Don Pendleton: Lethal Tribute

The translator stopped as the transmission was cut off. Bolan didn’t need translation. He had the man in plain view. The man in Section 1 who was transmitting levitated from where he crouched. His arms flailed and with a convulsive jerk he floated up and over the rock he’d been crouching behind and disappeared.

Section 2 began firing in all directions. One soldier rose. He heaved and flailed. His silenced submachine gun fell from his hands as he stumbled backward like a spastically moon-walking marionette. He dropped from sight in a crevice between two boulders.

“Bear! What do you have!”

“Movement, Striker!” Kurtzman was also perplexed by what he was seeing via satellite. “Anomalous movement! Musa Company is in a fight with something, but we can’t see it!”

“Bear!” Bolan watched as another man from Musa Company was seized by the invisible and dragged into darkness. “Give me something!”

“Striker, there is nothing! I repeat! Satellite does not pick up any hostiles! All we—Jesus!”

Bolan watched as the waist, legs and then boots of a Musa Company commando were dragged behind a boulder and disappeared.

“Striker, this is Translator 2.” The woman’s voice trembled. “I have nothing. No Musa Company units are transmitting. Only headquarters is on the channel, demanding to know what’s happening. It sounds like they are panicking back in Islamabad.”

Bolan watched through his night optics. Nothing moved but the wind whistling through the rocks.

“Striker, we have nothing.” Kurtzman’s voice went flat. “Musa Company is gone.”

Bolan’s skin crawled.

“Striker?”

Bolan strained all of his senses out into the darkness. “Receiving you, Bear.”

“Get the hell out of there.”

Bolan adjusted the gain on his optics. “I see movement.”

“Confirmed!” Kurtzman was adjusting his own optics from their vantage two hundred miles up in space. “Looks like one of Musa Company, staying low in the rocks and maintaining radio silence.”

Bolan watched the man crawl through the mountain terrain. His submachine gun was cradled in his hands and his head whipped back and forth fearfully. The Executioner’s instincts tingled as he felt the watching presence of the enemy. Something else was out there and it was observing the man from Musa Company, as well. Bolan had ugly thoughts of cats tormenting mice before the kill.

“Bear, can you patch me in to him?”

“I cannot recommend that course of action, Striker.”

“Can you do it?”

“Striker, has it occurred to you whatever the hell is out there achieved total surprise because they were listening to everything that Musa Company was saying? We compromised their secure channel. I’m thinking someone else did, too. Right now I think—and I emphasize think—you’re anonymous because we are communicating via satellite. The minute you transmit on the Musa Company radio frequency you are fair game, Striker.”

“Do it.”

“Striker, I cannot recommend against this strongly enough—”

“Do it!”

Kurtzman acquiesced unhappily. “Patching you in, Striker. Link achieved, you are on the Pakistani secure mission net. The minute we unsquelch you, you are active. Do you want the translator?”

“No.” Bolan turned on his radio and spoke in English. “Surviving Musa Unit Section 2! Move due north! Now! As fast as you can! I will cover you!”

There was a split second’s hesitation, then the man rose and bolted for his life. Bolan’s eyes slitted as something blurred behind the man in his optics. The Executioner pulled his trigger repeatedly and the M-1 A rifle bucked against his shoulder. Bolan couldn’t tell if he had gotten any hits. There was nothing there but shards of rock and boulders the size of men. The Pakistani ran as if hell were on his heels.

Bolan snarled silently. He could feel the enemy. They were all around.

The Musa Company soldier suddenly staggered as if he had run into an invisible wall. His submachine gun flew from his hands as he toppled to one side and then staggered backward. The air around him blurred. Bolan fired three quick shots directly behind the tottering Pakistani.

The Musa Company soldier seemed to be walking backward against his will toward an outcropping.

Bolan spun the sound suppressor from the muzzle of his rifle and aimed just above the Pakistani’s head as he squeezed the trigger repeatedly.

The M-1 A scout ripped into life. Without the suppressor the rifle spit flame in a meter-long muzzle-blast. The rifle cycled through the remains of its 20-round.

Bolan’s position was revealed to the world by the strobing fire of his rifle.

“Striker!” Kurtzman’s voice thundered in Bolan’s ear. “You’re lit up like Christmas!”

Bolan knew it all too well, but the gambit paid off.

The Pakistani stumbled forward, clutching his throat, seemingly released from the grip of the invisible entity. Bolan slapped in a fresh magazine of full power 7.62 mm ammo and began engaging the unseen. His weapon pounded out rounds like a jackhammer out of control as he laid down covering fire to either side of the Pakistani as he began to run again. Bolan’s weapon finally clacked open on empty. He shoved in a fresh magazine and slid a rifle grenade down over the muzzle of his weapon. The grenade clicked into place on the launching rings that the Cowboy had machined into the weapon back in Virginia.

“Musa!” Bolan transmitted as he raised his rifle skyward and fired. “Take off your goggles!”

The rifle boomed against Bolan in recoil and the grenade shot up into the night sky. Bolan ripped off his night-vision goggles as the French Night-Sun illumination munition detonated like a star going supernova. The burning magnesium flare burst into five-million candlepower brilliance. The lunar landscape of the pass was thrown into a shadowless white incandescence. Bolan flicked 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.”