Rebel Force. Don Pendleton

swept the rifle muzzle around as he entered the room, his feet moving in a shuffling motion. His eyes sought the parameters of the room, seeing the contents of the chamber in terms first of motion, second in broad details of shape. He felt a breeze on his face, smelled the damp pollution stink of the Sunzha River bisecting Grozny.

      A large desk dominated the middle of the room, a dark hulk in his goggles. The top of it glowed with a dripping luminescence. Behind the desk a body cooled as the night breeze blew in through a window blown to shards. Moving carefully, his nerves crackling with the electricity of potential danger, Bolan checked the corpse.

      He reached down and unceremoniously yanked the dangling head up by a shock of greasy hair. In the IR enhancement light, the bland features of Enzik Garabend looked back up at him. The middle-aged man’s eyes bulged sightless from his death-slackened face. Bloody holes the size of coins riddled the man’s chest, ruining an expensive suit under a waterproof parka.

      Bolan was too late.

      Disgusted, he put a boot on the edge of the office chair and kicked it over in frustration. It slid a few inches and then toppled. The heavy, loose form of Garabend’s body slipped onto the floor with all the deftness of a sopping wet bag of cement. Out of professional habit, he quickly looked around on the floor for Garabend’s laptop, or any other effects. Nothing. The place had been stripped clean of all but the ex-terrorist’s corpse.

      Now that he was sure of Garabend’s fate, Bolan knew he had to exit the scene as quickly as possible. The abandoned factory had become red hot. Too hot for a foreigner packing a military arsenal on Russian soil in a time of heightened attacks by a savage, determined insurgency. He had to get out of there, retreat to his safehouse and contact Brognola for extraction.

      Suddenly Bolan froze. Some faint sound, almost inaudible on the periphery of his hearing, came to him. He cocked his head to the side, tense.

      He couldn’t recapture the sound again, now that he was actively listening. In the graveyard silence that surrounded him, Bolan couldn’t be sure he’d heard anything to begin with. It was unsettling. The Executioner didn’t spook. He slowly sank onto one knee by the sprawled corpse of the Armenian terror merchant and ran an expert hand over the man’s body, fishing through his pockets.

      Nothing.

      Bolan turned and stood. It was then that the necessary angle of vision was correct. The battery light from Garabend’s satellite phone burned green, suddenly obvious in the gloomy room. Bolan frowned, head cocked, listening for any sound coming from outside the office. He heard nothing to give him pause and turned his attention back to the sat phone. Garabend’s phone was a good catch, not the same as his laptop, to be sure, but still good. It seemed hard to believe that professional operators capable of a hit of this magnitude could have possibly missed it.

      Still, though the takedown had all the earmarks of top-line training, Bolan figured it couldn’t have been Russian Spesnaz teams. The entire site would have been locked down for the entry team. Intelligence technicians would have been crawling across the site post-action, searching for any evidence. Garabend’s bullet riddled corpse would have been whisked away and paraded on Russian television. After the Belsan school siege, dead terrorists made for great ratings from an angry, vengeance minded Russian nation.

      Whoever had taken out Garabend had been a player; but not official Russian. Bolan picked up the phone. It was sticky with the dead man’s blood. Bolan powered the device off and placed it in a pocket of his nightsuit. The phone provided a clue, in and of itself. The high-tech devices made doing business in the modern age much, much easier, especially from remote or uncivilized areas, but they were a liability as well.

      Worldwide, terrorists had learned a lesson a decade earlier, in the spring of 1996, from the death of Dzokhar Dudayev. The Chechen leader had known he needed to limit the time he spent using the satellite phone given to him by his Islamic allies in Turkey. The survivor of two Russian assassination attempts had been wary of Moscow’s ability to home in on his communication signal and thus his location.

      But on the evening of April 21, Dudayev, baited by Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s offer of peace talks, called an adviser in Moscow to discuss the impending negotiations.

      Dudayev stayed on the phone too long.

      American spy satellites, trained on Iraq and Kuwait, were quickly turned north to the Caucasus Mountains and Chechnya, according to media reports by a former communications specialist with the U.S. National Security Agency—NSA—The satellites pinpointed the Chechen leader’s location to within feet of his satellite phone signal, and the coordinates were sent to a Russian fighter jet.

      Dudayev was killed by two laser-guided air-to-surface missiles while still holding the phone that had pinpointed his location.

      Had Garabend made the same mistake? Only instead of missiles, had a call he made triggered a hit squad or some lone, hyper-skilled, assassin? Whatever the case, Bolan had enough to go on for the moment. Once Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman and his team got hold of the information in the communication device, they would have plenty of clues for further operations.

      Bolan stepped around the desk and moved through the open door into the outer office chamber. The bodies of the dead Armenian’s bodyguards still lay sprawled around in haphazard disarray. After years of experience, Bolan had a critical, almost gifted, eye for crime-scene forensics. He was able to recreate the events of even the most horrific battle by the position of corpses, spent shell casings and blood spatter. In this case, rushed for time, he was unable to conclude whether this butcher’s work had been done by a coordinated team or a single, talented professional.

      Bolan moved carefully through the room. He held his AKS at the ready as he approached the door. His feeling of disquiet had not subsided. He couldn’t place his unease, and that made it all the more bothersome. He stalked forward, pausing at the door leading out into the hall.

      He stopped, sensed nothing, moved forward.

      All hell broke loose.

      3

      When he stepped through the door and entered the hall, Bolan felt as if he had moved into a field of static electricity. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck lifted straight up as cold squirts of adrenaline surged into his body. The night fighter reacted instantly, without conscious thought. He dropped to one knee and leaned back in the doorway, sweeping the barrel of his AKS up and triggering a blast.

      The unmistakable pneumatic cough of a sound-suppressed weapon firing full-automatic assaulted Bolan’s ears across the short distance. Shell casings clattered onto the linoleum floor, mixing with the sound of a weapon bolt leveraging back and forth rapidly. Bolan felt the angry whine of bullets fill the space where his head and chest had been only a heartbeat before.

      The Executioner targeted diagonally across and down the office hall, firing his Russian assault rifle with practiced, instinctive ease. He let the recoil of the carbine shuttering in his strong grip carry him back through the doorway behind him in a tight roll. From his belly Bolan thrust the muzzle around the doorjamb and arced the weapon back and forth as he laid down quick, suppressive blasts.

      The 5.45 mm rounds were deafening in the confined space and his ears rang painfully from the noise. Bolan reached up and jerked his night-vision goggles down so that they dangled from the rubber strap around his neck. He heard the bullets from his assailant’s answering burst smack into the plasterboard of the outer wall with smacks that rang louder than the muzzle-braked weapon’s own firing cycle.

      From the impacts, Bolan determined the shooter was using a submachine gun and not an assault rifle, though he was hard-pressed to identify caliber with the suppressor in use. Bolan scrambled backward and rested his rifle barrel across the still-warm corpse of a dead bodyguard. If there was more than one assassin out there, and he were determined to get him, the person would either fire and maneuver to breach the room door, or possibly use grenades to clear him out.

      There was silence for a long moment. Bolan’s head raced through strategies and options. If the assassin’s intent had been