Terror Ballot

by Don Pendleton

  “I will see to it you are allowed to leave the building unmolested. Understand that I cannot guarantee anything further beyond that. If you do not leave the country immediately, I cannot say what will happen to you in an official capacity.”

  “I get that,” Bolan said.

  “But I wish to say one thing more. Please understand that I did not report your actions to my superiors because I wanted you apprehended. I did so because I disagree with your methods and because our procedure dictates that I keep this organization informed of such matters. I will not maintain secrets from the DCRI. But as futile as I believe your effort with Roelle to be in terms of...politics, Agent Cooper...in terms of humanity, it was the right thing. I wish for you to know that.”

  “Thanks, Inspector. Do me a favor and call downstairs.”

  “Agent Cooper?” Bayard looked at him, confused.

  “So I can get my car back without a shoot-out,” Bolan explained.

  “Oh. Yes. I will see to it.”

  “Take care of yourself, Inspector. Perhaps we’ll speak again before I leave Paris.”

  “Go with God, Agent Cooper. I think you will need Him.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Paris Suburbs

  The car was a Mercedes, several years old, dented and careworn. The two men sitting in it were wearing civilian clothes, which by itself told Bolan nothing. But he had watched them for an hour as they sat, unmoving, watching the house and the street beyond Bolan’s vantage in the Paris suburb. They were chain-smoking cigarettes and dropping the butts out the open window of the vehicle. The pile on either side told Bolan that the car had been parked for hours, if not days. That meant the men sitting in it were probably taking shifts, and that made them sentries.

  He could not be certain of that, of course. The Mercedes sat some distance from the large home in this densely populated residential area. It was the spot Bolan himself would choose, if he were positioning lookouts before the safehouse. From the car to the house, the configuration of the street and the neighboring yards formed a natural bottleneck. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to approach the house without being seen.

  Bolan parked his rental vehicle on the street two car lengths away from the sentry sedan. The men in the vehicle did not expect so brazen a maneuver. They were focused on looking anywhere but at him when he walked up to the car, and so they did not notice the M16 barely concealed under his coat.

  They also did not notice him place the weapon on the ground next to the four-door vehicle before he simply whipped out his combat knife in his left hand, his Beretta 93R in his right, and smashed out the rear window behind the driver’s side.

  Safety glass pebbled the upholstery. Bolan wrenched open the door and sat in the backseat, placing the suppressed barrel of the Beretta against the neck of the driver. The blade of the knife he placed against cheek of the man on the passenger side. Both men froze, their hands inches away from what Bolan assumed were guns under their windbreakers.

  “I’m operating under the assumption that both of you are members of the group known as Suffering,” Bolan said in French. “Do either of you care to deny it?”

  The two men exchanged glances. Bolan looked down. On the floor beneath his combat boots, behind the driver’s and passenger’s seats, were a pair of folding-stock Kalashnikov-type rifles. The passenger began to move, slowly.

  “Don’t go for that gun,” Bolan said. “No matter how fast you think you are, you can’t make it. I’m guessing these automatic rifles aren’t what the Paris fashion set are carrying around these days. You couldn’t leave some black ski masks lying around to clinch it for anyone who happens to look in?”

  “We will kill you,” the driver said. “You and every other stinking foreigner. You don’t belong here.”

  “Well, that settles that question,” Bolan said. “You’re going to very carefully step out of the vehicle, and then I’m going to secure you in the trunk.”

  The passenger went for his handgun.

  Bolan shoved the knife into the side of the man’s neck, then thrust it forward. He did not have to look at the driver to know that he, too, was going for his gun. As the knife came through the passenger’s neck, the soldier triggered the silenced Beretta. The windshield of the car was suddenly blotted out in a crimson wash.

  Bolan paused to strip out the bolts from the AK-pattern rifles and unload the pistols. He tossed the bolts and magazines into a nearby gutter.

