Loose Cannon

Wasting no time on self-congratulation, Ferstera scanned the knoll for more targets. He knew the playing field was a long way from being leveled….

MUHTAR YEILAM was knocked unconscious when a chunk of the obliterated police chopper crashed down on him. When he came to moments later, he was lying on the road next to his toppled motorcycle, fighting off a wave of nausea brought on by the stench of raw fuel and charred flesh. A searing, knife-like pain gnawed at his skull. Reflexively, he grabbed at his helmet and pried it off his head. The pain abated quickly as he noticed that the helmet had cracked almost in two while absorbing the impact of the fallen debris, which lay a few feet away, smoldering next to a severed arm. Staring past the grisly sight, Muhtar saw that the road was strewn with carnage. Beyond his field of vision, he could hear screams and gunfire and the flap of loose clothing as people fled in all directions, trying to take themselves out of the line of fire.

When he tried to rise, Muhtar became aware of a tingling numbness in his legs. Glancing down, he saw blood seeping through his right pantleg up high near his hip. He wasn’t sure what had caused the wound, but he knew he had to stop the bleeding. As he reached down, a sudden, aching weariness washed over him him, and he could feel himself on the verge of passing out again.

“No!” he gasped, shaking his head, fighting to remain conscious.

Then he thought of his brother.

“Ashar,” he murmured, groaning at the monumental effort it took as he rolled over and tried to get up. He collapsed back onto the roadway. He’d moved enough that he could see Ashar, however. His younger brother had been knocked off his motorcycle as well, but the blow had been less severe, as Ashar was on his feet, crouched near the front grille of the governor’s car, trading shots with an assailant firing down at him from one of the half-built homes off to his right. A group of commandos had entered the housing project and were heading toward the house where the shots originated.

“Need to help,” Muhtar moaned to himself.

He ignored the bleeding in his leg and looked around him. His service pistol lay a few feet away on the road next to his toppled bike. Drawing in a deep breath, he rallied his strength and willed himself to roll toward the gun, then reached out and slowly closed his fingers around it.

Straining, Muhtar turned onto his other side and propped himself up slightly with his free arm. He looked back down at his legs; they were still numb and the bloodstain on his hip was spreading. He took solace, though, when he realized he could wriggle both his feet. Not paralyzed, he thought. He knew he was probably in shock and convinced himself that the numbness would soon go. He would tend to the bleeding later, but for now he wanted to do what he could to help his brother protect the governor, who, Muhtar assumed, was still alive inside the car.

From his new position, Muhtar could see across the road, where there was a flurry of commotion. Most of the demonstrators had retreated back toward the tent city, but a handful of men stood just off the shoulder, hunched in a tight circle like football players huddling to discuss their next play. Something about their demeanor—they way they’d turned their backs on the pandemonium around them—put Muhtar on alert.

His suspicions were borne out when, a few seconds later, the men suddenly turned away from each other, eyes on the governor’s car. Remaining in a tight formation, they strode purposefully out onto the road, heading toward the vehicle. Muhtar could see that they were making an effort to shield one man in particular. When he saw the man reaching under the folds of his loose shirt, adrenaline spiked through his veins, giving him the strength to let out a plaintive cry.

“Ashar!” Muhtar shouted to his brother. “Behind you! They have a bomb!”

ASHAR YEILAM WHIRLED at the sound of his brother’s voice. Muhtar had managed to get a shot off before blacking out, and one of the men approaching the governor’s car dropped to the road. The others continued forward, closing ranks to protect the man in the middle of the formation. Shelby Ferstera had also been alerted by Muhtar’s cry and two more men went down when the Aussie cut loose with his M-16. Ashar took out a fourth with the last round in his weapon. That left three men, however, including the one fumbling with the bomb concealed beneath his loose shirt. They reached the car and pressed themselves against the passenger side of the vehicle.

There was no time for Ashar to reload. Casting the gun aside, he raised one foot onto the front bumper of the car, then pushed off with the other and leapt up onto the hood. As his forward momentum carried him toward the three demonstrators, Ashar extended his arms. The other men were crowded together enough that he was able to collide with all three of them, knocking them away from the car. As he fell to road, the young police officer managed to drag down two of the men, including the bomber.

But it wasn’t enough.

Though shaken and lying on his back, the bomber quickly regained his wits and grabbed at the detonator wired to the sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. With a malignant grin, he eyed Ashar, who was an arm’s length away, preparing to lunge..

“Praise Allah!” the bomber cried out, triggering the detonator.

THE EXECUTIONER and his colleagues were thirty yards from the partially built home the JI snipers were firing from. “Try to hot-wire the bulldozer and put it to use!” Bolan shouted to Grimaldi.

The pilot nodded and was headed toward the earthmover when a violent explosion shook the ground under his feet, throwing him off balance. Bolan felt it, too. He crouched behind a Jeep, M-16 at the ready, and glanced over his shoulder, just in time to see the governor’s car fly into the air and slam back onto the road, landing on its roof.. There was a small crater in the road where the bomb had gone off. Nearby, a fresh heap of corpses lay in mangled ruin.

“Suicide bomber,” John Kissinger murmured, hunched next to Bolan behind the Jeep.

Bolan nodded gravely, ears ringing from the explosion. One side of the governor’s car had been caved in by the bomb’s force, but he thought there was a chance the governor might have survived the blast. If so, Zailik would have to wait to be rescued. Shelby Ferstera’s surviving commandos had their hands full contending with snipers on the hill behind the tent city, and when gunfire coming from a second house peppered his Jeep, Bolan knew that he was locked into his own battlefield.

Daud Umar, the Densus 88 member rounding out Bolan’s crew, had taken cover behind a stack of lumber just to the right of the Jeep. He fired at the enemy gunners in the second house, then pulled back when a return volley splintered the two-by-fours.

