As the Israeli howled in surprise and shock, the Executioner followed up with a palm-heel stroke that struck the dead center of the murderer’s face.
Soze was sent stumbling, heels skidding on the floor as he fought to maintain his balance, arms windmilling. There was no mercy from the Executioner as he moved in. He grabbed the Israeli’s web belt and hauled him into his knee. Like an understuffed mattress, Soze folded over the stabbing joint that plowed deep into his abdominal muscles, sending shock waves of force rippling through his guts. With a twist, Bolan sent the Abraham’s Dagger terrorist flying to the floor, landing in an uncontrolled sprawl.
The Executioner stomped his boot down hard on Soze’s arm. He was rewarded with the sound of splintering bone and the high-pitched squeal of agony that signaled a breaking of spirit as well. He clawed his micro-Uzi out of its harness and aimed it directly at Soze’s face.
“You have four more extremities left. Three of them will hurt just as bad as that arm. The fourth will set you free from all that pain,” Bolan promised in a graveyard voice.
“Pull the trigger. You’re not getting anything from me,” Soze said defiantly.
Bolan glared at the downed man, knowing that anyone could be broken in interrogation, but he also knew that his team wouldn’t have the time to waste on a long interrogation, let alone the risk of having a professional in their midst making every effort to escape. It would make for an indefensible situation.
And still, the Executioner wasn’t willing to drop the hammer on an unarmed, wounded opponent, no matter what.
Heartbeats pounded in his chest, ticking off slices of time that in his hyped-up condition could have been seconds or hours. Bolan’s head throbbed from the abuse heaped on it in the course of battle. Movement surged in his peripheral vision, and he swung up, Uzi following his line of sight. His vision sharpened on two men with AKs, hurling themselves into view, their weapons tracking him.
There was no more time to contemplate the man from Abraham’s Dagger. Bolan took a diving leap backward, 7.62 mm slugs tearing through the air. His Uzi bucked and spit, ripping a fireball as he dropped to the ground, breaking his fall on one bruise-covered forearm. The wild spray of autofire he launched had tagged one of the Taliban recruits, a row of slugs stitching the gunner from shoulder to navel in a wild grouping. It wasn’t the prettiest shooting the Executioner had ever done, but it was a controlled, short burst, despite his decidedly uncontrolled footing. On one elbow and braced, he swung the muzzle of the micro-Uzi on the other killer, tripping the trigger once again.
The second burst was equally short, five rounds flashing from the end of the barrel. Not a shot from the salvo missed, and the combined impact knocking him off his feet in a messy display.
Bolan remembered the body armor the gunmen with Soze were wearing just as the pair stirred, recovering from their shock. One gunner was truly wounded, his arm hanging limp where a slug sliced into unprotected flesh and bone. He clawed desperately to get his rifle with his other hand. The second gunman was getting his feet back under him, spraying a wild burst into the ceiling as he struggled to shoot and stand up at the same time.
The Executioner threw himself prone and saw Soze slip around the corner and disappear into a hallway. He let his opponent escape, instead lining up the ring front-post on the Uzi pistol and ripping a short blast into the bearded features of the Taliban veteran who shot first. Bolan rolled to one side as the injured shooter let go of his burst of rifle fire.
A storm of autofire filled the air before Bolan could get a head shot on the second killer, and he rolled, looking behind him at a Middle Eastern man. He looked more like a Mediterranean Arab than a local native, and he was holding a short-barreled AK-47, looking wildly between the floored soldier, and the Taliban gunman he’d just chopped to pieces.
Bolan glanced back at the enemy shooter. It didn’t matter how good the body armor was. The steel-cored 7.62 mm Soviet-style ammunition launched from the AKs was capable of defeating all but the heaviest “bulletproof” vests. The expatriate Taliban thug’s Kevlar wasn’t thick enough to stop the chest shredding power of the AK.
Bolan turned his attention back to his savior, who stood glancing between him and a figure around the corner.
