Exit Code

by Don Pendleton

  “Oh, shit!” the Mob guy said. “Am I glad to see you!”

  “Yeah,” Bolan said as he raised the Desert Eagle and put a bullet through the guy’s head.

  The Executioner holstered his weapon and continued down that path in a crouch, the FNC held battle-ready. So far, he’d only eliminated three on this floor, and counting the two in the lobby along with Pescia, that left maybe a dozen or so. It didn’t take him long to reduce that number, when he happened on a quartet of Donatto’s soldiers, all deceased. It looked like the NIF’s resistance had been much heavier than expected.

  Bolan’s sixth sense suddenly triggered an alarm, and he turned and dropped in time to avoid being ventilated by a hailstorm of bullets. He crawled to an area of cover behind a filing cabinet and then rolled into a kneeling position. He leveled the FNC on the top of the waist-high cabinet, sighted on the closest of his targets and squeezed the trigger. The thin batting and plywood of the prefab dividers was no match for military-grade ammunition. Material and wood splinters exploded and lodged in the terrorist’s face, evoking a shout of surprise. He rolled away in a natural desire to avoid death, but instead that was what he found. Bolan shot him twice through the top of the head.

  The other two began to press forward, opening up with a continuous stream of autofire. Still, their timing was off and Bolan could tell he was dealing with completely inexperienced soldiers when firing from one gun ceased, followed by another a moment later. Both of his opponents had expended their ammunition almost simultaneously.

  Bolan decided to deal with that by the easiest tactic possible, and that was heavy explosives. The soldier yanked a smoker from his harness, as well as an M67 fragmentation grenade packed with HE. Bolan removed the pins from both, but let the smoker fly first. He heard the grenade hit the floor, the yelling and uncertainty as the terrorists attempted to escape, and then he could hear it explode and the unmistakable hissing as smoke began to fill the room. Bolan released the M67 by leaving the cover of the cabinet for a moment and rolling the grenade down the walkway. He rolled back to his original position to insure he wouldn’t fall victim to any fragments. The concussion alone rocked the area, and Bolan could smell the cordite and expended comp-B as the HE ignited. Flaming air whooshed past him as the grenade did its intended work.

  In the aftermath of the shock wave, Bolan rose and took only a moment to survey the destruction. Bits and chunks of wrecked furniture and computer equipment lay everywhere, and one of the two terrorists was motionless. The last other had been left screaming and writhing on the ground, his body filled with superheated fragments of metal and wood. As Bolan moved past, he used the FNC to pump a few rounds into him, thereby ending his misery.

  Bolan nearly walked into a group of Mafia soldiers that came around the corner, their weapons held at ready. The group was led by Ray Donatto. The mobster took one look at the destruction and a small, cruel smile played at his lips.

  “Holy shit, Frankie, you do damn good work!”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Bolan said. “What’s left of these guys?”

  “Nothing,” Donatto said. “We eradicated all of the bastards, but we lost a few of our own doing it.”

  “Yeah,” Bolan replied, trying to act grim and saddened. He waved in the general direction from which he’d come and said, “I’ve seen nothing but dead bodies so far.”

  “It’s okay,” Donatto said, looking at his remaining men for approval. “They’ll be remembered by the Family for eternity.”

  The men nodded and grumbled their agreement.

  “So will we if we don’t get out of here,” Bolan reminded them. “You head for the elevators and I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Check for any survivors.”

  “But we already—”

  “Ray, you want to take the chance of somebody being alive?” Bolan asked, cutting him off. “You want somebody talking to the Arabs, or worse, somebody talking to Don Lenzini or the cops before we’re finito?”

  Donatto looked like he’d been slapped, and Bolan realized he’d made a mistake in talking down to the guy in front of his men. Still, he knew in about a minute or two that it wouldn’t matter.

  “Now you go ahead, and I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Hey, before you go,” Donatto said, “where the hell is Gino?”