“Give ’em a grenade!” Bolan shouted.

Umar nodded, grabbing for an M6 clipped to his ammo belt. He waited out another round from the JI gunners, then thumbed the pin free and twisted his body, heaving the grenade. His aim was off, but not by much. The grenade exploded as it struck the loose dirt just in front of the house where the sniper was embedded.

The front door flew off its hinges and a dust cloud bloomed into the air, mixing with smoke given off by the blast. Bolan doubted the enemy inside the house had been taken out, but he figured they’d at least been distracted.

“Now!” he called out, breaking clear of the Jeep.

Together, Bolan and Kissinger rushed the house, using the dust cloud to mask their approach. Kissinger, like Bolan, had been issued an M-16, but his assault rifle came equipped with an under-barrel M-203 grenade launcher. As the dust began to settle, he stopped and planted himself behind a bulky, two-wheeled rototiller, shifting his trigger finger from the carbine to the launcher.

“Go wide!” he shouted to Bolan, waving to his left.

The Executioner veered away from Kissinger, following the dust cloud as it began to drift. Kissinger took aim at the house, peering through the haze. Once he could make out the framework of the ground-floor window, he fired. A 40 mm grenade whooshed from the launcher and finished off the job Daud Umar had started, penetrating the house before it detonated.

Bolan didn’t wait to see if the blast had neutralized the enemy. Cutting toward the house, he set his sights on the front door, ready to finish the job.

FIFTY YARDS AWAY, Grimaldi had already scrambled past the dead man next to the bulldozer and climbed up to the driver’s compartment. There was blood on the seat and when Grimaldi glanced down to his right, he spotted another slain worker sprawled on the ground near the treads. The man had apparently been gunned down while at the controls, because there were keys in the ignition, saving Grimaldi the need to hot-wire the engine.

“We’ll take our breaks where we get them,” the pilot muttered as he cranked the ignition. White smoke belched from the exhaust and the gears meshed noisily as he worked the clutch and maneuvered the front plow off the ground, giving himself just enough clearance to proceed.

The bulldozer rumbled and groaned as its tanklike treads clawed at the ground, pulling it forward. Grimaldi had seen the damage Umar and Kissinger had inflicted on the second house being used by the JI, and as they joined the Executioner in storming the house, he wrestled with the controls, moving down the unpaved street toward the structure from which the enemy had fired the missile rounds that had brought down the two choppers. Grimaldi could only hope they didn’t have a rocket left with his name on it.

NOORDIN ZAILIK WAS DISORIENTED when he regained consciousness. The last thing he remembered was one of the motorcycle officers tackling some demonstrators who’d rushed his car. Now, partly deaf, his face bleeding and his shoulder throbbing with raw pain, he found himself staring up at the backseat of the car. It made no sense. It was only after he’d turned slightly and found himself staring at bits of flaming debris on the road that he realized the car had flipped over. The passenger side of the vehicle was caved in and the windows had all shattered.

A bomb, Zailik thought.

Still dazed, the politician groaned, trying to move. He let out a cry as he shifted his weight onto his injured shoulder. Another shout leapt from his bleeding lips when a hand reached out and grabbed hold of him. He whirled and saw his chauffeur staring at him from a space between his headrest and the collapsed rooftop.

“Don’t move, sir.”

Zailik could barely hear the man, but he understood what was being said. He stayed put, grimacing, as the chauffeur contorted and slowly wriggled through what was left of the window frame next to him. Once he was out on the road, the driver crawled over and looked in at Zailik.

“Stay put,” he told the governor. “I’ll get—”

The chauffeur’s voice trailed off suddenly and his eyes went blank as blood and gore erupted from his chest and sprayed Zailik. The driver fell to the ground, dead.

Terrified, Zailik stared past the chauffeur’s body and caught a glimpse of one of the houses in the partially built development set just off the road. There was movement in one of the upper windows, and when he looked closer, Zailik saw a man taking aim at him through a high-powered rifle. He knew that even if he wasn’t injured, there would be no time for him to avoid the sniper’s next round….

6

Crouched next to the two spent rocket launchers he’d used to take down the Densus 88 Huey as well as the smaller police chopper, Yorvit Varung propped his elbows on the windowsill of the partially built house and grinned as he peered through the scope of his sniper rife, drawing a bead on Zailik. For Varung, it had already been a glorious day. Besides those in the chopper, he’d also taken out an enemy ground soldier. And now he had a chance to put a bullet through the skull of a despised nemesis who regularly denounced Jemaah Islamiyah and the notion of clerical rule in Indonesia.

Life was good.

“Take care of him!” snapped Freper Lorten, the sniper’s older colleague. He was in a dark mood after witnessing a handful of recruits gunned down and blown to bits on the roadway below. He’d come to know most of the men during their long months of training at a JI encampment outside Calang, and while he understood the need for martyrdom in the name of a greater cause, he was not the sort to gloss over casualties incurred on the battlefield.

“I’ll take care of him once I have a clear shot!” Varung retorted without taking his eye off the scope. “If I’d rushed earlier, I wouldn’t have brought down the helicopters.”

Lorten knew it was pointless to argue with the younger man. Instead, clutching his AK-47, he stared across the road, where surviving members of Densus 88 were caught in a firefight with JI assailants in the foothills behind the tent city. Lorten doubted he could do much to help, so he instead shifted his gaze to the road, looking for a closer target. In front of the overturned car, one of the motorcycle officers was crawling toward the remains of the man who’d nearly thwarted the suicide bomber. The officer was clearly wounded and seemed to pose little threat, but he was still the enemy, so Lorten raised his assault rifle into firing position, ready to finish the man off.