Terror Ballot

by Don Pendleton

  There were no hostages secured near the front of the bank.

  “Fire!” came the command in French, screamed by someone behind the counter. A hail of 7.62 mm gunfire chipped away at the alcove, raising a cloud of plaster dust and pelting Bolan with debris.

  Bolan wore a green canvas war bag under his leather jacket. He holstered his Beretta, then plucked a pair of M61 fragmentation grenades from the bag. Each bomb had an effective killing radius of five yards, with casualties virtually assured within fifteen yards. Some fragments might disperse as far away, Bolan knew, as two hundred yards or more.

  He armed the bombs, tossed them and ducked back into cover. Almost casually the soldier put his middle fingers over his ear canals.

  The twin explosions ripped through the counter, driving fragments of it and other shrapnel from the fragmentation grenades through the bodies of the men sheltered there. The screams of agony sounded inhuman.

  The Executioner was up and moving in a crouch, tracking right and left for targets. To the rear of the counter area was an arched and fluted doorway, as overbuilt as everything else in the building. Bolan knew that archway was a choke point and that more ES forces would be staged behind it.

  Aaron Kurtzman had transmitted the layout of the bank directly to Bolan’s secure smartphone. If Bolan were in charge of holding hostages in the bank, he would have done just what the ES had done—establish a perimeter of shooters in the main foyer of the bank while guarding the hostages deeper within the building. That way they were secure from any grandstand plays—such as driving an armored vehicle through the front—the purpose of which was to deploy a tactical team.

  He imagined the French authorities were still debating what to do, if they weren’t spending their time screaming for official intervention through government and international channels. Bolan did not envy Brognola his job.

  Bolan took another grenade from his war bag. He did not pull the pin. Instead he simply rolled the lethal egg across the marble floor through the archway. It thunked heavily before skittering through the opening.

  The ploy worked perfectly. Bolan would no more throw a grenade in the vicinity of hostages than he would shoot them himself, but the terrorists couldn’t know that. When the first ES gunman broke from cover to scramble for what he thought was a live grenade—no doubt thinking to throw it back the way it had come—Bolan pumped two rounds from his Beretta through the shooter’s neck.

  The second man was cagier. He tried to check the arch by exposing only one eye and the barrel of his gun. That was all the target Bolan needed. A single shot blew away the back of the terrorist’s skull after tunneling through the eye socket.

  The soldier pushed through the archway low and fast. The corridor beyond led to offices and the bank’s safe-deposit box area. At the end of the corridor, the hallway made a hard right turn, which led to the vault area. If he had to guess, Bolan would put the hostages in the vault, guarded by reserves.

  He shifted left as gunfire tore up the wall behind him. They were shooting from within at two levels, high and low. That would be a man standing and another crouching, from the same angle. They were shooting blind, or they would have corrected their fire by now. Bolan knelt and scooped up the grenade he had rolled in earlier, careful to watch the corridor beyond him.

  Bolan waited for the lull in the shooting that he knew had to come. Then he leaned forward just enough to assess the deposit box room. There were two gunmen inside, each wearing military surplus camouflage fatigues and black ski masks. This was the standard uniform of the ES.

  No hostages.

  The Executioner pulled the pin on the grenade, let the spoon fly free and counted. Then he lobbed the grenade through the doorway.

  “Merde!” one of the gunmen shouted, before the frag grenade blew both men to hell.

  Bolan dropped the 20-round box magazine from his Beretta. It clattered to the floor, but not before he was already slamming a fresh magazine into the butt of the gun. He let the weapon lead him down the corridor.

  The door at the end of the corridor, which fronted an anteroom to the vault, was closed. Bolan planted the sole of his combat boot against it and smashed it open. The gilded wood splintered under Bolan’s assault. The flimsy frame was not meant to provide a significant barrier; it was for decoration only, shielding the vault room with its heavy safe from eyes that might be offended by its functional form.