  There could be no doubt now that he was in the right place.

  He took up the M16 and clipped it once more to his sling. Wiping his knife on the shirt of the dead driver, he sheathed it, then holstered the Beretta. The assault rifle would be his primary weapon for the entry to the safehouse.

  It was not likely the yard would be mined, given that explosions would draw immediate attention should a stray dog or unaware jogger happen by. There might be passive sensors in place, however. Infrared beams or simply surveillance cameras would be enough. There was not that much territory to cover.

  There was a grim task to complete before he hit the safehouse, but one would facilitate the other.

  Bolan found the keys in the ignition. He popped the trunk and, one at a time, dumped the two dead men in it. There was a camouflage BDU jacket on the backseat of the car, which he used to wipe the windshield reasonably clear. It did not have to be spotless; he just needed to be able to see where he was going.

  He started the car, put it in gear and slammed his foot on the gas pedal.

  The Mercedes leaped forward. Bolan jammed on the brake, shifted into Reverse and sent the car speeding down the street, away from the safehouse. When he judged the distance sufficient, he tromped the brake pedal again, then shifted into low gear, put his left foot on the brake and put the gas pedal to the floor.

  The engine roared in protest. Bolan sent the car shooting down the street and across the lawn of the safehouse, cutting deep gouges in the grass, building speed as he hurtled toward the front of the building.

  He reached across his chest and put on his seat belt as he drove.

  Shoving the M16 out the window, he braced it against the driver’s side mirror, aiming it with his left hand. As the wall of the safehouse loomed, he saw the first orange-yellow fire-blossoms from the windows. They were muzzle-flashes, from the guns of the ES terrorists. The blood-smeared windshield cracked and spiderwebbed as bullets struck it. Bolan bent as far as he could below the dash, pressing the trigger of his M16, sending controlled bursts into the windows.

  The Mercedes struck the safehouse.

  The front of the car crumpled with the impact, driving the hood up and folding it in on itself, causing the engine to scream at high revolution as the drive train did its best to eat itself. Before the heavy sedan came to rest, it crushed the safehouse kitchen and pulled a man in camouflage fatigues—who had been seated at a table in that kitchen—under its wheels. A micro Uzi, lost from the ES gunman’s hand, struck the windshield. Bolan heard bones cracking before the man’s scream was cut off.

  The Executioner released the seat belt and stepped out of the car.

  The shooters came fast. They were wearing camouflage fatigues, the uniform of the ES, and they carried AK-47 assault rifles as well as other small arms and pistols. Bolan threw himself over the hood of the car, putting the engine block between himself and the rest of the kitchen, then fed a 40 mm grenade into the launcher slung under his assault rifle.

  He raised the weapon from behind the Mercedes just long enough to let fly with the HE round, which punched into the wall opposite the kitchen, before ducking back behind the engine block. The explosion sent the hurrying gunners airborne, spreading them around the dining room, scorching and blackening the kitchen as it blew the cupboards to splinters.

  Bolan waited long enough for the explosion’s aftermath to settle. T
hen he left the shelter of the much-abused Mercedes, moving in a combat crouch through the wreckage of the kitchen and into the slaughterhouse that was the dining room.

  Two men began to shout at him in French.

  They were hiding behind furniture in the living room, waving guns at him. Bolan ducked behind the corner of the entrance to that room and waited. Bullets tore the floor near his feet and chewed through the wall above his head. He crouched lower.

  It was called the “fog of war.” Bolan had heard the term many times, and it could mean different things...but among them was the confusion that sometimes led men to do foolish things when threats arose. In the stress, the adrenaline dump, the rush to do something, anything, they sometimes behaved in ways that, objectively, made no sense.

  One such irrational act was to use upholstered chairs as cover.

  There was cover, and there was concealment. The furniture in the living room, made of wood and springs and foam, would provide neither. Bolan let his M16 fall to the end of its sling, drew his pistols and snapped off their safeties.

