Dead Reckoning

Bolan already had the Steyr at his shoulder, half of Rajhid’s face framed in the reticle of his integrated telescopic sight. Rajhid was stuck there, obviously knowing that the only way to hide his face completely was to lose sight of his enemy.

“Put down the gun and you can walk away from this,” Bolan said, lying through his teeth.

“Put down your gun,” Rajhid replied, “and you can—”

Bolan’s bullet drilled Rajhid’s forehead just above his right eye. The 5.56 mm bullet left a tidy entrance wound, then tumbled through the man’s brain, yawing after it cleared the bony barrier of his frontal bone and found soft tissue. Dead before the impact registered, Rajhid slumped over backward, still clutching his female hostage as he fell.

Bolan was on the pair of them in nothing flat, released the woman from Rajhid’s dead grasp and plucked the subgun from his other hand. No questions would be answered here, but Bolan did his best under the circumstances, patting Rajhid’s several pockets, locating a compact satellite phone first and then a regular cell phone. He claimed both, then kept digging until he found a bulging wallet, while a group of cautious rubberneckers started edging closer.

Time to go.

Rising, he tucked the Steyr out of sight beneath his raincoat, left the stall with no attempt to hide his face and walked away. An alley beckoned to his left, and Bolan ducked in there, then sprinted down past its stinking garbage cans to reach another cross street, operating from a street map of the city he had memorized beforehand.

How long before police arrived to check out Rajhid’s corpse and start interrogating witnesses? The apartment-building battleground should distract most of them for a while. With any luck, enough time for him to regroup with Grimaldi and clear the scene.

When he was on the next street over, strolling with the flow, Bolan fished out his cell phone and pressed the button for Grimaldi’s number. Two rings in, he heard his voice.

“I blew it,” the Stony Man pilot confessed, without preliminaries. “Got the shot, but came up empty-handed.”

“Nearly the same for me,” Bolan replied, “but I’ve got two phones and a wallet.”

“Could be helpful,” Grimaldi said.

“Fingers crossed. I’ll meet you at the car in five.”

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_0080901a-1761-558c-bada-6d4c63403520)

Walid Khamis sat and watched the Hezbollah fighters conferring in the dining room, just out of earshot from the sofa where they’d ordered him to sit and keep his mouth shut. They were angry, obviously, seeking ways to blame him for the raid on their apartment building, but he did not intend to stoke that anger by admitting the attack might well have been, in fact, his fault.

Not his specifically, of course, but all of theirs, his comrades and himself. He sat and wondered if the others, Rajhid and Farsoun, were even still alive.

Upon arrival in the city, when the Hezbollah team had grudgingly accepted them, Khamis and his companions had been warned against leaving the four-story apartment building. If they managed to forget that simple rule, or were forced out somehow and got lost, they’d been provided with an alternative address, the house in which he now sat, waiting for these strangers to decide his fate.

There was a chance, he understood, that they might kill him. Hezbollah was ruthless with its enemies, and he might qualify as one if they believed he was responsible for the attack on Calle Victor Hugo Norte, costing them that property and any men who had been killed or nabbed by the police because of it. They risked the wrath of God’s Hammer if they executed him, but Hezbollah was vastly larger than his own small group of fighters, famous globally for decades, and they feared no one.

His only hope, Khamis believed, was to play stupid, claim that he had no idea the raiders could have come for him and his compatriots specifically. The more he thought about it, Khamis almost managed to convince himself. Who could have traced their path to Paraguay and mounted an attack there, after all?

A phone rang in the dining room. One of the Hezbollah fighters answered, listened and answered in Spanish. Khamis had no clue what he had said, but when the call was ended, his interrogators whispered urgently among themselves, glancing frequently in his direction, then approached him as a group, their faces dour.

“Your friends are dead,” their spokesman told him bluntly.

“Both of them?” Khamis thought he could feel the planet tilting underneath him.

