Plains Of Fire

“We’ve got your back,” James said. “Put some boot to ass.”

Bolan remained silent. He was in the strike zone and had a sentry in his sights. Not literally, because right now Bolan had only a knife with a black phosphate blade in his hand, and the suppressed MP-5 machine pistol cinched over his shoulder. He was prepared for close-quarters combat, falling into the profile that his prey were told to expect. As long as he was only going against the Thunder Lion militia, James and Encizo were to hold their fire. Their guns were reserved for shattering the spine of the Muslim Brotherhood ambush.

Bolan lunged at the Thunder Lion sentry, his black-bladed Cold Steel Recon Bowie knife driving deep into the guard’s sternum, piercing the abdominal wall and spearing into his heart. The African’s dying cry of pain was strangled and trapped in his throat, cut off by Bolan’s forearm crushing into his windpipe. The kill was over in the space of a heartbeat, completed with no more noise than the rustle of a bird’s wings as it took flight. Bolan hauled the corpse into a set of decorative flower bushes, stowing him out of sight. He took the dead man’s rifle and his bandolier of ammunition to bolster his firepower for the coming battle.

There was a feeling in the air, and a more superstitious man would have attributed the eerie prickling at the back of his neck to some supernatural sense. The Executioner, however, was far more practical and realistic. It wasn’t a psychic awareness that he was being watched, but his subconscious mind picking up sensory data that his higher functions weren’t focused on. Bolan’s danger sense was an acute awareness of subliminal sensory data—a shadow in his peripheral vision, the silence of normally active rodents in their alley, or the whiff of hashish smoke still clinging to a Muslim Brotherhood warrior. Bolan’s subconscious mind processed all of this information with an uncanny ease, and the warrior’s experience and intellect were honed to pick up on these subliminal signals. The result was the Executioner’s almost omniscient understanding of any battlefield he found himself in, able to anticipate his enemy’s action even before they took it.

Forewarned was forearmed, he mentally repeated. That truly was the case for Bolan, and his arsenal of forewarning provided him with the firepower to obliterate twenty-to-one odds. He unslung the MP-5, then rushed to complete the sentry’s patrol path. Catching up to the dead African’s schedule, as observed from the night before, Bolan turned the corner and came face-to-face with a second Thunder Lion guard. Bolan expected the sentry, but the militiaman was thrown off balance by his partner’s replacement. Before the guard could react, Bolan fired a single suppressed round between his eyes, dropping the African in his tracks.

Two down and still eighteen Thunder Lions left to go, thanks to Kurtzman’s satellite reconnaissance of the hotel compound. That wasn’t counting the contingent of Muslim Brotherhood gunmen who’d been called in by Bitturumba. Bolan took the magazines of FAMAS ammo off the second corpse, adding it to his reservoir as he looped the bandolier of 25-round magazines over his neck and shoulder. He approached the back of the hotel compound, closing in on the service entrance. Bolan knew from the previous night’s recon that there were two Thunder Lions on post there, but as many as six could be on hand with a single cry of alarm. The soldier paused long enough to scoop up a rock and then hurled it with all his strength at the wrought-iron gate, raising a loud clang.

The heavy stone had accomplished its task, drawing the attention of one of the militiamen. The sentinel poked his head out around the corner, his face an easy target as he leaned off balance on the gate. Bolan fired a short burst of suppressed SMG fire, bullets tearing through the militiaman’s face. The second guard posted at the back let out a loud cry to alert the rest of the militia troopers as his partner convulsed, then collapsed in death, hanging halfway over the fence.

Everything was going according to Bolan’s plan, and the soldier turned and circled back around the way he’d come. While the Thunder Lions focused their attention on the service entrance, ready to repel the one-man assault, Bolan leaped up and grabbed the top of the eight-foot privacy wall. He powered himself to the top of the barrier and crouched. From his vantage point, he saw that a clot of six Africans were braced at the service entrance. Three of the militiamen were out of breath from racing to join their comrades in defending their post. He heard the scuff of boots in the distance as more of the African gunmen mobilized. Bolan pulled the stock of his MP-5 to his shoulder and triggered it.