  “Throw out your guns,” Bolan called in French, knowing that the order would not be heeded by the ES terrorists. “Throw them down and surrender.”

  The response was a blast of gunfire.

  Bolan threw himself to the floor in the doorway, rolling to avoid any shots that might come low, as a barrage of bullets ripped apart the facing wall of the dining room. From the floor, he pumped two rounds each from the Beretta and the Desert Eagle, aiming for the center of the two upholstered chairs behind which his enemies sheltered. When the nearly dead men fell to either side of those chairs, he fired once more into their skulls, making them completely dead men.

  The clatter of footsteps on stairs drew Bolan’s attention. A wooden door opposite his position was thrown open and a gunner appeared, apparently coming upstairs from the basement. The Executioner extended his Beretta 93R and fired a single round. The 9 mm slug drilled into the terrorist’s right eye.

  The body fell backward, toppling the next man on the stairs. Bolan rose to a combat crouch, fished a grenade from his war bag, armed it and tossed the bomb into the stairwell.

  The explosion was muffled; the grenade had bounced all the way to the bottom of the stairs before detonating, Bolan judged. He holstered his pistols and lifted his M16 again, stopping short of the stairway to expose just enough of his left eye for a quick look down. The steps were scorched and ripped to pieces near the bottom. The sublevel, which appeared to be a dug bunker and not a true basement, was dark. Bolan removed the modular combat light from his war bag and affixed it to the forward rail of his weapon. There he could trigger it with his support hand.

  It was necessary to jump the last few steps to the basement’s dirt floor. Bolan bent his knees to absorb the impact. His combat boots left heavy prints in the dirt.

  The sublevel was a workshop. Heavy wooden benches—rough-hewn from cargo pallets—held cartons, plastic bins and tools. The components on the benches were, to Bolan’s practiced eye, exactly what was required to make improvised explosive devices. He saw black powder, pipes and caps, fuses and a stack of cell phones, probably burners, to be used as detonators.

  Wireless bomb detonation had made great strides in the past few years, thanks to the widespread use of improvised explosive devices in battle zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. There was a time when the would-be terrorist had fewer options for causing his bombs to go off. He could use a timing device of some kind, which meant the bomb might go off when there were no high-value targets nearby. It was also impossible to abort a timed device, at least under common circumstances. Physical fuses were even more difficult to mess around with and easily circumvented.

  Wireless detonation was far more reliable, but the common problem in all bomb factories was prematurely blowing them up. Any number of cowardly home bomb technicians had blown themselves to hamburger while assembling explosive devices or testing detonators. That was the problem with radio detonation; it was too easy for an errant signal to blow the whole works sky-high.

  The bombers had turned to wireless phones as detonators for several years now. These presented their own issues, of course. Anyone with a cell-phone jammer, or authorities with access to the wireless grid, could shut it down, effectively creating a zone in which the bombers could not ply their trade. Something as innocent as a wrong number could trigger the bombs prematurely, and electromagnetic interference of multiple types presented problems.

  Bolan went to the table and examined the materials there. None of the bombs were in their finished state, but this was obviously one of the cells from which the ES was running its attack operations. The terrorist operations had been—according to the briefing files on his phone—a mixture of remote bombings and direct actions. Typically both were deployed.

  The ES would use a bomb to inflict casualties and incite a media response, then follow up with armed men to inflict more damage before they withdrew. Bolan’s assault on the bank had been the first effective counter, although the French authorities had attempted more than once to mount a meaningful counterterror operation. The death toll among their operatives had been among the reasons the French government had originally accepted the insertion of “Agent Cooper” in their midst.

  The withdrawal of French sanction for his mission complicated things considerably. He did not blame the French government, or the DCRI, or any of the other elements with whom Brognola had been playing diplomatic tug of war. These things happened. But it meant that Bolan was on his own and dodging more than the original complement of foes.

