Don Pendleton: Rebel Force

Worldwide, terrorists had learned a lesson a decade earlier, in the spring of 1996, from the death of Dzokhar Dudayev. The Chechen leader had known he needed to limit the time he spent using the satellite phone given to him by his Islamic allies in Turkey. The survivor of two Russian assassination attempts had been wary of Moscow’s ability to home in on his communication signal and thus his location.

But on the evening of April 21, Dudayev, baited by Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s offer of peace talks, called an adviser in Moscow to discuss the impending negotiations.

Dudayev stayed on the phone too long.

American spy satellites, trained on Iraq and Kuwait, were quickly turned north to the Caucasus Mountains and Chechnya, according to media reports by a former communications specialist with the U.S. National Security Agency—NSA—The satellites pinpointed the Chechen leader’s location to within feet of his satellite phone signal, and the coordinates were sent to a Russian fighter jet.

Dudayev was killed by two laser-guided air-to-surface missiles while still holding the phone that had pinpointed his location.

Had Garabend made the same mistake? Only instead of missiles, had a call he made triggered a hit squad or some lone, hyper-skilled, assassin? Whatever the case, Bolan had enough to go on for the moment. Once Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman and his team got hold of the information in the communication device, they would have plenty of clues for further operations.

Bolan stepped around the desk and moved through the open door into the outer office chamber. The bodies of the dead Armenian’s bodyguards still lay sprawled around in haphazard disarray. After years of experience, Bolan had a critical, almost gifted, eye for crime-scene forensics. He was able to recreate the events of even the most horrific battle by the position of corpses, spent shell casings and blood spatter. In this case, rushed for time, he was unable to conclude whether this butcher’s work had been done by a coordinated team or a single, talented professional.

Bolan moved carefully through the room. He held his AKS at the ready as he approached the door. His feeling of disquiet had not subsided. He couldn’t place his unease, and that made it all the more bothersome. He stalked forward, pausing at the door leading out into the hall.

He stopped, sensed nothing, moved forward.

All hell broke loose.

When he stepped through the door and entered the hall, Bolan felt as if he had moved into a field of static electricity. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck lifted straight up as cold squirts of adrenaline surged into his body. The night fighter reacted instantly, without conscious thought. He dropped to one knee and leaned back in the doorway, sweeping the barrel of his AKS up and triggering a blast.

The unmistakable pneumatic cough of a sound-suppressed weapon firing full-automatic assaulted Bolan’s ears across the short distance. Shell casings clattered onto the linoleum floor, mixing with the sound of a weapon bolt leveraging back and forth rapidly. Bolan felt the angry whine of bullets fill the space where his head and chest had been only a heartbeat before.

The Executioner targeted diagonally across and down the office hall, firing his Russian assault rifle with practiced, instinctive ease. He let the recoil of the carbine shuttering in his strong grip carry him back through the doorway behind him in a tight roll. From his belly Bolan thrust the muzzle around the doorjamb and arced the weapon back and forth as he laid down quick, suppressive blasts.

The 5.45 mm rounds were deafening in the confined space and his ears rang painfully from the noise. Bolan reached up and jerked his night-vision goggles down so that they dangled from the rubber strap around his neck. He heard the bullets from his assailant’s answering burst smack into the plasterboard of the outer wall with smacks that rang louder than the muzzle-braked weapon’s own firing cycle.

From the impacts, Bolan determined the shooter was using a submachine gun and not an assault rifle, though he was hard-pressed to identify caliber with the suppressor in use. Bolan scrambled backward and rested his rifle barrel across the still-warm corpse of a dead bodyguard. If there was more than one assassin out there, and he were determined to get him, the person would either fire and maneuver to breach the room door, or possibly use grenades to clear him out.

There was silence for a long moment. Bolan’s head raced through strategies and options. If the assassin’s intent had been escape, then why had he bothered to stay behind or try to take Bolan out? If the unknown assailant was armed for a quiet kill, then that would indicate he was probably not carrying ordnance much heavier than the silenced submachine gun being used.

The main thing, Bolan’s experience told him, was getting momentum back into his possession. He quickly stripped an extra rifle from a dead bodyguard and hooked the sling over his shoulder. Conscious of how vulnerable he was, Bolan crawled back toward the door. He maneuvered the barrel of his AKS through the entrance and triggered an exploratory blast, conducting a recon by fire. Precious seconds ticked away.

Almost immediately, Bolan’s aggressive burst was answered with a tightly controlled one. Bullets tore into the wooden door frame and broke up the floor in front of his weapon. Bolan ducked back. He had what he needed. He had found a way to exploit his heavier armament.

The gunman had taken position across and two doors down the hall from the room where Bolan was trapped. From that location the gunmen controlled the fields of fire up and down the hall, preventing Bolan from leaving the office without exposing himself to withering, short-range fire.

Again, Bolan triggered a long, ragged blast. He tore apart the door of the office directly opposite him, then ran his larger caliber rounds down the hall to pour a flurry of lead through the sniper’s door. Tracer fire lit up the hallway with surrealistic strips of light like laser blasts in some low-budget science-fiction movie. Bolan could smell his own sweat and the hot oil of his AKS-74. The heavy dust hanging in the air, kicked up by the automatic weapon fire, choked him.

Bolan ducked back around as the gunman triggered an answering burst. Bolan heard the smaller caliber rounds strike the wall outside his door, saw how they failed to penetrate the building materials. It confirmed his suspicions that he was facing no more than a 9 mm caliber in the killer’s weapon.

Bolan snarled, gathering himself, and thrust his weapon out the office door a final time. He triggered the AKS and the assault rifle bucked in his hands. Bolan sprinted out through the doorway hard behind his covering fire. His rounds fell like sledgehammers around the door to the room of his ambusher. Hot gases warmed his wrists as the bolt of his weapon snapped open and shut, open and shut, as he carried his burst out to improbable length even as he raced forward.

Two steps from the office door directly opposite Garabend’s death room, Bolan’s magazine ran dry and the bolt locked open. Without hesitation, he flung down the empty weapon and dived forward. The big man’s hard shoulder struck the door. Already riddled with 5.45 mm bullets, the flimsy construction was no match for Bolan’s heavy frame and he burst through it into the room.

The Executioner went down with his forward momentum, landing on the shoulder he had used as a battering ram and somersaulting over it smoothly. He came up on one knee and swung his second AKS carbine off his shoulder, leveling it at the wall separating his position from the gunman’s. Bolan triggered his weapon from the waist, raking it back and forth in a tight, low Z-pattern. The battlefield rounds chewed through plywood, drywall and insulation with ease, bursting out the other side with terminal velocity.