been for decades. His fiery rhetoric and extreme interpretation of the Koran had earned him followers among the disaffected Muslim youth of the area and the interest, albeit passively, of the RCMP.
The next man at the table was the youth with the wispy beard. Bolan identified him as Aram Mohammed Hadayet. It was his cell-phone calls that had been intercepted. An automatic pistol sat on the kitchen table in front of the youth. He listened as the cleric spoke, but his eyes kept shifting to the pistol on the table.
Next to Hadayet sat the man who had so excited the DIA—Walid Sourouri. A known graduate of al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sourouri had impressed his trainers with his nondescript demeanor and language capabilities. No glorious death by suicide for this warrior. Instead he was employed to help the networks circumvent the technical superiority of Western intelligence agencies by keeping things primitively simple. Sitting at the imam’s kitchen table was the foot messenger of al Qaeda.
The third man was Raneen Ogedi, a blunt-featured man with a large reputation within the intelligence community. It was a gruesome reputation that had somehow failed to capture the attention of the news media for one reason or another. Despite this, Bolan realized he had stumbled upon a killer from the Iraqi A-list of wanted men.
Ogedi was a former cell commander of Saddam’s fedayeen, and an operator who had exploited his Syrian intelligence contacts to funnel in foreign fighters during the earlier stages of the American occupation and to later on target Iraqi consensus government Shiite officials in hopes of exacerbating a civil war. He had been a virulent Baathist until the fall of Saddam, after which he had suddenly found his Muslim faith again, most specifically its very radical and extreme fringe elements.
The man was almost never accompanied by less than a squad of Syrian-trained bodyguards, but Bolan saw no evidence of them in the kitchen. Like the youth Hadayet, Ogedi had a weapon positioned in front on him on the kitchen table. The wire-stock of the Skorpion machine pistol had been collapsed, and the automatic weapon was barely larger than a regular handgun.
The resolution on the borescope was state-of-the-art, and Bolan was able to make out several books on the table as well as the weapons. One was a copy of the Koran, another a modern arms book and the third a U.S. Army munitions manual.
Bakr was speaking directly to Hadayet, his words impassioned. The youth nodded in agreement and muttered something in a low voice. The cleric’s blunt finger tapped the worn copy of the Koran for emphasis, and Sourouri nodded in enthusiastic agreement. His bulky parka fell open when he did, and Bolan got a flash of the nylon strap supporting the man’s shoulder holster.
Out of the jumble of conversation Bolan suddenly heard several words he recognized from his intel briefings at Stony Man Farm. Someone said Monzer al-Kassar’s name, which he’d already known. Then Hadayet said a different name: Scimitar.
The code name was cliché but iconic and was used as the calling card of a man believed to be at the center of the web of an international network of violent jihadist and criminal enterprises that stretched across the Middle East and southwest Asia.
Bolan slowly pulled his borescope out from under the lip of the door. He coiled the fiber-optic camera cable back up into a tight loop and attached it behind the heads-up display with a little Velcro strap designed for the purpose. He slid the device into the inside pocket of his jacket and shifted the H&K MP-5 SD-3 around.
Gary Manning’s deep voice came across the com-link. His voice remained calm but his urgency was obvious.
“We’ve got trouble,” Manning said. “There was nothing across the scanner, but I got an unmarked sedan with a dashboard light that just pulled into the alley.”
“Roger,” Bolan whispered.
“Get out!” Manning’s voice suddenly gritted. “Get out, they just rushed the door and a request for backup call just went out over the scanner. My boys had a surveillance operation. Get out.”
At that moment Bolan heard the downstairs door break open and the shouts of men as they entered the stairway on the first floor.
“Get Jack into the air and over the rally point,” Bolan ordered.
“Roger,” Manning acknowledged.
Then everything began to fall apart.
The voices in the kitchen went silent then burst into frantic curses, and in the distance Bolan heard the wail of police sirens. He knew with sudden intuition that a storm had just arrived in Toronto.
CHAPTER THREE
Bolan heard chairs scrape across the floor from inside the mosque’s kitchen and backpedaled from the door as it was thrown open. Light spilled into the gloomy hallway like dawn rising, and Bolan dropped to one knee and swung up the MP-5.
The first of the kitchen cabal rushed into the hallway. Raneen Ogedi held his Skorpion machine pistol at hip height as he emerged from the cramped room, his head already turning toward the far end of the hall where the footsteps of numerous men could be clearly heard thundering up the fire stairs. He looked stunned to see the black-clad Bolan crouched in the hallway. Ogedi leveled his weapon. The chugging sound of the silenced MP-5 was eerie as Bolan pulled down on the terrorist. His spent shells were caught in the cloth-and-wire brass catcher attached to the weapon’s ejection port. A 3-round burst of 9 mm Parabellum slugs ripped into the Iraqi’s face with brutal effect.
Blood splashed like paint onto the wood of the door and stood out vividly against the pale linoleum of the kitchen floor behind the man. Ogedi turned in a sloppy half circle and bounced off the kitchen door before dropping onto the ancient carpet of the hallway.
The next figure in the frantic line stumbled into the door frame. Bolan cut loose again and put a tight burst into the chest of the pistol wielding Sourouri, who had raced into the hallway directly behind the Iraqi killer. The man’s eyes were locked on the fallen form of his jihadist brother, and they lifted in shock as Bolan’s rounds punched up under his sternum, mangling his lungs and heart.
Blood gushed in a waterfall over the lips of the man’s gaping mouth and he tripped up in Ogedi’s legs and went down face-first. Bolan saw Bakr frozen at the edge of the kitchen door, hands held out and empty, his eyes locked on the grim specter of the Executioner.
Down the hallway the fire door burst open and Bolan glimpsed three men in suits, pistols drawn, as they raced into the hall. The lead man had a leather wallet open in his left hand and Bolan caught the dim flash of an RCMP badge.
Bolan rushed forward, hurtling the tangled mass of the two fallen terrorists. He slammed his shoulder into Bakr and knocked him out of the way. The old man grunted under the impact and spun off Bolan, stumbling backward over a chair and falling heavily to the kitchen floor. Something in Bolan, some sense of mercy or propriety, kept him from killing the man.
The soldier used the momentum of his impact with the man to spin to one side, putting himself at an angle to the fumbling Aram Hadayet, who was attempting to bring his pistol to bear. Bolan gripped his MP-5 in both hands and chopped it down like an ax, using the long sound suppressor like a bayonet.
The smoking, cylindrical tube struck the youth in his narrow almost-feminine wrist with a crack, and he dropped his weapon in surprised shock. Bolan swept the submachine-gun back and then thrust it forward, burying it in the Syrian’s soft abdomen. Hadayet folded as he gagged, and Bolan cracked him across the back of the neck with the MP-5’s collapsible buttstock. The youth went down hard to the floor. A cell phone skidded out