“Your friend, Tera?” Bolan asked. His grip was uneasy, one hand slicked with blood, one bicep throbbing with pain from the opened wound. He still would have been able to put a dozen rounds into the gunman’s center of mass.
“You could say that,” Geren’s voice called from around the corner.
Bolan lowered his Uzi pistol and struggled to his feet. The Arab man stepped forward and picked up the Desert Eagle, handing it to Bolan butt-first. Up close, the Executioner recognized the man’s face. His brow furrowed.
“Haytham is a friend of yours?” Bolan asked Geren.
“You know who I am?” the Hamas man asked.
“You’ve got a rap sheet. Unfortunately, I’ve got an armed killer running away,” Bolan said. “You’re helping us hunt Abraham’s Dagger?”
Haytham nodded. “I’ll help you.”
“Forgive me if I don’t shake your hand right away,” Bolan replied, heading off in pursuit of Soze. A broken arm wouldn’t slow the man much, but it would hinder his ability to fight back.
“Laith?” Bolan called.
“I’m reading you, Colonel.”
“If you see a man nursing a broken arm, that’s our Israeli. I want him alive if possible. For a long talk.”
Laith chuckled over the headset. “One kneecap, coming up.”
Bolan turned the corner and realized that Soze had cut through the center hallway of the building, probably to get to the other side. He turned back and raced for the stairwell on the other side of the building. The door was swinging shut as he reached it, and he slammed his right shoulder into it, bringing a flare of new agony down his injured arm. He didn’t release his death grip on the Desert Eagle, though, and slid through the door, going down the stairs, following the racing stomps of rubber-soled boots on concrete. The echoing drumbeats raced up like panicked doves in flight. The soldier’s pain disappeared with each bounding leap down the flights of steps, his long legs allowing him to clear to landings in only a few bounds.
He was taking a bruising as he hit the bottom of each landing, and the scrape of his guns against the brick was definitely giving his position away. But the Executioner would rather take the heat of a bullet than allow anyone else to get hurt.
Almost on cue to that internal admission, a trio of gunshots barked up the stairs, bullets whistling past Bolan’s head to smash brick and drop broken chips into his hair. Bolan ignored the stinging splinters of stone and raised both guns, firing the Uzi until it was empty. The Desert Eagle issued only two meaty roars. There was a strangled cry below, and Bolan continued down the stairs, leading the way with the Desert Eagle, wobbly in his right fist. There were three more shots left in the gun.
Soze wasn’t moving, his Kevlar was wet and sticky with blood, the side of his neck drenched in dark crimson. The Abraham’s Dagger man glared at him through enraged blue eyes, gasping with pain and weakness.
“I’ll give you medical attention,” Bolan told him.
“You’ll give me shit,” Soze grunted. “You don’t have the time to interrogate me properly. By the time you do, we’ll get everyone else we’re looking for.”
“Says you,” Bolan challenged. He stayed three steps up, away from the downed assassin. “We can do this the easy way, you know.”
Soze still had his gun clutched in what was once his good hand, but both weapon and hand were drenched with blood.
“Both my arms are dead to me, American,” Soze whispered. “And you know my face. But you’re not going to get anything more out of me.”
Bolan took a step forward, but the assassin kicked out. He winced as he slid down the bare brick of the stairwell. More blood pumped from the neck wound.
“It’s possible you’ll let me bleed to death, or into
unconsciousness more likely,” Soze whispered. “But you have one small problem. I’m willing to die for my beliefs. Are you willing to die for the children of terrorists, Mr. Bleeding Heart American?”
Bolan looked at Soze’s other hand, the hand of the arm he’d broken. A small egg-shaped form lay in the palm, a pin dangling from a ring around the man’s thumb.
“Four,” he began to count.
The Executioner whirled, charging back up the stairs.
“Three…”
One landing up was not enough room to get away from the concussion and fragmentation of the blast.
