by Ian Barclay
Even if the traffic had not been so hellishly noisy, the first two policemen would not have heard the two dry coughs which the MP5’s silencer made. It was like an invalid clearing his throat.
Awad walked out the door of the building with another man. He stopped, transfixed, and looked at the crumpled body in front of the door. He looked up the street at the backs of the other two cops, still talking and smoking. Then he looked in Dartley’s direction.
Dartley had waited for that. He wanted to see recognition dawn on this bastard’s face before he quenched the life in his sick brain.
The MP5 gave three bronchial rasps and Awad rolled on the pavement. Dartley took out the other man with a couple of shots. Then he put another two slugs into Awad’s still moving, fat pig carcass.
Passersby were taking shelter behind parked cars and in doorways. The street traffic tore heedlessly by.
Ibrahim braked the car beside him, Dartley got in and they passed the two secret policemen farther up the street, who were still smoking and talking.
The seven ragged fellahin carried rusty picks and battered shovels. They plodded wearily and unseeingly through the city streets until they came to an intersection. Here they dumped their picks and shovels in the middle of the intersecting streets. Teams of ragged urchins ran to them, carrying portable traffic barriers which they had obviously scavenged from other sites. The men erected these barriers in a square around themselves and their equipment.
They began to break into the road surface with their picks, levering up the paving stones with crow-bars and stacking the stones in small piles banked by shoveled earth. The traffic flowed around them as they worked. The urchins continued to arrive with more barricades.
As the work spread, the traffic slowed as it navigated around the excavated part of the intersecting streets.
Drivers cursed. A policeman directed traffic for a while and then left. The seven workmen, all still in their teens, had sunken eyes and thin faces—all had an amazing resemblance to one another, as if they were close cousins. But no one noticed, since no one pays attention to workmen in a street.
No one asked who had sent them or what they were doing there.
Ahmed Hasan and his bodyguards were nearing the Citadel in three Range Rovers. The president had received word of Awad’s death and thought about declaring a state of emergency. It would be a sign of weakness on his part, Ahmed decided, if one man or at most a small group could force him to do this. Any panic on his part, any backing down, any display of fear would only further lower the morale of the army. He felt he could depend on the police forces—the army he had doubts about. The officers plotted against him among themselves, and the enlisted men were ignorant and easily roused.
So far the Light of Islam mullahs had controlled the Cairo mob, but Ahmed could see that their grip was slipping. The mullahs themselves were now split by dissent. This in one way was a benefit to him. If the mullahs had been united, they might have turned on him and pacified the people by blaming all the wrongs on him. That would not happen. They had chosen him and would have to stick by him now that the dissenting liberal mullahs were denouncing him.
The three Range Rovers were slowed by the traffic as they neared the Citadel. The drivers went up on the pavement at times and people scattered out of their way. Roadwork at an intersection was causing most of the mess. The drivers nosed their Range Rovers into the slowly moving cars again, keeping their 1, 2, 3 pattern and staying close together. They were almost at the Citadel now.
One of the bodyguards in the leading vehicle shouted that the roadworkers looked more like they were building fortifications than replacing cables or pipes. The vehicle’s driver saw it too and radioed back an alarm to the two Range Rovers behind them.
But all three were stuck in the slowly moving traffic and had no room to maneuver.
One roadworker rolled a grenade beneath the first vehicle and all seven ducked down behind their fortifications. The grenade blew and flipped the Range Rover onto its side.
Another grenade rolled beneath the second vehicle, and two beneath the third. The second Range Rover was flipped on its side by the explosion, like the first. The third was lifted ten feet high by the simultaneous explosion of the two grenades beneath it. The military vehicle crashed down squarely on all four wheels, shattering its axles.
Black smoke billowed everywhere. The second Range Rover was on fire and its occupants desperately struggled out of its upward-facing door.
None of the bodyguards noticed the seven road-workers slip away through the stalled cars and hysterical drivers at the crossing. The force of the blasts had shattered windshields and side windows of cars, but no innocent passengers, drivers or passersby seemed injured. They just added to the chaos by shouting and running in all directions.
