Blood Vortex

by Don Pendleton

  It would not sit well with him, leaving her, but he was long past babysitting anyone with the ability to take care of herself.

  Suite 249, West Wing

  Captain Abolhassan Bizhani and Lieutenant Maziyar Rasouli of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps huddled in their suite with two invited guests from 251, lights doused except for one they’d left on in the bathroom, providing faint illumination.

  Their companions were Parvena Pahalgami and Braj Haksar, representatives of Hizbul Mujahideen. The “Party of Holy Warriors” had been formed in connivance with Pakistani’s ISI to agitate for severance of Jammu and Kashmir from Indian rule, merging it with Pakistan while fighting for establishment of an Islamic caliphate to rule the world at large.

  Bizhani and Rasouli were unique among the delegates invited to Las Palmas, as the only members of a recognized, official military unit. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was formed in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to safeguard the country’s Islamic system against foreign interference and coups by the military.

  They were Iran’s thought police, bolstered by the paramilitary Basij militia—90,000 active personnel. Its motto was “Prepare against them whatever you are able of power,” and to that end, the IRGC aided terrorist groups including Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command, and the Taliban. That support had earned IRGC designation as an international terrorist group by Washington in April 2019. Its backing was deemed essential for creation of a worldwide terror network combating Western imperialism.

  But now, the whole grand plan had gone to hell.

  “We plan to leave as soon as possible,” Captain Bizhani told his visitors, “and hope you may come with us to improve our chances of escaping from this trap.”

  “You think the Venezuelan president planned this from the start?” Braj Haksar asked.

  “That is a matter for discussion at a later time,” Bizhani answered. “For the moment, it seems urgent that we get away from here and find a means to exit Venezuela.”

  “You have diplomatic passports, I believe,” Parvena Pahalgami noted.

  “True. And if you were identified as members of our party,” Maziyar Rasouli said, “immunity would thus extend to you.”

  “Unless the border guards fly in the face of law and precedent,” Haksar replied.

  Bizhani nearly laughed at that, since all of them had traveled under false identities on an illegal errand, but observance of the diplomatic niceties was a convenience in this instance.

  “First,” Bizhani said, “we should consider exit strategy and the best way to stay alive before we have to think about a border crossing, yes?”

  The four men had one gun apiece, together with a handful of spare magazines. Three of the weapons were pistols—two Glocks and one Browning—while Bizhani’s rank had gotten him a Micro Uzi, barely larger than a sidearm at eleven inches with its stock folded, but equal to its parent SMG in caliber—9 mm Parabellum—and in cyclic rate of fire.

  All they needed now, if they could reach the nearest parking lot, was wheels.

  “When would we leave?” Haksar asked.

  At that same moment, gunfire echoed from another wing of the resort, spiking the captain’s sense of urgency.

  “There’s no time better than the present,” Bizhani replied.

  West Wing

  Geller followed Cooper, keeping to the shadows as they searched for targets through the byways of Las Palmas. Sputtering of gunfire in the middle distance told her that Cooper’s plan was paying off to some extent, although she couldn’t tell whether delegates to the terrorist summit were battling each other, or nervous SEBIN guards were simply shooting at phantoms.

  Either way, the racket helped distract their enemies and furthered their intent of breaking up the conference.

  In fact, for all intents and purposes, she could have said their job was done—but Geller was not ready to retreat while any living terrorists remained.

  She was about to ask Cooper if he shared that view, when he stopped short in front of her, a clenched fist raised, the universal military signal for an enemy’s approach.

  Geller waited, watching and listening, her finger on the M4A1’s trigger, until she heard muffled voices in the night. A moment later, she saw four men, two in turbans, all bearded, proceeding two abreast toward the same northwest parking lot where she had flattened tires on every vehicle. She did not need the gift of second sight to know where they were headed or that their intent was to flee the resort in any car they could get started.

  Too late.

  Even if the four of them were seasoned auto thieves—adept at jump-starting a ride without the keys, bypassing various security precautions—in a few more moments they would realize that no remaining mode of transportation could be driven off the property.

  And what would they do then?

  With any luck at all, Geller was hoping they might die.

  And she would offer all the help she could.

  Cooper dropped his fist and whispered back to her, “Let’s go.”

  Ready for anything, Adira Geller followed him along the pathway taken by their enemies.

  Suite 411, South Wing

  “So, to be clear, we’re agreed then? It’s the only way?” Marios Lekka asked his three companions.

  All nodded, Georgios Xenakis, Xabier Biscailuz and Sabino Urkullu. Each man was armed and ready to fall in with the plan.

  “So be it, then,” Lekka declared.

  The last surviving Europeans at Las Palmas had decided on evacuation of the site without further delay, using a vehicle from the resort’s collection on the northwest parking lot. It was the only viable alternative aside from trekking out on foot—a pipedream that ensured they would be lost within a mile or less, and vulnerable to a world of stalking forest predators, whether on four legs, two, or none.