  He dropped to one knee as soon as he cleared the opening.

  One of the skills Bolan had developed through years of combat was the ability to observe the threats before him and burn a flash picture of the scene in his mind. It was much like a popular memory game played by children and adults: given only a moment to record the details, the player had to act on his or her memories in choosing sectors of the game board.

  Bolan, on seeing the tableau spread in front of the vault, instantly memorized the positions of each of the hostages in the room. He noted one discrepancy while fixing the relative locations of the ski-masked shooters in the room. Two of them held human shields as targets, their arms wrapped around the necks of a man and a woman, respectively.

  Bolan dealt with those first. The gunmen had left large portions of their heads exposed behind their shields. The Executioner snapped a 9 mm bullet into the eyeball of one and the forehead of the other. He was still moving, still shooting, when return fire erupted, but as he pushed off laterally and fell to his side, he was already extending the Beretta and tracking to the right.

  The sound of the suppressed Beretta was like the muted clapping of hands. The echoes of the Kalashnikovs were still ringing in Bolan’s ears when the last of the terrorists collapsed. That left only the anomaly.

  The ES gunmen were smart; Bolan could give them that, despite their tactical mistakes. One of the shooters had removed his mask and the camouflage jacket of his fatigues. He was sitting behind the other hostages with a borrowed suit jacket on his lap to cover his camouflage pants.

  But Bolan had seen the man’s combat boots and noted his disheveled, sweat-plastered hair. Before the holdout shooter could bring up the pistol in his hand, Bolan sat him back down with a 9 mm round to the chin. The bullet dug a furrow through the man’s jaw and continued through, exiting the base of his skull.

  One of the female hostages started to scream.

  Mack Bolan couldn’t blame her. Things were going to get a lot bloodier before they got better.

  He was only getting started.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The street gangs of Paris had a long history. Bolan considered his briefing with Brognola as he observed the activities on the street. He was trying to get the lay of the land around the first of the ES safehouses on his priority list. The neighborhood in which he found himself mirrored decaying neighborhoods the world over. He could practically smell the unemployment, the predation, the corruption, the social dynamics that spilled across the pavement and radiated from the doorways of the shops and flats he passed.

  It was no coincidence that the ES would choose to place its safehouse network in the midst of the worst areas of Paris. The no-go areas—all but forbidden to police intervention—were well-known to the international media. Certain ethnic enclaves were firmly in control of the various immigrant groups that had flooded France in the past several years. The street gangs were an outgrowth, an extension of these, as many and varied as those who made up their ranks.

  Bolan had read up on the factions. The Blousons Noirs, or “Black Jackets” of the 1950s and 1960s, had been ersatz greasers, an imitation of the motorcycle youth culture of the United States at the time. These biker gangs had long ago been supplanted by much more vicious, much more businesslike gangs. Their goals were power, money and gratification, not always in that order.

  Zulu gangs, composed of Black Africans and their allies, were among the fiercest. Posses of Antilleans and
Africans had started to take over the streets in the 1990s. They were not well organized, but street brawls among opposing gangs had become a fixture of life in Paris’s worst sectors in the ensuing decades.

  Into this mix had been added the neo-Nazi skinhead gangs, as well as other violent factions and pressure groups. Every faction that rejected the status quo and the “establishment,” every antisocial mob of violent would-be predators, had a gang to back them up. The lawlessness, and the culture of “don’t get involved” that this would breed, would appeal to the ES, allowing them to function with relatively little interference.

  It also made the prospect of going in and rooting out the entrenched ES gunners that much more intimidating to the local authorities. It would take a force the size of an army to go into a neighborhood like this and challenge the ES on its own turf, where the citizens would look the other way.

  France simply did not have those types of resources available, not with its government suffering the financial woes occurring in every nation during a difficult global economy, and not with its available law enforcement already dealing with the often pressure-cooker scenarios at the neighborhood level. These issues had spread from the cities proper, including Paris, to the outskirts or suburbs.

