LITMIR.BIZ

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community. He most certainly would be able to use it as an excuse, a rationale, for his brutal tactics at home.

      The Executioner didn’t intend to let him get that far.

      The foyer, opening up from the double doors, had a small door set at the far end. Bolan cautiously checked this and found a storage closet with a floor buffer inside. He dragged the two bodies into the closet, throwing the now useless Kalashnikov in after them. He paused a moment, then placed the functional Kalashnikov with its magazines in a corner of the storage room, under the mop and bucket standing next to the buffer. Much as the firepower might be needed, he could not risk going full-auto, and he needed to be able to travel fast and light. He eased the door shut. Then he paused and simply listened.

      It was eerily quiet inside. He could hear voices amplified through bullhorns outside, probably the police or Padan Muka throwing demands at the terrorists or at the Westerner who had just blundered into their midst. Given that Fahzal’s people, or at least those at the upper levels, knew the CIA had brought in a troubleshooter they didn’t want, the soldier was a little surprised no one had taken a shot at him at some point. Bureaucracy seemed to be working in his favor; even a despotic regime like Fahzal’s had many tentacles, and the dozens or hundreds of right hands didn’t know what the dozens or hundreds of left hands were doing at any given moment.

      The sound of the bullhorns was faint through the heavy front doors. Even if they had no reason to want to shoot him on sight, Bolan knew that walking so boldly into the midst of this hostage crisis might prompt a reaction from the police and troops outside. He was, however, gambling hard that it wouldn’t. He could smell politics here. He was going to bet his life that the armed men outside would stay right where they were until Fahzal was ready to move—and not before.

      Bolan consulted the intelligence files in his secure satellite phone. On the small color screen he called up the floor plan of the building. It might or might not be completely accurate; the plans were those originally filed for the construction of the structure a few years before. Had those plans been altered during construction, or had the building been renovated subsequently, the information in the soldier’s phone could be flawed. That did not matter. He would work with what he had. This was why Brognola and the Man had chosen him for a seat-of-the-pants, near-suicidal mission of this type. Bolan gave the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group plausible deniability if things got ugly. He could be dismissed as a rogue operative for whom the United States would claim no responsibility. Much more important, he was the type of flexible, veteran combat operative who could roll with a fluid situation and come out on top, trusting his guts, his guns and his sense of intuition to get the job done.

      According to the floor plan, the classrooms were located on the second and third floors. The main floor was used for administrative facilities and consisted of small offices. The fourth floor boasted a large auditorium with skylights and roof access.

      Bolan put himself in the position of Fahzal’s forces. That roof would almost certainly be covered by snipers, and unless the skylights could be blocked somehow, there would be a clear line of sight to anyone in the auditorium. That would mean the BR terrorists wouldn’t set up in the auditorium, despite the convenience of having a large, open space to keep their hostages corralled. That is, they wouldn’t set up in the auditorium unless they were profoundly stupid. Bolan had no reason to think they would be.

      He was left, then, with the classrooms on the middle two floors, and that would make things more difficult. He would have to search room by room, eliminating resistance as we he went, doing it as quietly as he could to avoid alerting the others. The closer he got to the BR troops and their hostages, the more danger there was that he could tip off all of them to his presence. To succeed, he had to retain the element of surprise, but each guard, each terrorist he eliminated along the way, increased the odds of his detection.

      Attaching the sound-suppressor to the Beretta 93-R, he made a cursory, hurried sweep of the ground floor, moving quietly heel-and-toe with the weapon held in both hands before him.

      There was, according to the plans, another ground-floor entrance ahead and to the right, at the side of the building. Bolan made his way to the middle of the hallway, his civilian hiking boots quiet enough on the polished marble floor. Some part of his brain took note of the extensively carved moldings and ceiling art that decorated the interior of the school. No expense had been spared. The elaborately worked and padded benches that occasionally dotted the walls, outside of the administration offices, appeared to be very expensive, too, though Bolan was no expert on furniture.

      He found the access hallway to the side entrance, opposite the metal doors of an elevator that he ignored. Approaching the access hallway, he risked a glance around the corner. There was a fatigue-clad man standing there with his back to Bolan. The Executioner thought it odd that the noise of his conversation with the guards at the front entrance had not brought this one to investigate. Then he heard the tinny sound of music, coming faintly from the guard’s head.

      The man was wearing a portable music player. An AK-47 was slung over his shoulder. While he did seem intent on the view through the windows set on either side of the doorway, as if expecting a police raid at any moment, he certainly wasn’t listening for trouble.

      Wondering if this really was amateur night after all, Bolan raised his Beretta and pointed the sound-suppressor at the back of the sentry’s head.

      “Hey,” he said softly, as he nudged the man with the barrel.

      The sentry’s head whipped around. He gasped, sucked in a breath to scream and grabbed for his rifle.

      Bolan put a single round quietly through the man’s face. The terrorist folded in on himself and was still.

      That was another hole in the perimeter security. Bolan could hear the ticking of the clock deep in his mind, constantly aware of the mission’s time constraints.

      He kept going, finishing his sweep, quickly checking for stragglers or hidden shooters among the offices. As he neared the door at the far end of the corridor, which led to the stairwell, he caught a glimpse of movement through the small reinforced glass window set within the fire door.

      He crouched low and pressed himself against the wall next to the door. The heavy door prevented him from hearing whomever was on the other side, but it could only be a sentry. Transferring the machine pistol to his left hand, he used the knuckles of his right to rap on the metal door. He knocked quietly but insistently.

      The dark-skinned man who pushed the door open was wearing camouflage fatigues and aiming a Makarov pistol. Bolan fired, putting a single 9-mm round through the man’s head. He dropped like a stone.

      The Executioner scooped up the Makarov and tucked it into his belt behind his left hip. He had to move; there was no time to worry about the sentry’s body. He had to keep up his pace in order to take the second, then the third floors.

      Things had already gotten bloody. They were, he knew, about to get much, much worse.

      4

      Bolan crept up to the second floor and cautiously opened the fire door leading to the corridor beyond. There was no one waiting. The hallway was as impressive as the ground floor in its furnishings and decoration, but there were subtle differences. Bulletin boards lined the walls, and artwork obviously made by the students was on display. Brognola’s files had said the school catered to children aged roughly seven to twelve; Fahzal’s boy Jawan was twelve years old. The art on the walls was the usual fare produced by children in that age range the world over. Seeing it there, and knowing that BR was threatening those children with death, brought a hard gleam to the Executioner’s eyes. He’d seen far too many innocents caught in the cross fire of power plays like these.

      He began working his way down the hall. The layout was simple: there were half a dozen classrooms on each side, spaced exactly opposite each other, with more of the benches he had seen downstairs to break up the monotony. At the center of the hallway was an elevator on one side and a pair of doors leading to the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms opposite that.

      He checked each classroom in turn. Each was empty. Satisfied that the second

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