than verifying his suspicions.
Zailik had become oblivious to the ebb and flow of the confrontation taking place outside the car. Balled up behind the driver’s seat, all he could hear was the mad pulsing of blood rushing through his temples and the frantic stabbing of his thumb against the cell-phone keypad, followed time and again by a recorded message where his secretary explained that she was unable to answer the phone.
“Pick up, damn you!” Zailik seethed after the fifth time he’d dialed both her work and personal numbers.
He was about to dial yet again when the entire car began to shake and wobble. Zailik could hear a loud thundering outside the vehicle. Forced back to reality, Zailik’s first thought was that the demonstrators had stormed the car and were attempting to overturn it. But as he was unfolding himself from his crouch, he detected motion through the sunroof overhead and glanced up. It was then he realized the police helicopter had arrived and was hovering directly above him, using its intense rotor wash to drive back the demonstrators who’d yet to stray from the road.
Looking out the front windshield, Zailik could see the motorcycle officers hunched low over their bikes, uniforms snapping in the fierce downdraft as the chopper eased past them, then tilted slightly so that the demonstrators caught the full brunt of the whirlwind. Many of the tent dwellers lost their footing and tumbled backward, then found themselves rolling across the tarmac toward the shoulder of the road.
“I think you just lost a few votes,” the chauffeur called out as he prepared to shift the car back into gear. “But at least now we’ll be able to get you to the airport….”
MACK BOLAN WAS RIDING shotgun in the second of the two Jeeps racing down the road from the airport. Jack Grimaldi was behind the wheel and John Kissinger was in the back along with one of the Densus 88 commandos, Daud Umar, a 37-year-old native of Banda Aceh.
“So far, so good,” Grimaldi said as he watched the Huey bank toward the mob. Like the police chopper, the larger aircraft was using its rotor wash to keep the protestors off the road. Clouds of dust rose into the air, providing a protective screen as the motorcade began to inch forward. The lead Jeep had stopped thirty yards ahead of the motorcycle officers. Shelby Ferstera stood in the front seat, gesturing to the motorcycle cops that the Jeep would turn around once the motorcade had passed and would follow as they proceeded to the airport.
Watching things play out, Bolan had a sense that something was wrong. It was all going far too smoothly. Ferstera’s informant, after all, had said that Jemaah Islamiyah had planned to go after the governor, and from what he knew of the terrorist sect, he thought their game plan would have consisted of more than setting loose a rock-throwing mob.
“Keep an eye on the crowd,” he called out over his shoulder.
“On it,” Kissinger replied. He was already putting to use a pair of high-powered binoculars. “It’s a little hard, though, with all that dust.”
Bolan turned his attention to the other side of the road, where the skeletal wooden frames of several hundred homes spread out across a series of unpaved streets. A few of the structures closest to the road were nearer to completion than the others, their inner walls hammered into place with foil-backed insulation strips secured between the studs. A handful of construction vehicles was parked nearby, but there was no sign of activity. Bolan had binoculars, too, and he used them to take a closer look at one of the bulldozers situated between a Dumpster and a large stack of lumber. Half-hidden behind the earthmover’s large front scoop, the Executioner spotted a body sprawled across the dirt.
He was about to pass along his findings when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a thin ribbon of smoke trail out from a second-story window of one of the homes near the road. A split second later, the police helicopter disintegrated in a fireball, showering the road with debris.
“A trap,” Bolan shouted, even as a second missile streaked through the air, broadsiding the Huey. In an instant, Governor Zailik lost his aerial support, and the Executioner knew his instincts had been correct.
5
Once the last fiery remains of the two downed helicopters had crashed onto the roadway between his Jeep and the governor’s motorcade, Shelby Ferstera fought off his shock and cursed. Jemaah Islamiyah had lured him into an ambush and now, in the blink of an eye, more than a dozen of his best men were gone. He could see a few of them scattered amid the flaming shrapnel, lifeless bodies rent and torn by the force of the explosion. Some were engulfed in flames, others spattered with blood, all of them missing limbs so that they looked like the remains of storefront mannequins that had been run through a threshing machine. There was nothing to be done for them other than to see to it that they had not died in vain. And despite the devastating blow to his ranks, Ferstera was determined to carry out Densus 88’s mission and ensure the governor’s safety. To do that, however, he had to make certain the rest of his men were not slaughtered by the enemy.
“Out of the Jeep and take cover!” he commanded, bolting from the vehicle. The surviving commandos followed suit, and not a moment too soon. Even as they were flattening themselves against the roadway, a stream of gunfire strafed over their heads and pelted the Jeep. The shots were coming from the direction of the tent city, so Ferstera crawled around to the far side of the vehicle. His men were right behind him. Three of them made it. A fourth caught a hail of bullets and slumped to the roadway, dead by the time his face struck the asphalt.
“Jackals!” Ferstera shouted.
He glanced quickly behind him. The Americans in the other Jeep had detoured from the road and were headed toward the housing development. They were veering to and fro to make themselves less of a target for the JI snipers firing from the upper floor of one of the uncompleted homes. Smoke and flames from the downed Huey’s charred fuselage blocked Ferstera’s view of those snipers, but he trusted that meant the enemy was similarly unable to take aim his way, allowing his men to focus on the gunners across the road.
Readying his M-16, Ferstera rose to one knee and peered over the Jeep’s hood. Through the rifle’s scope he was able to pinpoint a sniper positioned behind a large boulder on a raised knoll just beyond the tent city. The gunman had spent his ammo and was slamming a fresh cartridge into his rifle. He was a long way off, barely within range of Ferstera’s M-16, but the Aussie was an expert marksman and proved it as he cut loose with a burst that streaked above the rocks and found home in the enemy’s chest, taking the sniper down.
Wasting no time on self-congratulation, Ferstera scanned the knoll for more targets. He knew the playing field was a long way from being leveled….
MUHTAR YEILAM was knocked unconscious when a chunk of the obliterated police chopper crashed down on him. When he came to moments later, he was lying on the road next to his toppled motorcycle, fighting off a wave of nausea brought on by the stench of raw fuel and charred flesh. A searing, knife-like pain gnawed at his skull. Reflexively, he grabbed at his helmet and pried it off his head. The pain abated quickly as he noticed that the helmet had cracked almost in two while absorbing the impact of the fallen debris, which lay a few feet away, smoldering next to a severed arm. Staring past the grisly sight, Muhtar saw that the road was strewn with carnage. Beyond his field of vision, he could hear screams and gunfire and the flap of loose clothing as people fled in all directions, trying to take themselves out of the line of fire.
When he tried to rise, Muhtar became aware of a tingling numbness in his legs. Glancing down, he saw blood seeping through his right pantleg up high near his hip. He wasn’t sure what had caused the wound, but he knew he had to stop the bleeding. As he reached down, a sudden, aching weariness washed over him him, and he could feel himself on the verge of passing out again.