  The riots that had ripped through Paris and then spread across the nation in 2005 were a prime example. Gangs consisting mostly of North African youths had created a state of emergency for months, burning cars and public buildings as the violence spread to low-income-housing projects across France. Almost three thousand people were arrested, and nine thousand cars burned. Nearly 130 police and firefighters were injured or wounded during the unrest.

  The problems weren’t confined to Paris, Bolan knew. In Marseille in southern France, drug-running gangs had become so great a problem that politicians were calling for military intervention. Gunmen equipped with automatic weapons were regularly dueling in the streets, taking lives from among their opposing numbers and from the ranks of innocent bystanders.

  Poverty and ethnic discrimination had created a thriving black market in France, which operated hand-in-glove with the gangs and their criminal activities. Drugs flowed freely. The most popular of these were the staples: heroin, cocaine, ecstasy. There was plenty of marijuana to be had, as well, although in Bolan’s experience, its traffic was rarely as violent as that for coke and heroin.

  The address of the safehouse put it on the third floor of a squalid flat wedged into a block of crumbling concrete buildings, most likely another public housing project. The streets were narrow and cluttered with cars that appeared to be barely mobile. Two were burned-out shells that would never drive again—playground equipment now to the street children climbing over the blackened frames. Bolan brought his rental car to a stop, leaned out the driver’s window and beckoned to a group of teenagers.

  “Does anyone want to make some money?” he asked in French.

  One of the youths stepped forward. “What for?” the kid asked.

  Bolan waved a pair of twenty-euro notes in front of the youth’s face, then took one back and tucked it in the pocket of his jacket. “One now,” he said. “One if I come back and my car is still here. With all its parts still attached.”

  “Yes. We will watch it.”

  Bolan nodded. He stepped out of the vehicle and the teens immediately made themselves at home, sitting on the hood and climbing over the roof. He waved one of them away from the trunk and popped it, removing his M16 with its attached grenade launcher. He expected that to raise some comment, perhaps even alarm, but the teenagers simply took it in and looked away.

  The street people were more inured to the constant violence here than even Bolan would have guessed. He filed that for future reference and pulled the weapon’s single-point sling over his body.

  He brought up the rifle, tugged on the magazine and slammed the plunger back with the side of his hand. The Farm’s armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, had fitted the charging handle with an extended L-shaped bolt that mimicked the bolt on a Ruger or Kalashnikov rifle.

  That made it possible to operate comfortably with one hand, compared to using two fingers to claw it back. Kissinger had also fitted a smooth ergonomic pistol grip to the weapon, which was a nice touch. It reduced fatigue over long periods of carrying and operating the weapon.

  The soldier made his way to the tiny alley between the nearest buildings. The flat he wanted was the one on the left. It was a gray graffiti-covered structure that reminded him of a cinder block on one end. Public housing, most likely, or something that had started that way. It did not take long for a decent neighborhood to turn into a jungle, for predators and crime to claim or reclaim the land on which the buildings stood. Turf was everything in environments like these.

  Bolan stopped at the end of the alley, just short of the corner of the building. The block of flats backed against another building very similar to it, creating a canyon between the two through which the residents had strung clotheslines. The pavement between the buildings was littered with debris and stinking piles of garbage. There were dark streaks beneath the windows on the upper floors. The tenants were dumping their trash out the windows.

  The smells of refuse and urine were overpowering. Bolan flattened himself against the wall inside the alley and crept as close as he dared to the corner. Then he took a small dental-type mirror from inside his jacket and poked the round lens past the wall.

  It was as he had suspected. A metal landing resembling a fire escape was visible on the rear of the building, rickety iron steps leading up to it. Sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette and balancing a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun in his lap, was a young man in a black leather jacket.