Richard Dartley and Abdel Ibrahim stood inside a dark store looking on at the scene through its window. Sacks of coffee beans were piled everywhere, and gleaming brass scales stood on the counter where the merchant weighed his customers’ purchases. The merchant and two women assistants—one or both perhaps his wives—stood at the back of the store and wrung their hands. The two armed men had been in the store an hour, had locked the door and put a sign on it saying CLOSED. The foreign one had promised to kill them with his silenced submachine gun if they annoyed him in any way. They shrank back into the shadows when he came near them.
“No sign of the fucker yet,” Dartley grated, as he calmly watched the cut, bruised, bleeding bodyguards help each other out of the first two vehicles. Two seemed to have broken arms, and most of the others looked battered and had lost their weapons.
No one stirred from the third vehicle, sitting squat on its chassis on the street.
“Damn, they’re waiting for reinforcements before they come out,” Dartley said. “We’ve got to flush Hasan out if he’s in there.”
Ibrahim gestured wildly at a youth outside the store window. He nodded and walked quickly away. Ibrahim unlocked the door and opened it a few inches. Then they saw the youth again, walking fast toward the third Range Rover with a two-gallon can in his right hand. He stooped for a moment and set the can next to the disabled vehicle and broke into a run.
Dartley poked the barrel of the MP5 through the doorway opening. He missed with his first two shots, then landed the third in the middle of the can, which exploded and blew flaming gasoline all over the Range Rover.
The doors opened on both sides and the occupants came pouring out. Dartley ignored the kids in their camouflage jumpsuits and bush hats. He watched for a tall, bony man in an officer’s khaki suit with lots of ribbons and brass.
“There he goes!” Ibrahim yelled.
Then Dartley saw him too. The skunk must have crawled on his hands and knees out the far door and along the street. Now he had broken into a run, glancing back and keeping behind the cover of cars.
“Get out of here,” Dartley said to Ibrahim. “Clear all your family away.”
Dartley ran from the store. The bodyguards from the third vehicle had their weapons and were covering their president’s escape route. They didn’t see him coming. Not from a store almost next to them. They hadn’t expected that.
He knew he had to take them with what was left in his magazine. Thirty rounds less the three he had fired at the can. He came at them on the run and fired from left to right, taking the first man with a single shot in the shoulder.
A short burst ran a line of holes across the midriffs of two others, and they fell hard, like mechanical targets on a range.
Things got messier with the rest. Dartley sprayed them wildly with bullets like a person spraying roaches from a can. He could not be sure how many he got, how many fired back or even how many just lay still and played dead. All he knew or cared about was that no one stood between him and the fleeing president.
He changed magazines as he ran. Hasan was quite a ways off down the street, running among the stalled, hooting cars. Dartley noticed that people who recognized their almig
hty president pointed in wonder as they saw him run for his life down the traffic-clogged street.
Dartley charged after him, running as fast as he could in the heat and fumes, holding the submachine gun in his right hand. It was perfectly timed. The car door swung outward just before he drew level with it, held steady by the driver’s shoulder with one foot on the road. It caught Dartley all the way from the neck to the knees, as he slammed into it at a full run.
He picked himself up off the street, dazed and winded, then saw someone picking up the MP5 where it had flown from his grasp. Dartley drew his Browning and shouted a warning. The man paid no attention. Dartley fired. He missed. The man scooped up the submachine gun and ran. Dartley fired twice more and missed each time. His left knee hurt, the breath had been knocked out of him and he couldn’t shoot for shit! A car door could put an end to all that? Like hell it could. Dartley braced himself.
Hasan was still in sight down the street, going at a nice easy clip now, as if he were a marathon runner. Dartley set out after him, but immediately had to dive for cover as a burst of gunfire sounded behind him. The clown who had run off with the MP5 was now firing on him. Dartley showed himself and hit back with his Browning, drawing longer bursts of fire—until they stopped, the magazine exhausted. Dartley still had all the spares for the MP5 in his pockets. He ignored the gunman now and took off again after Hasan.
Hasan looked back over his shoulder and slowed down. He looked back again and stopped.
All Dartley could think was that Hasan had heard the pistol shots, had missed seeing him and assumed that the American was no longer in pursuit. True, Dartley was now running on the other side of the two columns of cars than where he had previously been. He kept low and close to the cars.
Then Dartley saw something else. Ahmed Hasan was talking with two uniformed cops, who would probably have stopped him anyway if he had tried to continue running. This gave Dartley time, and he used it to eat up the distance between him and his quarry. The two policemen were now looking back in the direction from which the president had come. They did not see Dartley until he was less than a hundred yards away. A pistol is not much use at that range, but Dartley blazed away.
