off the power to his rifle’s light-gathering optics and snapped his rifle down. His muzzle tracked from rock to rock as he searched the unforgiving glare for targets. Bolan began to feel a mounting sense of dread.
There was nothing.
Bolan had been betting that whoever was out there was wearing night-vision equipment, and the intense flare of the burning magnesium would have solarized their optics and temporarily blinded them. Bolan had also hoped to find his enemy blinded, stumbling and exposed by the sudden supernova of light.
Nothing moved.
There was no movement other than the running man from Musa Company. No sound other than the ragged panting of the runner in Bolan’s earpiece, his boots crunching into sand and rock, and the stuttering hiss of the burning flare as it slowly floated to the ground on its parachutes.
Bolan began to engage nothing, firing rapidly into any dark crevice sheltered from the vertical glare of the grenade. He fired for effect, but nothing fired back. Darkness draped down the slopes of the hillsides as the burning grenade drifted low in the sky. The Pakistani clawed his way up the slope. His right hand filled with a Browning Hi-Power pistol. He caught sight of Bolan, who waved him forward and then crouched back down among the rocks.
A moment later the Pakistani piled into Bolan’s position. He collapsed against a boulder in a fit of ragged coughing. The world plunged into darkness once more as the grenade fluttered sputtering to the ground. It landed among blades of rock and sent strobing pulses of light out from the crevices like a beacon. There were only scant seconds left of light. Bolan pulled his night-vision goggles back over his eyes and powered up the optics of his rifle.
“Who the hell are you?” the Pakistani wheezed in excellent English.
Bolan saw no reason to lie. “An American.”
The muzzle of the commando’s 9 mm pistol leveled at Bolan’s skull. “How do I know you are not…” The Pakistani’s voice trailed off. He lowered his pistol as he considered the destruction of his unit. The answer was obvious.
Bolan answered him anyway. “If I’d wanted you down, I’d have taken you down.”
The Pakistani commando glanced at Bolan’s telescopic rifle and accepted the truth of the statement. Bolan’s teeth clenched as his eyes told him nothing was out there and his spine told him the enemy was closing in. “You’re Musa Company.”
“Captain Mahmoud Makhdoom.” The Pakistani captain prudently turned his back to Bolan and watched the rear.
Bolan swept his scope across the landscape. There was still nothing to see. “What hit you?”
The Pakistani shuddered and shrugged at the same time. “Djinns?”
Bolan raised an eyebrow without looking up from his scope. Captains of highly professional special forces units didn’t often blame supernatural beings for their misfortunes. Bolan didn’t scoff. What he had seen with his own eyes and, more to the point, what he hadn’t seen, had set his own skin to crawling.
“We have to get out of here.”
“Indeed.” The captain’s hands were shaking. He had lost his entire unit and he, himself, had been assaulted by the invisible opponents.
“Striker!” Kurtzman was far from panic, but his voice had gone up a register. “What is your situation?”
“Situation…” Bolan searched for a way to summarize what was happening. “Bear, this situation has gone X-Files. Enemy unknown. Nature unknown. Numbers unknown. I am with Captain Mahmoud Makhdoom of Musa Company.” Bolan shook his head bitterly. The nukes were in unknown hands and there was no way to get his hands on them. “The nukes are gone. We are extracting.”
Bolan turned to Makhdoom. “You do have extraction?”
“Helicopters will come if I call for them, but I was maintaining silence until you broke into our channel. Our primary extraction point was the plateau above your position.”
Bolan gazed out into the dark. “I think the djinns can hear you.”
Makhdoom nodded unhappily. “I believe you are correct.”
Bolan considered the plateau he had crossed earlier in the evening. It was three hundred yards upslope, and an ugly climb. The only alternative was to stay where they were and wait. “Do it.”
Makhdoom spoke rapid Sind into his radio. Bolan could feel invisible ears pricking up and taking notice of the transmission.
The Pakistani nodded. “The chopper is coming, with gunship escort.”
Bolan took out his two white-phosphorous grenades and pulled the pins. “Go!”
Makhdoom bolted from cover and began to claw his way up the rock slope. Bolan hurled his grenades off to the right and left. The grenades detonated and the incandescent flare of magnesium was replaced by hellish heat of burning phosphorous that shot up into the sky in streamers trailing white smoke. Bolan burned a magazine in an arc in front of him and began loping up the hill. He clicked in a fresh magazine and pounded up the mountainside.
Makhdoom’s voice boomed. “Down!”
Bolan went flat into the rocks as a grenade sailed over his head and detonated with the whipcrack of high-explosive driving razor-sharp bits of metal at supersonic speeds. The fragmentation hissed and sparked off the rocks. Bolan leaped back up and climbed for the plateau. He passed the Pakistani and clawed on upward.
“Allah Akhbar!” The man from Musa Company roared in religious defiance against the unseen. He rose up and began unloading his pistol in rapid double taps in an arc across the way they had come. No cries rang out. No answering fire came back. Makhdoom was firing at shadows.
The shadows were closing in.
Makhdoom’s pistol racked open on a smoking empty chamber. Bolan whirled. “Go! Go! Go!”
The captain turned and ran, reloading his pistol as Bolan pumped covering fire into the trail behind him. The big American searched for flaming figures, unnatural shadows, any break in the landscape, any movement at all.
There was nothing.
Every fiber of Bolan’s being screamed at him that time was running out.
“Go!” Makhdoom roared. “I will cover.”
Bolan and the Pakistani leapfrogged positions up the mountainside. Bolan clambered up beside the captain and stopped. “I think they’re waiting for us up top.”
Makhdoom’s commando knife rasped out into his left hand. “Inshallah.”
God willing.
Bolan smiled grimly. The man from Musa Company wanted payback. Voices spoke in Bolan’s ear in Sind. Translator 2 spoke from Washington. “The helicopters say ETA five minutes.”
The Pakistani spoke. “The helicopters will be here in—”
“Five minutes, I know.”
An eyebrow rose above the captain’s goggles. It was very clear that just about everyone
