Plains Of Fire

“Only ten men are reporting in,” Lieutenant Anid told him, looking up from his radio.

Ten men? Aflaq’s stomach churned as he processed his nephew’s words. He realized that his fighting force had been halved in a matter of seconds. He was about to give the evacuation order when a powerful concussion shook the small hotel. Aflaq looked out the window and saw a column of smoke billowing upward from a corner of the compound. Rifles exchanged blistering salvos through the breach in the hotel grounds before the firefight was terminated by the bellow of a hand grenade.

“He’s in here with us,” Aflaq said, stunned.

Anid’s eyes were wide with horror. “He told us not to side with Bitturumba any longer.”

Aflaq’s lips drew into a tight, bloodless scar across his face. “Run.”

“But, Uncle—” Anid began to protest.

Aflaq gave the young man a hard push. “I ordered you to run!”

Anid nodded and spun, racing into the hallway. Even as Aflaq’s door swung open, the Thunder Lion officer heard the blazing chatter of French FAMAS rifles, snarling in a vicious two-way cross fire. Anid whirled in the doorway, his shoulder blown into a bloody mess by a snap shot from down the hallway. Aflaq leaped across the office and pulled his nephew back to cover behind his desk. Was it too late for his sister’s son?

“Fall back! Fall back!” Aflaq bellowed into Anid’s walkie-talkie. “It’s not worth dying for! Retreat!”

“Listen to your boss,” Bolan’s chilling voice agreed over the radio. The Executioner’s Arabic was thickly accented, and by no means fluent, but where his words were slightly halting, the tone of voice conveyed a message easily understood. “The Thunder Lions will be extinct inside of a week. Why join Bitturumba all the way to the bitter end?”

“God,” Aflaq prayed.

“No,” Bolan responded, returning to his native English. “Not God. Just your judgment, Captain. It takes a lot more to earn my forgiveness.”

Aflaq looked down to Anid, who was clutching his wounded limb. “I have a wounded boy in here with me. Spare him. I ordered him to stay with me here.”

Bolan strode into view, his tall frame filling the doorway. Clad all in black, bristling with weaponry, the grim figure of the Executioner turned Aflaq’s bowels to ice water with his fearsome visage.

“No!” Anid shouted, almost deliriously. Somehow the eager youngster had twisted his left hand around and had pried his South African Vektor pistol from his hip holster. The sleek black Beretta clone filled his fist as Anid rose to confront the ferocious wraith looking across the desk.

Aflaq lunged and crashed into the wounded lad, knocking the pistol from his grasp. Its metal frame clattered on the floor of the office.

Bolan glared at Aflaq, who was certain that he had doomed himself.

Then the wraith spoke. “Make sure the kid behaves.”

Aflaq kicked the weapon across the floor to Bolan. “I will.”

“Good call.” Bolan glanced out into the hallway. “Keep behind the desk. It’s going to get a hell of a lot hairier in here.”

Bolan fired three swift bursts down the hall, tagging targets in the distance. Satisfied that he’d bought himself a few moments, the Executioner reached into his battle harness, opening a pouch and taking out a small packet. He turned and lobbed it to Aflaq. “It’s something to make the blood clot. Pour it on his shoulder wound, and it’ll stop the bleeding.”

Aflaq tore open the packet. “Peace be unto you, soldier.”

Bolan was taken aback by the militiaman’s gratitude. “Let’s hope not too soon. I’ve got some aggression to extinguish.”

The Executioner turned and fired another long burst from his FAMAS, targeting enemy gunmen making another approach to the office. He disappeared from Aflaq’s sight, and the former militiaman did his best to be a healer.

THE THUNDER LION RESISTANCE had been shattered to pieces in almost record time. It didn’t hurt that Bolan had destroyed half their fighting force in the space of ten seconds, but the conversion of Fial Aflaq and his nephew was an unexpected bonus. Now the Executioner was free to focus on the Muslim Brotherhood contingent who had foolishly dealt themselves into this battle. He keyed his throat mike. “Pushed back a fire team from the Egyptians. Any other advancement on my position?”

“Movement around the lobby at the front of the hotel,” Encizo explained. “I don’t have the range on my launcher and no straight shot with my rifle. Can’t help you with them.”

“Approximate numbers?” Bolan inquired.

“Eight to ten,” Encizo answered. “I’m holding off another group, but they’re retreating to try another approach.”

“Let them through and just concentrate on your side of the hotel. They’ve only got one path to get to me, and if I know my back’s covered, I can deal with their pressure,” Bolan returned. “I’ve got my battlefield set up, and they’re just being funneled into a slaughterhouse.”

“Cattle don’t usually bring AK-47s and RPGs into a slaughterhouse, Striker,” James admonished.

Bolan plucked a fragmentation grenade from his thigh-mounted pouch and bowled the minibomb down the hallway heading toward the lobby. As the fragger’s momentum petered out, the tip of the first Muslim Brotherhood assault team lurched into view. Bolan could see three sets of eyes widen with horror as they looked down at the smooth-skinned green egg of damnation that skittered toward them at head level as they rushed to the top of the steps. A moment later the grenade detonated and the three terrorists disappeared behind a cloud of flame, smoke and dust, their death cries swallowed in the throaty roar of the explosion.