Bolan’s nighttime camouflage made him into a barely visible ghost in the Thunder Lions’ peripheral vision, and their attention was directed forward, not to their flanks. The mighty warriors named for lions were more like sitting ducks as heavyweight 9 mm rounds ripped through the flank of braced gunmen, drilling tunnels through vital organs. Two of the riflemen dropped immediately, another staggering as his thighs were shredded by the salvo that had been slowed by the corpses of his partners. As the wounded guard had dropped his weapon, Bolan focused on the ones still standing as they reacted to the sudden deaths and injuries among their number. They whirled to face the Executioner, but he stepped off the privacy wall, dropping eight feet to the ground and landing in crouch. The move had dropped him beneath their focus as the riflemen fired, spearing 5.56 mm bullets through the air that Bolan had occupied a heartbeat earlier. The sudden drop had bought the big American an additional second of confusion among his foes, and he took full advantage of it by hosing down the last three Thunder Lions.

The trio convulsed as bullets punched into their faces and chests, bodies trembling under the onslaught as they tumbled dead to the ground. The injured gunman reached out for his fallen FAMAS rifle. It was a mistake, but not an immediately fatal one. Bolan triggered a burst of 9 mm bullets that forced the man to hastily withdraw his hand.

“You’ll want to bandage that,” Bolan said, gesturing to the man’s bloody thighs.

The gunman looked up at the Executioner, his eyes wide. He glanced to the FAMAS.

“I wouldn’t,” Bolan warned.

The guard lunged anyway, tugging the butt of his rifle to his left shoulder. Bolan was ready for the resulting firestorm, taking one step to the side to avoid the initial trigger pull. The FAMAS was a sturdy, reliable assault rifle, and its bullpup configuration kept the black weapon compact by placing the trigger guard and handle well forward of the firing mechanism. This way, a twenty-inch barrel could be put on a weapon that was only slightly longer than thirty inches, maintaining full power while improving maneuverability. Unfortunately for the African rifleman, the FAMAS was an older generation bullpup, which meant that the ejector port threw blistering-hot empty casings out of a breech right at the face of the shooter if he used it in the wrong hand.

While the FAMAS was great for a right-handed gunman, spitting its shells out over his shoulder, when the rifle was fired from a left-hander’s stance, as the guard tried to now, his head was right in the path of a stream of superheated cartridges. The brass tore at the rifleman’s left eye and cheek, slicing flesh. The guard screamed and dropped his rifle. Blinded and lacerated, the sentry curled up into a ball, harmless and whimpering in agony. Bolan reversed his MP-5 and slammed the steel stock into the side of the wounded man’s head, knocking him out cold.

“Told you,” Bolan said. He tucked the MP-5 behind his back and transferred to the fully loaded FAMAS he’d taken from his first victim. The scuff of boots announced that two more Thunder Lion militiamen were rushing toward his position. As they turned the corner, almost as if they were on a preset schedule, Bolan had his rifle ready for their anticipated approach. The FAMAS snarled two rapid bursts, bullets punching through the militiamen’s chests.

A loud crack filled the air, the passage of a supersonic bullet across several rooftops. Waves of air displaced by the high-caliber sniper round bounced off nearby surfaces. It was James’s warning to Bolan that the Muslim Brotherhood was making its move. James’s first shot from his Israeli M-89-SR, a silenced 7.62 mm sniper rifle, had the power to obliterate a human skull in a fountain of bone fragments and vaporized brain tissue, even at five hundred yards. There were cries of dismay as Egyptian terrorists watched their friend’s head explode. The semiauto rifle had launched two more rounds in the time it took for the first bullet to reach the renegade Egyptian. Multiple shouts of alarm, warnings against a sniper attack, were suddenly cut off as James’s subsequent shots struck their targets.

Thumps filled the air as 40 mm grenades landed two hundred yards from the wall. Bolan knew full well that Encizo’s grenade launcher had a 350-meter maximum effective range, so he could guess that the stocky Cuban was firing on Muslim Brotherhood forces who were staging closer to their sniper’s roost. Encizo’s salvo of grenades spit up columns of smoke and debris that Bolan could see over the service-entrance gate, the first shot landing in a street. Bolan also caught a glimpse of a rooftop erupting, bodies backlit by an explosion, the length of a mangled machine gun twisting in front of the blossoming fireball.