  “He’s dead. A straggler got him on the stairs. Son of a bitch took a bullet for me.” Bolan forced a grin, adding, “Can you believe it?”

  “I’ll be damned,” Donatto replied. He looked at Bolan and said, “I can’t let you go it alone then. You need backup. My guys will head for the elevators and we’ll search together.”

  Suspicion settled in Bolan’s gut, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue. If he’d offered any resistance, Donatto would have suspected something. He didn’t have any choice. Donatto had him pegged and anything other than accepting his offer would compromise him. He couldn’t afford to let the cat out of the bag. Not yet…not with so much at stake.

  14

  “All right,” Bolan said. “You’re on.”

  Donatto turned to his men. “Get to the elevators and get the hell out of here. No, wait! Take the stairs.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Bolan said. “Most likely the cops will be here pretty damn quick and the stairs will take too long.”

  Donatto thought about a moment and nodded. “You’re right. Take the elevators.”

  Bolan added, “We’ll be right behind you.”

  The two moved off in the direction of the other offices while Donatto’s men headed for the elevators. Bolan could only hope that the signal device inside his pocket would set off the C-4 at any sort of distance. He figured it wouldn’t be a problem, although there might be a slight delay in the signal getting to it. The wizardry of Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz wasn’t to be underestimated, hadn’t ever been underestimated, and Bolan wasn’t about to start now.

  That left the Executioner with only one other problem: he had to find a way to get rid of Donatto. The guy was behind him now, refusing to lead, and Bolan hadn’t wanted to risk a firefight with a dozen of Donatto’s hoods. He noticed that Donatto was keeping him at a disadvantage, and Bolan was beginning to wonder if the guy suspected something. So far, everybody around Bolan had ended up dead. The Executioner wasn’t naive enough to believe his dumb luck would hold out forever. Good skills kept a soldier alive; intuition kept a soldier alive; and sometimes even destiny, a fate ordained by some higher power, kept a soldier alive. But reliance on luck alone would get a soldier killed quicker than anything else, except maybe underestimating the opposition.

  The Executioner had learned these lessons the hard way, and he had also learned that when a guy had a gun at his back—even one who might think he was an ally—it was definitely not the time to risk a sucker play. Something told Bolan that it wasn’t time to kill Donatto yet.

  They continued through the offices, each splitting away to search more quickly and efficiently, and Bolan kept a constant vigil on his watch. As they rounded a far corner in the hallway, they found themselves heading toward the elevators, and Donatto’s men were just off-loading the last of the human corpses Bolan had left as a time-delay mechanism. Donatto started to rush toward the men as they disappeared one by one onto the elevator, moving past Bolan in the process and affording the Executioner an opportunity.

  Bolan reached into his pocket, retrieved the detonator, thumbed back the protective cover and pushed the button. The elevator area erupted into a ball of flame as the powerful plastique exploded under the heat and pressure of the blasting caps. Pieces of bodies, including arms, legs and heads, flew in every direction. Fire ignited the carpets and immediately began to crawl up the walls, and as the smoke roiled and the heat reached the fire sensors, the sprinklers started raining water on that zone.

  Bolan trotted forward and grabbed Donatto’s arm. He was trying to get up after being knocked to the ground by the shock wave. Bolan urged him
on with a few, well-chosen but harsh words. Donatto was visibly upset by watching his men being blown to bits, but the Executioner simply pushed him into the stairwell, careful to insure the guy didn’t collapse on his rubbery legs.

  As they reached the landing below, Bolan suddenly noticed the reason for Donatto’s strange behavior. It wasn’t shock. There was a large piece of metal protruding from his head. Bolan couldn’t tell what it was in the dimly lit stairwell, but he could see that it was embedded deeply in Donatto’s skull, which meant—for all practical purposes—that it might even be lodged in a portion of the guy’s brain.

  In either case, as Bolan continued to assist Donatto down the steps, the effects of the injury were taking a toll. He was acting almost as if he was drunk, stumbling along as they continued to descend the steps. His movements were jerky and uncoordinated, and it took all of the Executioner’s strength to hold on to the guy and maintain his own balance.