  The watch cap on his head could easily have been a black ski mask rolled up, but that didn’t matter. Whether an ES terrorist or a gang member, it was a good bet he wasn’t merely a neighborhood punk out for a quick drag. Not with the shotgun evident for everybody to see.

  There was no point in waiting. Bolan walked out from cover, his right hand on his M16, his left hand up. He spoke in English. “Hey. Is this where I buy drugs?”

  The sentry spit out his cigarette, leaped to his feet and pointed his shotgun. Bolan ducked back behind cover. The shotgun boomed, coating the soldier in concrete dust as the shot ripped fragments from the corner of the building.

  “Because I heard,” Bolan said calmly, cupping his free hand beside his mouth, “that this was where you buy drugs—”

  The second shotgun blast struck six inches below the first. Bolan immediately whipped around the corner and charged the shooter, who was struggling to break open his now empty weapon.

  Bolan smacked him in the face with the butt of the M16. The shotgunner grunted and went down, blood spurting from his nose.

  The sentry had time to look up accusingly at Bolan before the soldier stomped him in the face with one combat boot. The impact of boot to head and thereafter head to pavement was enough to put him out cold but not to kill him. Under other circumstances Bolan would have taken the time to search him and secure his wrists with a pair of zip-tie cuffs, but the shotgun blasts would have already warned anyone inside the upstairs flat. Bolan could not afford to put himself in so vulnerable a position. Instead, he hurried up the stairs.

  No sooner had he pressed himself against the wall by the door to the upper flat than automatic gunfire punched through the rotting wood. Well, that settled that. Anyone willing to draw down on the door with a full-auto weapon was neither law enforcement nor law-abiding citizen.

  Stony Man had pegged this location as an ES safehouse, but if Bolan were instead taking down a cell of heavily armed criminals unrelated to the terrorists, he would lose no sleep over it. He risked rapping on the door with the back of his hand and was rewarded by another spray of fire. A fist-sized hole grew in the flimsy door.

  Bolan took a canister grenade from his war
bag, pulled the pin and popped the bomb in through the hole.

  The gas grenade blew, filling the flat with noxious fumes—fast acting, fast evaporating. The gunman inside fired his weapon empty, leaving a random pattern of exit holes in what little was left of the door. Bolan took the opportunity to take a deep breath, lower his shoulder and splinter the remains of the barrier. He plunged through the entryway and into the flat’s living area.

  Inside—amid the swirling cloud of gas—he nearly fell on top of the gunman, who wore camouflage pants and boots. The man, maybe thirty, was shirtless and struggling with a chopped-down Krinkov-style AK. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, generated by the gas.

  Bolan’s own eyes were watering, but the gas was already dissipating through the open doorway. The stuff was like watered-down CS, a lightweight formula Cowboy Kissinger had recommended for dealing with crowd control...and for distractions like this one.

  The two of them were not alone. Doors led from the living area to what seemed to be a bathroom and— visible through a hanging bead curtain—a squalid bedroom. The kitchenette area was open to the living room, delineated by a waist-high half wall of cracked drywall and flaking paint. In the kitchen area, another gunman was raising a Kalashnikov rifle, as he cursed in French.

  The Executioner snapped up his M16 to his shoulder and triggered a single shot that punched through the gunman’s right cheek. The exit wound sprayed crimson.

  Bolan swiveled as the first gunner, the one with the Krinkov, had managed to slam a fresh magazine into his weapon. There was no need to fire another shot; the shooter was well within kicking range. Bolan rammed the sole of his combat boot into the man’s face. The blow snapped the man’s head back. His skull cracked loudly on the wooden floor.

  The soldier caught movement in his peripheral vision and threw himself to the floor, pushing the M16 before him. The target he was searching for was not long in coming.

  The shooter in the bedroom was a man covered in tattoos, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. While Bolan would never sympathize with terrorists and murderers, he did feel a pang of mild empathy. Nobody liked being caught unaware in the middle of a nap.