Don Pendleton - Plains Of Fire

“Told you,” Bolan said. He tucked the MP-5 behind his back and transferred to the fully loaded FAMAS he’d taken from his first victim. The scuff of boots announced that two more Thunder Lion militiamen were rushing toward his position. As they turned the corner, almost as if they were on a preset schedule, Bolan had his rifle ready for their anticipated approach. The FAMAS snarled two rapid bursts, bullets punching through the militiamen’s chests.

A loud crack filled the air, the passage of a supersonic bullet across several rooftops. Waves of air displaced by the high-caliber sniper round bounced off nearby surfaces. It was James’s warning to Bolan that the Muslim Brotherhood was making its move. James’s first shot from his Israeli M-89-SR, a silenced 7.62 mm sniper rifle, had the power to obliterate a human skull in a fountain of bone fragments and vaporized brain tissue, even at five hundred yards. There were cries of dismay as Egyptian terrorists watched their friend’s head explode. The semiauto rifle had launched two more rounds in the time it took for the first bullet to reach the renegade Egyptian. Multiple shouts of alarm, warnings against a sniper attack, were suddenly cut off as James’s subsequent shots struck their targets.

Thumps filled the air as 40 mm grenades landed two hundred yards from the wall. Bolan knew full well that Encizo’s grenade launcher had a 350-meter maximum effective range, so he could guess that the stocky Cuban was firing on Muslim Brotherhood forces who were staging closer to their sniper’s roost. Encizo’s salvo of grenades spit up columns of smoke and debris that Bolan could see over the service-entrance gate, the first shot landing in a street. Bolan also caught a glimpse of a rooftop erupting, bodies backlit by an explosion, the length of a mangled machine gun twisting in front of the blossoming fireball.

The Brotherhood had its own sniper roosts spread throughout the surrounding rooftops, but the Cuban disrupted them with 40 mm packets of steel and fire. He had a second M-89-SR to back up James, but for now he was relying on the effective Russian RG-6 revolver-style grenade launcher to pour devastation on the heads of the carefully laid ambush.

“Enemy force engaged,” Encizo announced over Bolan’s earpiece. “I have movement heading for the wall you just scaled. No clean shot. Be advised.”

“On it,” the Executioner replied. He grabbed a second FAMAS rifle in his off hand and tucked himself behind a low planter wall filled with decorative ferns. As the wall itself was made of thick stone and filled with densely packed dirt, it shielded the Executioner as the Brotherhood blew open the wall with a pair of RPG-7 rocket grenades. Exploding masonry bounced all around Bolan as he braced himself against the dynamic entry. He fired the FAMAS in his left hand as if it were a pistol, keeping the ejector port well away from his face to avoid an injury similar to the one suffered by the unconscious African lying next to him. He emptied the French rifle’s 25-round magazine through the breach, eliciting howls of agony. The thump of two corpses sprawling across the bottom of the blasted hole in the wall let the Executioner know that his suppressive fire was more effective than he’d counted on.

In response to Bolan’s salvo, the Muslim Brotherhood cut loose with their AKs. Wild autofire slashed through the night, proving ineffective in dislodging the Executioner from behind the low wall. The sheer volume of autofire was deafening, informing Bolan that his opposition had been thrown off its game.

Bolan’s next trick was going to put it into sudden death. He reached into his thigh pouch and pulled a fragmentation grenade. Knowing the distance and the angle he needed to make the shot, he sailed the orb through the hole in the wall, right into the knot of Brotherhood gunmen on the outside the hotel compound. Six-and-a-half ounces of plastic explosive detonated, hurling splinters of razor-sharp wire at high velocity through vulnerable flesh, inducing crippling lacerations that tore apart skin, muscles and internal organs. It was a brutal, devastating maneuver, as likely to produce painful, slowly lethal injuries as it was instant death. The Executioner couldn’t spare time or mercy for the mangled and mortally wounded. He was outnumbered and living in the space between the hammer and the anvil.

The Executioner whirled and drove deeper into the Thunder Lions’ headquarters, drawing the Brotherhood forces after him into the compound. This night was going to be a message heard across the underworld of radical fanatics.

The message was that extremist groups had someone to fear.

“MACK’S INSIDE,” Rafael Encizo told Calvin James as the Phoenix Force medic triggered his silenced sniper rifle.

James’s shot hit another of the Brotherhood’s fighters who had noticed their position. The Egyptian was on the parapet of a roof and was in the process of turning his RPK light machine gun when James punched a 7.62 mm NATO bullet through the bridge of the gunner’s nose.

“The troops are paying too much attention to us now to do more than spot for him,” James said. “All the rooftops are crowded with snipers and machine-gun nests. This is almost as bad as when the Russians came after us at Gary’s place in Montana.”

“There were twice as many of those guys,” Encizo reminded his friend. “And we were all deployed in one general fortification because we only had to defend one approach. This time, we’ve got them surrounded.”

James glanced over his shoulder, then swung his rifle around, popping a suppressed bullet into the chest of another rooftop gunman. “You think?”

“Well, we’re fighting them on two fronts, instead of just one,” Encizo corrected. He punctuated his argument by triggering his reloaded RG-6, lancing a clot of armed Egyptians coming up the street with a 40 mm fragmentation shell. Bodies scattered as the round detonated, hurling heads and limbs from torn torsos in a grisly testimony to the launcher’s fearsome power. Encizo scanned for more targets, then caught the sound of boots and bodies rattling the ladder of the fire escape that had brought them to the roof. “Company’s coming.”

The Cuban set down the RG-6 next to James, trading it in for his Heckler & Koch USP. The 9 mm pistol didn’t have quite the same devastating ability as the other weapons, but Encizo wanted to err on the side of weapon retention. It was easier to hang on to a handgun in close-quarters combat than it was to retain a long arm, which provided an attacker with more leverage. An angry face topped the ladder and Encizo aimed and fired in a split second. Two rounds from the 9 mm H & K struck the Brotherhood assailant within an inch of each other, one coring an eye socket into a smear of punctured cornea, the other cracking against the forehead, the wide mouth of his hollowpoint round snagging the bone and breaking it, but not penetrating to the brain beneath. The bullet through the eye, however, took care of the right hemisphere of the Egyptian’s brain, and his head snapped back, fountaining gore.

Encizo rushed to the top of the ladder now that the Brotherhood attacker’s brainless corpse surrendered to the embrace of gravity, pulling it out of the way between him and the rest of the climbers. Egyptian faces looked up in a mixture of anger, fear, determination and resignation. Encizo shouted an order in Arabic. “Turn back or die!”

A handgun barked from lower on the ladder, but the climber had to shoot one-handed and off balance on a rung while aiming around a higher climber. The topmost Egyptian hugged the side of the ladder, giving Encizo a clean shot at the Muslim Brotherhood aggressor. The Phoenix Force commando took it, drilling the feisty terrorist through the top of his head. The 9 mm slug fractured the bone at the top of the Egyptian’s head, cracking down between his right and left lobes to peel him off the ladder and dump his lifeless corpse to the floor of the alley, thirty feet below.