LITMIR.BIZ

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by both the military and law enforcement in the nation.

      Fahzal’s internal security thugs would be among those so armed, though apparently the prime minister’s tastes ran to Israeli submachine guns as much as to Russian assault rifles. Bolan saw several knots of men in brown-and-black uniforms that could only be Padan Muka, based on what Rosli had told him. They had the dull, contemptuous look that he associated with goons of that type—people who enjoyed hurting others and who didn’t do much thinking about that, or anything. They weren’t soldiers and they certainly weren’t patriots, not in the righteous sense; they were hired muscle, and they were predators. The nearest Padan Muka triggermen eyed him hard as he passed them, giving him a cold look.

      He’d dealt with their kind before, and taught more than a few of them very painful lessons. There was no time to indulge his sense of justice on nonpriority targets, however.

      Brognola’s slim dossier had included the layout of the building he was now encountering. On the plane, he had formulated the most basic of plans, which left a lot to chance. He’d made his earliest incursions in his war against society’s predators perfecting his abilities at role camouflage, and what he was about to do was an aspect of that. Fixing his gaze on a point far ahead of him, he looked past everyone who noticed him, as if he were irritated, rushed and focused on getting to some point beyond each of the glaring Padan Muka fighters and police officers. He got past the first set of barriers simply by acting as if he belonged there.

      He was counting on complacency. The barricade of the school, and the hostage crisis within, was in its second day. The guards outside, perhaps expecting fireworks early on, would have had plenty of reasons to get bored by this time. They’d have gone from expecting anything to expecting nothing; the human mind sought routine and pattern even when there was no rational reason to expect either.

      More significantly, they’d be expecting either violent enemy action or deadly subterfuge. They were focused on the school and on stopping that enemy action from within. They would not be expecting an incursion from outside, nor would they automatically think they should prevent someone outside from going in. After all, how crazy would a man have to be to want to enter a building held by dangerous, armed terrorists willing to threaten the lives of children?

      The hard part, therefore, was not getting past the cordon outside the school. As the Executioner nodded and brushed past the barricades, brazenly walking through them as if he belonged there, nobody challenged him directly. He had known it would probably work, but in the back of his mind he had been prepared to shoot his way through if necessary. There was no time to do otherwise, and no viable alternative.

      When he reached the front doors of the school, a few of the Royal Malaysian Police officers began to shout at him. It was possible they hadn’t thought he’d do something so direct; perhaps they’d assumed he was simply moving toward the foremost barriers. Whatever they were shouting, he couldn’t understand it, anyway. He figured they probably wouldn’t shoot him for fear of touching off something inside the school.

      Probably.

      There were three sets of double doors within the front entrance. Each door was heavy, polished wood with brass fittings. The fogged glass of the doors has been starred with bullet holes, probably during the initial stage of the BR capture of the building. Bolan simply put his hand out and, ignoring the shouted protests from the men at the barricades, threw the doors open and stepped inside.

      There were two men dressed in camouflage fatigues standing inside the doorway. They turned as he entered, but were apparently too baffled by his sudden appearance even to bother shooting him. They both held well-worn Kalashnikov clones, which they pointed at him.

      “Hello there,” Bolan said cheerfully. “Do either of you speak English?”

      The door slid shut on well-oiled hinges behind him. The click of the mechanism engaging echoed through the suddenly very quiet hallway.

      The two BR men turned to look at each other, their expressions almost comical. They looked back at Bolan.

      “I do,” the one on Bolan’s left said. “Who are you? How did you get in here?” His accent was heavy, but his English was excellent. He punctuated his words by jabbing the muzzle of his rifle at Bolan.

      “Door was open,” Bolan answered, shrugging. “I’m the negotiator,” he said.

      “Negotiator?”

      “I was sent to hear your demands, make arrangements for their fulfillment,” Bolan said. “What, they didn’t tell you?”

      The two men glanced at each other again, then back to Bolan. “You two are with the group called the, uh, the BR, right? Fighting for freedom for your oppressed ethnic group?”

      “We fight the oppression of Fahzal!” the English speaker said proudly. His companion either knew enough English to agree, or recognized the tone; he smiled and nodded with equal pride.

      “Yes, by threatening to kill children,” Bolan said. “But thanks. It would have been irresponsible of me not to check.”

      As he said the words, Bolan knew both men’s brains would be focused on the dialogue he had created with them, and not immediately on his actions. They had already, thanks to his assertion, formed an opinion in their minds as to his purpose there.

      The six-inch blade of the stiletto snapped open in his hand. He swung the knife up and slashed out across both of their throats in turn. Bolan sidestepped to his right, his right hand completing the arc. He elbowed the closest man in the back of the head to drive him to the floor. The other terrorist, the man who had spoken, fell to his knees clutching at his throat. He died with his eyes wide, trying and failing to say something with his last breath.

      Bolan bent, picked up the better-looking of the two assault rifles and checked it. He grabbed the spare magazines the terrorists had carried, then took a moment to pop open the second rifle, pull the bolt and drop that bolt into his bag. There was no point in leaving functioning weapons behind him if he could help it.

      It was time to get down to business, before those two were missed.

      Neither man appeared to have a wireless phone or a walkie-talkie. That meant that either the terrorists were operating according to a preset plan, or they were using runners to transmit messages to the different teams securing the building. Either way, Bolan had just opened a gaping hole in their perimeter at the school’s front door. He had to make sure they were too busy with him to realize that fact. And he’d have to hope that the forces outside didn’t discover it, blunder in and make everything a lot more complicated. They were already going to be agitated, knowing that an unknown quantity had waltzed right past their roadblocks.

      He considered the situation as he assessed his immediate environment for more threats. Brognola’s briefing had included some notes on the political climate surrounding the events of the past day and a half in Kuala Lumpur. Ostensibly, Fahzal’s government wasn’t mounting a counterterrorist operation to retake the school for fear of what would happen to Fahzal’s son, Jawan, and to the other hostages. Realistically, if Fahzal was the sort of man who was willing to use his son’s kidnapping as an excuse to carry out a genocide, it wouldn’t be out of the question that he might be prolonging the episode deliberately. Every moment of bad press the BR got was a nail in the coffin of both that group and the Chinese-Indian ghetto between Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya.

      Bolan knew it was a standard policy of such regimes. First, you used a common enemy to generate support for your cause, even if that enemy was contrived. Then, you herded all of your supposed enemies into a centralized location, where you could control and monitor them. And finally, you solved the contrived problem by killing the enemies you’d rounded up.

      Bolan couldn’t help but think that was the real motive here. Fahzal may not have anticipated his own boy being caught in the cross fire, but the soldier figured the Malaysian prime minister would have found another excuse to raze the ghetto if this one hadn’t come up. If the BR’s brutal activities could be used to paint all of the members of that ghetto neighborhood with the label of child-killing terrorists, it was likely Fahzal would be able to justify

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