Agent Of Peril. Don Pendleton
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the Executioner’s signature pistols and his heavier weaponry were left behind. Bolan had left his usual weaponry in a diplomatic pouch, ready to be forwarded anyplace that he needed more firepower for a long-haul mission.
This day the Executioner made do with what he’d bought at a tribal gun shop in Peshawar. He had plenty of money for some hand-built, if eccentric, weapons.
The primary weapon was a hand-tooled Short Magazine Lee Enfield—the classic SMLE of the British forces during World War II. The weapon was topped with a Chinese knockoff of an ECLAN scope that gave Bolan some reach. The pistol-gripped rifle was a smooth shooting machine. For more hectic work, Bolan had also bought a 9 mm Skorpion machine pistol and a pair of stainless-steel Brazilian Taurus PT-92s. The Taurus handguns were almost identical to his Beretta 93-R, lacking only barrel length, a folding foregrip and a 3-round burst option. The Peshawar gunsmiths even managed to retool the Taurus to operate with the Beretta’s extended 20-shot magazines. Still, they were somewhat different from what he usually carried.
That didn’t matter.
It wasn’t the tools that had allowed Bolan to survive against insurmountable odds for as long as he had. But they sure helped.
Bolan swept the fighting field and wondered what his course of action should be. He wasn’t sure what he’d find, following the trio. They’d come ashore at Gwadar, more than nine hundred kilometers south, but thankfully in the age of satellite telephones and satellite surveillance, the Executioner was able to keep tabs on the massive boxcars as they were loaded onto train tracks from Gwadar to Nok Kundi to Quetta, where they were offloaded.
Bolan was racing to intercept them from the north, having managed to snag a transport flight into Afghanistan and stopping off with American U.S. Army Special Forces. The Special Forces operational teams were dividing their time between restoring the nation in their role as teachers and diplomats, and on the side, still hunting for leftover madmen from the Taliban. The Executioner wished those men luck, and left them to their task, knowing that it was in good hands.
The Hezbollah trio was a danger that he had taken unto himself. They had picked up a good-sized bodyguard force during their train trip. Now the three moneymen were accompanied by a dozen well-armed men. Bolan didn’t know them by their faces, but if he transmitted their images back to Stony Man Farm, he was certain that he’d come up with local al Qaeda loyalists.
Bolan wanted to take another close look at the Hezbollah bunch.
They were talking, moving out of the way as the contents of the first container came rolling out.
It wasn’t the chill of the Pakistani spring winds that Bolan felt in his bones as he saw the familiar boxy frame of a tank rolling out of the boxcar. He wanted to believe it was a Soviet tank, or some Chinese knockoff, but his eyes and mind were already placing the unique frame and shape of the armored vehicle. His stomach curled into a knot. He didn’t want to believe what he saw, but there it was.
An M1A1 Abrams tank. The main cannon was disassembled, and from the range Bolan was looking, it was an older model, with the old 105 mm gun instead of the newer 120 mm gun that was the mainstay of the United States armed forces. This was cold comfort, as the tank was still an almost unstoppable war machine, capable of laying waste to an entire city before an air strike or other tanks could be brought to stop it.
Three boxcars.
Three tanks.
The terrorists could easily barter themselves up to seventy-five million dollars for the sale of these war machines to anyone who wanted a small armored force. And it wouldn’t take much effort to convert the old 105 mm cannon into the more modern 120 mm pieces that could cut through an entire building with one shot. Bolan set down the SMLE and checked his arsenal. He didn’t have a single thing that could make the odds anywhere close to equal against even an empty Abrams with half a tank of fuel. The forty pounds of C-4 explosive might be able to dent one tank, but to destroy all three…
The waiting game was over and Bolan swiftly began setting up his first shot with the SMLE.
Destroying tanks with a .30-caliber rifle wasn’t something he planned for, but he did have eighteen stripper clips of .303 ammunition for the SMLE and he was mentally setting up the long shots to cause mayhem and destruction. Armor-piercing rounds were filling the magazines.
Bolan brought the scope to bear on a stacked crate of 67 mm artillery rockets. He reckoned the distance as around 400 meters, and brought the rifle’s point of aim up enough to compensate, then pulled the trigger. The SMLE shoved against the Executioner’s shoulder. Thick cedar burst apart like flimsy plywood as the 124-grain tungsten-cored slug slammed into the contents of the wooden crate. What happened next shook the ground, but the Executioner was already looking for new targets, throwing the bolt back to feed a fresh .303 into the breach.
With both eyes open, he saw the bowl of smoke rising, a blast zone easily forty yards across. Screams of panic rang out as the terrorists ran for cover. Spotting a fresh target, Bolan pumped a second round through the fuel tank of a motorcycle. Fuel sprayed wildly from the burst bladder, and the gunman atop the bike slipped, tumbling to the ground. Bolan dropped his aim and sent off a second round almost immediately after the first, skipping the third .303 round off the fuel-soaked tarmac. The bullet hit with a flaring spark, and gasoline flashed in a fireball, washing over the guard.
Panicked bodyguards whipped out weaponry from wherever they had it stored and more than a few began blasting at each other. Bolan swept along, burning off the rest of his first magazine, taking shots that nicked or sparked close to already hyper alert gunners.
A few bullets here and there got the maddened gunfight going. Bolan threw back the bolt one last time, then stuffed down ten fresh rounds and closed the rifle, swinging for more new targets. One of the weapons auctioneers was screaming, pointing frantically toward him. The Executioner might have ignored him except for the RPG-7 rocket launcher being aimed in his direction.
With a single stroke of the trigger a bullet slammed into the rocketeer’s groin, tearing through his pelvis with sledgehammer force. In the same instant, the severely injured gunner squeezed the trigger on his weapon, bending halfway over. He skipped the 77 mm warhead off the ground, firing too soon to slam it point first into the earth. The teardrop-shaped warhead deflected and went skidding along the tarmac, giving the detonator time to arm.
In an instant, the point of the rocket struck the treads of the Abrams tank. On impact, the shell went off. The explosion wasn’t the earthshaker that the Executioner started the show with, but Bolan saw one of the Hezbollah moneymen go skidding away, his feet turned to greasy streaks in their wake. He cried out, pistol in hand, clawing toward a suitcase full of money and firing aimlessly in rage.
The Hezbollah group had been chopped in two. Bolan had seen the fifteen-man force brought down to nine by the warhead’s explosion. If he was going to get any answers on the tanks, he needed to start taking the moneymen alive.
One was firing off the contents of his weapon into the wounded RPG gunner, stitching him with 9 mm pistol rounds. Bolan tagged him in the shoulder, blowing the back out of the joint with a .303 round and knocking him down. He swiveled and punched a second round into the face of a gunman who noticed the moneyman go down. Gunfire sizzled back and forth as the Executioner turned his weapon and aimed at the crates that the RPG gunner drew his shells from. The .303 round sailed and hit wood, but nothing happened. Bolan cycled the action and shifted his aim slightly.
This time RPG shells shattered the earth and sky in a chain reaction, one hammering explosion after another, sending shrapnel, flame and splinters flying in an ever growing cloud of devastation. Bolan rose, slinging his war bag. He ran hard toward the caldron of chaos and confusion and cut the distance between himself, and the destruction by half.
After reloading Bolan dropped to one knee. He snapped the rifle to his shoulder and burned off ten shots as fast as he could. The first rounds went into the tires of a jeep whose driver was trying to get himself, some customers and their goods, either bought or to be sold, the hell out of Dodge. The vehicle swerved hard and flipped.
The unlucky driver’s passengers went flying