Dead Reckoning. Don Pendleton

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      A little chime went off as Bolan entered, with Grimaldi on his heels. No doubt it was supposed to warn whoever occupied the office that they had a walk-in, and it brought the young guy’s frowning face around in time to see two silenced weapons pointed at him. Blurting something in Arabic, he dropped the phone and shoved a hand into the knee well of his desk, maybe for a weapon or a panic button hidden under there.

      He never made it.

      Bolan’s Steyr AUG coughed out a single round and granted the Hezbollah’s receptionist the martyrdom he may have dreamed about when he signed on to be a terrorist. The exit wound sprayed abstract art across a filing cabinet behind him, and he slithered out of sight beneath the desk.

      * * *

      ABDULLAH RAJHID WAS tired of being cooped up in the small apartment, only seeing sunshine through his window or on those occasions when his hosts allowed him access to the building’s roof. He understood that he and his two roommates were on every watch list in the world, their faces posted on the internet with prices on their heads, but he was sick and tired of hiding.

      He was sick and tired of Paraguay.

      Sitting on a sway-backed sofa in his underwear, Rajhid ticked off the things that irritated him about the country he’d been sent to as a fugitive.

      The weather. He was used to heat, of course, but Paraguay’s humidity was killing him. It sapped his energy and made him feel exhausted from the moment he awoke each morning to the final hour when he dragged himself to bed.

      The insects. He had lived with desert scorpions and spiders all his life, and cockroaches, but those in Paraguay were monsters, grown unnaturally large, and they could turn up anywhere. Just yesterday, he’d found a black, five-inch scorpion hiding beneath his pillow when he went to bed, a shock that left him wondering if one of his so-called protectors might have placed it there to rattle him.

      And Hezbollah. That was another thing. Its members, with their clique in Paraguay, had treated Rajhid almost like a leper from the moment he arrived with Walid Khamis and Salman Farsoun. It was as if they thought their little private army was the only group entitled to make war on the Crusaders in the name of God. Rajhid wrote it off to jealousy, but he resented being forced to smile and thank them for their hospitality. The war was going on without him, and he wanted to get back to it.

      The food. Now, there was one thing Rajhid did enjoy. They all avoided pork, of course, but he was very fond of pira caldo, Paraguay’s fish soup; the great asado barbecues; the kiveve made from pumpkins; and the lampreado, fried cakes made with manioc. Rajhid had put on weight since landing at the hideout, but he tried to keep it down with exercise, the only form of entertainment granted to him, other than a television set that played three channels, none of which he understood.

      He hoped Khalid would reach out to them soon. Rajhid and his companions needed action, not the world’s worst-ever tropical vacation, locked up in an apartment and eaten by mosquitoes, while they never even got to glimpse the rain forest.

      Khamis was snoring in one of the apartment’s two bedrooms, while Farsoun was in the small bathroom, door closed for privacy. Rajhid was field-stripping a MAC-10 machine pistol, its components spread out on a coffee table just in front of him, and watching a peculiar game show, where the losers had their heads shaved to remind them they had failed. It was pathetic, childish and—

      The first shot startled Rajhid, brought him to his feet in an involuntary reflex, clutching the MAC-10’s dismantled, useless pistol grip. He waited, thought perhaps someone had fumbled with a weapon, had a stupid accident—with Hezbollah, why not?—but then a blast of automatic fire rang through the building and he heard men’s panicked voices shouting.

      The police? A US Navy SEAL team, just for him?

      Rajhid had no time to consider who might be attacking them. He called out to his comrades while he tried to reassemble the MAC-10, his fingers as thick and numb as sausages in his excitement.

      Fear? Not yet.

      As soon as he was finished with the gun, he had to get dressed. Rajhid could not go running through the streets of Ciudad del Este in his underwear, with a machine pistol. Police in Paraguay might be slow and foolish, but they would not miss a chance to get their faces in the newspapers.

      The last part of his weapon finally snapped into place. More firing came from the second or third floor, below him, as Rajhid snatched up a magazine, then loaded and cocked the little SMG. Now all he needed was a pair of pants, his shoes and one of those baggy shirts that everybody seemed to wear in Paraguay, hiding a multitude of sins.

      And once he’d dressed, Rajhid could figure out whether to join the fight or run and leave his hosts to save themselves.

      * * *

      CLEARING THE DOWNSTAIRS rooms required less than a minute. The office, mosque and two small bathrooms were the whole of it, and all unoccupied except for Hezbollah’s late greeter in the lobby. The corpse was out of sight of anybody passing on the street, positioned beneath the desk, and they were set to take the game upstairs.

      And upstairs it would be, specifically between the empty mosque and office space. The building had no elevator, meaning that anyone trying to flee the upper floors had to either fight his way past Bolan and Grimaldi, or go out the nearest window.

      The Stony Man duo reached the second floor without encountering a problem, but it started to unravel there. The landing faced back toward Calle Victor Hugo Norte, three apartments on each side of a narrow hallway. Three doors open, three closed. Just as Bolan reached that landing, a bearded young man in a T-shirt and khaki pants, barefooted, stepped out of the second door down, to his left.

      The terrorist saw them, saw their guns,and blinked once in surprise before he turned and lunged for the open doorway just behind him. Bolan beat him to it with a 3-round burst of 5.56 mm NATO rounds, punching the rag doll figure sideways, slamming him against the doorjamb on his way down to the floor.

      The AUG’s suppressor wasn’t perfect, but it reduced the sound of gunfire to a kind of stutter-sneeze. Bolan moved forward, leaving his partner to cover the closed doors behind him while he cleared the first open apartment on his left. He stepped across the dead man on the threshold, checked the other rooms in nothing flat, and found them all unoccupied.

      His next step was to double back and join Grimaldi for the two apartments he had bypassed, not surprised to find them both unlocked in what the occupants would have regarded as a safe environment. He barged in unannounced and uninvited, caught two more Hezbollah terrorists sitting on a sofa, eating pita sandwiches, and shot them both before they could react to the invasion of their home away from home.

      Behind him, Bolan heard the muffled stutter of Grimaldi’s SMG, ending another argument before it had a chance to start in earnest. Seconds later, the Stony Man pilot was back beside him in the hallway, nodding, turning toward the next door that stood open, on their right.

      This time, they heard a shower running. Bolan went to find it, leaving Grimaldi to guard the open doorway and the last two apartments downrange. The bathroom wasn’t hard to locate in a place that small, its door ajar, and Bolan eased his way inside. Behind a semi-opaque shower curtain, he saw two forms intertwined, both men, unless the women sprouted beards in Paraguay.

      To each his own, in Bolan’s view—but this was strictly business. He preferred to give an opponent a fighting chance, but in this case it was a no go.

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