The Brotherhood had its own sniper roosts spread throughout the surrounding rooftops, but the Cuban disrupted them with 40 mm packets of steel and fire. He had a second M-89-SR to back up James, but for now he was relying on the effective Russian RG-6 revolver-style grenade launcher to pour devastation on the heads of the carefully laid ambush.

“Enemy force engaged,” Encizo announced over Bolan’s earpiece. “I have movement heading for the wall you just scaled. No clean shot. Be advised.”

“On it,” the Executioner replied. He grabbed a second FAMAS rifle in his off hand and tucked himself behind a low planter wall filled with decorative ferns. As the wall itself was made of thick stone and filled with densely packed dirt, it shielded the Executioner as the Brotherhood blew open the wall with a pair of RPG-7 rocket grenades. Exploding masonry bounced all around Bolan as he braced himself against the dynamic entry. He fired the FAMAS in his left hand as if it were a pistol, keeping the ejector port well away from his face to avoid an injury similar to the one suffered by the unconscious African lying next to him. He emptied the French rifle’s 25-round magazine through the breach, eliciting howls of agony. The thump of two corpses sprawling across the bottom of the blasted hole in the wall let the Executioner know that his suppressive fire was more effective than he’d counted on.

In response to Bolan’s salvo, the Muslim Brotherhood cut loose with their AKs. Wild autofire slashed through the night, proving ineffective in dislodging the Executioner from behind the low wall. The sheer volume of autofire was deafening, informing Bolan that his opposition had been thrown off its game.

Bolan’s next trick was going to put it into sudden death. He reached into his thigh pouch and pulled a fragmentation grenade. Knowing the distance and the angle he needed to make the shot, he sailed the orb through the hole in the wall, right into the knot of Brotherhood gunmen on the outside the hotel compound. Six-and-a-half ounces of plastic explosive detonated, hurling splinters of razor-sharp wire at high velocity through vulnerable flesh, inducing crippling lacerations that tore apart skin, muscles and internal organs. It was a brutal, devastating maneuver, as likely to produce painful, slowly lethal injuries as it was instant death. The Executioner couldn’t spare time or mercy for the mangled and mortally wounded. He was outnumbered and living in the space between the hammer and the anvil.

The Executioner whirled and drove deeper into the Thunder Lions’ headquarters, drawing the Brotherhood forces after him into the compound. This night was going to be a message heard across the underworld of radical fanatics.

The message was that extremist groups had someone to fear.

“MACK’S INSIDE,” Rafael Encizo told Calvin James as the Phoenix Force medic triggered his silenced sniper rifle.

James’s shot hit another of the Brotherhood’s fighters who had noticed their position. The Egyptian was on the parapet of a roof and was in the process of turning his RPK light machine gun when James punched a 7.62 mm NATO bullet through the bridge of the gunner’s nose.

“The troops are paying too much attention to us now to do more than spot for him,” James said. “All the rooftops are crowded with snipers and machine-gun nests. This is almost as bad as when the Russians came after us at Gary’s place in Montana.”

“There were twice as many of those guys,” Encizo reminded his friend. “And we were all deployed in one general fortification because we only had to defend one approach. This time, we’ve got them surrounded.”

James glanced over his shoulder, then swung his rifle around, popping a suppressed bullet into the chest of another rooftop gunman. “You think?”

“Well, we’re fighting them on two fronts, instead of just one,” Encizo corrected. He punctuated his argument by triggering his reloaded RG-6, lancing a clot of armed Egyptians coming up the street with a 40 mm fragmentation shell. Bodies scattered as the round detonated, hurling heads and limbs from torn torsos in a grisly testimony to the launcher’s fearsome power. Encizo scanned for more targets, then caught the sound of boots and bodies rattling the ladder of the fire escape that had brought them to the roof. “Company’s coming.”

The Cuban set down the RG-6 next to James, trading it in for his Heckler & Koch USP. The 9 mm pistol didn’t have quite the same devastating ability as the other weapons, but Encizo wanted to err on the side of weapon retention. It was easier to hang on to a handgun in close-quarters combat than it was to retain a long arm, which provided an attacker with more leverage. An angry face topped the ladder and Encizo aimed and fired in a split second. Two rounds from the 9 mm H & K struck the Brotherhood assailant within an inch of each other, one coring an eye socket into a smear of punctured cornea, the other cracking against the forehead, the wide mouth of his hollowpoint round snagging the bone and breaking it, but not penetrating to the brain beneath. The bullet through the eye, however, took care of the right hemisphere of the Egyptian’s brain, and his head snapped back, fountaining gore.