  Before departing from the suite, Lekka considered whether he should carry anything besides his weapon, passport and the clothes he wore. His luggage was disposable, as were his extra garments, shaving gear and such. With ample cash in his pocket and two credit cards cloned from the internet, he was prepared to pay his way back home or to another destination of his choice.

  But first, he had to put Las Palmas in the rearview mirror and remove himself from Venezuela, where he’d learned to trust no one but Georgios Xenakis and, perhaps, their new Basque traveling companions.

  All that still remained was acquisition of a vehicle and then a mad dash to escape from the resort, before deciding where best to attempt a border crossing to Colombia. That part could wait until they’d cleared Las Palmas and were on the road.

  Marios Lekka relished driving on the open highway, even when it meant exposure to police and other enemies. Life was a risk, and his profession merely added spice to what uncounted billions deemed a tedious existence, plodding toward their graves with no accomplishments to call their own, damned few surprises on the way except more debt and finally grim news delivered by a doctor trying to pretend concern.

  When Lekka died—whether this night or years from now—at least no one could say he had not truly lived.

  Northwest Parking Lot

  Bolan had almost reached the parking lot, not close enough to see it yet, when gunfire crackled up ahead. Pausing in his advance, he heard male voices shouting back and forth in Arabic and other languages he didn’t recognize offhand. One might well have been Greek, the other totally beyond him, as if someone mingled French with Spanish before bleating it.

  No Spanish, though, which told him that SEBIN was likely not involved.

  “I think they’re disappointed, looking for a car,” Geller said, half smiling.

  “Can’t imagine why,” Bolan replied, and moved to check it out, the Metsada agent at his side.

  When they arrived, eight men we
re taking shots at one another in the parking lot-cum-junkyard, ducking behind vehicles with flattened tires and popping up to blast away at anything moving in front of them. Four were the bearded wanderers he’d followed here with Geller, while their four opponents were clean-shaved, lighter-skinned, and none the less determined to annihilate their opposition.

  Of the eight guns, the majority were pistols, while at least one piece crackled with automatic fire that sounded like 5.7 mm to the warrior’s expert ears. None had produced a hit so far, and Bolan thought it a waste of time to stand by watching all that futile rage.

  “You want the left or right?” he asked Geller.

  “I’ll take the Arabs,” she replied.

  “Suits me.”

  Bolan shifted away from her, aiming his Steyr AUG’s Swarovski telescopic sight to frame the nearest of the terrorists on his side of the skirmish line. An angry profile came into relief and Bolan stroked his rifle’s trigger lightly for a single shot, a 5.56 mm NATO round hurtling downrange at half a mile per second, striking his target with 1,294 foot-pounds of destructive energy.

  A crimson mist haloed the dead man’s skull as he pitched over sideways, dropping out of sight behind an SUV and firing one last wasted shot into the driver’s window as he fell.

  Beside the still warm, twitching corpse, another shooter gaped and turned as if to flee, but there was no place left for him to hide. Bolan squeezed off another round, drilling his mark between the runner’s shoulder blades and dropping him in midstride, falling on his face.

  Behind him, Geller triggered short bursts from her M4A1 carbine, drawing fire from those who had managed to survive her opening barrage. Bolan heard bullets whispering around him, but he had his hands full with the two remaining terrorists on his side of the bloody playing field.

  Another moment and his men were down, never to rise again. He pivoted to help Geller, but needn’t have bothered. No sooner had he turned than she’d completed her clean sweep, four bearded killers down and out on pavement running red with blood.

  “Now, what?” she asked him.

  “Flip a coin,” he said. “We can stay here and wait for more to try the motor pool, or else go hunting.”

  “Waiting always seemed a waste of time,” she answered.

  “So, hunting it is.”

  West Wing

  “Hurry!” Captain Zavala ordered his SEBIN soldiers.

  They obeyed him without question, breaking into double time although he knew that some of them had to be reluctant to confront another killing situation in the wake of what they’d recently survived.

  Their destination was the resort’s northwest parking lot, where shooting had erupted moments earlier. Most of the firing seemed to come from pistols, though Zavala had also heard a submachine gun stuttering, before two rifles joined the chorus.

  And within another eight to ten seconds, the firing ceased.

  Zavala raised a hand to slow his group’s advance, not altering his goal but urging them to caution.

  Whatever had provoked the rage of shooting, it seemed to be over now, but that did not suggest that charging headlong toward the killing zone was wise, by any means. Zavala reckoned it was better to delay arrival and preserve his squad intact than to rush into an ambush and be slaughtered.

  With fifty yards to go, he caught the smell of burnt gunpowder on the night air, heard no sounds suggesting that the skirmish might have left wounded survivors in its wake. But if there were survivors, maybe fit and spoiling for another fight, Zavala meant to see them before they saw him.

  Infantry Tactics 101.

  Romulo Zavala held his FN FNC rifle tightly as he advanced, a portion of his mind reminding him unbidden of the Venezuelan army’s motto Falsificador de libertades. Forger of Liberties.