The wall of fragmented razor wire wrapped around the grenade’s explosive core didn’t have the velocity to reach back to the Executioner as he crouched in a doorway twenty-five yards from ground zero. On the other hand, the renegade Egyptians were well within the ten-meter total kill radius of the rocketing, flesh-shredding shrapnel. Meat and skin were pulled from the Brotherhood’s skulls, ripped away as the high-powered sheet of concussive energy struck them like an invisible guillotine blade, shearing through neck bones and ripping the dead men’s heads clean off.

Killed twice over, the mutilated masses of flesh toppled backward onto their overpressure-stunned compatriots, throwing the Brotherhood’s charge even further off balance. Bolan knew he’d only given himself a small window of opportunity against the Egyptian militia, so he charged to the end of the hallway as fast as he could. He fed the FAMAS a full kill-load while he was still on the run, charging a live round into the chamber as he put on the brakes. Bolan’s momentum glided him across the smooth tile floor as if he were ice skating, slowing to a halt at the grenade-crumpled top step. He looked down the stairway and into the dazed opposition as they struggled to free themselves from beneath the tangled limbs of their three decapitated comrades.

Bolan opened fire with the FAMAS. At a range of less than three yards, the French rifle’s full-powered 5.56 mm NATO rounds, launched from a full-length twenty-inch barrel, had no difficulty in tunneling through the mass of jumbled bodies between him and the still stunned enemy. Searing along at 3200 feet per second, the bullets shredded through lifeless meat and bone as if they were made of tissue paper. Ugly craters dented the torsos of the terrorists jammed beneath the deadweight of their friends.

It was a brutal, merciless slaughter, one in which his opposition had very little chance, but Bolan knew that if he had been a mere two seconds slower, the Egyptian renegades would have pulled themselves free from their jumbled mass, grabbed their weapons and launched a hail of lead against him. The difference between two different one-way slaughters was the breadth of three or four heartbeats, and the Executioner’s ruthless efficiency had kept him alive through thousands of such encounters.

“More movement on your side, Striker,” James warned over the radio. “Rafe was right, that group swung back to try a different approach.”

Bolan saw the mob of Muslim Brotherhood gunmen approach the lobby door. His FAMAS had been locked empty, and he let it drop on its sling, transferring to the mighty .44 Magnum Desert Eagle on his hip. When the Egyptians made their move, the need for his stealthy 9 mm weapons had ended, and the suppressed weapons didn’t have the same reach and power as the Israeli-designed hand cannon. In a lightning quick movement, he leveled the .44 at the lobby doors, waiting for the right moment.

The first Egyptian through the door stopped cold, as if he’d struck an invisible brick wall, 240-grains of lead smashing violently through his forehead. The heavyweight slug punched out of the back of the dead man’s neck and speared into a gunman behind him, the poor guy screaming as the deformed hollowpoint round lanced into his groin, shredding through muscle to cut his femoral artery. It was a two-for-one shot that Bolan sometimes encountered when firing high-powered weapons at his enemies. It was the kind of bonus that Bolan didn’t want to count on in the field. A jet of arterial blood hosed onto the other gunmen beside him, jolting them in surprise. The Executioner adjusted his aim and triggered two more rounds into the third and fourth terrorists who were trying to charge through the entrance.

The doorway suddenly became an unnavigable mass of bodies as four corpses blocked the way, bodies piled high enough to force anyone behind them to climb up and over the dead. This gave Bolan an opening to draw another fragmentation grenade. He popped the cotter pin and launched the munition past the pile of lifeless Egyptians. It bounced off a corpse’s back and landed at the feet of a clutch of stacked up Brotherhood gunmen. The terrorists weren’t able to go forward because the bodies of their Magnum-mutilated comrades were too high to easily step over, and the men at the back of the group were shoving too hard against them to allow them to haul the bodies out of the way. When the jammed up gunmen saw the lethal grenade arc into their midst, panic seized the group and they tried to force their way back against the crush of gunmen at the rear of their group. The riflemen at the back were unaware of the impending detonation at their feet until it came through.

The M-26 fragmentation grenade disintegrated, unleashing an umbrella of cutting force through the legs of the snarled terrorists, carving through thighs, knees and shins with enough force to rip them from their owners’ bodies. Shrapnel sliced into vulnerable bellies, ripping open abdominal muscles and crushing intestines and lower spines. Bolan took the opportunity to slam a fresh magazine into the FAMAS and clean up the horrific mess caused by his grenade, firing head shots to end the suffering of those who still lived despite their brutal grenade-mauling.

“The Brotherhood’s in full retreat,” Encizo announced. “Ambush broken.”

“Watch yourselves,” Bolan warned. “The Brotherhood might not be too happy with you guys and take a parting shot.”

“They tried to get us before,” James stated. “They’d come up on the roof with us, but we put them back down.”

“Let the survivors run,” Bolan said. “The Brotherhood knows who they came after, that’s why we had nearly a hundred of them show up to fight. By now, they’ve learned their lesson, in spades.”

“The faster these creeps learn that they’re no longer the top of the food chain, the better,” James stated. “These screwheads need to be more scared.”

“Trust me, I’m getting through to some of them,” Bolan replied. “At least one of the Thunder Lions had a significant change of heart.”

“We had a convert up here, too,” James answered. “He won’t be walking too well, but he’s no longer interested in helping out violent insurgency anymore.”

“Wish the ratio of slaughtered to converted was the other way around,” Bolan said. “More good people are always welcome in the War Everlasting.”

“Better than none redeemed,” Encizo interjected.

Bolan returned to Aflaq’s office. The former militiaman looked up from his first-aid efforts on his nephew.