he lumbered through the shop. Another misstep sent a case of colorful glass bottles and vases shattering to the floor, and brought on more unintelligible curses. Finally, he burst blindly through a violet-colored curtain and out the back door.
Behind the shop, Ronnie Cassetti saw the confusing, winding streets he’d hoped for. Picking one at random, he raced past the wrinkled faces of old men and women and groups of playing children. He didn’t stop running for five more minutes.
When Cassetti finally slowed to a walk he was breathing hard. It took another five minutes to find his way out of the labyrinth of small streets and emerge onto one of Khartoum’s main streets. A second later, he flagged a cab and rode it back to his hotel. With his Swiss Army knife, he slit open the envelope. He was surprised to find that the single page inside was written in English. But what shocked him even more was that it was a poem. Not just a poem, but a limerick.
Cassetti closed his eyes and leaned back against the seat. Something valuable had to be hidden within these rhyming words. The old man had made sure he was an American before giving him the envelope, so it was his duty as an American to find out what the limerick actually meant. Which meant he’d have to get into bed with men most journalists considered the enemy.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency.
1
Mack Bolan had just stepped out of the plane onto the tarmac in Khartoum when the first shot exploded to his right. The bullet missed the Executioner’s head by half an inch as it drilled a hole through the window of the still-open cockpit door.
“Take off, Jack!” Bolan yelled as he rolled to the ground away from the plane and drew the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle.
“Like hell I’ll take off!” Jack Grimaldi shouted back through the doorway. The pilot reached behind him, grabbed a German-made Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun and tossed it to Bolan.
The Executioner reholstered the Desert Eagle as he caught the subgun with his left hand. Twirling it in his hands to grab the pistol grip and fore end, he turned it in the direction from which the shot had come.
As he did, a barrage of rifle fire came from his left.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bolan saw that Grimaldi had pulled another MP-5 from behind his seat in the cockpit and was deplaning on the other side of the aircraft.
Flipping the selector switch to 3-round-burst mode, Bolan cut loose with a trio of 9 mm soft-point RBCD “total fragmentation” rounds. The bullets in the brass casings looked like simple soft-points, but were hardly simple in the way they worked. While the RBCDs would penetrate most substances—like glass, thin wood or plaster—they literally exploded in any water-based material.
Such as a human body.
As he held back the trigger, the Executioner saw three men dressed in olive-drab BDUs racing his way. They continued to fire as they ran, but their rounds flew wide of Bolan’s.
The Executioner’s return fire did not.
The first set of rounds from the big man’s MP-5 caught a dark-skinned, bearded man within a two-inch group—all in the heart. He dropped like a cow hit over the head with a sledgehammer as it walked through the slaughter gate.
Shifting the German weapon slightly to the side, the Executioner fired a 3-round burst into the throat of the next man in green. A geyser of blood erupted from the man’s carotid arteries as he staggered backward, dropping his AK and holding his neck with both hands. A split second later he, too, was on the tarmac, dead.
On the other side of the Learjet that had brought him to Khartoum, Bolan heard Jack Grimaldi firing at the men who approached from the other end of the runway. But he didn’t have time to look that way. The third man in green was still running forward, an Uzi gripped in his fists.
The Uzi fired 9 mm rounds just like Bolan’s MP-5, and had been created for the same reason—to serve as a midrange submachine gun and lay down a lot of fire, fast. But it had one distinct disadvantage from the H&K. It fired from an open bolt, meaning that the bolt didn’t slam shut until the trigger was pulled and the weapon fired. This often threw off the first round.
And now was no exception.
The man with the Uzi had been smarter than his friends—he had waited until he got closer to begin shooting. But now, as he neared, Bolan saw his index finger move rearward. The jar of the bolt sent the first 9 mm hardball round to Bolan’s left, but before the full-auto weapon could fire again the big American had swung the MP-5 on target. Another trio of RBCD rounds struck the man with the Uzi squarely in the face, practically decapitating him.
Bolan turned his back to the three men he had just killed and spotted six more running toward the Learjet from the other side. Behind them, on the tarmac, he could see that Grimaldi had already downed two of the men. But the remaining six still sprinted toward the plane, firing on the run.
More fire from the Learjet’s pilot dropped another man in green as the Executioner dumped two more of their assailants. Bolan’s soft-point bullets caught the first gunner in the chest, and a pink mist burst forth as if someone had just sprayed it from a bottle of window cleaner. He opened his eyes wide in awe, not knowing what had happened, then fell forward onto his face.
Bolan’s second target was trying to run and fire another of the AK-47s. He, too, wore a sidearm, as well as carrying the assault rifle, but his short gun of choice appeared to be a revolver of some kind.
Bolan directed a trio of RBCDs at the running target. The first round caught the attacker in the pelvis, the second in the gut and the third in the heart.
In the meantime, Grimaldi downed yet another of the yet-to-be-identified assailants with a triburst into the chest.
Only two men remained now, but they showed no signs of giving up peacefully. Bolan shifted his front sight toward a slightly overweight man who looked to be of mixed African and Arabic descent. Holding the MP-5s trigger back again, the Executioner sent three more soft-point slugs into the man’s rib cage. When they exploded, sharp white slivers of bone came shooting out along with the same pink mist Bolan had created a second earlier.
Almost simultaneously, Grimaldi downed the final man approaching the tail of the Learjet with three more 9 mm bullets.
For a moment, it appeared the unexpected attack was over.
It wasn’t.
Suddenly, the tarmac around the Executioner’s sides was torn to flying pieces of tar. Bolan turned to his left and saw that more men in green were approaching from the area of the terminal itself.
He briefly wondered again who these men were and how they had known he was arriving. None of their attackers’ OD green fatigues bore any markings.
But this was still not the time to worry about such things. First he had to stay alive. And make sure that Grimaldi did, too.
“Jack!” Bolan cried out. “You okay?”
The pilot’s voice came back to him. “If you don’t count these guys who just popped their heads up behind that berm to the side of the runway!”
Bolan nodded as he watched three more rounds take out another man in fatigues. So, a second wave was mounting on Grimaldi’s side of the Learjet, too.
A