He emptied the magazine without hitting either of them. He had to root in his pockets among the MP5 magazines to find his only other pistol mag. The police were zinging bullets off cars, almost touching his ears.
He emptied the new magazine at them, rapid fire, and brought both men down. Hasan was no longer with them or he would have bought it too.
Dartley saw him run into the entranceway of a building. Afraid to lose him if he stopped to pick up the downed cops’ weapons, Dartley tossed away his empty pistol and went after him. His left knee was bothering him badly now, and he was not sure if he could manage a long chase through buildings and maybe over rooftops. Ahmed Hasan seemed to have nine lives.
Dartley laughed out loud when he saw Ahmed hiding behind some bushes at the back of the courtyard.
Dartley limped toward his prey. He was covered with sweat and dirt, his clothes were ripped, he was panting and he had no gun. Yet he intended to kill Hasan any way he could.
The president, seeing the American unarmed, emerged from the bushes with a combat knife in his right hand. He and the American stalked each other. It was clear to Dartley that Hasan wanted to play for time, jab at him and keep him at arm’s length until help arrived.
Dartley pulled off his jacket, took a full MP5 mag from one pocket and then wrapped the jacket around his left forearm as a defense against Ahmed’s knife thrusts. He moved in, and each time Ahmed jabbed at him with the blade he took it in the coat and Swung at the Egyptian’s face with the magazine.
Blood soaked through his coat as time after time the knife point found its mark in the flesh of his left forearm. The pain only served to determine Dartley even further, and he continued his attack until he had Ahmed backed up against the rear wall of the courtyard.
The mag’s metal edges cut Hasan about the eyes and one blow had already raised a huge, blue buise over his left cheekbone. Hasan desperately drove the knife with all his strength at his attacker. Dartley felt the blade tear through the fabric of the coat a half-inch beneath his arm. He let the blade sink to the hilt into the cloth, then sharply twisted his arm downward. The coat held the blade and twisted its handle out of Hasan’s grip.
Hasan jumped Dartley and knocked him on his back. He tried to straddle him and choke him—but suddenly released his fingers from the American’s throat. Hasan screamed in pain and his eyes rolled in his head. He staggered slowly to his feet off the downed American, who looked up at him with a crimson-dripping blade in his hand. Hasan clutched his stomach with both hands and half-ran, half-stumbled across the courtyard to the street entranceway.
Hasan tottered out onto the sidewalk, then weakened, and his hands dropped away from his stomach. His belly was slit from hip to hip, and the contents of his body cavity spilled out on the sidewalk at his feet.
Hasan wavered and fell face forward onto his own throbbing, glistening entrails.
The Light of Islam mullahs put their militias in the streets and the Cairo mobs fought them with American weapons and ammo which suddenly turned up in plentiful supply all over the city. The soldiers fought the police, and each side racked up impressive body counts. Fighting lasted into the early morning hours and did not start again at dawn.
When President Mubarak’s motorcade left the American Embassy, he was greeted by joyous multitudes. There didn’t seem to be a person left in Cairo who wanted to recall the bad old Light of Islam days.
Abdel Ibrahim insisted that Dartley attend the reception for the new president. Pritchett sent word from the embassy that he’d love to meet him. Dartley took a stroll and didn’t come back.
The ticket agent at Cairo International Airport couldn’t understand why Dartley was willing to wait six hours for an AirEgypt flight to New York via London, when for the same price he would only have to wait an hour for an Air France flight via Paris.
The President Must Die!
A shroud of doom descends over the world when a fanatical religious faction, headed k.y Ahmed Hasan, takes over the Egyptian government. With nuclear technology within his grasp, Hasan poses a deadly threat to an area already at the brink of war. Only one man can stop the mad Egyptian: Richard Dartley, the world’s most expert and expensive professional assassin, whose fee is one million dollars.
A cold killing machine, Dartley works with ruthless efficiency–which is why he gets the job. But Cairo is infested with spies and fanatics that include the treacherous Light of Islam faction. A target and enemy of all, the Crime Minister now must dodge both bullets and booby traps to destroy the president willing to plunge the planet into the nightmare of nuclear war.