Encizo rushed to the top of the ladder now that the Brotherhood attacker’s brainless corpse surrendered to the embrace of gravity, pulling it out of the way between him and the rest of the climbers. Egyptian faces looked up in a mixture of anger, fear, determination and resignation. Encizo shouted an order in Arabic. “Turn back or die!”

A handgun barked from lower on the ladder, but the climber had to shoot one-handed and off balance on a rung while aiming around a higher climber. The topmost Egyptian hugged the side of the ladder, giving Encizo a clean shot at the Muslim Brotherhood aggressor. The Phoenix Force commando took it, drilling the feisty terrorist through the top of his head. The 9 mm slug fractured the bone at the top of the Egyptian’s head, cracking down between his right and left lobes to peel him off the ladder and dump his lifeless corpse to the floor of the alley, thirty feet below.

Three of the other Egyptians had slid back down the fire escape as fast as they could, realizing that they were sitting ducks for the Cuban warrior on the roof. A rifleman who was at the base of the ladder opened up, trying to tag Encizo at the edge of the roof. The Brotherhood trooper who had elected to sit out the fight on a ladder rung screamed in pain as two AK-47 bullets slashed through his right leg.

Encizo pulled a fragmentation grenade from his harness and dumped it over the side. Screams of dismay filled the alley as the terrorists recognized the egg-shaped envelope of death spiraling down into their midst. The rifle salvo ended as the terrorist chose to run, rather than be blown to smithereens. It was too late. Thunder boomed, grounded gunmen smashed into greasy pulps of crushed flesh and bone, destroyed by the high-powered blast. Encizo reached down to the injured Egyptian and took his hand. There was a moment of doubt on the Brotherhood prisoner’s part, but he let the Cuban haul him onto the roof. Encizo’s powerful upper body strength made lifting the slender Arab as easy as hoisting a child.

“They shot me,” the man whimpered in broken English, voice trembling from a mixture of pain and betrayal.

“Cal, we have wounded!” Encizo called out.

“Busy!” James responded. The Phoenix Force medic had transferred to his Beretta and was in the process of stitching a line of 9 mm rounds into a gunman on the next rooftop over. The M-89-SR lay at James’s feet, action locked open, the magazine well empty.

Encizo caught movement on another rooftop and whirled, spotting three gunmen rushing up in James’s blind spot. He snapped up the USP and let them have it with a salvo of rapid-fire rounds, drilling two of the terrorists when he heard the crack of another pistol firing. The Egyptian he’d rescued emptied half the magazine of his 9 mm Helwan into the third attacker.

“They shot me,” the ex-Brotherhood gunman growled, having shaken off his moment of shock. Betrayal still burned in his eyes as he reloaded the Egyptian Beretta copy. “I don’t owe those traitorous dogs more than goat shit and death.”

Encizo gave him a friendly smirk. “That’s the spirit.”

He went back to searching for more rooftop enemies, but the Phoenix Force pair and their newfound ally had depleted their ranks.

“Clear for now,” James said, rushing over with his first-aid kit. “I’ll look after our buddy’s leg. Rafe…”

“I’ve got Striker’s back,” Encizo replied. He scooped up the sniper rifle and fed it a fresh magazine. “Take good care of him. Hearts and minds.”

“You know it,” James responded.

The Cuban warrior nestled behind the sniper rifle and set to work thinning out the crowd of Muslim Brotherhood soldiers who were trying to rush the rear of the hotel’s compound. There was still work to be done.

CHAPTER SIX

Captain Fial Aflaq had been prepared for the coming of the nameless crusader for a full day. It was common knowledge among even African militiamen trained by the radical Islamic clerics of the Middle East that there was an American commando who stalked those who fought for the cause of converting the world to their ways. This one man, almost mythic in strength, prowess and the sheer number of kills attributed to him, was unknown, other than for the effects he had left behind him.

Aflaq jolted as he heard the rattle of a lone FAMAS preceding the rolling thunder of a multigrenade barrage. Shock gripped the Thunder Lion leader.