Don Pendleton - Assassin's Code

Ghulz looked like he might throw up.

Bolan pressed Send. The phone rang three times and the line clicked on.

Ghulz spoke a sentence in Arabic. Bolan raised an eyebrow at Ous and the warrior shrugged. A voice spoke back. Ous mouthed words in translation. “Ustad Ghulz has failed.”

Ghulz whimpered something back. “He tells his co-conspirator that the United States Marines came.”

The voice on the phone spoke again.

Ous’s eyes flew wide as he translated. “Ustad Ghulz is a liar. A lion and an eagle came.”

The symbolism was pretty heavy-handed.

The line clicked dead.

“What’d you get, Bear?”

Kurtzman grunted unhappily. “Not enough time.”

Bolan clicked off Ghulz’s phone. “Bear, I got a feeling that the moment I turned on Ghulz’s phone and pressed Send, I got GPSed.

“Striker! Get out of there!”

“Hold that thought.” Bolan dialed another number.

Keller answered on the first ring. “Yo!”

“How soon can you and the Marines get back here?”

“Half an hour, why? Did you get anything out of Ghulz?”

“Not much, but I think we’re about to get something courtesy of Ghulz.”

“You’re going to get hit?”

Something the size of a 155 mm howitzer round hit the house. Ghulz screamed as dust sifted down from the floor above. The second impact blew the cellar door inward, and heat and smoke roared down the stairs in a wave. Ous slashed Ghulz’s bonds and ran to the other end of the cellar.

“Come!” He overturned two barrels to reveal a hatch. He pulled it open and dropped down. Between the Soviet invasion and the war on terror, Afghanistan had become a veritable termite’s nest of tunnels.

Bolan shoved the shrieking Ghulz into the dark as the power cut out. The world plunged into darkness that relit Halloween orange and hell red as the third shell impacted. Bolan tossed Ghulz’s phone back behind him as he dropped down and gave the cowering Ghulz a shove to motivate him onward. The soldier pulled out his tactical light. The tunnel was just big enough to move at an uncomfortable crouch. Ghulz crawled, sobbing, on hands and knees. Ous scrambled ahead. Heat seared the back of Bolan’s neck, and a second later the tunnel hatch filled with rubble as the floor of the house above failed. Bolan’s internal compass told him they were heading northwest in a line that was taking them to Ous’s stable. His sense of direction bore out as the tunnel dead-ended with a hatch leading above.

Ghulz whimpered and Ous cuffed him to silence. Bolan and Ous crouched and listened for long moments. The shelling had stopped. Ous’s tone was dangerously conversational. “Do you know? I was not aware of an artillery emplacement in the hills above my home.”

“It wasn’t artillery.” The explosion pulse and Bolan’s sense of smell told him what happened. “They’re using thermobaric weapons.”

Ous gave Bolan a look.

“Fuel-air explosive,” Bolan explained. “I smelled the stench of the fuel over the burnt high explosive. I’d bet they’re hitting us with Russian-made Shmel or Shmel-M shoulder-fired recoilless grenade launchers.”

“Truly you are a fountain of knowledge. What else does this mean?”

“It means three hundred meters is the effective range and seventeen is the maximum. They’re aiming at a large house and they’re up in the hills firing down, so it’s plunging fire. I’m guessing if they have training and want hits they’re at five hundred meters or less.”

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