leveled. “Something. Nothing.”

“I must apologize, given the debt I owe you.” The uncomfortably warm muzzle of Makhdoom’s pistol pressed behind Bolan’s ear. “But you are under arrest.”

Bolan had expected nothing less. He opened his hands and let his pistols fall forward from his grip, hooked only by a single finger through the trigger guards. “Captain, get us the hell off this hilltop and I’ll be the one in your debt.”