Dead Reckoning

“I wouldn’t miss it. What’s our estimated time of departure?”

“As soon as you can get up here to Arlington.”

Grimaldi did the calculations in his head. There was drive time from the pub to Opa-locka Executive Airport, eleven miles north of downtown Miami, then the prep and clearance for takeoff. He guesstimated flight time from OEA to Arlington in his Piper Seneca, cruising speed 216 miles per hour, then the rituals of landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

“Six hours, minimum. I’ll call you if they tie me up too long with paperwork.”

“That’s Reagan?”

“Right.”

“I’ll see you there,” Bolan replied, and he was gone.

The Sarge had never been the chatty type, a trait Grimaldi had appreciated from the day they met. Their hookup had been strange, perhaps unique—a kidnapping, in fact, Grimaldi on the hostage end of it—but it had given the pilot a new life. Maybe saved his life, although the new one was a hectic roller-coaster ride of peril.

Fun, though, in a demented kind of way, once you had settled in and got into the spirit of the thing.

The bonus, in Grimaldi’s case, was knowing that he sometimes made a difference. He’d gone from being part of the problem—a see-nothing, hear-nothing syndicate flyboy—to playing on the side of the angels.

No, scratch that. He would never be an angel, and the jobs he did for Stony Man, with or without Mack Bolan, sure as hell wouldn’t strike most folks as angelic. He was still outside the law, but with a twist, pursuing bad guys who had been above the law so long, they thought they were invincible. He’d hated bullies from the time he was the shortest kid in kindergarten class, until he’d learned to take a punch and give back three or four for every one received.

Grimaldi thought about the next few days, unsure when he would have another chance to eat, and finished off the plate in front of him. He quaffed the beer and pushed his empty back. “Another?” the barkeep asked.

“Wish I could,” Grimaldi told him, lifting off his bar stool. “But I have to fly.”

Ronald Reagan National Airport

WAITING FOR JACK GRIMALDI, with nowhere else to go, Bolan picked out a reasonably isolated seat in Terminal A and settled in to review Hal Brognola’s files. The thumb drive held a total of nineteen, one titled “AQ/AH,” the remainder bearing what he took for Arabic surnames.

Bolan started with the file on God’s Hammer, skimming over what he’d already learned from the big Fed about the group’s roots and creation. It was a splinter of a splinter, descended from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda by way of the “subordinate” AQAP, active mainly in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The parent organizations were dominated by Salafi Muslims—also called Wahhabis—who, in turn, comprised a subdivision of the Sunni sect. Bolan wasn’t interested in Islam’s doctrinal rifts, any more than he was by the multitude of self-styled Christian denominations, but he focused on Salafist jihadism preached by al-Qaeda and its descendants.

Bottom line: they were at war with Israel and the “decadent” West, especially that “Great Satan,” Uncle Sam. Whatever they could do to hurt their enemies, from bombing navy ships in port to 9/11, Salafist jihadists were ready to go.

And if they died in that pursuit, well, hello Paradise: ripe fruit in shady gardens, bottomless goblets of wine with no hangovers, dark-eyed virgins galore to serve a martyr’s every need.

Why not go out in one great blaze of glory for the cause?

God’s Hammer had made its debut with the consulate attack in Jordan, and lost two fighters in the process. Stony Man or someone else had managed to identify the dead as a twenty-three-year-old Egyptian, Djer Badawi, and a nineteen-year-old Saudi, Sulaiman Waleed. Waleed had been a rookie, more or less, arrested once during a protest in Riyadh. Badawi was—make that had been—a veteran of the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda, suspected of participating in Alexandria’s al-Qidiseen church bombing that killed twenty-one Coptic Christians in 2011. He’d been living off the grid since then, and clearly up to no good.

Those two were dead now, and no longer Bolan’s problem. Moving through the other file as Brognola had numbered them, he came first to another Saudi, Saleh Kabeer, recognized as the founder and leader of God’s Hammer. He was thirty-seven years old, a Salafi jihadist from way back, the black sheep of a wealthy family who served the House of Saud without regrets. Kabeer had jumped the traces, following in bin Laden’s footsteps as a rebel who rejected his inheritance and chose the path of war over a life of luxury.

Or so he said, at any rate. Brognola’s dossier revealed that Saleh Kabeer had founded God’s Hammer with a start-up contribution from his kinfolk, petro-dollars he had spent while posing as an enemy of any commerce with Crusaders from the West. Hypocrisy was nothing new, of course, and none of those who joined God’s Hammer appeared to mind Kabeer’s personal brand.

