Ground Zero

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan, for his part, had chosen the Uzi that he had been using more of late. Its lightweight and faster draw contrasted well with the heaviness of the pistol he favored, the Desert Eagle Mark XIX. He had always liked the .44 Magnum version, but he had gone with the .357 for the mission. Although he had no real desire to use the weapon that evening, its efficiency would be useful in an emergency. Last, he’d chosen a BXP10, like his comrade. The MAC-10 knockoff was a solid, reliable weapon.

  Their duffel bags also contained monocular night-vision headsets with infrared and heat functions, wireless security cams and fiber-optic cameras with small monitor attachments that could prove vital. They carried small quantities of Semtex with detonators, and CS and flash-bang grenades, as well as nose plugs. Finally, and perhaps the weapon that they might need most on this stage of the mission, they both carried Benchmade Stryker automatic knives with four-inch blades.

  With some regret they placed the ordnance left for them to one side and went about the task of readying their own weapons for the night’s mission. Once that was done, it was time to study the intel that had been left for them on the tablet.

  Bolan had to give it to the men who had been charged with gathering the data. They were thorough. There were schematics of all telecoms and electrical cabling for the block on which the target’s house was situated. The building itself was a four-story apartment building similar to the one in which they were holed up. Its schematics and blueprints had been laid down for them, showing all the possible points of ingress and egress, as well as the security system that had been installed. It was much the same as the building they were in.

  These were buildings for the business and political classes, and as such they were designed to keep people of money and influence safe from attack or robbery. They were not impossible to crack, but without the full picture it would be easy to trigger one of the many alarms and bring police or military down on Bolan and Yuri.

  Finally, there was footage shot from phones and also—somehow—lifted from the internal CCTV, showing their target as he went about his business. Timed, and with a written report filed alongside, it showed any regular routines the man had in his personal and professional life, allowing Bolan and Yuri to build a picture of each day of the week. Being that this was a Tuesday, they homed in on the target’s regular routine for such a day, along with the forecast for any changes brought about by government business that had been plotted for a week ahead. Unless he had something in his personal life occurring that would cause a major change, they had as clear a picture as was possible of his activities for the day, both as they studied the intel and in the hours ahead, when they expected to achieve their mission.

  While they studied, they ate the fruit and spiced vegetables that had been left for them, along with tea and yogurt, a light meal high in sugar.

  Eventually they completed their self-briefing. Outside, night had descended. It was time to head out.

  * * *

  “THIS IS IT,” Bolan said softly. “You take the front and draw the security. I’ll take the garage entrance and make our man.”

  “Obviously, I get all the glamorous jobs,” Yuri said flatly. “Don’t think I will forget this. How long do you need?”

  “Fifteen minutes maximum. If I can’t finalize the mission by then, we’ll have to withdraw and take a different approach. But that’s not going to happen.”

  Yuri’s face cracked in a smile. “I don’t suppose it is. You go now.”

  Bolan left the Russian on the street corner and made his way to the garage entrance at the rear of the building. The streets were devoid of people at this time of night, especially as the last call to prayers had rung out from the muezzin and the men had returned home to their meals and families.

  All except for Lotfy Mussivand. The government official lived alone, and Bolan and Yuri had watched him enter the building, exchange words with the concierge and security and then take the elevator to his apartment. From the intel they had received, they knew that the man was a serious individual who was dedicated both to his religion and to the furtherance of his regime’s influence. The word fanatic sprang to mind. Apart from prayer and religious meetings, Mussivand had little time for any kind of social activity and was not married. He was in his mid-thirties, and Bolan was surprised that this had not caused comment or affected his career. But it was good this night.

  Dressed traditionally in clothing that had been left for them and that covered their blacksuits, both men had been able to pass for Iranians with just a little makeup to alter their complexions and beards added to their clean-shaved faces. They had waited until the mosques had discharged the devout onto the street before leaving their safe-house apartment by the back way, blending in easily with the sudden crowds. Their ordnance fitted easily onto the web harnesses over their blacksuits, with the loose-fitting clothing overtop. As long as they were not stopped for any reason, they were sure to reach their destination with ease.

  The streets were heavily policed, but there was no indication that was anything other than usual, and they were able to walk from the safe house to their target without challenge. The time it took enabled the streets to clear and the sun to fall, leaving them with the space and cover they required.

  Disguised as he was, Bolan had no worries about the cameras picking him up. The only danger they presented was if the concierge and security came to investigate. Hopefully, Yuri would do his job.

  The entrance to the garage was by a key-operated electric eye. Bolan did not have the necessary key. He had to find a way of getting in that was quick but also quiet enough so as not to attract attention. Blasting the mechanism with a small lump of Semtex would have been his first choice, but it was not an option.

