bastard has planned for me especially? I wouldn’t think of it.”
“You’ll wear the Kevlar, though?”
“Of course. I’m not an idiot,” Kamran replied.
He would be armed, as well, with his usual sidearm for a start, a Heckler & Koch P30 chambered in .40 S&W, with a 13-round magazine. To back it up, another favorite: the Spectre M4 submachine gun with its casket magazine containing fifty 9 mm Parabellum rounds, less than fourteen inches long with its metal stock folded above the receiver. With the Spectre he could lay down 800 rounds per minute, killing anyone or anything that stood between him and his goal.
Including this killer who believed that he could dupe Kamran somehow, perhaps make off with Kamran’s hard-earned money, and the heroin besides.
“Good luck with that,” he muttered to himself.
“What did you say?” Munadi asked.
“Nothing. Go and make sure the men are ready. We should leave soon.”
“But it’s only—”
“Yes, I know the time. I want to be there, waiting, when our friend arrives. Let us surprise him, eh?”
“As you wish it, Wasef.”
He was looking forward to the meeting with this stranger who had robbed him—or, in truth, who’d robbed the Chinese Kamran had meant to rob. He felt a sneaking kind of admiration for such courage and audacity, but it required a harsh response to salvage Kamran’s reputation as a man whose enemies enjoyed short, miserable lives.
This one, whoever he might be, would have been wiser to go hunting somewhere else, perhaps rob the Jamaicans or Dominicans, maybe the damned Armenians. He was about to learn a lesson that Afghanis had been teaching Westerners since 1839. Kamran’s people could not be vanquished in their homeland—not by England, Russia or America—and now they were expanding into every corner of the planet to assert themselves and claim their proper share of wealth.
This night, Roosevelt Island. This time next year, perhaps Manhattan. And beyond that...who could say? It was a whole new world, beyond Khalil Nazari’s wildest dreams from Kabul, where the old ways mired him down. Perhaps a younger, stronger man was needed to command that new domain and bend it to his will.
Job one: collect the heroin without dispensing any cash to the audacious thief. Then, having proved himself, Wasef Kamran could think about tomorrow and the great things he was going to accomplish.
All he had to do was make it through the night alive.
Roosevelt Island
BOLAN PARKED HIS latest rental car, a Honda CR-V, in the visitor’s lot at Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital, and made his way to the roof of the X-shaped facility’s northwestern wing. From there he had a view across treetops to Lighthouse Park, where his intended targets would be showing up, at least in theory, sometime in the next three hours.
Waiting was a sniper’s specialty. Bolan likely could not have counted all the times he’d lain in wait for enemies in heat and cold, under a drenching rain, while insects crawled over his skin and hummed around his ears. He’d learned to lie in perfect stillness, barely breathing, while a target took its own sweet time about appearing, stepping finally into the crosshairs of his telescopic sight and dying there, struck down from half a mile or more away, with no idea how death had come so suddenly, without a hint of warning.
He was ready now, with his weapon of choice for this phase of the hunt, an M-110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System manufactured by Knight’s Armament in Florida. The rifle measured 46.5 inches with its buttstock extended and a suppressor attached, tipping the scales at just over fifteen pounds with a 20-round magazine full of 7.62 mm NATO rounds. Its AN/PVS-10 night sight would let him place accurate shots out to 875 yards, nearly nine times the range he would be firing from this night. It should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
But these fish might be shooting back.
His plan was simple: place the Afghans and Wah Ching hardmen into proximity, both looking for the same thing, then cut loose and see what happened next. A well-placed shot or two might do the trick, but if the opposition needed any more help, Bolan had a stack of extra magazines on hand and was prepared to use as many as the job required.
Scorched earth, all the way.
He didn’t need to rattle either side for information, since the next stop on his tour had been determined in advance. Khalil Nazari’s opium was processed into bricks of morphine near the poppy fields he cultivated in Afghanistan. Bolan knew approximately where the morphine bricks were sent for their conversion into heroin. The details he did not as yet possess would be available when he arrived on-site, secured by one means or another to complete the next link in the chain.
This night he would be shutting down the pipeline in Manhattan. Not for good; no one could claim permanent victory in any war against a human craving for release. But Bolan could remove the major players in this one dark corner of the world. Maybe incite some other scavengers to take each other off the board while they were grappling to fill the power vacuum that resulted.
Doing what he could with what he had.
His field of fire was open from the hospital’s six-story rooftop to the Blackwell Island Light, four hundred feet northeast of where he sat cradling the rifle, waiting. Once the action started, Bolan’s enemies could break in one of three directions: toward the light, away from him; to cars parked on the left or right, against the river’s edge; or back toward Bolan, seeking refuge among trees that formed a kind of horseshoe shape at his end of the park. Whichever way they ran, it would be under fire from Bolan and from adversaries on the other side, who’d come expecting to go home with ten kilos of heroin.
How many would go home at all?
Bolan never indulged in overconfidence. He trained and practiced, planned and double-checked his plans, then trusted to his own experience and skill. That recipe had kept him in the game so far, but he did not deceive himself into believing that his luck would hold forever. No one had that guarantee, and least of all a fighting man who put himself in harm’s way constantly.
His greatest apprehension at the moment was that Paul Mei-Lun or Wasef Kamran might decide to stay at home, let their gorillas keep the date and see what came of it. If he missed one or both of them this night, he’d have to stick around New York until the job was done, giving his adversaries at the next stop more time to prepare themselves.
For all the good that it would do them.
Even with the news of his Manhattan blitz, they wouldn’t know with whom they were dealing.
They would not be prepared to meet the Executioner.
Lighthouse Park, Roosevelt Island
“Remember, everyone,” Paul Mei-Lun said. “No shooting till we see the bag. It’s all for nothing if we go back empty-handed.”
The shooters riding with him in the Hummer H2 all nodded like a bunch of bobbleheads. In Mei-Lun’s hand, a walkie-talkie crackled and a voice came to him from the second vehicle, trailing behind his, with the other Wah Ching soldiers
