Plains Of Fire. Don Pendleton

the Executioner as the Brotherhood blew open the wall with a pair of RPG-7 rocket grenades. Exploding masonry bounced all around Bolan as he braced himself against the dynamic entry. He fired the FAMAS in his left hand as if it were a pistol, keeping the ejector port well away from his face to avoid an injury similar to the one suffered by the unconscious African lying next to him. He emptied the French rifle’s 25-round magazine through the breach, eliciting howls of agony. The thump of two corpses sprawling across the bottom of the blasted hole in the wall let the Executioner know that his suppressive fire was more effective than he’d counted on.

      In response to Bolan’s salvo, the Muslim Brotherhood cut loose with their AKs. Wild autofire slashed through the night, proving ineffective in dislodging the Executioner from behind the low wall. The sheer volume of autofire was deafening, informing Bolan that his opposition had been thrown off its game.

      Bolan’s next trick was going to put it into sudden death. He reached into his thigh pouch and pulled a fragmentation grenade. Knowing the distance and the angle he needed to make the shot, he sailed the orb through the hole in the wall, right into the knot of Brotherhood gunmen on the outside the hotel compound. Six-and-a-half ounces of plastic explosive detonated, hurling splinters of razor-sharp wire at high velocity through vulnerable flesh, inducing crippling lacerations that tore apart skin, muscles and internal organs. It was a brutal, devastating maneuver, as likely to produce painful, slowly lethal injuries as it was instant death. The Executioner couldn’t spare time or mercy for the mangled and mortally wounded. He was outnumbered and living in the space between the hammer and the anvil.

      The Executioner whirled and drove deeper into the Thunder Lions’ headquarters, drawing the Brotherhood forces after him into the compound. This night was going to be a message heard across the underworld of radical fanatics.

      The message was that extremist groups had someone to fear.

      “MACK’S INSIDE,” Rafael Encizo told Calvin James as the Phoenix Force medic triggered his silenced sniper rifle.

      James’s shot hit another of the Brotherhood’s fighters who had noticed their position. The Egyptian was on the parapet of a roof and was in the process of turning his RPK light machine gun when James punched a 7.62 mm NATO bullet through the bridge of the gunner’s nose.

      “The troops are paying too much attention to us now to do more than spot for him,” James said. “All the rooftops are crowded with snipers and machine-gun nests. This is almost as bad as when the Russians came after us at Gary’s place in Montana.”

      “There were twice as many of those guys,” Encizo reminded his friend. “And we were all deployed in one general fortification because we only had to defend one approach. This time, we’ve got them surrounded.”

      James glanced over his shoulder, then swung his rifle around, popping a suppressed bullet into the chest of another rooftop gunman. “You think?”

      “Well, we’re fighting them on two fronts, instead of just one,” Encizo corrected. He punctuated his argument by triggering his reloaded RG-6, lancing a clot of armed Egyptians coming up the street with a 40 mm fragmentation shell. Bodies scattered as the round detonated, hurling heads and limbs from torn torsos in a grisly testimony to the launcher’s fearsome power. Encizo scanned for more targets, then caught the sound of boots and bodies rattling the ladder of the fire escape that had brought them to the roof. “Company’s coming.”

      The Cuban set down the RG-6 next to James, trading it in for his Heckler & Koch USP. The 9 mm pistol didn’t have quite the same devastating ability as the other weapons, but Encizo wanted to err on the side of weapon retention. It was easier to hang on to a handgun in close-quarters combat than it was to retain a long arm, which provided an attacker with more leverage. An angry face topped the ladder and Encizo aimed and fired in a split second. Two rounds from the 9 mm H & K struck the Brotherhood assailant within an inch of each other, one coring an eye socket into a smear of punctured cornea, the other cracking against the forehead, the wide mouth of his hollowpoint round snagging the bone and breaking it, but not penetrating to the brain beneath. The bullet through the eye, however, took care of the right hemisphere of the Egyptian’s brain, and his head snapped back, fountaining gore.

      Encizo rushed to the top of the ladder now that the Brotherhood attacker’s brainless corpse surrendered to the embrace of gravity, pulling it out of the way between him and the rest of the climbers. Egyptian faces looked up in a mixture of anger, fear, determination and resignation. Encizo shouted an order in Arabic. “Turn back or die!”

      A handgun barked from lower on the ladder, but the climber had to shoot one-handed and off balance on a rung while aiming around a higher climber. The topmost Egyptian hugged the side of the ladder, giving Encizo a clean shot at the Muslim Brotherhood aggressor. The Phoenix Force commando took it, drilling the feisty terrorist through the top of his head. The 9 mm slug fractured the bone at the top of the Egyptian’s head, cracking down between his right and left lobes to peel him off the ladder and dump his lifeless corpse to the floor of the alley, thirty feet below.

      Three of the other Egyptians had slid back down the fire escape as fast as they could, realizing that they were sitting ducks for the Cuban warrior on the roof. A rifleman who was at the base of the ladder opened up, trying to tag Encizo at the edge of the roof. The Brotherhood trooper who had elected to sit out the fight on a ladder rung screamed in pain as two AK-47 bullets slashed through his right leg.

      Encizo pulled a fragmentation grenade from his harness and dumped it over the side. Screams of dismay filled the alley as the terrorists recognized the egg-shaped envelope of death spiraling down into their midst. The rifle salvo ended as the terrorist chose to run, rather than be blown to smithereens. It was too late. Thunder boomed, grounded gunmen smashed into greasy pulps of crushed flesh and bone, destroyed by the high-powered blast. Encizo reached down to the injured Egyptian and took his hand. There was a moment of doubt on the Brotherhood prisoner’s part, but he let the Cuban haul him onto the roof. Encizo’s powerful upper body strength made lifting the slender Arab as easy as hoisting a child.

      “They shot me,” the man whimpered in broken English, voice trembling from a mixture of pain and betrayal.

      “Cal, we have wounded!” Encizo called out.

      “Busy!” James responded. The Phoenix Force medic had transferred to his Beretta and was in the process of stitching a line of 9 mm rounds into a gunman on the next rooftop over. The M-89-SR lay at James’s feet, action locked open, the magazine well empty.

      Encizo caught movement on another rooftop and whirled, spotting three gunmen rushing up in James’s blind spot. He snapped up the USP and let them have it with a salvo of rapid-fire rounds, drilling two of the terrorists when he heard the crack of another pistol firing. The Egyptian he’d rescued emptied half the magazine of his 9 mm Helwan into the third attacker.

      “They shot me,” the ex-Brotherhood gunman growled, having shaken off his moment of shock. Betrayal still burned in his eyes as he reloaded the Egyptian Beretta copy. “I don’t owe those traitorous dogs more than goat shit and death.”

      Encizo gave him a friendly smirk. “That’s the spirit.”

      He went back to searching for more rooftop enemies, but the Phoenix Force pair and their newfound ally had depleted their ranks.

      “Clear for now,” James said, rushing over with his first-aid kit. “I’ll look after our buddy’s leg. Rafe…”

      “I’ve got Striker’s back,” Encizo replied. He scooped up the sniper rifle and fed it a fresh magazine. “Take good care of him. Hearts and minds.”

      “You know it,” James responded.

      The Cuban warrior nestled behind the sniper rifle and set to work thinning out the crowd of Muslim Brotherhood soldiers who were trying to rush the rear of the hotel’s compound. There was still work to be done.

      CHAPTER SIX

      Captain Fial Aflaq had been prepared for the coming of the nameless crusader for a full day. It was common knowledge among