head, fighting to remain conscious.
Then he thought of his brother.
“Ashar,” he murmured, groaning at the monumental effort it took as he rolled over and tried to get up. He collapsed back onto the roadway. He’d moved enough that he could see Ashar, however. His younger brother had been knocked off his motorcycle as well, but the blow had been less severe, as Ashar was on his feet, crouched near the front grille of the governor’s car, trading shots with an assailant firing down at him from one of the half-built homes off to his right. A group of commandos had entered the housing project and were heading toward the house where the shots originated.
“Need to help,” Muhtar moaned to himself.
He ignored the bleeding in his leg and looked around him. His service pistol lay a few feet away on the road next to his toppled bike. Drawing in a deep breath, he rallied his strength and willed himself to roll toward the gun, then reached out and slowly closed his fingers around it.
Straining, Muhtar turned onto his other side and propped himself up slightly with his free arm. He looked back down at his legs; they were still numb and the bloodstain on his hip was spreading. He took solace, though, when he realized he could wriggle both his feet. Not paralyzed, he thought. He knew he was probably in shock and convinced himself that the numbness would soon go. He would tend to the bleeding later, but for now he wanted to do what he could to help his brother protect the governor, who, Muhtar assumed, was still alive inside the car.
From his new position, Muhtar could see across the road, where there was a flurry of commotion. Most of the demonstrators had retreated back toward the tent city, but a handful of men stood just off the shoulder, hunched in a tight circle like football players huddling to discuss their next play. Something about their demeanor—they way they’d turned their backs on the pandemonium around them—put Muhtar on alert.
His suspicions were borne out when, a few seconds later, the men suddenly turned away from each other, eyes on the governor’s car. Remaining in a tight formation, they strode purposefully out onto the road, heading toward the vehicle. Muhtar could see that they were making an effort to shield one man in particular. When he saw the man reaching under the folds of his loose shirt, adrenaline spiked through his veins, giving him the strength to let out a plaintive cry.
“Ashar!” Muhtar shouted to his brother. “Behind you! They have a bomb!”
ASHAR YEILAM WHIRLED at the sound of his brother’s voice. Muhtar had managed to get a shot off before blacking out, and one of the men approaching the governor’s car dropped to the road. The others continued forward, closing ranks to protect the man in the middle of the formation. Shelby Ferstera had also been alerted by Muhtar’s cry and two more men went down when the Aussie cut loose with his M-16. Ashar took out a fourth with the last round in his weapon. That left three men, however, including the one fumbling with the bomb concealed beneath his loose shirt. They reached the car and pressed themselves against the passenger side of the vehicle.
There was no time for Ashar to reload. Casting the gun aside, he raised one foot onto the front bumper of the car, then pushed off with the other and leapt up onto the hood. As his forward momentum carried him toward the three demonstrators, Ashar extended his arms. The other men were crowded together enough that he was able to collide with all three of them, knocking them away from the car. As he fell to road, the young police officer managed to drag down two of the men, including the bomber.
But it wasn’t enough.
Though shaken and lying on his back, the bomber quickly regained his wits and grabbed at the detonator wired to the sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. With a malignant grin, he eyed Ashar, who was an arm’s length away, preparing to lunge..
“Praise Allah!” the bomber cried out, triggering the detonator.
THE EXECUTIONER and his colleagues were thirty yards from the partially built home the JI snipers were firing from. “Try to hot-wire the bulldozer and put it to use!” Bolan shouted to Grimaldi.
The pilot nodded and was headed toward the earthmover when a violent explosion shook the ground under his feet, throwing him off balance. Bolan felt it, too. He crouched behind a Jeep, M-16 at the ready, and glanced over his shoulder, just in time to see the governor’s car fly into the air and slam back onto the road, landing on its roof.. There was a small crater in the road where the bomb had gone off. Nearby, a fresh heap of corpses lay in mangled ruin.
“Suicide bomber,” John Kissinger murmured, hunched next to Bolan behind the Jeep.
Bolan nodded gravely, ears ringing from the explosion. One side of the governor’s car had been caved in by the bomb’s force, but he thought there was a chance the governor might have survived the blast. If so, Zailik would have to wait to be rescued. Shelby Ferstera’s surviving commandos had their hands full contending with snipers on the hill behind the tent city, and when gunfire coming from a second house peppered his Jeep, Bolan knew that he was locked into his own battlefield.
Daud Umar, the Densus 88 member rounding out Bolan’s crew, had taken cover behind a stack of lumber just to the right of the Jeep. He fired at the enemy gunners in the second house, then pulled back when a return volley splintered the two-by-fours.
“Give ’em a grenade!” Bolan shouted.
Umar nodded, grabbing for an M6 clipped to his ammo belt. He waited out another round from the JI gunners, then thumbed the pin free and twisted his body, heaving the grenade. His aim was off, but not by much. The grenade exploded as it struck the loose dirt just in front of the house where the sniper was embedded.
The front door flew off its hinges and a dust cloud bloomed into the air, mixing with smoke given off by the blast. Bolan doubted the enemy inside the house had been taken out, but he figured they’d at least been distracted.
“Now!” he called out, breaking clear of the Jeep.
Together, Bolan and Kissinger rushed the house, using the dust cloud to mask their approach. Kissinger, like Bolan, had been issued an M-16, but his assault rifle came equipped with an under-barrel M-203 grenade launcher. As the dust began to settle, he stopped and planted himself behind a bulky, two-wheeled rototiller, shifting his trigger finger from the carbine to the launcher.
“Go wide!” he shouted to Bolan, waving to his left.
The Executioner veered away from Kissinger, following the dust cloud as it began to drift. Kissinger took aim at the house, peering through the haze. Once he could make out the framework of the ground-floor window, he fired. A 40 mm grenade whooshed from the launcher and finished off the job Daud Umar had started, penetrating the house before it detonated.
Bolan didn’t wait to see if the blast had neutralized the enemy. Cutting toward the house, he set his sights on the front door, ready to finish the job.
FIFTY YARDS AWAY, Grimaldi had already scrambled past the dead man next to the bulldozer and climbed up to the driver’s compartment. There was blood on the seat and when Grimaldi glanced down to his right, he spotted another slain worker sprawled on the ground near the treads. The man had apparently been gunned down while at the controls, because there were keys in the ignition, saving Grimaldi the need to hot-wire the engine.
“We’ll take our breaks where we get them,” the pilot muttered as he cranked the ignition. White smoke belched from the exhaust and the gears meshed noisily as he worked the clutch and maneuvered the front plow off the ground, giving himself just enough clearance to proceed.
The
