Don Pendleton - Loose Cannon

“Ashar!” Muhtar shouted to his brother. “Behind you! They have a bomb!”

ASHAR YEILAM WHIRLED at the sound of his brother’s voice. Muhtar had managed to get a shot off before blacking out, and one of the men approaching the governor’s car dropped to the road. The others continued forward, closing ranks to protect the man in the middle of the formation. Shelby Ferstera had also been alerted by Muhtar’s cry and two more men went down when the Aussie cut loose with his M-16. Ashar took out a fourth with the last round in his weapon. That left three men, however, including the one fumbling with the bomb concealed beneath his loose shirt. They reached the car and pressed themselves against the passenger side of the vehicle.

There was no time for Ashar to reload. Casting the gun aside, he raised one foot onto the front bumper of the car, then pushed off with the other and leapt up onto the hood. As his forward momentum carried him toward the three demonstrators, Ashar extended his arms. The other men were crowded together enough that he was able to collide with all three of them, knocking them away from the car. As he fell to road, the young police officer managed to drag down two of the men, including the bomber.

But it wasn’t enough.

Though shaken and lying on his back, the bomber quickly regained his wits and grabbed at the detonator wired to the sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. With a malignant grin, he eyed Ashar, who was an arm’s length away, preparing to lunge..

“Praise Allah!” the bomber cried out, triggering the detonator.

THE EXECUTIONER and his colleagues were thirty yards from the partially built home the JI snipers were firing from. “Try to hot-wire the bulldozer and put it to use!” Bolan shouted to Grimaldi.

The pilot nodded and was headed toward the earthmover when a violent explosion shook the ground under his feet, throwing him off balance. Bolan felt it, too. He crouched behind a Jeep, M-16 at the ready, and glanced over his shoulder, just in time to see the governor’s car fly into the air and slam back onto the road, landing on its roof.. There was a small crater in the road where the bomb had gone off. Nearby, a fresh heap of corpses lay in mangled ruin.

“Suicide bomber,” John Kissinger murmured, hunched next to Bolan behind the Jeep.

Bolan nodded gravely, ears ringing from the explosion. One side of the governor’s car had been caved in by the bomb’s force, but he thought there was a chance the governor might have survived the blast. If so, Zailik would have to wait to be rescued. Shelby Ferstera’s surviving commandos had their hands full contending with snipers on the hill behind the tent city, and when gunfire coming from a second house peppered his Jeep, Bolan knew that he was locked into his own battlefield.

Daud Umar, the Densus 88 member rounding out Bolan’s crew, had taken cover behind a stack of lumber just to the right of the Jeep. He fired at the enemy gunners in the second house, then pulled back when a return volley splintered the two-by-fours.

“Give ’em a grenade!” Bolan shouted.

Umar nodded, grabbing for an M6 clipped to his ammo belt. He waited out another round from the JI gunners, then thumbed the pin free and twisted his body, heaving the grenade. His aim was off, but not by much. The grenade exploded as it struck the loose dirt just in front of the house where the sniper was embedded.

The front door flew off its hinges and a dust cloud bloomed into the air, mixing with smoke given off by the blast. Bolan doubted the enemy inside the house had been taken out, but he figured they’d at least been distracted.

“Now!” he called out, breaking clear of the Jeep.

Together, Bolan and Kissinger rushed the house, using the dust cloud to mask their approach. Kissinger, like Bolan, had been issued an M-16, but his assault rifle came equipped with an under-barrel M-203 grenade launcher. As the dust began to settle, he stopped and planted himself behind a bulky, two-wheeled rototiller, shifting his trigger finger from the carbine to the launcher.

“Go wide!” he shouted to Bolan, waving to his left.

The Executioner veered away from Kissinger, following the dust cloud as it began to drift. Kissinger took aim at the house, peering through the haze. Once he could make out the framework of the ground-floor window, he fired. A 40 mm grenade whooshed from the launcher and finished off the job Daud Umar had started, penetrating the house before it detonated.

Bolan didn’t wait to see if the blast had neutralized the enemy. Cutting toward the house, he set his sights on the front door, ready to finish the job.

FIFTY YARDS AWAY, Grimaldi had already scrambled past the dead man next to the bulldozer and climbed up to the driver’s compartment. There was blood on the seat and when Grimaldi glanced down to his right, he spotted another slain worker sprawled on the ground near the treads. The man had apparently been gunned down while at the controls, because there were keys in the ignition, saving Grimaldi the need to hot-wire the engine.

“We’ll take our breaks where we get them,” the pilot muttered as he cranked the ignition. White smoke belched from the exhaust and the gears meshed noisily as he worked the clutch and maneuvered the front plow off the ground, giving himself just enough clearance to proceed.

The bulldozer rumbled and groaned as its tanklike treads clawed at the ground, pulling it forward. Grimaldi had seen the damage Umar and Kissinger had inflicted on the second house being used by the JI, and as they joined the Executioner in storming the house, he wrestled with the controls, moving down the unpaved street toward the structure from which the enemy had fired the missile rounds that had brought down the two choppers. Grimaldi could only hope they didn’t have a rocket left with his name on it.

NOORDIN ZAILIK WAS DISORIENTED when he regained consciousness. The last thing he remembered was one of the motorcycle officers tackling some demonstrators who’d rushed his car. Now, partly deaf, his face bleeding and his shoulder throbbing with raw pain, he found himself staring up at the backseat of the car. It made no sense. It was only after he’d turned slightly and found himself staring at bits of flaming debris on the road that he realized the car had flipped over. The passenger side of the vehicle was caved in and the windows had all shattered.

A bomb, Zailik thought.

Still dazed, the politician groaned, trying to move. He let out a cry as he shifted his weight onto his injured shoulder. Another shout leapt from his bleeding lips when a hand reached out and grabbed hold of him. He whirled and saw his chauffeur staring at him from a space between his headrest and the collapsed rooftop.

“Don’t move, sir.”

Zailik could barely hear the man, but he understood what was being said. He stayed put, grimacing, as the chauffeur contorted and slowly wriggled through what was left of the window frame next to him. Once he was out on the road, the driver crawled over and looked in at Zailik.

“Stay put,” he told the governor. “I’ll get—”

The chauffeur’s voice trailed off suddenly and his eyes went blank as blood and gore erupted from his chest and sprayed Zailik. The driver fell to the ground, dead.

Terrified, Zailik stared past the chauffeur’s body and caught a glimpse of one of the houses in the partially built development set just off the road. There was movement in one of the upper windows, and when he looked closer, Zailik saw a man taking aim at him through a high-powered rifle. He knew that even if he wasn’t injured, there would be no time for him to avoid the sniper’s next round….