  From the blacksuit he slipped out a small tool kit that contained a socket spanner. The plate over the electronics was secured by four bolts that were almost flush. If he was lucky, the socket would have just enough purchase. Third time and the socket caught, loosening the first bolt. The second and third were easier, with the fourth proving to be as awkward as the first. Bolan withdrew the plate and shorted the electric circuit within. The lock clicked, and he was able to pull the gate open just enough to enter, but not before he had replaced the plate and secured the bolts just enough to keep it in place, lest any passerby notice the damage.

  Once he was in and the gate was closed at his back, he hurried across the underground garage until he reached the elevator, hoping that it was not also key operated, as sometimes happened in such buildings. There had been no mention of it in the schematics, but it was the kind of tiny detail often overlooked.

  After checking his watch to see that opening the gate had cost valuable minutes, Bolan cursed to see that the garage-level elevator entrance had no call button and was key operated. The same would no doubt be true for the emergency stairwell. He was about to check that out when fortune favored him: he heard the elevator car rattle down the shaft toward the garage level. He secreted himself behind a concrete support pillar, bringing the knife to hand and hoping that whoever was descending was alone. Right now, the last thing he needed was a fight that would use up more valuable moments.

  The doors opened, and from his vantage point he could see that a lone man exited the car, his attention focused on his phone as he fumbled for his keys. Bolan contemplated for a moment whether he should hit the man with the hilt of the knife and render him unconscious, or whether he could actually risk leaving him to go about his business—after all, it was not his fight.

  The broken gate cinched it. The man would be sure to raise the alarm. Bolan watched the door of the elevator start to close and cursed as he was forced to step in the opposite direction. Two strides and he stood at the man’s shoulder. One blow and the man crumpled without even realizing he had been hit, his phone and keys clattering to the floor.

  The elevator door closed, and the soldier snatched
up the fallen key in order to trigger the door before the cage could ascend again. He had hit the man hard enough to keep him out for a while. And the soldier hoped he’d be gone by the time he came to.

  * * *

  YURI APPROACHED THE front of the building as Bolan vanished around the corner. His job, as he saw it, was simple. He had to distract the men inside from the security cameras and if necessary create a diversion. His hand reached into the pocket of his robe and through the hole he had cut so that he could access directly into his blacksuit. He clutched the SIG Sauer P229, ready to draw it if necessary. A single-shot weapon would make less noise, but it did leave him more open to attack than a swift burst with the BXP10.

  He entered the building and saw three men gathered in the lobby. One was the concierge; the other two had the look of security men. To have two security men in a building was unusual, and it bespoke of the importance in which Mussivand was held. All three eyed him with suspicion as he entered, not recognizing him as either tenant or regular visitor.

  He made a supplicatory gesture and greeted them traditionally. They returned the greeting in a hesitant manner. Yuri continued, “My friends, I am wondering if perhaps you can be of assistance to me. I am searching for this address, and I have become lost.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and placed it on the surface of the reception desk. The concierge leaned forward to take a look at the address the Russian had scrawled at random from the street map on the tablet. It was two blocks away, far enough to not find with ease, yet not far enough to render his presence here suspicious.

  “You have taken a wrong turn, my friend,” the concierge told him. “Where did you start from?”

  Yuri named the street in which the safe house was located. The words were out before he could bite his tongue, and he cursed his stupidity. He had not meant to incriminate those who had aided them. There was another reason, too, one that the concierge seized on as he looked oddly at Yuri.

  “But if you came from that area, then how could you have passed this place and arrived here without noticing that you had done so?”

  Yuri did not immediately answer. He was aware of the CCTV monitors that were behind the concierge’s desk, where he could see Cooper leaving the elevator on the fourth floor. He was also aware that the suspicion of the man in front of him had alerted the security guards, one of whom stepped a little close, while the other lined himself up between the Russian and the door to the street. The guard who had come closer was now peering over the desk at the piece of paper, his line of sight uncomfortably close to the CCTV monitors.

  “How can you not know this?” he repeated, looking Yuri square in the eye with a penetrating gaze that seemed to search for any sign of untruth.

  “I am not from Tehran,” Yuri replied calmly. “I have come from Rasht and am not familiar with this city.” It should have fooled any lie detector, as it was nothing less than the truth, if a little on the economical side. He should not have put himself—or Cooper—in that position. He felt that he had spent too long running errands for Schevchenko and was out of practice. That he would attend to if they got home in one piece.

  The guard studied him. He kept his face as immobile as only a Russian ex-soldier could. His eyes locked with the guard. He could read in the man’s face that he believed him. He truly believed that he had ridden the wave...until the other guard moved forward from the door.

  “Hey, who is that?” Yuri heard the guard behind him move forward, could almost feel him as he leaned over to look at the CCTV monitors.

