“I do,” the one on Bolan’s left said. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” His accent was heavy, but his English was excellent. He punctuated his words by jabbing the muzzle of his rifle at Bolan.
“Door was open,” Bolan answered, shrugging. “I’m the negotiator,” he said.
“Negotiator?”
“I was sent to hear your demands, make arrangements for their fulfillment,” Bolan said. “What, they didn’t tell you?”
The two men glanced at each other again, then back to Bolan. “You two are with the group called the, uh, the BR, right? Fighting for freedom for your oppressed ethnic group?”
“We fight the oppression of Fahzal!” the English speaker said proudly. His companion either knew enough English to agree, or recognized the tone; he smiled and nodded with equal pride.
“Yes, by threatening to kill children,” Bolan said. “But thanks. It would have been irresponsible of me not to check.”
As he said the words, Bolan knew both men’s brains would be focused on the dialogue he had created with them, and not immediately on his actions. They had already, thanks to his assertion, formed an opinion in their minds as to his purpose there.
The six-inch blade of the stiletto snapped open in his hand. He swung the knife up and slashed out across both of their throats in turn. Bolan sidestepped to his right, his right hand completing the arc. He elbowed the closest man in the back of the head to drive him to the floor. The other terrorist, the man who had spoken, fell to his knees clutching at his throat. He died with his eyes wide, trying and failing to say something with his last breath.
Bolan bent, picked up the better-looking of the two assault rifles and checked it. He grabbed the spare magazines the terrorists had carried, then took a moment to pop open the second rifle, pull the bolt and drop that bolt into his bag. There was no point in leaving functioning weapons behind him if he could help it.
It was time to get down to business, before those two were missed.
Neither man appeared to have a wireless phone or a walkie-talkie. That meant that either the terrorists were operating according to a preset plan, or they were using runners to transmit messages to the different teams securing the building. Either way, Bolan had just opened a gaping hole in their perimeter at the school’s front door. He had to make sure they were too busy with him to realize that fact. And he’d have to hope that the forces outside didn’t discover it, blunder in and make everything a lot more complicated. They were already going to be agitated, knowing that an unknown quantity had waltzed right past their roadblocks.
He considered the situation as he assessed his immediate environment for more threats. Brognola’s briefing had included some notes on the political climate surrounding the events of the past day and a half in Kuala Lumpur. Ostensibly, Fahzal’s government wasn’t mounting a counterterrorist operation to retake the school for fear of what would happen to Fahzal’s son, Jawan, and to the other hostages. Realistically, if Fahzal was the sort of man who was willing to use his son’s kidnapping as an excuse to carry out a genocide, it wouldn’t be out of the question that he might be prolonging the episode deliberately. Every moment of bad press the BR got was a nail in the coffin of both that group and the Chinese-Indian ghetto between Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya.
Bolan knew it was a standard policy of such regimes. First, you used a common enemy to generate support for your cause, even if that enemy was contrived. Then, you herded all of your supposed enemies into a centralized location, where you could control and monitor them. And finally, you solved the contrived problem by killing the enemies you’d rounded up.
Bolan couldn’t help but think that was the real motive here. Fahzal may not have anticipated his own boy being caught in the cross fire, but the soldier figured the Malaysian prime minister would have found another excuse to raze the ghetto if this one hadn’t come up. If the BR’s brutal activities could be used to paint all of the members of that ghetto neighborhood with the label of child-killing terrorists, it was likely Fahzal would be able to justify his actions with at least some of the international community. He most certainly would be able to use it as an excuse, a rationale, for his brutal tactics at home.
The Executioner didn’t intend to let him get that far.
The foyer, opening up from the double doors, had a small door set at the far end. Bolan cautiously checked this and found a storage closet with a floor buffer inside. He dragged the two bodies into the closet, throwing the now useless Kalashnikov in after them. He paused a moment, then placed the functional Kalashnikov with its magazines in a corner of the storage room, under the mop and bucket standing next to the buffer. Much as the firepower might be needed, he could not risk going full-auto, and he needed to be able to travel fast and light. He eased the door shut. Then he paused and simply listened.
It was eerily quiet inside. He could hear voices amplified through bullhorns outside, probably the police or Padan Muka throwing demands at the terrorists or at the Westerner who had just blundered into their midst. Given that Fahzal’s people, or at least those at the upper levels, knew the CIA had brought in a troubleshooter they didn’t want, the soldier was a little surprised no one had taken a shot at him at some point. Bureaucracy seemed to be working in his favor; even a despotic regime like Fahzal’s had many tentacles, and the dozens or hundreds of right hands didn’t know what the dozens or hundreds of left hands were doing at any given moment.
The sound of the bullhorns was faint through the heavy front doors. Even if they had no reason to want to shoot him on sight, Bolan knew that walking so boldly into the midst of this hostage crisis might prompt a reaction from the police and troops outside. He was, however, gambling hard that it wouldn’t. He could smell politics here. He was going to bet his life that the armed men outside would stay right where they were until Fahzal was ready to move—and not before.
Bolan consulted the intelligence files in his secure satellite phone. On the small color screen he called up the floor plan of the building. It might or might not be completely accurate; the plans were those originally filed for the construction of the structure a few years before. Had those plans been altered during construction, or had the building been renovated subsequently, the information in the soldier’s phone could be flawed. That did not matter. He would work with what he had. This was why Brognola and the Man had chosen him for a seat-of-the-pants, near-suicidal mission of this type. Bolan gave the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group plausible deniability if things got ugly. He could be dismissed as a rogue operative for whom the United States would claim no responsibility. Much more important, he was the type of flexible, veteran combat operative who could roll with a fluid situation and come out on top, trusting his guts, his guns and his sense of intuition to get the job done.
According to the floor plan, the classrooms were located on the second and third floors. The main floor was used for administrative facilities and consisted of small offices. The fourth floor boasted a large auditorium with skylights and roof access.
Bolan put himself in the position of Fahzal’s forces. That roof would almost certainly be covered by snipers, and unless the skylights could be blocked somehow, there would be a clear line of sight to anyone in the auditorium. That would mean the BR terrorists wouldn’t set up in the auditorium, despite the convenience of having a large, open space to keep their hostages corralled. That is, they wouldn’t set up in the auditorium unless they were profoundly stupid. Bolan had no reason to think they would be.
He was left, then, with the classrooms on the middle two floors, and that would make things more difficult. He would have to search room by room, eliminating resistance as we he went, doing it as quietly as he could
