“If you were,” Bolan said casually, “I’d kill you, take the wheel and use the curb to bring the car to a stop.”
Rosli opened his mouth to say something, caught something in Bolan’s expression and thought better of it. Finally, he laughed. “Fair enough, Mr. Cooper,” he chuckled. “Fair enough. I do believe you would, too.”
Bolan did not comment.
“We will be at the school within ten minutes, depending on the traffic,” Rosli said, darting around a small panel truck. “There is no time to waste. Your airdrop could not have come too soon.”
“I wouldn’t call a commercial flight an air drop,” Bolan said.
“First class,” Rosli said, “and faster than we could have arranged a charter.”
“Luck,” Bolan said.
“Providence,” Rosli said with a grin. “And therefore the same thing. Regardless, we shall have you in place as quickly as possible, which is not soon enough. You will find what you requested under your seat. You will be pleased to see that everything is there. It was not easy. Your request was very specific. Very difficult.”
Bolan nodded. He reached under the passenger seat to retrieve the olive-drab canvas messenger bag hidden there. He put it on his lap, below the level of the passenger-side windowsill, and inspected the contents.
The bag contained a Beretta 93-R machine pistol. There was also a stainless steel .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. A sound-suppressor and a leather shoulder-harness rig for the Beretta, several loaded magazines and a KYDEX inside-the-waistband holster for the Desert Eagle rounded out the bag’s contents. The Executioner checked the action of one pistol, then the other, before loading both weapons and chambering live rounds. He set both guns on his lap.
In one of the outer pockets of the bag, Bolan found a locking stiletto with a six-inch blade. He pocketed the knife and shrugged into the shoulder harness under his shirt, holstering the Beretta and clipping the Desert Eagle in its holster behind his right hip. He slung the bag across his body, where it could hang on his left side.
Rosli had watched all this activity with interest. “You are impressively armed, Mr. Cooper,” he said. “I am told the weapons were test-fired yesterday, and all is in order.”
Bolan again made no comment. Either the guns would work or they wouldn’t. He didn’t like fielding gear untested by him or the Farm’s armorer, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, but there was nothing to be done about it and no time not to do it. Mentally shrugging, he looked at Rosli and inclined his chin. When the Malaysian operative offered nothing, Bolan said, “And you?”
“A revolver, by my belt buckle,” Rosli said, shrugging. “It is enough.”
“It might be,” Bolan said grudgingly. “It might not. That’s going to depend.”
“On what?” Rosli asked.
“Your proximity to me,” the soldier said frankly.
“Ah.” Rosli nodded, grinning widely through crooked but bright, white teeth. “Yes, that is as your friend Hal warned me it would be.”
Bolan could imagine the exchange the big Fed might have had with Rosli, whom Brognola had described as a CIA asset of some sort, a local boy in long-distance employ of Central Intelligence. Bolan’s own hurried conversation with Hal Brognola had taken place by phone only scant hours before, most of it occurring as Bolan was racing to make the international flight that was, simply by good fortune, scheduled to leave within the half hour. Had Bolan not been concluding some…business…in New York City that put him within a breakneck cab ride to JFK, he’d never have made it. As it was, the hundred dollars he’d tipped the cabbie before the ride had gotten him to the airport with no time to spare despite his near-suicidal driver’s most earnest efforts.
“Striker,” Brognola had said, using Bolan’s code name, “you’re needed in Malaysia. Are you still in New York?”
When Bolan had acknowledged that, yes, he was, Brognola had asked him to catch the nearest cab as fast as he could for the airport, telling the soldier he would explain on the way.
“Okay, you’ve got my attention, Hal,” Bolan had told him, hanging on for all he was worth as his taxi driver burned rubber while weaving in and out of traffic. “I’m on my way.”
“There’s a hostage situation in Kuala Lumpur,” Brognola had explained. “An exclusive private school. It was seized by guerillas today.”
“That sounds bad, Hal—” Bolan nodded, even though the big Fed couldn’t see him and the very focused cabbie couldn’t hear him and wouldn’t care “—but that also sounds like a local problem.”
“It would be,” Brognola said, sounding tired. “But nothing is ever that simple, these days. Have you heard of—” Brognola paused, then recited as if reading from something “—Dato Seri Aswan Fahzal bin Abdul Tuan?”
Bolan blinked. To Brognola, he said, “I can’t say I have.”
“He’s the prime minister of Malaysia,” Brognola said. “Dato Seri is his title. Abdul Tuan was his father, if it matters.”
“So this…Aswan Fahzal, is it?” Bolan said. “What’s his connection?”
“He’s referred to as just Fahzal, usually,” Brognola said. “He swept into power last year amid a flurry of jingoistic fervor, as the media like to call it. His Nationalist Party has some pretty nasty overtones. ‘Malaysia for Malaysians,’ that kind of thing.”
“Understood,” Bolan said, his jaw clenching slightly.
“Well, Fahzal’s government has been putting pressure on Malaysia’s ethnic Indian and Chinese populations, of which there are significant numbers,” Brognola continued. “It started slowly and was initially dismissed as caste-system politics or simple government favoritism. When it got worse, people started to complain, in the United Nations and on the international grassroots scene. I know the folks involved tried to get the attention of Amnesty International, among others.”
“Did they?” Bolan asked.
“Not to the satisfaction of a very vicious few, apparently,” Brognola said. “A new and violent Malaysian rebel group has risen up over the last, oh, six months. The members call themselves what translates roughly to something like, ‘Birth Rights.’ The Farm tagged the group ‘BR’ for simplicity’s sake, because a few of the international terrorist-tracking groups call it that. The Malaysian government has taken to calling it that, too, for the sake of convenience, if nothing else, at least when they refer to it in English. I couldn’t say about the Malay translation.”
“I’m with you so far,” Bolan said.
“BR has claimed responsibility for taking and holding the school,” Brognola said. “If history is any guide, this will not end well. BR may claim to have noble goals, but its members have shown themselves to be terrorists. They’ve staged dozens of actions over the past few months, and in each case, innocents have died, and died hard. Lots of those have been children. BR likes to target young people to make the parents pay. It hasn’t hit the international news because Fahzal’s government has covered it up, suppressed it in the local media, but word has filtered out through other channels.”
“You said BR has taken a school.”
“I did. Among the VIPs who have children in that school is the prime minister himself. His son, Jawan, was the explicit target of the rebel action. They’ve threatened to kill him, not to mention the other students, if Fahzal does not publicly repudiate the Nationalist Party’s agenda and then publicly step down. The crisis has been dragging on, with the terrorists periodically issuing demands. But, while the threat against Fahzal’s son is in force, the government won’t send anyone in to break the stalemate. The terrorists are dug in but good and there’s no telling what defenses they’ve rigged on-site. The longer the standoff goes, the greater the