  This was nothing new to him.

  When he had finished his inspection of the bomb-making shop, he went to the last doorway, which was crafted from a table, something heavy with an ancient Formica surface. There was a rope pull, but no handle. He grabbed the rope and gave it a yank, reasoning that this was probably not a booby trap within the safehouse’s inner sanctum. Nothing happened when he tugged on the door.

  The hinges were exposed, an artifact of the crude construction of the barrier. Bolan backed up, palmed his Desert Eagle and drew a bead on the top hinge. He blew it apart on the first shot and used two more bullets on the hinges below it.

  His ears rang with the volume of the gunshots at close range. Another tug on the rope brought the heavy table-door falling to the dirt with a muffled thud.

  The bullets that burned past him seemed almost perfunctory. Bolan stepped to the side, snapped up his rifle and triggered several bursts into the chamber beyond. Dancing lights flickered more brightly as electronic equipment flared and buzzed. Bolan triggered another burst and yet another, before the yelling in French from the next room prompted him to stop.

  “Throw your gun out,” Bolan called in French. “I’m going to put a light on you. If that light reveals any other weaponry, or you make any sudden moves, the assault rifle attached to that light is going to end your life.” He opened the M203 and inserted a buckshot round. “Specifically the weapon has a 40 mm grenade launcher. The grenade inside will blow you apart.”

  “Don’t shoot. Here is my weapon.” Bolan heard the thud of a gun as a weapon hit the floor.

  The soldier entered the room with the M16 ready. In the circle of illumination cast by his combat light, a man in camouflage fatigues cowered behind a desk. On that desk were multiple monitors, some dark, some still operable. These were surveillance screens. The images that Bolan could see depicted the house above and the yard beyond. The image of the kitchen area showed the Mercedes among the debris.

  “You’re ES.” It was not a question.

  “We are freeing France from evil,” the terrorist spit. “We are burning out an infection that—”

  “Spare me the party line,” Bolan said. “You’re going to tell me everything you know.”

  “You are the police?” the terrorist demanded.

  �
�No,” Bolan said. “But I’m on their side. You’re going to tell me everything you know about the ES and its plans in Paris. And you’re going to look at a list of addresses here in the city and surrounding neighborhoods. You’re going to tell me where I can find more of your friends.”

  The terrorist looked at the enormous muzzle of the M203. “You cannot make me talk.”

  “This isn’t going to go like you think it will,” Bolan warned.

  The terrorist’s arm snaked up. In his hand was what Bolan thought, at first glance, was a knife. But as the man tried to aim the blade like a gun, Bolan realized he was looking at an ballistic knife, a spring-loaded weapon that could hurl its razor-sharp blade hard enough to pierce body armor.

  He pulled the trigger on the M16, maintaining a sustained burst.

  “I warned you,” Bolan said a heartbeat later. But there was no one alive to hear him.

  The Executioner turned and left the surveillance room.

  Vaulting the hole at the bottom of the stairs, he ascended to the main floor, checking the ground level and then finding the stairs leading to the next story. As he climbed, he listened for sirens. It was curious that there were none yet, especially in this quiet suburban environment. Was it possible that the local authorities had been plied with bribes, as the responders in the ethnic enclave had been? He supposed so. But if that was the case it pointed to a level of corruption even worse than his conversations with Bayard had revealed.

  The combat light on his M16 led the way. Two silvery trip wires on the stairs caught the light, and Bolan stopped to examine each one. They were connected to electronic devices that were not bombs, at least as far as Bolan could tell. He guessed they were early-warning tools intended to alert those upstairs that they were about to have visitors.

  Bolan stepped over the wires, mindful of pressure plates in the floor. He had walked into more than one elaborately booby-trapped enemy lair in his time on the battlefield. If he had learned anything from this, it was that human malevolence and human ingenuity knew no limits. If he could think of it, someone else could think of it, and find a way to make it reality.