Don Pendleton - Frontier Fury

“Allah be praised!” Gorshani cried, catching the action in his rearview mirror.

Bolan didn’t care who got the credit, and he knew that they weren’t out of danger yet.

“There’s still the APC,” he said. “I won’t crack that with 40 mm frag grenades.”

“I can outrun them,” Gorshani said.

“Now’s the time to do it, then,” Bolan answered.

In response, the SUV seemed to discover extra power somewhere underneath its hood. The truck surged forward, despite the rough ground underneath its tires. Thin carpet on the rear deck failed to cushion Bolan’s spine and buttocks against heavy pounding.

He was lucky to have hit the Jeep at all, much less to stop it cold the way he had. Now Bolan saw the APC pull up beside the Jeep’s wreckage and brake.

“They’re stopping,” he informed Gorshani. “Now’s the time to give it everything you’ve got.”

“I shall!” the Pakistani said, but their speed did not increase—it seemed the SUV had no more left to give. But still, every moment that the APC stayed where it was lengthened their lead.

“They’ve got someone up and moving,” Bolan said. “He’s in the vehicle. They’re coming!”

Bolan did the math in his head. Say the SUV was traveling at sixty miles per hour, pulling steadily away. The APC would soon accelerate to its top speed of fifty miles per hour. It could never catch Gorshani’s ride at that speed, all things being equal.

But they weren’t equal.

The APC was built for travel over this type of terrain. Gorshani’s SUV, despite its four-wheel-drive capacity, could not compete with the military vehicle in the long run.

And there was still the APC’s machine gunner to reckon with. His PKM machine gun had a muzzle velocity of 2,500 feet per second, with a maximum range of 1,000 meters. It could rip through a belt of 650 rounds in 60 seconds and land a fair number of bullets on target at 200 meters.

The bottom line: if something happened to the SUV, or if the gunner in the APC got lucky, they were dead.

It would require a daring move to prevent either one of those events, and while that kind of play was Bolan’s stock-in-trade, he didn’t know whether Gorshani had the nerve to pull it off.

Fleeing from adversaries in a high-speed chase was one thing. Meeting them head-on was something else completely.

“They’re gaining on us,” Bolan said.

Gorshani muttered something Bolan took to be a curse, then said, “It won’t go any faster.”

“I don’t want you to,” Bolan replied.

“What, then?” Gorshani’s eyes, reflected in the rearview mirror, held a hint of desperation.

“Slow down,” Bolan told him. “Let them catch us.”

THE EXECUTIONER knew he couldn’t penetrate the BTR-70’s armor with anything in his mobile arsenal. His 40 mm frag grenades would merely glance off the APC’s nose to explode in midair—no threat to the soldiers inside. But he still had one chance.

“Slow down?” Gorshani questioned, from the driver’s seat.

“And stop, when I give you the word,” Bolan said.

The mirror-eyes met his again, for a heartbeat, then shifted away.

“As you wish.”

Bolan fed the GP-25 another fragmentation round, as Gorshani raised his foot from the accelerator, letting the SUV decelerate without using the brakes. Behind them, the APC was gaining steadily, a juggernaut that seemed intent on running them down.

But that wasn’t how it was done. Bolan knew his adversaries wouldn’t ram Gorshani’s vehicle if they had any other choice.

And they also had a machine gunner, who likely craved an opportunity to see some action.

A gunner who could only fire his weapon if he first revealed himself.

Bolan was ready when the hatch opened, a soldier’s head and shoulders rising into view behind the pintle-mounted PKM. The Executioner fired his 40 mm round, then shouted at Gorshani, “Stop! Stop now!”

The SUV slid to a halt and Bolan rolled over the tailgate, conscious of the HE detonation eighty yards in front of him. He didn’t see the nearly headless soldier topple backward, dropping through the hatch and almost landing in the driver’s lap. Success was measured by the fact that no one riddled him with bullets as he charged the APC.

That vehicle slowed for a moment, lurching. It was just enough of a delay for Bolan to sprint across the intervening distance and launch into a leap from ten feet out.

The APC was nine feet tall, from ground level to the apex of its turret, but the fenders were about waist-high. Bolan’s leap put him there, but it was not his final destination. Taking full advantage of the shock his 40 mm round had caused, he scrambled upward, toward the open hatch.

And as he reached it, Bolan held an RGD-5 frag grenade in his left hand. He yanked its safety pin at the last instant, dropped the bomb through the open hatch, then crouched and found a handhold on the turret’s flank.

The grenade had a four-second fuse, granting zero time for anyone inside the APC to pick it up and throw it back. The blast reminded Bolan of a cherry bomb inside an oil drum, multiplied to the tenth power. Smoke and screams poured from the open hatch, as the APC lurched to a halt.

Bolan waited, knowing that one of two things had to happen next. The soldiers who could move would spill out through the APC’s exit doors, or someone would lurch forward to take over from the mangled driver.

In the latter event, he would feed them another grenade. If they bailed—

Bolan heard the rear doors open, soldiers cursing as they scrambled from the smoky, blood-spattered interior. Their boots crunched on sand, losing traction as the men stumbled out.

The BTR-70 had room inside it for a three-man crew, plus seven passengers. Bolan had killed one of the crew with his first shot, and guessed the other two were dead or dying from the RGD-5’s blast. How many others had been hit by shrapnel from the frag grenade? And how many of those were still fit to fight?

He strode across the flat top of the APC and caught the soldiers as they tried to organize—four men armed with Kalashnikovs, two of them with bloodstains showing on their desert-camo uniforms.

Their blood, or someone else’s?

Bolan didn’t care.

His AKMS raked the four men from left to right, then back again, making them dance as bullets ripped through flesh and fabric, dropping them before they could return fire. Bolan waited for another moment, covering the exit hatch. When no one else emerged, he readied himself for the nine-foot drop, prepared to check out the interior. Just as he flexed his knees to jump, he heard a scraping sound behind him.

One of the shell-shocked soldiers had been strong and smart enough to flank him. Now, unless Bolan could spin and drop at the same time, fire from the hip and nail the man who meant to kill him—

Halfway through his turn, Bolan flinched at the report of a Kalashnikov on autofire. Already braced to take the bullets that he knew were coming, the big American blinked, surprised to see his would-be slayer sprawled across the APC’s gun turret, facedown in a spreading pool of blood.

“He’s dead, I think,” Gorshani called up to him from the ground.

“I’d say you’re right,” Bolan replied. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

Mount Khakwani, North-West Frontier Province

The messenger’s name was Harata Bhutani. At thirty-four, he was the youngest man permitted access to the leaders of al Qaeda in hiding. All of the command staff’s other aides were ten or twelve years older—and, of course, they all were men.

Akram Ben Abd al-Bari would not trust a woman—even his own mother, were she living—with the knowledge of his whereabouts, much less his current plans. To him and those around him, granting any power to a woman reeked of sacrilege.