mountain road below al-Bari’s cave. Their small convoy would hasten to the border, through the same Khyber Pass that Alexander the Great had used to invade the Indus Valley in 326 BC. Even then, it was well-known to traders, fugitives and bandits.
It would serve al-Bari well.
And he would live to fight again.
The infidels in Washington and London who believed that they had heard the last of him were wrong. Dead wrong.
Akram Ben Abd al-Bari was not beaten yet.
His war endured.
1
North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan: The Present
Mack Bolan leaned into the rush of icy wind, his gloved hands clutching the frame of the plane’s open doorway. Ten thousand feet below him, rivers, trees and hills resembled landmarks on a model-maker’s diorama, tiny and remote.
The pilot’s voice came to him through a small earpiece. “On my mark—five…four…three…”
He waited, didn’t bother with the thumbs-up signal or a parting word, but simply launched himself on “Go!” The lurch of falling was immediately countered as the aircraft’s slipstream caught him, whipping him away.
There was a moment during every jump when Bolan felt as if he wasn’t falling, but was rather being blown along sideways, and perhaps he’d keep going in that direction until he had learned to fly on his own power, overcoming gravity itself to soar across the landscape like an eagle. Why should he go down, when all that waited for him on the ground was blood and suffering?
That moment always passed, of course, and as the Earth’s pull reasserted its command, he started calculating where to land.
He could control it, to a point. The wind and Earth’s rotation played a part, of course, but once his parachute had opened, he could use the steering lines and toggle to control his drift and speed, guiding himself toward touchdown at the preselected site.
Wherever that was.
In an exhibition jump, the landing zone would be marked off by colored fabric, smoke bombs, lights, or something. A covert drop, by contrast, was intended not to advertise his landing for the benefit of those he’d come to find—or for the soldiers who, in spite of public statements to the contrary, might very well be guarding Bolan’s targets.
From the moment Jack Grimaldi’s plane had crossed the border into Pakistani airspace, Bolan had been on the wrong side of the law. He was a trespasser, intent on the commission of assorted felonies which could, if he was captured, land him in a prison cell for life—or, as it seemed more likely, send him to the wall before a firing squad.
What else is new? he asked himself, then concentrated on the landscape drawing closer to him by the moment.
There! That river with the hairpin turn and twin hills standing just off to the east defined his target. He would try to land inside the loop formed by the river, seeming only inches wide from where he hung in space, but something like a quarter mile across at ground level.
With any luck at all, his native contact would be waiting for him there.
And if he wasn’t?
In that case, Bolan would go on and do the job alone, somehow.
Granted, it would be impossible to read road signs, and he wouldn’t be able to carry on routine conversations, but he had his maps and GPS device, along with all the killing gear he’d requisitioned for the job at hand.
Think positively, Bolan told himself. There’s no reason your guy shouldn’t be in place, on time.
No reason except being caught, tortured for information, and replaced by shooters who would zero in on Bolan as he floated toward them from on high, the fire-selector switches on their weapons set for full-auto.
But Bolan didn’t worry about what might be. It was a rule he had adopted early in his military service, and it had served him well. Fretting over the possibility of failure would accomplish nothing, but it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A glance at the altimeter on Bolan’s right wrist told him he had reached two thousand feet. He found the rip cord, clutched it, counting silently until he knew that he had plummeted five hundred more, then gave the brisk, life-saving tug. The chute rose, deploying overhead, and Bolan felt the shoulder, chest and leg straps of his harness cut into his flesh.
Parachutes had come a long way from the mushroom shapes depicted in films such as Flying Tigers and Twelve O’clock High. They were lozenge-shaped now, more or less, with individual cells, designed for maximum maneuverability. In Bolan’s case, the nylon parachute was colored sky-blue, in the hope that any unintended watchers on the ground below might overlook him.
But it wouldn’t help if they had been forewarned of his arrival.
Weighted by the weapons, ammunition and explosives that he carried, in addition to his rations and survival gear, the Executioner started to accelerate once more and used the right-hand brake to manage it.
The river with its hairpin loop was more than just a line drawn on the landscape now. Bolan could see the sun glint off its running water. He had to steer well clear of landing in its depths and being swept away.
He was a strong swimmer, but there was only so much muscle could accomplish when the current seized a parachute and dragged a jumper over jagged rocks, through rapids and somersaulting over waterfalls. It took only one solid blow to snap a neck or bring unconsciousness and allow the river to flood a pair of helpless lungs.
One thousand feet, and Bolan saw a vehicle below him. Only one, and there appeared to be a single figure standing on the driver’s side.
So far, so good—unless the lookout was reporting back to shooters waiting out of sight.
Bolan would have a chance to fight, if so, but he had no illusions that the odds would favor him in such a circumstance.
He didn’t touch the safety on his AK-47, chosen for deniability if he was caught or killed in Pakistan, like all the other gear he carried. At a thousand feet, he still had time.
But it was swiftly running out.
HUSSEIN GORSHANI watched the stranger plunge toward Earth, while the aircraft that had delivered him turned back and hurried toward the sanctuary of Afghanistan. Most of the Pakistan air force’s twenty-seven front-line squadrons were deployed along the border shared with India, far to the south and east, so the plane managed to escape without pursuit.
Leaving one of its occupants behind, falling through space.
Gorshani wondered—not for the first time, by any means—if he had lost his mind. Meeting the stranger and assisting him was certainly a crime under his nation’s laws. It might not rank as treason, technically, since spokesmen for the government proclaimed themselves allies with the United States in fighting terrorism, but Gorshani knew his private enterprise would not be cheerfully rewarded by the state police or army.
And, once they discovered that he drew a covert paycheck from the CIA, he would most certainly be killed. The best that he could hope for, in that case, would be a clean death without torture, but he realized that notion verged on fantasy.
The state would want to know how long he’d been employed by the Americans, what he had told them, who his contacts were, and where they could be found. And since Gorshani’s sense of honor would not let him answer any such questions, naturally, pressure would be applied.
He knew what that meant, and it gave him nightmares.
Gorshani almost missed the parachute, expecting some dramatic color bright against the washed-out sky, but it was blue, and made him strain his eyes. Even when he had spotted it, the soldier slung beneath it still looked like an insect zigzagging through empty air.
Gorshani took his eyes off the stranger long enough to sweep the road behind him and the open landscape to either side.