Dead Reckoning. Don Pendleton

whole damned world.

      “What are we flying south?” Grimaldi asked, once he was on the ground at Reagan, with his Piper battened down for the duration.

      “Hal’s got something waiting for us, subject to your signing off on it,” Bolan replied.

      “Close by?”

      “A couple hundred yards that way,” Bolan said, pointing to the west.

      “Let’s check it out.”

      They walked across the tarmac to a hangar labeled Bellair Charters, where an Eclipse 500 microjet sat waiting for them. “Not bad,” Grimaldi offered as they did a walk-around. “A service ceiling of forty-one thousand feet, maximum range of 1,295 miles and a top speed of 425 miles per hour. That’s five refueling stops before we land in Paraguay. I’m thinking Dallas, Oaxaca, Mexico, Panama City over the Gulf, Canaima, Venezuela, Alta Floresta, Brazil, then on to Asunción. A lot of stops, but it’s the best this little bird can do.”

      “How long?” Bolan asked.

      “Air time, about eleven hours. Ground time, messing with the locals?” Grimaldi considered it and shook his head. “Your guess would be as good as mine.”

      “No time to waste, then,” Bolan said. “The sooner we’re airborne, the better.”

      “Roger that. I’ll start the preflight check right now, then have a chat with the tower.”

      Bolan left Grimaldi to it. He wasn’t happy with the time lag between takeoff and their final touchdown in Paraguay. If something spooked the people he was hunting in the meantime, he could miss them altogether and be back to square one, hoping Stony Man could run them down again.

      And if they couldn’t, he’d be waiting for the next attack, like everybody else.

      But that was unacceptable. Failure was not an option for the Executioner.

      The plague of terrorism was as old as humankind. It could not be eradicated, only held at bay, until such time as fundamental change in human nature was achieved. So far, in Bolan’s lifetime, there had been no sign of that occurring. Planet Earth still needed soldiers standing watch against the predators who populated so-called “civilized” society, taking advantage of the weak and hopeless for their own ends, masked by politics, religion, pick your poison.

      In his idle hours, few as they might be, Bolan sometimes philosophized about a world without atrocities, devoid of greed and cruelty, hatred, discrimination and suspicion. He would never live to see it—no one would, in fact—because the human animal was deeply and irrevocably flawed.

      Men craved what they could not afford, what they had no right to possess. When frustrated in their pursuit of more, they turned on those presumably obstructing them. Some humans learned to channel greed and hatred into lucrative careers in various fields. Others sated their greed through commerce, raping the environment with utter disregard for future generations. Altruists, when they appeared, were such a novelty that they were usually murdered, canonized as saints or both.

      The bottom line: there were no angels, and no demons. Every man and woman on the planet was an individual, resisting or surrendering to baser instincts as they passed through life, taking it one day at a time. Some gave free rein to their desires, and in the process jeopardized communities, whole nations, or the world at large.

      When those predators stood beyond the reach of ordinary law, they had to be curbed by extraordinary force.

      Enter the Executioner, commissioned to continue with a job he’d started on his own, without official sanction, to repay a private debt of blood. He kept on fighting now because he could, because somebody had to if “polite” society was going to survive.

      That meant confronting human monsters where they lived and preyed on others weaker than themselves. It meant destroying them, scorching the earth to stall—where he could not prevent—another monster rising in their place.

      The war, he realized, could not be won. It was a holding action, not some grand crusade.

      Bolan would occupy the firing line as long as he was able. After that...

      He hoped that someone would rise to grab the torch.

       CHAPTER THREE

      Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

      Bolan had reached the fourth floor and still had not seen any of the God’s Hammer fugitives among the men he and Grimaldi had put down so far. This was the last floor left to check, and he’d begun to worry that they might have slipped the net—or, at the very least, gone shopping, out to get a meal, whatever, and eluded him by sheer coincidence.

      Not good.

      Before they rushed the final set of apartments, Bolan huddled with Grimaldi on the stairwell. Just above and to their left, he heard the last defenders talking excitedly and priming their weapons, maybe trying to decide if they should rush the stairs or dig in for a last-ditch fight.

      “It’s getting dicey now,” he told Grimaldi, almost whispering. “The guys we’re after could be here, but if they’re not—”

      The Stony Man pilot saw where he was going and finished for him. “Then we need to bag somebody who can tell us when they left and where they went.”

      “Right,” Bolan said. “I’d like to take one down but leave him breathing so we can question him, but don’t take any chances. Still take care of Number One.”

      Grimaldi flashed a grin. “Which one of us is Number One?”

      “Ready?” Bolan asked him.

      “Set.”

      Bolan eased up and pitched the frag grenade that he’d been holding while they talked, a blind toss down the narrow hallway. Four-point-something seconds later it exploded, filling the corridor with smoke and dust.

      One guy was down and out, sprawled in the middle of the hallway, leaking from at least a dozen shrapnel wounds. A couple others staggered through the battle mist, approaching Bolan in a daze, but neither of their faces rang a bell from Brognola’s portfolio of God’s Hammer fugitives. The Executioner dropped both of them with one round each and moved on, searching.

      First door on his left, ajar. He ducked and nudged it open, ready for a burst of autofire, but it was vacant, no one hiding underneath the bed or in the tiny bathroom. Doubling back, he heard Grimaldi’s muffled SMG responding to a challenge from the Hezbollah gunners and went to join him on the firing line.

      Grimaldi had already cleared the rooms directly opposite, then run into a roadblock from the second flat in line, off to the right. At least one terroriat was battened down in there, firing short bursts from a Kalashnikov without putting much effort into aiming. So far, he had strafed the ceiling and the walls to either side, while Grimaldi lay prone out in the hallway, waiting for a shot.

      Bolan got there ahead of him, his different perspective granting him an early crack at the defender. Three rounds from the Steyr chewed his adversary’s face off—not a face he recognized—and dumped him back across the threshold of the last room he would ever occupy.

      Grimaldi bolted to his feet and cleared the apartment, while Bolan took the next one on his left. He saw no further movement in the hallway, no signs of continuing resistance, but they’d have to go the whole route, checking every room and closet, just in case.

      Unless...

      There was no one in the apartment, but on a whim, he checked the window, the first one he’d seen standing open yet, despite the building’s air-conditioning. A fire escape was bolted to the wall outside, and down below, three men were running toward the far end of an alley lined with garbage bins. One of them paused long enough to glance back at the room he’d lately vacated, and Bolan made his face.

      Salman Farsoun, one of the three he’d come to find