Death Run

by Don Pendleton

  The bomb that bin Osman was in the process of activating would kill nearly all of the people in San Francisco, and it would kill hundreds of thousands in the surrounding area. The fallout from the bomb would kill hundreds of thousands more. After the attack the government would almost certainly declare martial law. The chaos that would result from this would throw the United States into such a state of turmoil that controlling the chaos would consume all of the country's resources. It would force the U.S. to withdraw much of its military forces from around the world. This would leave al Qaeda free to achieve its aims without American interference.

  It would work. Botros could feel it in his bones. By this time, Maurstad should have finished assembling the bomb and set the timer. The bomb would be set to go off at 6:00 p.m. the following evening, in almost exactly twenty-four hours. By that time everyone would have returned from the races and the Egyptian, the Saudi, and the Jordanian traitors would be back in the city. Bin Osman should be returning to the compound within half an hour. After that, it would just be a matter of waiting. Waiting, and watching for that devil Cooper.

  Botros knew he had to stop worrying about the American. Everything was going as planned.

  * * *

  The man guarding the young woman hadn't noticed the Executioner peering through the doorway, which was partially open to let air flow into the hot room. The guard was too busy staring at the girl's thighs, which were uncovered because her skirt had ridden up on her hip, exposing a lacy pale pink undergarment. The guard seemed transfixed by the sight, as if he'd never seen a woman before. Bolan watched as the man moved closer to the girl.

  Just then the girl saw Bolan's face through the doorway. Her eyes went wide, but Bolan held a finger to his lips, indicating she should remain quiet. The fact that she didn't scream even when she saw the soldier's grease-painted face in the doorway told him that she was either nearly catatonic or else very tough.

  The girl looked at the guard and spread her legs, moving the skirt even farther up her hip. Then she gave the guard a seductive smile.

  The guard glanced through the door into the main area of the shed to make certain no one could see him, then moved closer to the girl. Bolan crept closer to the doorway and prepared to move. The guard reached down to touch the girl's leg. It looked to Bolan as if the man was shaking. When he reached down to unbuckle his pants, Bolan made his move. He leaped through the door with the Fairbairn-Sykes knife in an ice pick grip and drove it down into the man's sterno-clavicular junction. The blade sliced through the man's jugular vein and he collapsed before he even knew he'd been attacked.

  Again Bolan held his finger up to his lip, indicating that the girl should remain quiet, and glanced out the door into the main area of the shed. In the middle of the room he could see what most likely had been a female human, though she'd been sliced into such a gory mess that the soldier couldn't be completely certain. Her bloodless body was tied to a chair. Next to her Eddie Anderson was tied to a similar chair, his face bloodied and bruised.

  A more thorough survey of the room revealed several vehicles, including the two he'd followed to the compound after Anderson had been kidnapped. He saw about a dozen Arab-looking men, who must have been Botros men, along with six Filipinos.

  The soldier had faced some impossible odds in his life and come out on top — odds a lot worse than eighteen to one — but his luck had to run out sometime. Just because he'd faced worse didn't mean eighteen to one odds were good. He had to play this smart or he'd not only get himself killed, but he'd also bring about the deaths of Anderson and the girl, whom he assumed was Mareebeth Maurstad. He wished he'd have called in Osborne, but he'd been too busy trying to rescue Anderson to take the time to call for help.

  Bolan needed some sort of diversion. He was still trying to figure out what form that diversion might take when he heard a cell phone ring. He watched as Jameed Botros pulled a phone from his pants pocket and said, "Did it go well?"

  Botros appeared pleased with the answer. "How far out are you?" he asked. When he apparently got the answer he hung up his phone. "Open the door," he ordered. "They are coming up the road."

  * * *

  Musabin Osman hoped the Filipinos in the truck with him would not notice that he was excited. His heart pounded when he thought about the task before him, and he plotted out every cut he planned to make on the American's body before he finally released him into death. He probably wouldn't take as much time as he had with the Maurstad woman, but the youngster had caused him problems and for that he would pay.

