Desert Fallout. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ sockets of the other guard. With the clenching of his fist, he blinded the Somali thug as fingernails popped eyeballs and tore bloody rifts through flesh. With a powerful wrench of his arm, Bolan snapped the stunned pirate’s neck using the holes in the man’s face as leverage. The death shriek that issued forth was drowned out by the thumps of two grenades thrown through the doors of the storehouse.

      The pirates were so frightened of the intrusion by the Executioner that they were willing to risk their delivery of antiarmor rockets by using the minibombs on the storehouse. Bolan fished out another of his hand grenades and aimed the bomb at the crate of illicit firepower. Dropping the fragger in the midst of the 84 mm ammunition, Bolan whirled and ran from the building. The hand grenade would set off the armor-smashing shells, and the explosion could bring the building crashing down atop him if he didn’t gain some distance from the structure.

      Thunder split the night, and the storehouse seemed to swell, heaving with a gigantic sigh. Chunks of masonry and other shrapnel flew from the front of the building, the roof collapsing under its own weight. The two bodies that Bolan had left behind the storehouse were crushed as the wall collapsed on them. The guards were already dead, but Bolan’s suspicion that he would have been pulverized was proved correct. He set down the Carl Gustav and its bandolier. It was too heavy, too much to move quickly with, but he still tucked it beside a vehicle for future usage.

      Bringing the FAL to bear, he spotted Kamau and Masozi barking out orders, directing traffic as Shabaab pirates and militiamen scrambled, dealing with their wounded and searching for signs of their escaped opponent. Bolan announced his presence with a rapid-fire string of single shots into the crowd, the 7.62 mm NATO rounds piercing bodies, popping internal organs like balloons and sending gunmen on the fast track to oblivion. The 20-round string collapsed thirteen of the Somali compound guards, but Bolan left the men actually tending to the wounded alone.

      The Executioner often struck ruthlessly, but he was no cold-blooded murderer. As long as the men acting as medics sought to save lives, and the wounded men appeared incapable of putting up a fight, he would allow them to live. Helpless and nonhostile people weren’t Bolan’s enemy. There were still plenty of riled Shabaab killers to keep the warrior busy, however.

      After a quick magazine change for the FAL, Bolan scurried to another position as rifles snarled in the darkness, dumping bullets toward where the blaze of muzzle-flashes had issued. Though he was only moving from one end of a pickup truck to another, the change in location gave Bolan a new angle on the enemy forces.

      The Shabaab militiamen took the lull in return fire as an invitation to break from cover and stalk toward the vehicle that they’d hosed with their automatic weapons. Bolan let them get to within two yards of the Peugeot’s rear bumper before he cut loose with the big Belgian rifle. The leader of the security detail stared down at the smashed crater in his chest where his heart had once been. Blood sneezed from his nostrils, soaking his shirt with even more crimson before his legs folded beneath him. The second and third gunmen didn’t have time to register the death of their partner, Bolan’s next rounds spearing through their skulls.

      The remainder of the squad spun and retreated, so the Executioner turned his attention toward Somali riflemen who had stayed back to provide cover. He took down the two snipers after he flicked the selector switch to full-auto. Most people wouldn’t have been able to handle a 7.62 mm NATO rifle at 600 rpm, but Bolan’s 220 pounds of finely tuned muscle and sinew, as well as years of experience, allowed him to drill tri-bursts into the Shabaab gunners who had opened up on him.

      Pivoting, Bolan turned his fire toward the enemy troopers who had halted their retreat and turned their AKs toward him. The soldier had good cover, and better aim than the Islamist fanatics, but there were enough of them, spread out, that he wouldn’t be able to take them all down in one burst before they threw a wave of deadly steel-cored torment at him.

      Moments later the Somalis jerked violently under gunfire from some unknown source. Bolan almost took it as a sign that a new player had entered the fight on his side.

      The pickup truck Bolan crouched behind suddenly heaved as the unmistakable bulk of a .50-caliber rifle round smashed into its fender, seeking the Executioner’s flesh.

      The death raining down on the Shabaab pirates came for Mack Bolan, as well.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Bolan leaped from behind the Peugeot’s fender as a second .50-caliber antimatériel round sliced through the vehicle as if it were made of paper. Had he not moved, he would have been caught in the path of the metal-crushing round and churned into froth by the passage of the irresistible bullet. He swept up his FAL, looking for the shooter who was concentrating on him, but couldn’t see a thing in the darkness.

      The Shabaab gunmen were in a panic as they swept their AKs in all directions, opening fire on every shadow and flicker that caught their eyes. They had gone from warring with a one-man army to being surrounded and gunned down mercilessly. Bolan could see Kamau tuck Masozi under one arm and take flight once more, just as he’d done when he threw the first grenade through the storehouse window. Bolan was tempted to cut the two men down, but he needed answers. Everything had gone wrong, and the only way to salvage the situation was to get some inside information. That meant that suddenly, Bolan was on Masozi’s side.

      Without a target, the Executioner was going to have to apply his razor-sharp intellect to determining where the new enemy was firing from. He couldn’t use muzzle-flashes, since whoever was firing utilized suppressed weaponry. It was disconcerting that the .50-caliber antimatériel rifle was also wearing a can, dampening its dragon’s-breath belch of flame down to a dull red glow that wouldn’t carry far in the night. However, there was no way for the riflemen to hide the angle at which their bullets impacted the ground, or the dust kicked up when they hit. The rounds impacted the dirt at an acute angle, meaning that the elevation of the enemy gunners had been between eight and twenty feet off the ground. That ruled out warehouses neighboring the Shabaab compound, which were thirty to forty feet tall with no windows.

      Bolan swung back to the Peugeot and ducked below the fender. He put his eye to the cavernous tunnel that the enemy Fifty had torn through the metal, and saw shadowy figures crouched atop one of the small barracks buildings inside the complex. The enemy was dressed in black, making them almost impossible to see if they remained still, but because the Shabaab scattered under the onslaught of stealth weaponry, they had to change positions.

      Bolan popped up over the pickup’s hood and triggered his FAL at the rooftop, raking the night sky. Drawing on his limited, halting Arabic, he shouted, “Over there!”

      The big American pointed at the rooftop. Four Somali gunmen turned and saw what the Executioner had indicated. The young radicals hoisted their Kalashnikov rifles and opened up on the rooftop, as well.

      The soldier sidestepped and sought new cover, this time behind the bed of the Peugeot. He’d moved just in time as the front of the pickup truck was clawed by a storm of automatic fire punctuated by the muffled thunderbolt of the enemy heavy antiarmor rifle. Bolan grimaced and knew that the Shabaab pirates who were aware of the mysterious marauders wouldn’t last long, and any hopes of additional forces following their cue were slim because of the death toll and terror inflicted upon the Somali militiamen by both Bolan and the hidden squad of killers.

      The 84 mm rocket launcher and its bandolier sat at the wheel well of a Mercedes four-wheel drive, just where he’d left them. A mad dash across open ground drew the snipers’ attention, but Bolan was too swift, his own dark form flowing through the shadows, keeping ahead of the lines of bullets chasing him. He skidded to a halt, snatched up the launcher and swung behind the bulk of the jeep. Bullets hammered into the Mercedes’s frame as Bolan swung open the launch tube and stuffed a black, serrated warhead into the breech. Closing СКАЧАТЬ