opportunity to dash in a crouch into the thin woods to the spot ten yards away where he had stashed his snowmobile. As he ran, he ejected the spent magazine in his Desert Eagle, grabbed into his ammo pouch for a fresh one and rammed it home.
Behind him, the cabin groaned once and collapsed on itself with a heavy sigh resembling a man’s final exhale, becoming a fifteen-foot heap of flickering rubble. Without the building’s hungry flames leaping high into the air, visibility was abruptly and dramatically reduced.
Peering through the trees with his night-vision goggles, Bolan could see his adversary in a prone position behind his snowmobile, the stubby muzzle of his Uzi poking around the vehicle’s front end. The man’s partners had moved far enough away to be outside the halo emitted by the burning cabin, apparently playing the odds that their opponent would not be equipped with night vision. Considering what his course of action would be if the tables were turned, Bolan thought his enemies would take cover in one of the little snow gullies before attempting a flanking movement. He jumped onto his snowmobile, revved the powerful motor, and sped straight toward the gunman who had been attempting to pin him down while his partners maneuvered.
In an effort to reduce his profile as much as possible, Bolan hugged his snowmobile’s fuselage as he shot out of the tree line on a direct course for the man lying in a covered position behind his vehicle. Making sure to maintain a straight-on approach to take advantage of the protection his snowmobile’s windshield offered, Bolan fired the Desert Eagle with his left hand, holding the snowmobile’s handlebars steady with his right.
The move obviously surprised his opponent, who hesitated for a fatal second before engaging the fast-approaching warrior with his Uzi, filling the night air with the chilling sound of automatic chatter. The 9 mm lead sprayed wildly across the space separating Bolan from his enemy. Bullets ricocheted off his bulletproof windshield as he charged forward at full throttle, covering the distance between him and his foe in less than thirty seconds. In a move resembling that of a bullfighter, the Executioner swung outward at the last instant in order to avoid a collision, his Desert Eagle roaring death in triple-time tempo. A few rounds sparked upon impact with the gunman’s Uzi a nanosecond before a pair of .44 rounds whizzing through the air in heel-to-toe configuration found the man’s face, exploding his head in a crimson blossom. Bolan pulled hard on the snowmobile’s handlebars while depressing the brake, causing the machine to slide sideways next to the dead man’s vehicle. Throwing himself to the ground, he rolled into a prone position taking advantage of both snowmobiles for cover.
From his new location, he looked out beyond the pile of smoldering rubble of the cabin. One of his two remaining opponents was crawling toward the microwave cannon, while his partner engaged Bolan with a steady stream of lead from the relative safety of a snow gully approximately fifty feet away. Bolan drew his Beretta and fired the silenced weapon with his right hand while simultaneously blazing away with the Desert Eagle in his left, halting the man’s progress toward the cannon and driving him back into the same gully as his teammate. A series of angry curses told him he had hit, albeit not fatally, the gunner trying to reach the microwave weapon.
With his enemies now occupying positions where they could battle him with only their heads exposed above the lip of the gully, the situation was classic trench warfare. Two adversarial forces separated by a no-man’s land one hundred yards wide, with the microwave cannon occupying a position equidistant from both sides. In this situation, the day would belong to the combatant who could flush the other from cover.
Bolan holstered his Beretta, changed out magazines in the Desert Eagle and, while sporadically firing well-aimed shots to prevent his foes from advancing, reached into one of the pouches on his web belt containing a length of thin cord resembling braided dental floss. The three-hundred-foot length of specialty twine was fine enough to fold entirely in the palm of his hand while possessing all the strength of mountaineering rope.
Remaining behind the fuselage of his late adversary’s snowmobile, Bolan reached up and wrapped a section of the cord around the vehicle’s throttle to provide a steady fuel supply. When he turned the ignition key, the engine sprang to life, purring in neutral while he twisted the handlebars to aim the snowmobile toward the gully holding his foes. With the rounds from his Desert Eagle keeping his opponents pinned, Bolan used his free hand to unhook two concussion grenades from his combat belt’s webbing and set the fuses to their maximum thirty seconds. Throwing the shift into gear, he dropped the apple-shaped bombs into the snowmobile’s two cup holders and released the vehicle.
The snowmobile moved on a perfectly straight course from Bolan to the gully, where it toppled into the depression, carrying its lethal load into the trench occupied by the two gunmen. When the grenades detonated with an eardrum-throbbing concussion, they ignited the vehicle’s gas tank, spraying the fuel through the trench in a firestorm reminiscent of a Vietnam napalm attack. The ferocious explosion left no doubt regarding its effectiveness, but Bolan had his Desert Eagle loaded, cocked and held at the ready when he walked to the edge of the snow gully to investigate the damage. His former adversaries were charred beyond recognition, calling to mind the corpse he had discovered inside the cabin.
The Executioner walked slowly back to his snowmobile, started the engine and drove to the microwave weapon. With a remaining section of the cord, he was able to securely attach the sled to his vehicle before setting off toward the North Dakota border approximately seven hours distant. When he got close to the States, he’d come into range of a telephone tower enabling him to make an encrypted call to Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller. She would take care of the necessary cleanup and the retrieval of remains to be delivered to the families of the Nautech engineers.
The hunting horn had been sounded. There were miles to go before the Executioner would find rest.
2
Ali Ansari Hasseim squinted against the water’s glare as he gazed southwest from the outskirts of Bandar-e Abbas, a biblical town on Iran’s Persian coast across the channel from Qeshm Island. Below him sat the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which twenty percent of the world’s oil supply passed. The busy waterway was bordered by Iran, Oman’s Musandam Peninsula and the United Arab Emirates. Were it not for the region’s constant political unrest, the Iranian shoreline’s rugged beauty and perfect climate would have the potential to make the locale one of the world’s top vacation destinations. As it was, however, there were no vacationers in the vicinity. Most of those who ventured along the scenic trails traversed by Hasseim and his ilk were heavily armed with the intent to kill.
For centuries, the coastal strip on which Hasseim and his four companions stood had been recognized as a strategic key to controlling the entire Persian Gulf. Blocking the landlocked waterway’s sole egress at the point where it emptied into the Indian Ocean’s Gulf of Oman was a tactic used at a time when the only power available for ships came from either the wind or human rowers. In contemporary times, closing the Strait of Hormuz would create a logjam, snarling military and commercial traffic alike. In such a situation, American warships patrolling the Gulf would be sitting ducks.
Wind gusts hugging the shoreline whipped a combination of sea salt and desert dust into thin clouds that raced across the land break. Hasseim avoided breathing the gritty mixture by pulling a corner of his black checkered kaffiyeh over his nose and mouth, covering the jagged scar that ran from his left earlobe to the edge of his lower lip, tugging his mouth into a perpetual frown.
In the distance, silhouetted against the horizon out beyond the islands of Hormoz and Larak, Hasseim could see the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the United States Navy’s nuclear aircraft carriers. At the sight of the occupying force, Hassein’s heartbeat quickened in anger. Bitter bile found its way into his mouth, causing him to turn from his companions while he lifted the corner of his kaffiyeh and spit the rancid liquid onto the ground where it was immediately absorbed into the dust.
His