“Two…”
Bolan leaped like a cat, clearing a second landing. He spotted Haytham and Geren on the stairs above him. He started to speak, to warn them of the grenade, but instead he ran. Dropping his pistols, he grabbed their shirtfronts and shoved them down hard against the thick, sheltering shields of the staircase.
“One…”
Crane Soze ceased to exist as anything resembling a human being. His body was dismembered by the awesome force of 6.5 ounces of high explosive. His legs were intact, but his torso and head were obliterated.
Up two flights, Bolan and his companions were feeling like God Himself had reared back, bringing down His fist upon their bodies. No shrapnel had rebounded and struck any of them, but the concussion wave was another thing entirely. It was a massive, hateful beast that took them and chewed on them until they felt like their stuffing would pop out of their skin. Once more, Bolan’s head thundered from overpressure shock in a confined space.
But he would live. His vision was already refocusing, and as he pulled himself to his feet, he realized his balance was already returning. Equilibrium preserved, he checked on the others.
Neither looked to be in the best of health, but then, neither looked dazed and bewildered.
“Colonel?” Laith called.
“Laith, forget about picking that last guy up,” Bolan said. The earplug on his radio set had saved his hearing in that ear.
“What happened?” Laith asked.
Bolan sighed.
“He went to pieces.”
MARID HAYTHAM DIDN’T know why he chose to enter the hospital to aid Tera Geren in the rescue of the UN worker. He radioed his status to the rest of his team. His mind was racing.
The gunfights, the presence of two enemies of his organization and his people, the conflicts of loyalties churned in his gut. He stepped past the shattered remains of Crane Soze, the heavy concrete of the landing buckled by the grenade’s explosion.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get a prisoner,” he said softly, bending over the dead man, fingers poking at the corpse.
“We don’t have time to stick around,” Geren said sharply. She looked like a person trying to sit comfortably on the edge of a sword. Her voice was taut and hard, and she didn’t give the impression that she was going to take much playing around.
Prodding the hideous mess, Haytham knocked loose a wire that came over the shoulder of the smashed remains. The big soldier bent over the dead man, gripped the microphone cable and tugged. The Palestinian saw what he was doing and gripped whatever was worth holding and hauled the bloody mess forward, exposing the back-mounted vest pouch for a radio system.
“Just like on the vests we borrowed from them,” Bolan explained. “Except this will have the radio frequencies they’re working under.”
“They’ll change it all,” Geren spoke up. “They’ll know his body was captured.”
“They’ll assume the radio was destroyed when the grenade went off,” Haytham said. “Not protected by a foot and a half of flesh, bone and Kevlar.”
The tall man plugged the earpiece from his own radio into the captured unit and listened. He didn’t stop walking, and Haytham and Geren both followed silently, as if drawn by some powerful magnetic charge. He led the way down to the bottom of the steps, still paying attention to the radio, eyes scanning the stairwell.
He unplugged the radio unit and stuffed it into his vest, reconnecting to his own LASH. “Laith, anyone responding to the gunfight in the street yet?”
“Not yet,” Laith responded. “But I hear them coming.”
“We’re at the first floor now,” he said.
Haytham paused. “I cannot join you.”
Geren and Bolan came to a halt, both looking at him.
“We’re on the same side, as rare as that might seem,” Bolan stated.
Haytham had seen the ability of the soldier. The man before him was a hardened warrior. Even with one arm drenched with blood, he was still standing tall and firm, while Haytham’s hands trembled from the aftereffects of the grenade detonation.
The Palestinian was surprised at the soldier before him, a total lack of accusatory anger in his features. Ice-blue eyes peered deep into him, regarding him, taking a measure that Haytham actually felt ashamed that he might not live up to. The man was a Westerner, but there was something…bigger about him. He was a force unto himself, like the living, walking embodiment of an ideal that was asking for more than just an arm’s-length alliance for the time being.
“We’ll trade cell phone numbers,” Haytham said quickly and softly, feeling ashamed of himself to pass off his chance to stand tall beside this stranger.
“That’ll work,” the American said.