Kabeer’s number two was a fellow Saudi, twenty-two-year-old Mohammed Sanea. He didn’t share his leader’s gold-plated background but came by his radicalism the old-fashioned way, after his father served three years in prison for his role in founding Saudi Arabia’s National Society for Human Rights. Perhaps ironically, that hadn’t turned him against his homeland’s rigid Islamic monarchy, but rather against the “Western parasites” who propped it up with billions for oil and foreign aid. Suspected of leading terrorist raids from Yemen, Sanea had survived a US drone strike in 2013 and came back more rabid than ever.

Other known members of God’s Hammer, still at large after the raid in Jordan, included four Palestinians, four Jordanians, two more Saudis, two Syrians, one Lebanese and one Egyptian. Bolan read their bios, noted their affiliation with various terrorist groups, drifting into al-Qaeda and on from there to God’s Hammer as their views became more radical over time. All were relatively young men, ranging in age from nineteen to thirty. All but two were named in outstanding warrants from their homelands or neighboring countries, circulated by Interpol and Europol.

Sixteen mad dogs, and Bolan only knew where three of them were hiding. He’d have to do better than that, and quickly, before they could regroup and try to top their first outing for mayhem and publicity.

Why not? He only had to search the whole damned world.

“What are we flying south?” Grimaldi asked, once he was on the ground at Reagan, with his Piper battened down for the duration.

“Hal’s got something waiting for us, subject to your signing off on it,” Bolan replied.

“Close by?”

“A couple hundred yards that way,” Bolan said, pointing to the west.

“Let’s check it out.”

They walked across the tarmac to a hangar labeled Bellair Charters, where an Eclipse 500 microjet sat waiting for them. “Not bad,” Grimaldi offered as they did a walk-around. “A service ceiling of forty-one thousand feet, maximum range of 1,295 miles and a top speed of 425 miles per hour. That’s five refueling stops before we land in Paraguay. I’m thinking Dallas, Oaxaca, Mexico, Panama City over the Gulf, Canaima, Venezuela, Alta Floresta, Brazil, then on to Asunción. A lot of stops, but it’s the best this little bird can do.”

“How long?” Bolan asked.

“Air time, about eleven hours. Ground time, messing with the locals?” Grimaldi considered it and shook his head. “Your guess would be as good as mine.”

“No time to waste, then,” Bolan said. “The sooner we’re airborne, the better.”

“Roger that. I’ll start the preflight check right now, then have a chat with the tower.”

Bolan left Grimaldi to it. He wasn’t happy with the time lag between takeoff and their final touchdown in Paraguay. If something spooked the people he was hunting in the meantime, he could miss them altogether and be back to square one, hoping Stony Man could run them down again.

And if they couldn’t, he’d be waiting for the next attack, like everybody else.

But that was unacceptable. Failure was not an option for the Executioner.

The plague of terrorism was as old as humankind. It could not be eradicated, only held at bay, until such time as fundamental change in human nature was achieved. So far, in Bolan’s lifetime, there had been no sign of that occurring. Planet Earth still needed soldiers standing watch against the predators who populated so-called “civilized” society, taking advantage of the weak and hopeless for their own ends, masked by politics, religion, pick your poison.

In his idle hours, few as they might be, Bolan sometimes philosophized about a world without atrocities, devoid of greed and cruelty, hatred, discrimination and suspicion. He would never live to see it—no one would, in fact—because the human animal was deeply and irrevocably flawed.

Men craved what they could not afford, what they had no right to possess. When frustrated in their pursuit of more, they turned on those presumably obstructing them. Some humans learned to channel greed and hatred into lucrative careers in various fields. Others sated their greed through commerce, raping the environment with utter disregard for future generations. Altruists, when they appeared, were such a novelty that they were usually murdered, canonized as saints or both.

The bottom line: there were no angels, and no demons. Every man and woman on the planet was an individual, resisting or surrendering to baser instincts as they passed through life, taking it one day at a time. Some gave free rein to their desires, and in the process jeopardized communities, whole nations, or the world at large.

When those predators stood beyond the reach of ordinary law, they had to be curbed by extraordinary force.

Enter the Executioner, commissioned to continue with a job he’d started on his own, without official sanction, to repay a private debt of blood. He kept on fighting now because he could, because somebody had to if “polite” society was going to survive.

That meant confronting human monsters where they lived and preyed on others weaker than themselves. It meant destroying them, scorching the earth to stall—where he could not prevent—another monster rising in their place.

The war, he realized, could not be won. It was a holding action, not some grand crusade.

Bolan would occupy the firing line as long as he was able. After that...

He hoped that someone would rise to grab the torch.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a0cc521d-717e-5ef4-b190-24c38cd2d55f)