  After what seemed like hours, but was really only a matter of minutes, Bolan reached the first floor with Donatto. He moved into the lobby, practically dragging Donatto’s corpse-like form along with him, sweeping the area with the muzzle of the FNC. There were no challengers, but Bolan knew it wouldn’t be long before help arrived. He could see the flashes of light from the first police and fire vehicles arriving on the scene. Well, he thought, at least the security guards had been diligent in following his instructions to get help, and in staying out of his way during this mission.

  Bolan turned and headed toward the rear of the building. He remembered seeing the alleyway, and he knew that Donatto’s car was parked one street over. It wouldn’t be difficult to get away unseen, provided that he didn’t have to drag his burden the entire way.

  Bolan nearly lost his balance under Donatto’s weight, and he finally had to stop and ease the limp form to the linoleum. The capo looked up into Bolan’s eyes, that cruel half smile playing on his lips as he wheezed and gasped, his brain trying to force him to continue breathing even though it was probably being flooded with blood. Yeah, the guy was dying a slow death.

  “You aren’t really part of the Family,” Donatto said quietly, “are you?”

  Bolan saw no reason to deny it at this point, and he shook his head.

  “I—I knew it,” Donatto finally managed to get out, gasping. “I…knew…it…”

  The man died.

  Bolan rose and put this thing from his mind. He’d accomplished the second stage of his mission, so he was halfway there. Next, he had to neutralize the major electronics site that provided communications throughout all of Lenzini’s networks. That would wrap up his activities on the West Coast. He would then go back and deal with Lenzini.

  Bolan was uneasy about the NIF and their real plans in this. In fact, he was more concerned about that than anything Lenzini was cooking up. Everything had seemed a bit too easy to this point. While he trusted his plan as the best one for going against the syndicate, he wasn’t sure the same tactics would work with the NIF. It was one thing to get Mafia guns itching for a fight to believe that they were being betrayed by a foreign terrorist group, but it was quite another to make the NIF think they had anything to fear in a converse fashion. After all, the NIF had operated within American borders for some time with impunity, and the Executioner wasn’t about to let that continue. One way or another, he would have to stop them. Even if he managed to destroy the alliances between Lenzini and whoever was running the show for the terrorists, it didn’t mean the dangers were over; in fact, they would have just begun.

  Bolan trusted Brognola and the genius of Aaron Kurtzman, and he was wholly confident in MacEwan’s technical abilities, as well. Still, there were times when a soldier couldn’t rely on the tenacity and skills of others, but instead had to turn to something deeper and more personal.

  Yeah. The Executioner was taking the war straight to the enemy. And they would find, when he was knocking on their door, there was no place to run.

  Washington, D.C.

  COLONEL ABDALRAHMAN had heard enough.

  He’d started pacing when the reports first came through that there had been trouble at their base in Los Angeles, but now he was hearing of death tolls and the words “total destruction” being whispered on the breaths of many of his most trusted men. This wasn’t good. It wasn’t good for the morale of the New Islamic Front’s soldiers, and it wasn’t good for the success in their operations.

  Abdalrahman had barely left Rhatib and Shurish since returning from his meeting with Lenzini. During the aftermath of their tragedy, he watched them as they worked furiously to reroute some of the systems to other locations. Primary data was being sent to the large communications network they had operating by remote satellite at an abandoned warehouse facility on the outskirts of Seattle, and the remainder was being handled by a location somewhere near Washington. That was a secret location, by Shurish’s design. That, coupled with Shurish’s insistence that they move their operations from the relative safety of his home in the foothills to this abandoned factory near the Potomac, had infuriated Abdalrahman.