Relief washed over Haytham, a relief he didn’t understand. By all rights, they were men who would be at each other’s throats at any other time. Instead, it was a truce, two enemies uniting against a common cause. Haytham memorized the number given by the big man in black, then gave his own information.
Geren looked between the two of them, similarly bewildered by the awkward, unusual, but solid détente that her companion had established.
“Peace between us for tonight,” Haytham said, offering his hand. “For tomorrow, we may return to the sword.”
There was a moment’s pause.
The American man put his finger to the earpiece as Laith’s voice was audible over the tiny speaker. “Colonel, we’ve got company on the way.”
“We hear you,” Bolan answered, then shook Haytham’s hand.
The soldier’s mitt was huge, making Haytham feel childlike. A melancholy wave washed over his features. “I would hate to see you as an enemy tomorrow,” he said.
The wraith spun and disappeared into the shadows, Tera Geren hot on his heels.
Haytham dumped his AK in the stairwell and took off into the night, pulling his battered old army-issue jacket tighter around himself to fight off the sudden chill running through his body.
THE LAND ROVER’S ENGINE turned over easily for Robert Wesley as Geren and Bolan scrambled into the back seat. He glanced at them in the rearview mirror.
“Who’d you meet up with?” he asked, and the two shared a conspiratorial glance. A long moment’s quiet hung uncomfortably in the air like a cloud of acrid smoke. Wesley drove slowly past where Laith had parked himself, so slowly that the young Afghan warrior was able to throw open the door and pull himself inside without the American driver even needing to tap the brake.
“That’s a good question,” Laith responded. “What’s going on here?”
“Hamas is in town, and they’re looking for Abraham’s Dagger,” Bolan told them. “We met a more…moderate member of the group who felt that working alongside us was better than working against us.”
“One member?” Laith asked. “Explains how he slipped past me.”
“That and there’s a half dozen entrances to the hospital,” Wesley replied. He glanced to the back where Dr. Mikela Bronson sat, eyes wide with bewilderment as she rode in darkness with four heavily armed strangers who had claimed to be on her side, her protectors against an unknown death squad that had pursued her and her friends across half a continent from the Mediterranean to a shitty little hospital within spitting distance of Pakistan.
Any doubts she held were gone with the first gunshot through the window what felt like years ago. In reality, it was less than twelve mi
nutes by his watch. Wesley’s heart was slowing, but there was still the occasional sharp tang of adrenaline that spiked through it, branching out and down his arms, lighting him up like a Christmas tree with nervous energy. He desperately wished he’d brought a pack of cigarettes with him, but he knew better than to bring a load of coffin nails on a mission. Instead, he pressed his molars hard against one another, brow furrowed with worry.
“Wake up, Robert,” Laith said. “Unless you want me to drive.”
“Sorry,” Wesley answered.
“What’s troubling you?” Bolan asked.
“Just worried about the doctor,” Wesley told him. “Are you all right Dr. Bronson?”
There was a short, nervous nod. Her creamed coffee-colored features seemed even paler now than when he first saw her, but he wondered if it was just a trick of perception played by his mind.
“I guess so,” she voiced a moment later. There was a soft tremor to the words, and he could see her knuckles pressing the skin across them tight to the bone as she hugged her vest to her.
“You’re in good hands,” Bolan told her. “And the men who are trying to hurt you will be stopped.”
Mikela’s big brown eyes flicked to the Executioner’s craggy face. His voice was soft, yet filled with the deep timber of resolve. He wasn’t making a hollow promise.
When he spoke, Wesley suddenly found himself believing with his whole being that the frightened healer tucked in the third row of seats of the Land Rover was going to be safe from what vile howling armies of the damned Abraham’s Dagger could summon. Doubt burned away and his jaws loosened some.
“Thank you,” Mikela answered. The tremor of fear was gone from her voice, and deep within Staff Sergeant Robert Wesley’s heart of hearts, he felt a tremendous debt of thanks to the tall stranger who soothed the hearts and minds of innocents caught in the cross fire.
Suicide Highway Page 9