  When the van drove up to the overhead door that he'd had installed in the turkey shed, he looked at the guards Botros had placed in the derelict cars around the building. In one car he could see no one and in the other the sentry appeared to be asleep. Botros would pay for the incompetence of his men. By the time the door had been raised and the Filipino driving had shut off the engine of the van, he'd worked himself into a complete state of rage.

  "You incompetent fool!" he shrieked at Botros.

  "What is the problem?" Botros asked.

  "It's the men you have guarding the building," bin Osman shouted. "They are either asleep or they have left their posts."

  "That is impossible. They are good men, and experienced. They would never fail me."

  "If it is impossible, what has happened to them? I clearly saw one man sleeping in the vehicle near the door, and his counterpart seems to have disappeared entirely," bin Osman shouted.

  "Hadad!" Botros addressed one of his men. "Go and see if this is true. If these men are indeed absent or sleeping, find them and bring them in here."

  Hadad ran from the building to go and check on the guards.

  "If what you say is true," Botros said to bin Osman, "I will see to it that the men are punished."

  "You will if you do not want to be punished yourself," bin Osman warned.

  "Did you run into any problems arming the device?" Botros asked. They had been able to speak freely around the BNG members because none of them spoke Arabic. Most spoke only English with only a smattering of Tagalog because they had been in San Francisco since they were small children.

  "Only a bit of reluctance on the part of Dr. Maurstad," bin Osman said. "Bring Dr. Maurstad out here," he ordered in English.

  One of the Filipinos opened the rear door of the van's cargo box and two more BNG members emerged with Gunthar Maurstad sandwiched between them. When the man saw the remains of his wife tied to the chair, he almost collapsed, but the Filipinos on either side of him held him upright.

  "When I reminded him that his cooperation was the only possible way to spare his daughter the same fate his wife met, he became much more helpful."

  Once the device exploded, Botros knew his deviant master would deconstruct the younger Maurstad woman with at least as much care as he'd dismembered her mother.

  In the meantime, bin Osman could work on the young racer. And Botros would have two more people to guard for the next twenty-four hours. It seemed bin Osman did not care how much extra work he made for Botros and his men. As he contemplated the disrespect that bin Osman seemed to have for him, Botros heard three loud popping sounds from behind him, as if someone had set off three small firecrackers. He turned to look for the source of the sound, but was interrupted by a distraught Hadad, who came rushing into the building at that very instant.

  "They're dead!" Hadad shouted.

  "Who's dead," Botros asked.

  "All of them," the shocked man said.

  "All of who?" Botros asked, getting impatient with the man's circular discourse.

  "The guards. All of them, dead."

  Botros heard four more of the popping sounds in rapid succession and Hadad fell flat on his face, a large chunk missing from the back of his head.

  14

  When Botros sent the man he called Hadad to go check on the sentries, Bolan still hadn't formulated a good plan but he knew his time for formulating had run out. It was time to act. From his hide behind
a crate that had likely housed components for the nuclear explosive device that bin Osman and Botros had assembled, he counted the men in the room, noted their locations and decided the order in which he planned to shoot them. If he was really fast and his timing perfect, he'd be able to cut the odds against him in half before anyone had a chance to fire back.

  Unfortunately those odds had gotten much worse since the van full of more BNG members arrived. In addition to bin Osman, six Filipinos had exited the van, meaning the soldier was now facing twenty-five-to-one odds.

  The three men closest to him had bunched up fairly close together. Two sat on an old bus seat smoking cigarettes and another sat on a chair right beside them. He could take out all three in a fraction of a second. Next he would aim for the men standing in the center of the room, where most of the Filipinos had gathered. Then he'd shoot at the men on the other side of the van. He figured he could take out twelve or thirteen men before they even realized they were under attack, but only if his timing was perfect.