  Shurish, who allegedly did not know of the location of the Seattle base, had said it was best that nobody possess knowledge of the location of every key site in the operation. This way, if someone was captured and under torture or pain of death they decided to talk, the system could not be brought to its knees. While it sounded good, Abdalrahman believed that Shurish was simply guaranteeing his safety. Shurish could not take any real credit for the system, since it had almost solely been designed and built by Rhatib’s genius, but he had assisted in some respects. Shurish’s contacts within the American government had provided the gateway for the NIF to establish an operational foothold inside the country.

  Their initial plan to control American defense systems using Carnivore, a tool used by the FBI to spy on its own citizens, had failed, largely in part to the interference of the man called Cooper and the American bitch who had worked for Shurish at DARPA. As soon as the Americans discovered the leak, they shut it down. Still, by striking a deal with the American organized crime syndicate, they would be able to control American defenses on a large enough scale that it would spell doom for their most hated enemy.

  But Abdalrahman suspected none of it would come to pass if they did not determine what enemy was striking out at them, and attempting to destroy the system. Those were the answers he needed, those were the answers he’d ordered Shurish to get, and he had tired of waiting.

  “Well?” he finally said, stopping his pacing and coming to stand over Shurish’s shoulder.

  The scientist was studying a computer screen, beads of sweat visible on his skin as they glowed in the light of the CRT. “I’m still tallying the reports, Umar.”

  “Bah!” Abdalrahman spit. He reached past Shurish, grabbing hold of the CRT, and with an angry shout he tossed the monitor across the room.

  A heavy silence fell on everyone, broken only by the rasping of Abdalrahman’s breath. His face was visibly red, and he could feel the flush. His heart beat rapidly. He was fed up with Shurish and the weak-minded simpleton’s feeble excuses.

  “You are supposed to be one of the best!” Abdalrahman exclaimed. “You are supposed to be intelligent and dependable, but instead you whine and fret about your day, wringing your hands! I have grown tired of it!”

  The expression on Shurish’s face became apoplectic, as he was now so angered by Abdalrahman’s outburst that he looked as if he wanted to reach out and strangle the man barehanded. “And you are supposed to be some brilliant, military tactician but you cannot seem to stop one man. One man, Umar! Do you think me so weak that I could not kill a man with my own hands were I pushed to that? Yet we ask you to do one simple thing! We ask you to provide us security, to protect us from this man, and you cannot even do that! I stood within inches of this man, and risked my life by allowing that bomb to go off!”

  “You risked nothing!” Abdalrahman shouted, stepping back and letting his hand hover over his pistol hols
ter.

  The movement wasn’t lost on Shurish. “Oh, so you want to kill me? Then kill me! Where will your precious system be then, eh? Tell me that, if you can, Umar! Tell me all about how this system is going to work if I’m dead!”

  It was taking everything in his being not to pull his weapon and shoot Shurish in his bitter, screwed-up face. Ah, yes, he would have loved nothing better than to blow a hole in the man’s forehead. Still, he knew he needed Shurish, that he could not risk the operation, and Shurish knew it too.

  “So,” a quiet voice said. Both men turned to face Rhatib as he added, “It has finally come to this.”

  Abdalrahman slowly moved his hand away from his gun. While his nephew wasn’t squeamish, the soldier certainly didn’t want to expose him to such naked violence unnecessarily.

  “Do you think we will succeed while at each other’s throats?” Rhatib asked.

  Abdalrahman could barely hold back the tears of pride that suddenly came to his eyes. His nephew—his beloved Rhatib—had emerged as a voice of maturity, calm and reason. It was almost too much for his soul to bear. He’d always found his nephew to be immature in a number of ways, but now Rhatib was talking like a true man.

  “That is what they would like us to do, “Rhatib said. “They would like us to forgo our sense of duty and honor to our country, to our religion, to our people. The Americans would love nothing better than to see us destroy ourselves, so that all they have to do is step in and collect the spoils of our own bloodshed. This is the time we must band together, my brothers. This is the time that we must work with one another to accomplish our goal.

  “Shurish, you must work with me, so that we can insure nothing goes wrong at the time we must strike. You must not let things worry you, particularly if those are things that are none of your concern. You should be concentrating on your work.”