“Friend of a friend,” Casale said, and shot the traitor twice. One bullet through the forehead, and another through the temple as he slumped back dead, against his stack of pillows.
Done.
It was a good night’s work, with one last swim ahead of him before Casale made for home.
Hyder, Arizona
THREE MEN COULD NOT surround a house, per se, but they could cover it sufficiently by staking out three corners of the building. Each shooter thus had unobstructed views of two sides, cutting off any attempt by occupants to flee unseen.
Haroun al-Rachid claimed the northeast corner for himself, watching the north—or front—and east sides of the safehouse. Umarah, his driver, had the southeast corner, covering the east and south sides, while Tabari—on the southwest corner—watched the west and south.
Perfect.
Two lights were burning in the safehouse. One gleamed dully through a smallish frosted pane that had to have been the bathroom window, while another shone through crooked drapes and offered sliver glimpses of the kitchen. There were no signs of movement, but al-Rachid assumed that one or two guards had to still be awake.
His plan lacked subtlety, but had the virtue of surprise and overwhelming force. He would not give his enemies a chance to fight or run. Alert or dreaming, they were bound to die.
Besides the Armalite AR-18s, al-Rachid’s small arsenal included three LAW rockets, disposable bazookas featuring a lightweight plastic launching tube that held a 66 mm armor-piercing rocket with a high-explosive payload in its nose. Deemed obsolete against most modern tanks, the rockets still served well enough against civilian vehicles and homes.
As in the present case.
Al-Rachid’s companions had been trained to use the LAWs, advised that they would each have one shot only and had to make it count. Thermite grenades would follow the initial blasts, and they would stay to watch the house burn to its foundation, greeting any stunned survivors with their Armalites.
Al-Rachid released his launcher’s safety pin and drew it out to full length, balanced it across his shoulder as he aimed. The AR-18 rifle lay beside his right foot, in the sand, with the white-phosphorus grenade.
He armed the LAW, sighted on the window he had chosen for his target, six feet to the left of the front door, and pressed the trigger. Simultaneously, his two men released their rockets, warheads speeding toward the house with tails of fire.
Glass offered no significant resistance to the rockets. They were set to detonate on impact only with a solid wall, inside the house, where their explosive power would demolish timber, plaster, furniture and flesh.
The rockets detonated like a string of giant firecrackers, expelling smoke and shrapnel from their points of entry. Other windows of the safehouse shattered, front and back doors trembling in their frames but holding fast.
So far.
Before the echoes of the triple blast had time to fade, al-Rachid had palmed his Thermite canister, armed it, stepped closer to the stricken house and pitched it through the aperture where flames were visible already, spreading, feeding on the rubble, generating toxic smoke.
After the rockets, the grenades were relatively quiet. They made muffled whumping sounds inside the house, immediately spewing white-hot chemicals that would incinerate on contact virtually any man-made substance. Thermite would burn through tempered steel and concrete. Flesh and bone were nothing, in the scheme of things.
Al-Rachid stood waiting with his Armalite in hand, watching the safehouse burn. He felt the heat from where he stood and knew it had to be hell in there, almost beyond imagining. Still, traitors who abandoned sacred oaths of loyalty deserved no less. The Thermite blaze would give his target a foretaste of hell.
Justice.
Another job well done.
Al-Rachid was starting to relax when bullets churned the sandy soil around his feet, making him skip and dance away. He found cover behind a nearby Joshua tree, amazed that anyone was still alive inside the house, much less in any shape to fight.
Al-Rachid first told himself it might be ammunition cooking off inside the fire, but it defied the laws of physics that a clutch of random cartridges exploding could produce the pattern that had nearly cut his legs from under him.
Those shots were aimed by someone who had managed to survive both rockets and grenades.
So be it. They had planned for this.
Al-Rachid waited, resisted the impulse to fire back at the winking muzzle-flash he glimpsed sporadically. The raging fire would either eat his enemy alive or drive the man from cover where he could be shot at leisure.
All Haroun al-Rachid had to do was watch and wait.
Five minutes later, just when he’d begun to listen for the wail of sirens in the distance, al-Rachid saw a shadow figure move against the background of the flames. It lurched and staggered, nearly doubled over as the sole survivor of the holocaust hacked smoke and other fumes out of his lungs. Al-Rachid could not identify the weapon in his adversary’s hands and didn’t care to try.
He fired a long burst from the Armalite, expending half a magazine when two or three rounds would have sufficed. Al-Rachid was angry at his target, recognized the feeling as irrational and still allowed himself the luxury of overkill. His bullets dropped the man, then set his corpse to twitching, jerking on the arid soil.
When it was truly finished, when the safehouse had collapsed into itself and every part of it was totally engulfed by fire, al-Rachid beckoned his soldiers and they walked back toward their waiting vehicle.
1
San José, Costa Rica
June 19
Mack Bolan held the rented Ford at a nerve-racking fifty miles per hour, staying with the flow of traffic that jammed Avenida Central without ever seeming to slow its pace or stop for red lights. He kept a sharp eye on the drivers around him, many of them seemingly intent on suicide, while flicking hasty glances toward his rearview mirror, watching for police cars.
Bolan didn’t even want to think about what local law enforcement might say about a gringo driving through their capital with military hardware piled up in the backseat of his rental car.
“How much farther?” Bolan asked his navigator.
Blanca Herrera was a thirty-something knockout, her angel face framed by a fall of glossy jet-black hair, above a body that could grace a calendar.
Herrera checked the city street map, measuring with slender fingers. “Two kilometers, perhaps,” she said at last. “Turn right on Calle Quarenta—or Fortieth Street, you would say—then drive north to Avenida Cinco.”
“Right.”
Fifth Avenue. Unfortunately, they weren’t going to a fashion show at Sachs.
“If I may say again—”
He cut her off. “No calls. No warnings.”
“But