  The Executioner knew it was time to act when he saw the walk-in door beside the overhead door open. It could only be Hadad coming back to report that he'd killed the sentries. As soon as he saw the doorknob start to turn, he fired at the three men closest to him. Several of the men farther away heard the popping of his Beretta and turned to see what had happened. At that moment Hadad burst through the door and began shouting about all the sentries being dead.

  Bolan took the opportunity to draw a bead on one of the Filipinos standing in the center of the room, near the cargo van, and in quick succession he shot down three of the gangbangers, along with Hadad, whose head the soldier blew apart in midsentence. At that point everyone left standing ran for cover, drawing their weapons as they ran, but the Executioner was able to pick off four more of them before they'd found a decent hiding spot.

  In the confusion no one seemed to have located his hide and several men hadn't chosen locations that provided cover from him. He saw the spiked hair of one of the BNG members poking up from behind a wooden work bench. Just enough of the skull showed to make it worth taking a shot. Bolan aimed just millimeters above the top of the workbench and squeezed the trigger. The man's scalp flew off the top of his head, spiked hairdo and all, along with a four-inch section of his skull and a fair-sized chunk of his brain.

  Another man had found a better hiding spot, but his left arm protruded from the corner of the cardboard box that he hid behind. Using the man's arm as a starting point, Bolan estimated where the man's center of mass was and fired three rounds into that area. His estimate must have been sound, because the arm dropped to the ground and didn't move.

  The slide of his Beretta locked open and Bolan reached for another magazine. The time for stealth was over so the soldier replaced the empty magazine with one loaded with high-power ammunition. Then he removed the Desert Eagle from his leg holster. He had to find a new spot soon or they'd figure out where he was and blow him to pieces right through the wooden crate. He set the selector on the Beretta to tri-burst and blasted suppression fire with both guns as he dove for the rear bumper of a Toyota Tacoma parked along the wall to his left.

  The remaining men opened up at the area where they'd just seen him, but Bolan moved around to the front of the truck where the engine block would provide better cover than the sheet metal bodywork. He reloaded his handguns on the fly, and lay down on the ground behind the front wheel. He looked around the tire and saw the lower torsos of two men crouched behind the white cargo van, firing toward the rear of the Tacoma. With two quick shots Bolan put a .44 Magnum round from his Desert Eagle into the groins of each man, shattering their pelvises and most likely ensuring that if they did live, they would not sire any children. Both men fell behind the van where Bolan couldn't see them.

  His shots attracted the attention of the BNG members who had taken cover near the door and they began firing at his position with their SAR-21s. The air around him filled with flying 5.56 mm bullets, ricocheting around the truck. Sooner or later a stray round was going to hit him. Bolan estimated that there were six to eight men in the area, but what really interested him was the object behind which one of the men hid — the oxygen and acetylene tanks of an acetylene torch. Bolan pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade, counted to three and lobbed it at the tanks.

  Even though he was behind the Toyota pickup, Bolan felt the fireball roll over him, singing his hair and eyebrows. The men in that corner of the room fared much worse. The man behind the tank had virtually disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a grease spot on the cement floor, and the two men nearest him lay on the ground bleeding out from great rifts in their torsos and limbs that were missing completely.

  Three men had caught fire and ran around like human matchsticks. Three other men seemed to have escaped harm from the explosion, but they ran out to the middle of the room, right into Bolan's field of fire. Three quick shots from the Desert Eagle put them down, and another three ended the suffering of the flaming men.

  As quickly as the firefight had started, it ended. Bolan checked all corners of the room, but it was empty, except for Anderson, who remained tied up in the center of the room. The fireball had singed his hair and burned his eyebrows off, but he seemed relatively unscathed. Otherwise all that remained were dead Saudis and Filipinos. He saw no sign of Botros or bin Osman. Nor did he see any sign of Maurstad. He'd been counting on rescuing Maurstad so he could find out where the bomb was located and learn how to disarm it.

