Rogue Elements. Don Pendleton

of the Arabian Sea Benevolent Pirate Association has a bounty on guys like us.”

      “And?”

      “They want to play pirate? Then quick’s the word and sharp’s the action. Repel all boarders.”

      Sifuentes held up his blade. “With Port Salalah souvenir daggers?”

      “It starts with that.” Bolan took out three more daggers and handed one more to Sifuentes. “Then it escalates.”

      Sifuentes held a dagger in each hand. He laughed aloud. “Fuckin’ ay, Bubba! We got catapults and boiling oil?”

      Bolan reached into his bag and took out four plastic squeeze bottles of French dish soap. “No, but this contains lanolin. Go pour one on both back windowsills and pour a bunch down the outside of the drainpipe I climbed up.”

      Sifuentes smiled like it was Christmas and ran to lubricate all methods of third-floor rear access. Bolan did not share the young ex-Ranger’s enthusiasm. This was going to happen very fast or go south even faster. He took several moments to spritz out the second two bottles in ever-widening concentric circles on the tiles in front of the door. Sifuentes returned and was inordinately pleased by what he saw. “We can take these assholes! We can take ’em!”

      Bolan tossed away the empty soap bottle. “With science.”

      “Dude—” Sifuentes gazed at Bolan in awe. “You’re, like, Bill Nye the Assassin Guy.” He sniffed at the French aromatherapy filling the foyer. “Unless their Spidey senses detect lavender.”

      “There is that. So I want you lurking in the door of the kitchenette. When they kick in the door, there’s going to be a puppy pile right here in front of me. It’s going to get all stabby. The first gun I reap I am kicking or throwing to you, and then it is all on you. If I still have a pulse, I’ll grab the next gun and we take them all down.” Bolan didn’t usually repeat himself, but he locked gazes with the young Ranger and held it. “This is going to happen real fast.”

      “I hear you, brother.” Sifuentes held a nine-inch Omani hand-scythe in each fist. “If the guns don’t come, then it’s you and me against them, bro. It gets all stabby. Real fast.”

      Bolan nodded his approval. “Let’s do it.”

      “Lights on or off?”

      “On, and put on some music. Something inviting.”

      Sifuentes’s thumb rapidly roamed the screen of his smartphone. “Here, dig this. It’s dope.” Angry, Mexican heavy metal thundered and snarled out of the phone’s surprisingly powerful speaker. Sifuentes made the horns with his other hand. “Zombie Bullfighters of Death.”

      “Well, if a couple of brother Vikings have to have theme music for a pirate ambush on the Arabian Peninsula...”

      “That’s what I’m saying!” Sifuentes enthused.

      “Take your position.”

      The former Ranger took his position in the kitchen doorway. Somewhere along the line Sifuentes had forgotten that he was the senior Viking associate in charge, but Bolan had that effect on people. The Executioner pushed an ottoman to the left of the door and proceeded to wait. Less than five minutes later he saw shadows beneath the door. Bolan pointed a dagger toward the floor. Sifuentes nodded that he had seen.

      Bolan estimated at least three targets in the hallway. Sifuentes’s head snapped back toward the kitchen. He rapidly pantomimed hand-over-hand.

      Someone was climbing the drainpipe.

      That someone screamed as his hands suddenly closed around the soaped pipe and he fell two stories to the cobblestones below. A fist punched through the door in front of Bolan. It was gloved and holding a hand grenade.

      The Executioner lashed out. The crescent moon of Arabian steel just about took off the assassin’s hand at the wrist. The grenadier screamed, and the bomb fell in a spray of blood as its cotter lever pinged away. Bolan snagged the falling grenade and went for the double play as he flung it at Sifuentes. “Hot potato!”

      The younger man didn’t blink. He snagged the live grenade and hurled it out the kitchen window. The lethal orb detonated two stories down, and the fallen drainpipe climber screamed as he ate steel rain. The door smashed open beneath a boot.

      “Allahu akhbar!”

      A man charged in redecorating the flat with a stubby machine pistol. Bolan reversed his blade in his hand and lunged as lead flew and brass sprayed.

      The man caught Bolan too late out of the corner of his eye. “Allahu akh—”

      Bolan felt flesh part as he drew his sickle of steel from the killer’s left collarbone to his right ear. The assassin went boneless in double arterial spray. Bolan got two fingers on the falling machine pistol, but it fell away from his grasp and hit the floor. He got the toe of his boot into it and sent the Mini-Uzi spinning across the tiles toward Sifuentes. “Now or not at all!”

      He dived for the weapon.

      Bolan rose.

      The third man leveled his weapon.

      The Executioner hurled his blade. A curved khanjar dagger was no sticker, but about half a pound of steel and buffalo horn hit the assassin in the face and his shots went high and wide. The killer staggered as Sifuentes drilled a burst into his chest. Bolan ripped a grenade off the assassin’s belt as he fell, and pulled the pin. The remaining man in the hall fired burst after burst through the doorway, but he had no angle. He screamed in fear as Bolan pulled a bank shot and bounced the grenade off the far wall in the hall and sent it out of sight. The bomb whip-cracked. The killer in the hall’s scream was nearly lost in the explosion’s echoes as he fell.

      Bolan scooped up a Mini-Uzi and wiped blood off the action. “Any movement out back?”

      Sifuentes took a quick peek out the kitchen window. “Just one guy in puddles and piles.”

      Executioner took a quick look down the hall. The last assassin had taken a Russian F1 hand grenade at kissing distance and turned the walls into modern art. Lodgers on the first and second floors were screaming. “Hey, you remember your plan about waiting down on the beach?”

      Sifuentes nodded. “Yeah?”

      “Call Viking. Tell them that’s where we’ll be.” Bolan quickly searched the fallen. “We’re going out the kitchen window and down the drainpipe.”

      “Cool.”

      “Don’t slip on the soap.”

       Chapter Two

      The Arabian Sea

      The Huey descended toward the ship that was their new, temporary home. Both Bolan and Sifuentes had been surprised when the civilian-marked chopper had flown right up to the pier at dawn and someone had texted the former Ranger, instructing them to get on board, and fast. Bolan took in the ship. The Alice O’Kieffe was a small blue ’70s vintage coastal freighter. She had been converted into an arsenal ship. The majority of ports of call on the planet did not allow armed civilian ships to sail into port. The major shipping security companies like the Rampart Group and Viking got around that by keeping ships offshore and at strategic points in the shipping lanes where men and weapons could be loaded and off-loaded in international waters. The ship had a makeshift helicopter deck. Four shirtless, muscular, tattooed men were currently playing a game of two-on-two basketball. The central painted H made for a decent basketball key. The players stopped and squinted upward as the helicopter came in out of the brassy midmorning sun. Bolan raised an appreciative eyebrow at the sight of the copper-colored woman in a camo bikini sunning herself on top of a lifeboat out of sight of the rest of the crew.

      Sifuentes smirked. “Dude, I know you have like, superpowers and stuff.”

      “And stuff,” Bolan acknowledged.