  Ah, well, he figured, it had been a nice idea to try to keep this peaceful and quiet, to avoid fuss. A nice idea, but one that hadn’t come through in the end. As the guard and the concierge had their attention diverted from him for a moment, he stepped back so that he was near the door, pulling his hand from the folds of his robe and leveling the SIG Sauer.

  For a moment the two guards and the concierge were frozen, caught between the CCTV monitor and the sudden move in front of them. The guards were armed with Kalashnikovs that were shouldered, and there was no chance for them to unsling them before Yuri snapped off three shots, moving his arm only slightly to reposition and ride the kick. The three men had inadvertently clustered so closely together that they had made his task simple.

  Chest shots for all three dispatched them with no time wasted. He glanced out the front of the building. It didn’t seem as though the noise had attracted undue attention, and he thanked fortune for the thick plate glass of the lobby. Moving quickly, he dragged the man in front of the reception desk around so that he could be piled with the other two corpses. They could not be seen from the elevator or the street, but it would not be long before they would be found. Yuri looked at his watch, noting that Cooper still had five minutes to clean and clear.

  Yuri strode across the lobby and locked the glass doors, one eye on the elevator. Five minutes to stand guard and stop anyone or anything that crossed his path, preferably without any more commotion than had already been stirred.

  It was not the best job he’d ever had.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Bolan had made his way from the elevator and into the corridor of the fourth floor without interruption. Tehran was a busy city, and this would be an equally busy building as it housed families and single men of some wealth and importance. However, timing was everything, and to enter at this moment, when men had just returned from the mosque or had gone immediately about their business, meant that there was the kind of lull that happened three or four times a day. It was a moment of slackness in the day’s activity that gave enough of a window to enter without being observed.

  Bolan scoped out the CCTV security cameras as he entered the corridor. They would be picking him up, but he hoped that his companion was fulfilling his own task and that this would not matter. As he approached the door to the apartment where Mussivand was resident, it struck him that he had come halfway around the world to carry out the same kind of mission that he had been charged with in D.C. There was an odd symmetry to the way in which this part of the mission had unfolded, and it was not a symmetry that he found pleasing. He was a soldier by trade, not an assassin, which is how circumstance had cast him this time around.

  At least it would not—could not—be like this when they made their way to Parchin.

  This was assuming, of course, that they got that far.

  He stood outside the door to Mussivand’s apartment. He would have expected a man of such importance to have a stronger bodyguard presence than intel had shown. It was a measure of how secure this regime felt in its omnipotence that guards on the building were considered enough.

  The soldier slipped a skeleton key from one of the slit pockets of his blacksuit and stuck it in the door lock. With a bit of a judicious jiggling back and forth, he felt the lock click softly and yield.

  With a gentleness that belied his intentions, Bolan edged the door open wide enough to allow him to slip into the apartment. It had been difficult to keep the sound of his entry silent in the quiet of the block, but apart from a few scrabbling sounds of metal on metal and the click that signified entry, he had been able to keep it to a minimum.

  Inside, the ambient light from the street blended with the soft light from candles, which bathed the apartment in a kind of twilight glow. Bolan did not shut the door completely. A quick exit and the unnecessary noise of the lock closing were uppermost in his mind.

  He felt under his robes for the sheathed Stryker knife. It was best to have it in hand before proceeding any further; especially as he could feel his nerve endings tingle, years of experience feeding a sense that something was not right.

  Could someone have betrayed them? Was he expected?

  The carpet beneath his boots was thin, the flooring beneath of a hard wood. It was difficult to make any kind of footfall without some noise, but he was as expert as anyone in making
the impossible possible. He moved down the hallway of the building, familiar with the layout from the schematics that had been on the tablet in the safe house.

  The main living area was dead ahead; bedroom second left, bathroom first left. On the right was a second bedroom that was used as a study. The kitchen led off the main living area. Three storage closets were located within the apartment, with the doors to them in one bedroom, the main living area and the kitchen.

  The light was flickering despite the stillness of the air-conditioned atmosphere. Something was making the candles flicker: movement of some kind? Pools of shadow and the scent of sandalwood were his overriding impressions. If there was someone moving within the apartment, he was damned quiet. Too quiet. It was not the movement of someone who was going about his nightly activities with the lack of awareness he would have expected. This was the movement of someone who knew he was not alone.

  The doors to the first bedroom and the bathroom were closed. The flickering of the shadows in the hall originated from either the study or the main room. Bolan proceeded with caution. He flattened himself to the wall so that his own shadow did not merge with those already cast.

  As he neared the door to the study, he could hear breathing. Faint, regular and controlled: the breathing of a soldier in wait.

  “Come in. I know you are out there.”

  Bolan stayed where he was. It was not often that your prey invited you in, and if they did they sure were prepared.

  “Do not waste my time. I know you are there. I do not know who you are, but then I do not care. You should not be here—that is all I need to know.”