  Bolan heard an engine start up outside and a vehicle roar away.

  He had to catch the men and rescue Maurstad, but he couldn't leave Anderson and the Maurstad girl tied up in a burning barn. He cut the ropes holding Anderson, tore off his duct-tape gag and asked the young man, "Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine. I have to get that cocksucker."

  "You mean Botros?"

  "Yeah, I know he killed my brother." Anderson ran to the low-rider pickup and started to pull his bike out of the box. "Help me get this out," he said, "and I'll follow them to see where they go."

  Bolan went to help the young racer. "I'll help you on one condition," he said.

  "What condition?"

  "When they get wherever they're going, you call me before you go after them."

  "Fuck that," Anderson said.

  "I mean it. You want to get these guys, right?"

  "Damned right I do."

  "Then we'll get them together. Alone you don't stand a chance."

  "How will I call you?" Bolan gave him his cell phone number. "Where will you be?" Anderson asked.

  "I'll be as close behind you as possible," Bolan said. "But first I have to take care of someone."

  Anderson checked over his bike to make sure it was road-worthy after the crash, grabbed his helmet from inside the Mitsubishi and tore out of the building through the walk-in door, which was still open.

  Mareebeth Maurstad heard the gunshots from the main building. Then she heard the explosion and now she could hear the sound of a raging fire. She'd been trying to break through her bonds for nearly two days with no luck, but she continued to work them. Then a large shadow appeared in the doorway. This is it, she thought. This is when I'm going to die.

  The large man approached her with a long knife in his hands and bent over her. He sliced the knife downward and she held her breath, waiting for it to sink into her flesh. But instead of cutting her, it cut the ropes holding her feet. Then it cut the ropes holding her hands.

  It was the tall soldier who had killed the man she thought was going to rape her.

  "Are you all right?" he asked.

  "I think so. What about my father?"

  "I think he's all right," the man said, "but he's been taken away with the men who had you kidnapped."

  "What about my mother?" The man remained silent. "Is she all right?"

  "She's dead," the man replied.

  The girl felt the wind rush from her lungs, as if she'd just been punched in the gut. The big man was
already talking on his cell phone, telling someone named Bear to get a helicopter here as soon as possible. While he spoke, she tried to run into the burning barn to see her mother, but the big man stopped her before she could get through.

  He hung up the phone and said, "You can't go in there. We have to get out of here before this whole place goes up in flames." He led the girl out of the building and they jogged along the road away from the buildings while the flames grew higher and higher behind them. After they'd gone a ways the man walked off the road and pulled some brush aside, revealing a motorcycle. He rolled it out on the road and turned on the ignition key. When he turned the key, the motorcycle's lights came on.

  The man looked up at the sky and the girl saw a helicopter flying in from over the hills to the east. It landed on the road in front of the motorcycle. The big soldier put his hand on the girl's shoulder and ushered her toward the helicopter. When he helped her climb inside, she marveled at the gentleness of his touch. She had witnessed these hands take a human life with more ease than most people display opening a jar of peanut butter, yet when they lifted her up into the helicopter they displayed a tenderness completely at odds with their rough texture.

  What the girl didn't know was that the act of killing can engender a respect for the sanctity of life. The Executioner put more effort into saving lives than taking them. When he had to kill, he only did so to protect innocents like her.

  "You'll save my daddy, right?" the girl asked.

  "I'll try my best," the soldier said. He wished he could be more positive, but he couldn't lie to her; her father was in terrible danger and there were no guarantees. Then the helicopter rose into the air and the big man and his motorcycle faded into the night.

  * * *

  After the helicopter left, Bolan stripped out of his fatigues and put on his blacksuit. He topped off his magazines and put his weapons into their respective holsters and sheaths, then put on his riding suit over his gear. He was just about to put on his helmet when the phone vibrated in his vest pocket.