  Few natives of his homeland—fewer still living outside of it—had ever learned that motto or even remembered it today. Of those who did, Zavala felt sure many took it as a joke, considering the Venezuelan military’s record of denying basic human rights to anyone within its reach. SEBIN was even worse, and had no motto of its own as far as he could tell, involved from day one in political surveillance—with special attention to the nation’s Jewish citizens—and suppressing dissent in all forms.

  And now, if word of their collaboration with a veritable who’s who of international terrorists got out, SEBIN would take another hit from which its crippled reputation might never recover.

  That was bad enough, but Captain Zavala knew from personal experience that handpicked individuals would bear the brunt of condemnation, serving their homeland as human sacrifices to divert attention from El Presidente’s crimes.

  What else was new?

  Distracted by concern for his career—his very life, in fact—Zavala dropped his guard a little, and regretted it immediately.

  Fifteen, maybe twenty, yards in front of him, the night erupted into automatic fire.

  But this time it was aimed directly at Captain Romulo Zavala and his men.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Northwest Parking Lot

  Bolan triggered another short burst from his Steyr AUG and saw one of the SEBIN guards drop like a poleaxed steer, convulsing as he fell, then lying still in death. A few yards to his left, Adira Geller targeted another rifleman, her M4A1 carbine stuttering, while the remainder of the squad they’d ambushed ducked and dived for any cover they could find.

  The troops had been responding to their skirmish with eight terrorists back at the parking lot, a short distance to Bolan’s rear. He still had no idea which groups those delegates were meant to represent while gathered at Las Palmas, and it made no difference, since all of them were criminals with prices on their heads, some ranging upward of a million dollars.

  Not that Bolan or his friends at Stony Man would ever see a dime of those rewards. If justice worked that way in the United States, street cops from coast to coast might be retiring on the proceeds of arresting or dispatching fugitives from justice. Bolan figured that the odds of any given law-enforcement officer encountering a hunted felon were much higher than a normal lotto player’s chance of scoring big and landing on a sunny beach somewhere with millions in the bank.

  Two SEBIN riflemen were crouched behind a clump of areca palms some forty feet in front of Bolan, popping out on either side to lay down automatic fire by turns. He’d strafed them once without result, the palm stems shielding them, so now he secured one of his frag grenades, released its pin and spoon, then lobbed it overhand and ducked back under cover of his own.

  And that time, Bolan got it right.

  His green M26, a little under sixteen ounces with the safety spoon discarded, hung up in the palms just long enough for its M204-series timed friction fuse to trigger detonation, the explosion ripping through the screen of cultivated trees, its spray of shrapnel finding flesh and bone.

  His enemies beyond that screen were maimed, but neither of them suffered any outright fatal wounds, based on the racket they were making, thrashing on the ground and crying out for help that never came. They could not run, but others from their squad could manage it and did, bolting from cover, firing aimless rounds at tormentors they could not see, intent on making tracks and leaving wounded friends behind.

  It turned into a slaughter then, Bolan and Geller choosing targets on the fly and dropping them with 3-round bursts of 5.56 mm fire as if they had been silhouettes rotating through a carny midway’s shooting gallery.

  Another moment and it ended, ringing silence settling down over that section of Las Palmas. That wasn’t true for other parts of the resort, where shooting still continued, summit delegates trying to settle their outstanding grudges or elude the SEBIN guards some of them had begun to view as jailers.

  Making Bolan think he might not have to finish all of them himself, with Geller’s help.

  Las Palmas had been changed into a grim self-cleaning o
ven with the heat turned up to high. It was more or less as Bolan had intended from the outset.

  And no one still living on the grounds could stop it now.

  West Wing

  Colonel Pérez was torn as to which cardinal direction he should choose, leading his squad of soldiers into battle. Gunfire had erupted on all sides, it seemed, Las Palmas echoing with shots and angry shouts in languages gleaned from around the world, men fighting, dying, where they had been promised safety by his government.

  That meant Pérez had failed and would be forced to pay the price for that, if he survived the night and ever spoke to his superiors again. He would have no excuse to offer them for bungling what had seemed to be a reasonably foolproof plan.

  But he finally accepted what he’d suspected earlier in the evening—he’d likely be eliminated without trial and planted in a shallow grave somewhere.

  So be it.

  If his fate was sealed, the colonel thought he might as well go down in the performance of his duties as assigned, rather then fleeing from them like a coward.

  While he had no less than five or six outbreaks of violence to choose from at the moment, Pérez felt he owed his first allegiance to his captain, Romulo Zavala, and the soldiers he’d dispatched to scour the west wing of Las Palmas.

  How much farther to the spot where they had come under fire? He was not sure, but knew he had to be drawing closer by the moment, clinging to his Orinoco SMG so fiercely that it made his knuckles ache.

  A few more strides, then, and his point man turned a corner with Pérez so close behind him that he almost bumped into the corporal when he stopped without warning. On the concrete walk in front of them, a body sprawled in blood, facedown, its SEBIN outfit unmistakable despite the gore exuding from a tight cluster of bullet wounds.