he’d had to inspect the gear. He tested the top round in the magazine while he was looking, and decided that the spring felt weak, too. He dropped the magazine to the floor of the car. His prints weren’t on file anywhere, and the weapons Rosli had provided would not be traceable to any operation run by the Farm; if some overzealous Royal Malaysian Police officer decided to claim the magazine as evidence, he was free to do so and feel good about himself.
He quickly removed the slide of the 93-R. This was harder to do than normal because Rosli was sliding in and out of traffic like a man possessed. The smell of abused brake pads filled the compact car’s cabin and the engine screamed in protest.
He’d been able to travel with a small tactical flashlight. He took it from the pocket of his cargo pants and used its bright beam to illuminate the barrel and chamber from the muzzle end of the weapon. All seemed to be in order. He was intimately familiar with how the machine pistol should look and operate when properly functional. The finish had been badly scuffed by impact with the pavement, but nothing seemed damaged.
He reassembled the weapon, worked the slide a few times and, satisfied, started checking magazines. When he checked the spring tension and the feed lips of all of them, carefully, he inserted one and chambered the first round, setting the weapon’s safety and holstering it in his shoulder rig.
“It is my fault,” Rosli said. “I obtained the weaponry specified at your request. I should have been more meticulous.”
“It happens,” the Executioner said. “If gear has flaws, combat exposes them, without fail. And at the worst possible time.”
“Yes, this is true. Your philosophy is wise.”
“Not mine,” Bolan said. “Murphy’s Law.”
“Just so. You are ready?”
“Yeah,” Bolan said. “How long?”
“Now,” Rosli said. “We are here.”
Rosli guided the little car to a halt a block away from where the action was, from what the soldier could see. The two men stepped out of the vehicle.
“Where will you be?” Bolan asked Rosli.
“I thought I would be coming with you.”
“No,” Bolan said, shaking his head. “I work alone for this part. Stay out of sight, but stay close. I may need what or who you know before this is over.”
Without another word, the Executioner strode forward, toward the danger.
3
The school reflected the fact that it catered to the progeny of the wealthy and powerful. The building was an impressive neocolonial structure, four stories, with an elaborate entranceway and a sizable property around it—especially by the standards of a densely packed city like Kuala Lumpur. A parking lot, with a ramp leading to further underground parking, was located at the west side of the building. The cars parked in it were almost all very expensive.
Uniformed Royal Malaysian Police had set up a cordon half a block from the school. From what Bolan could see, coupled with the intelligence data Brognola had provided, every road leading to the school was blocked off. Wooden barricades had been erected and there were plenty of weapons in evidence, mostly Kalashnikov rifles. The intelligence files had included the fact that Fahzal’s regime was a regular purchaser of the Russian surplus arms, and that the first thing the Nationalist Party had done after sweeping to power was to authorize heavy expenditures upgrading or simply multiplying the weaponry used by both the military and law enforcement in the nation.
Fahzal’s internal security thugs would be among those so armed, though apparently the prime minister’s tastes ran to Israeli submachine guns as much as to Russian assault rifles. Bolan saw several knots of men in brown-and-black uniforms that could only be Padan Muka, based on what Rosli had told him. They had the dull, contemptuous look that he associated with goons of that type—people who enjoyed hurting others and who didn’t do much thinking about that, or anything. They weren’t soldiers and they certainly weren’t patriots, not in the righteous sense; they were hired muscle, and they were predators. The nearest Padan Muka triggermen eyed him hard as he passed them, giving him a cold look.
He’d dealt with their kind before, and taught more than a few of them very painful lessons. There was no time to indulge his sense of justice on nonpriority targets, however.
Brognola’s slim dossier had included the layout of the building he was now encountering. On the plane, he had formulated the most basic of plans, which left a lot to chance. He’d made his earliest incursions in his war against society’s predators perfecting his abilities at role camouflage, and what he was about to do was an aspect of that. Fixing his gaze on a point far ahead of him, he looked past everyone who noticed him, as if he were irritated, rushed and focused on getting to some point beyond each of the glaring Padan Muka fighters and police officers. He got past the first set of barriers simply by acting as if he belonged there.
He was counting on complacency. The barricade of the school, and the hostage crisis within, was in its second day. The guards outside, perhaps expecting fireworks early on, would have had plenty of reasons to get bored by this time. They’d have gone from expecting anything to expecting nothing; the human mind sought routine and pattern even when there was no rational reason to expect either.
More significantly, they’d be expecting either violent enemy action or deadly subterfuge. They were focused on the school and on stopping that enemy action from within. They would not be expecting an incursion from outside, nor would they automatically think they should prevent someone outside from going in. After all, how crazy would a man have to be to want to enter a building held by dangerous, armed terrorists willing to threaten the lives of children?
The hard part, therefore, was not getting past the cordon outside the school. As the Executioner nodded and brushed past the barricades, brazenly walking through them as if he belonged there, nobody challenged him directly. He had known it would probably work, but in the back of his mind he had been prepared to shoot his way through if necessary. There was no time to do otherwise, and no viable alternative.
When he reached the front doors of the school, a few of the Royal Malaysian Police officers began to shout at him. It was possible they hadn’t thought he’d do something so direct; perhaps they’d assumed he was simply moving toward the foremost barriers. Whatever they were shouting, he couldn’t understand it, anyway. He figured they probably wouldn’t shoot him for fear of touching off something inside the school.
Probably.
There were three sets of double doors within the front entrance. Each door was heavy, polished wood with brass fittings. The fogged glass of the doors has been starred with bullet holes, probably during the initial stage of the BR capture of the building. Bolan simply put his hand out and, ignoring the shouted protests from the men at the barricades, threw the doors open and stepped inside.
There were two men dressed in camouflage fatigues standing inside the doorway. They turned as he entered, but were apparently too baffled by his sudden appearance even to bother shooting him. They both held well-worn Kalashnikov clones, which they pointed at him.
“Hello there,” Bolan said cheerfully. “Do either of you speak English?”
The door slid shut on well-oiled hinges behind him. The click of the mechanism engaging echoed through the suddenly very quiet hallway.
The
