Executioner at work!
16
The gunship pilot could feel it, could sense it, the death in the air. Something had gone wrong. The orders were for tight formation in forward flight, not garbled messages over the radio and a precipitate drop to the ground under fire.
He glanced at the four other mercs under his command. They stood beside him in the open side door of their gunship.
'You men fall out here and flank out toward our nose,' he ordered. He looked at the armed navigator, unable even to remember the guy's name. 'You come with me. We'll flank out toward the left. Keep your heads down. All right, let's go. Kill anything that moves.'
The five men went EVA and started moving in the darkness toward the other helicopter.
He noticed for the first time that a ridge ran north-south to their right flank. It was possible that...
The night spat chattering gunfire from atop the ridge.
Two mercs emitted short grunts as they were spun around by the impact of the bullets, flurries of twisted arms and legs sprawling to the desert floor.
'Mother of God!' gasped the pilot in a scramble back toward cover.
The machine gun on the ridge stuttered again.
He and the navigator were already making a hurried dash back to the chopper when the pilot heard bullets snuff out the life behind him; he heard the sound of the dead man toppling to the sand.
As fast as he was pumping his legs, as close as his Huey gunship was, time stood still for the merc during that short dash for safety. His heart was hammering. He had the disjointed realization that his forehead wore a glaze of sweat despite the chilled night air.
There was no more gunfire.
Now what the hell?
He sensed movement from his right, from around the tail of the Huey gunship.
From his left, the other remaining merc shouted something unintelligible. More gunfire from that side.
But the pilot only had eyes on the big figure, gripping a Galil in his hands, who stepped into the red- splashed illumination of the copter's landing lights.
The big dude was moving toward him. The rosy glow of the Huey's lights were reflected, even from this distance, by the man's eyes that looked like chips of ice.
He brought up his AK-47 on the imposing combat figure striding toward him, knowing, even as his life survival instincts flared into crystal clarity, that he was too late.
The sharp report of the Galil was the last sound he ever heard.
Bolan heard the exchange of fire between Hohlstrom and the remaining merc, toward the front of the gun- ship.
Then the gunfire stopped. The Sahara night was utterly silent except for the ghostly whooshing of the gunship's rotor blades rotating in idle.
There was no sign of Hohlstrom.
Bolan moved across the field of dead men, jogging cautiously up to the rocky ridge where Hohlstrom had been inflicting his hits.
Bolan felt a sick premonition that was affirmed the moment he topped the ridge.
The 'Swede' was prone in a cleft in the rocks, which had given him a clear view of the ground surrounding the second gunship.
The Mossad agent was not moving.
Bolan bit off a curse as he approached the motionless form. He knelt beside his partner in this firefight and turned the man onto his side.
Hohlstrom had stopped at least one bullet before taking out the remaining merc down below. The agent's throat was a pulpy raw mess. This fighter would fight no more. He and the merc may have died at the same time; certainly within seconds of each other.
Bolan stood. He paused there in the cool night, above the body of his fallen ally. Mack Bolan listened. He watched.
Nothing moved.
He shared this desolation with the dead.
But his mind was also on the second gunship, which was operational. It was a slim chance, but he might still be able to trace Doyle to the south, in the mother ship with that mysterious cargo that all of the mercenaries here had died to protect.
Bolan slipped a silent salute to a good man who had sacrificed his life for a good cause. Then the Executioner turned from Hohlstrom's fallen form and started back down the ridge of that sand dune toward the idling helicopter.
When the sky came alive.
A whistling whine was piercing the darkness to the north. Two jets lanced in with their underbelly floodlamps casting quarter-mile pools of light in front of them on the desert floor as they screamed toward him.
When they were about a quarter mile away, the plane to Bolan's right veered sharply off from its mate, in an easterly sweep. Must be that the pilot of the second gunship had radioed ahead that they were going down, but had not had time for the exact coordinates. The jets were searching. From his Stony Man briefings, Bolan figured that the aircraft left for him to contend with was a Soviet-made Su-22.
Bolan hoped he could make it to the protection of the idling gunship before the Su-22 coming his way could spot him. His numbers had tumbled away, however. Another couple of heartbeats and that big warplane would be directly overhead, and Bolan was less than halfway down the sandy ridge that receded toward the Huey. He would be pinned beneath the harsh glare of the big jet's lights. The Libyan pilot was dusting the rolling terrain at a snug eight hundred feet. He would not miss Bolan.
Bolan acted.
He thumbed the Galil onto its grenade launcher mode. He undipped one of the grenades belted to his hip. He fed the grenade into the weapon's launcher apparatus.
The Galil is supposed to be fired from the tripod position when utilizing the grenade launcher. Bolan did not have time for that. He braced himself for the coming recoil. He triggered the assault rifle. Time had run out.
The Galil's recoil practically knocked Mack Bolan backward off his feet. The world screeched of madness from the big Su-22's engines. Armageddon would sound like this.
The HE impacted the Su-22 seconds after it passed over Bolan's head. The Soviet-supplied warplane blossomed into a wildfire flower. The jet disappeared for an instant, swallowed up by explosion. Then the scorched skeletal remains of the aircraft were visible hurtling into the gloom.
Scratch one Su-22.
Bolan scanned the night. Then he continued jogging toward the Huey gunship, still idling eighty yards away. He quickly spotted the other Libyan jet, maybe two miles to the east.
The second jet was responding by heeling around for a run of its own at Bolan.
It was happening in no time at all.
The Libyan jet sailed in with its wing-mounted miniguns blasting wide open.
17
The warplane, still a mile away in the night sky but gaining fast, fired off an air-to-surface missile that fingered out on a smoking trajectory toward the grounded Huey.