“Both. Shot down a mile apart. You separated?”

“To escape,” Khamis acknowledged. “Yes.”

“And you alone survived.” There was suspicion in the man’s gruff tone.

“If you say so.” A shameful tremor shook his voice. He had been disarmed upon arrival and felt vulnerable now, an easy target.

“We have had no trouble at the safe house for the past eight years,” his interrogator said. “You arrived mere days ago, and now we have a dozen soldiers dead, police demanding answers. It’s peculiar, you’d agree.”

“I would not,” Khamis answered. “You’re all fugitives from the Israelis and Crusaders, just as I am. Who’s to say they did not come for you, over the rockets that you send from Gaza?”

His hosts—captors?—exchanged dubious glances, two of them shaking their heads. Their mouthpiece said, “The timing is suggestive. We have no faith in coincidence.”

Khamis stiffened his spine and squared his shoulders. It was time to bluff, he thought. What did he have to lose?

“All right,” he said. “If you believe I am responsible for this somehow, then I shall leave you. Give my weapons back, and you will see no more of me. Whatever happens next, find someone else to blame.”

The Hezbollah man smiled at that, a hungry jackal’s smile.

“It’s not so easy,” he replied. “Before we rid ourselves of you, we must decide whether you are, in fact, responsible for this attack. If someone wants you, it may be to our advantage to accommodate them. Possibly, we might receive some compensation for our losses.”

Praying that they could not see him trembling, Khamis said, “So, you would ransom me? A soldier of the same cause you avow? I thought the men of Hezbollah were freedom fighters, not a pack of gangsters.”

“You’d be wise to say no more,” the leader warned him. “Even if we sell you, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t take a few fingers and toes.”

* * *

BOLAN AND GRIMALDI chowed down at an American fast-food restaurant, a familiar stop these days no matter where on Earth you were. Over hamburgers and fries with coffee, Bolan gutted Rajhid’s wallet, while Grimaldi did the same with one he’d lifted from Salman Farsoun. Walid Khamis was in the wind.

Between the two of them, the fallen God’s Hammer members had been carrying a hundred and fifty thousand Paraguayan guaranís—some thirty-five US dollars—in cash, two bogus passports and a notebook, Farsoun’s, filled with Arabic notations Bolan couldn’t translate. He set the currency aside, secured the notebook in his pocket and placed the other items on the empty seat beside him, where he planned to leave them when they left the restaurant.

That left the telephones, two cells and Rajhid’s satellite phone. Each of them took a cell phone first, scrolling through their memories in search of any recent numbers called by either of the two dead terrorists.

“Nothing on this the past ten days,” Grimaldi said.

“I’ve got one local call,” Bolan replied. “Prefix sixty-one. Rajhid called it three days ago.”

“Around the time they’d have checked into Hezbollah Arms,” Grimaldi stated.

“We can try for an address from Stony Man,” Bolan suggested, reaching for the small sat phone. Three calls had been logged in memory and not erased, a bonehead move. He set the phone beside Grimaldi’s plastic food tray. “Do the numbers ring a bell?”

The Stony Man pilot studied them. “The 249 is a country code, so forty-one is the city and the rest a local number. Off the top, I couldn’t tell you where it is. Sorry.”

Bolan got out his smartphone, thankful that the restaurant offered free Wi-Fi. He went online to check the foreign phone codes, found what he was looking fo, and told Grimaldi, “Two forty-nine is Sudan. The city code’s Kassala.”

“Never heard of it.”

“More homework for the Farm. I’ll send the numbers through.”

He switched to email on the smartphone, typed an address that would eventually allow the message to reach Stony Man Farm in Virginia without pinpointing his or Stony Man’s location and sent two phone numbers with a request for a speedy response. It was a relatively easy job for Aaron Kurtzman’s cyber-team, hopefully landing some pointers for Bolan within the half hour.

“When we get the local number—” Grimaldi began.

“We check it out.”