Desert Fallout. Don Pendleton

and the concealing cape altered that target, moving it away from Bolan’s body and saving his life by a matter of inches.

      With a wild dive, the Executioner returned to the column he’d previously evacuated. Bullets slammed into the ground, chasing him.

      The enemy was smart and fast. The gunners didn’t have a good angle on the Executioner yet, but it would only be a matter of moments before they could get him in their sights.

      The doomsday numbers tumbled as Bolan looked for a way out of this trap.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Bullets slammed into the stone column Bolan crouched behind. The mystery commandos surrounded the veteran warrior. Alone and outnumbered, he scanned for an angle where the enemy’s rifles hadn’t filled the air with blazing-hot steel-cored slugs.

      During his career, the Executioner had found himself backed into many corners by overwhelming enemy forces, so much so that one part of his mind always sought escape routes from any location or situation. Countless hours of practical experience had ingrained a situational awareness that would give him the means of evasion once an emergency presented itself.

      The eruption of bullets against the face of one stone showed Bolan that there was a two-foot gap, close to the ground. Thought was action for the lone soldier, and he tucked his rifle flat to his chest. In another heartbeat, his long, muscular legs propelled him into that gap, his tattered cloak flapping behind him and jerking as rifle rounds tore through its fabric. Nothing struck Bolan’s back or lower limbs, and with serpentine agility and speed, he slithered along the ground and out of the path of enemy gunfire. He could hear shouts of communication among his Arabic-speaking opponents. They knew he’d moved out of the pocket they’d tried to sew him into with full-auto fire as their needle and thread.

      Bolan didn’t spare their consternation another thought, seeing another furrow in the earth that would allow him to run while maintaining cover. He somersaulted into the crease and got his feet beneath him. After two long strides, he felt the air shake as a hand grenade detonated behind him. His improvised camouflage cape shuddered as it absorbed a wave of shrapnel that would have been deadly had Bolan not gotten enough distance between himself and the explosion. It was an uncomfortable set of factors that spared the soldier’s life for a few moments more, but he charged on, unhooking one of his own explosive eggs from his harness.

      With a deft turn and a hard throw, Bolan sailed his grenade at the torso of an enemy gunman who scrambled into view. The baseball-size knot of steel and RDX crunched against the man’s goggles, cracking them and knocking him onto his back. Moments later, the fuse ticked down to zero and detonated. Arms and legs were thrown into the air in a grisly display of carnage. Shreds of human tissue vomited upward in a column of debris that would rain down once gravity overcame their initial acceleration.

      Bolan knew he’d taken down one more of the enemy, but given the skills of the group, he wasn’t going to take that as a major victory. They were simply too good to take for granted. He skidded to a halt and dropped prone while facing the direction he’d just come from. The collapse to the dirt was swift, and his tattered blanket settled over his flat form. The crunch of racing boots sounded in the distance, and Bolan swung the barrel of his AK toward the noise. He had his weapon aimed, and one eye on the front sight, but his ears were open and his peripheral vision was peeled in order to keep from being flanked. He was still outnumbered and outgunned.

      A crunch off to Bolan’s left spurred him to roll onto his side, transitioning from the rifle to one of his sidearms. Aside from the AK and the Beretta, Bolan liked to have a handgun with considerable penetration and power. Normally, that was the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, but the rapid trip to the Sinai had left him needing a locally acquired alternative. His substitute was a Smith & Wesson .45 Military and Police with a 10-shot magazine. A hooded, goggle-wearing commando head appeared where Bolan had aimed the hand cannon, and he pulled the trigger, spearing a 230-grain round-nosed slug through his pursuer’s face. The goggles vaporized, along with the man’s eyes, and he flopped backward out of sight.

      The bellow of the polymer handgun’s discharge slowed the approaching boot stomps. Unfortunately for the pair of mercenaries, their forward advance hadn’t halted soon enough to save both of them. Bolan had kept his AK trained on the spot he’d expected them to appear, and now that the enemy was in sight, he held down the trigger on the Kalashnikov. A snarl of full-auto fire raked across the upper thighs and groin of one of the mystery gunmen. Heavy, steel-cored slugs shattered the rifleman’s femurs and pelvis while other rounds tore through femoral arteries. The sputtering roar of the AK was a death sentence for the gunner, and he toppled into a thrashing heap.

      The second of the killers managed to throw himself back toward cover. His reflexes had helped him to avoid the relentless, merciless slash of bullets that had taken down his partner. Bolan would have been tempted to go after the escaping gunman, but a hand grenade clanked on the stone furrow he was in, thrown by a third mercenary who hadn’t jolted out into the open. With his own reactions honed by countless battles, the Executioner hurled himself out of the gully, rolling on the flat ground as the fragger went off. In his tumble to escape the shrapnel and shock wave, the AK was torn from his grasp.

      Bolan didn’t bother to retrieve the assault rifle, both hands clasping around the grip of the Smith & Wesson .45. He rolled to one knee, maintaining a low profile out in the open. Two more grenades sailed from the crack, and Bolan scrambled to the cover of a low mount of stone. Thunderous booms resounded from the double blast, jarring the soldier’s ears, but the concussive energy wasn’t strong enough to do more than momentarily disorient him. With practiced wisdom, Bolan lay still behind the mound, allowing the plumes of dust and smoke from the explosions to obscure his presence.

      He heard the enemy conversing, wishing he had enough of a grasp of Arabic to pinpoint the style of speech. They could have been emissaries of any of a half-dozen governments, from Syria to Pakistan, and only their cold-blooded execution of hostages had dispelled any qualms Bolan would have had for gunning them down. Even if they were a “friendly” government’s death squad, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, they were heartless murderers, and as such had earned the cleansing flames of his wrath.

      Bolan noticed the man he’d shot in the face, sprawled on the ground not far from him. To replace his fallen rifle, he made a crablike scurry on all fours toward the fallen assault weapon. With a quick scoop, he retrieved it, a Steyr AUG A-3. He tore the pouch holder off the dead man’s thigh. It felt half-empty, but it was still more ammunition than none at all. With the straps clattering on the stone, he made enough noise to draw the attention of the enemy riflemen, but by the time they focused on the sound, Bolan had reached the cover of the outcropping he’d initially hidden behind. Bullets speared into the ground where he’d been only seconds earlier.

      The Executioner shouldered the rifle and tapped the trigger lightly. Unfortunately, the assault rifle he’d acquired had no selector switch; only the position of his finger on the trigger shifted the cyclic rate from semi-auto to full-auto. His tap on the trigger was to release a 5.56 mm round on a single shot. He needed to conserve ammunition, and at this close range, he was able to kill an opponent with a single shot, though he wasn’t going to stick around for long. He popped a round toward a standing figure, causing him to retreat. Another pair of quick taps induced a salvo of enemy rifles to erupt, spraying the area where they had seen his muzzle-flash.

      Bolan faked an agonized cry. It was a convincing ploy, and the warrior slithered along the ground. The enemy commandos had unintentionally kicked up new, thicker clouds of debris and dust that concealed Bolan as he slithered back into the gully. The sun had descended lower in the sky, and the long shadows cast by the ridge to the west had given the battleground between the Executioner and his enemy plenty of places for Bolan to conceal himself. The patches of darkness and the obfuscating clouds worked both ways, unfortunately. He needed to keep his senses sharp in order to continue his retreat.

      Bolan needed some information, which meant one more retrieval. He stayed low and rushed toward where he’d seen a specific part of a grenade-blasted corpse drop. While the enemy was busy making certain that the Executioner was down for the count, Bolan decided to give himself a hand. Specifically, he grabbed