Don Pendleton - Agent Of Peril

“That doesn’t make sense,” Michael answered. “They’re coming from the south. Why are they going that way? They should be taking the main road.”

Noah gave his friends a small push. “Look!”

The tanks weren’t skirting the orchard; they were plowing through the center of it. Liev’s jaw dropped as they spotted the trio of tanks tear through the small grove of apricot trees, smashing their trunks to splinters under their grinding steel treads.

“That’s insane! What do those idiots think they’re…” he shouted.

Suddenly gunfire began flashing from the turret.

Old Man Strieber had a half dozen farmhands on the porch of his squat ranch house, watching in shock as the orchard was ground to sawdust and pulp. They had no idea what was going on until the first muzzle-flashes erupted. Coaxial guns swept them with sheets of lead. Three undulating threads of slaughter ripped through the ranch house’s aluminum siding and flesh alike, the aluminum bursting and popping open neatly, gutting insulation and shards of wood underneath. The six men were not so neat and tidy as flesh and bone exploded, blood spraying across the front of the building, bullets continuing through, unabated by their time in a human body, to smash and puncture yet more aluminum and wood.

Strieber came running up the other side of the road. It was impossible to believe that only heartbeats earlier, Strieber had driven the boys away from the pile of stones and rotted wood he kept behind his equipment shed, where the boys had been feigning war. Feigning the hellfire that was now hammering real death, blood and thunder to the drumbeat of heavy machine guns.

The top hatch on the right-most tank popped open. Liev tried to make his mouth move, to scream a warning to Strieber. His throat had turned to a cracked riverbed, dry and burning as he tried to get more than a hoarse whistle past his tonsils. The gunner in the commander’s cupola spun the machine gun mounted there, swung it down on Strieber and tapped off a long burst.

Liev watched in disbelieving horror the atrocity going on before his eyes. Strieber disintegrated under the storm of .50-caliber rounds.

“Run!” Liev shrieked, finally forcing words past his lips with Herculean effort. His friends took off, legs pumping, like bats out of hell.

The ranch house detonated into oblivion under the impact of the tank’s main gun.

The shock wave gave Liev an extra bit of push.

Steel damnation was on its way.

Mack Bolan crawled across the slate, low shrubs concealing him as he pulled his improvised sniper’s drag bag behind him while keeping an eye on the temporary auction lot a half mile distant.

The Executioner was tracking a trio of traveling Hezbollah, led by Bidifah Sinbal, a veteran organizer and moneyman for the Lebanon-based Palestinian terror organization. They had been moving a lot of cargo on a freight ship from Lebanon to Pakistan. The freight was being unveiled on a slab of granite adorned with ammunition crates and assorted military vehicles. Bolan couldn’t see into the massive cargo containers that Sinbal’s men were opening, but he saw the look of awe on the faces of the men who swung open the gates on the three massive containers.

Something nasty was in there.

Bolan swept the area with a field scanner, checking for motion. He slipped like a ghost along the very edges of the field, disturbing little as he crawled along the path.

Bolan’s battle gear was limited. He’d been able to smuggle most of his nonlethal gear across borders as he raced to get ahead of the freighter. However, the Executioner’s signature pistols and his heavier weaponry were left behind. Bolan had left his usual weaponry in a diplomatic pouch, ready to be forwarded anyplace that he needed more firepower for a long-haul mission.

This day the Executioner made do with what he’d bought at a tribal gun shop in Peshawar. He had plenty of money for some hand-built, if eccentric, weapons.

The primary weapon was a hand-tooled Short Magazine Lee Enfield—the classic SMLE of the British forces during World War II. The weapon was topped with a Chinese knockoff of an ECLAN scope that gave Bolan some reach. The pistol-gripped rifle was a smooth shooting machine. For more hectic work, Bolan had also bought a 9 mm Skorpion machine pistol and a pair of stainless-steel Brazilian Taurus PT-92s. The Taurus handguns were almost identical to his Beretta 93-R, lacking only barrel length, a folding foregrip and a 3-round burst option. The Peshawar gunsmiths even managed to retool the Taurus to operate with the Beretta’s extended 20-shot magazines. Still, they were somewhat different from what he usually carried.

That didn’t matter.

It wasn’t the tools that had allowed Bolan to survive against insurmountable odds for as long as he had. But they sure helped.

Bolan swept the fighting field and wondered what his course of action should be. He wasn’t sure what he’d find, following the trio. They’d come ashore at Gwadar, more than nine hundred kilometers south, but thankfully in the age of satellite telephones and satellite surveillance, the Executioner was able to keep tabs on the massive boxcars as they were loaded onto train tracks from Gwadar to Nok Kundi to Quetta, where they were offloaded.

Bolan was racing to intercept them from the north, having managed to snag a transport flight into Afghanistan and stopping off with American U.S. Army Special Forces. The Special Forces operational teams were dividing their time between restoring the nation in their role as teachers and diplomats, and on the side, still hunting for leftover madmen from the Taliban. The Executioner wished those men luck, and left them to their task, knowing that it was in good hands.

The Hezbollah trio was a danger that he had taken unto himself. They had picked up a good-sized bodyguard force during their train trip. Now the three moneymen were accompanied by a dozen well-armed men. Bolan didn’t know them by their faces, but if he transmitted their images back to Stony Man Farm, he was certain that he’d come up with local al Qaeda loyalists.

Bolan wanted to take another close look at the Hezbollah bunch.

They were talking, moving out of the way as the contents of the first container came rolling out.

It wasn’t the chill of the Pakistani spring winds that Bolan felt in his bones as he saw the familiar boxy frame of a tank rolling out of the boxcar. He wanted to believe it was a Soviet tank, or some Chinese knockoff, but his eyes and mind were already placing the unique frame and shape of the armored vehicle. His stomach curled into a knot. He didn’t want to believe what he saw, but there it was.

An M1A1 Abrams tank. The main cannon was disassembled, and from the range Bolan was looking, it was an older model, with the old 105 mm gun instead of the newer 120 mm gun that was the mainstay of the United States armed forces. This was cold comfort, as the tank was still an almost unstoppable war machine, capable of laying waste to an entire city before an air strike or other tanks could be brought to stop it.

Three boxcars.

Three tanks.

The terrorists could easily barter themselves up to seventy-five million dollars for the sale of these war machines to anyone who wanted a small armored force. And it wouldn’t take much effort to convert the old 105 mm cannon into the more modern 120 mm pieces that could cut through an entire building with one shot. Bolan set down the SMLE and checked his arsenal. He didn’t have a single thing that could make the odds anywhere close to equal against even an empty Abrams with half a tank of fuel. The forty pounds of C-4 explosive might be able to dent one tank, but to destroy all three…

The waiting game was over and Bolan swiftly began setting up his first shot with the SMLE.