Beneath the large shade umbrella on the patio, Benjamin Franklin Davis shifted his chair slightly to block out the setting sun. Behind him, a good-looking Frenchwoman sat on a tall stool, a guitar in her lap, singing a folk song. Although he couldn’t understand the words, Davis listened to her voice. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Davis focused his attention on the café’s door to the patio as his contact arrived. Davis nodded. He would have known the man even if Ibrahim Nasab hadn’t told him he’d be wearing a brown sport coat and an open-collared white shirt. The look in Nasab’s eyes gave him away as a man accustomed to violence.

It was the same look Davis saw in the mirror each morning when he shaved.

Nasab walked to the table and pulled out the chair next to Davis just as the sun sank below the horizon. The woman on the stool continued to strum her guitar, her voice low and husky.

“Do you speak French?” Ibrahim Nasab asked as he settled into his seat.

“I speak English,” Davis almost spit. “The American version. Or I don’t speak at all.”

For a brief moment, Nasab’s eyes filled with hatred, but then the Arab forced a smile. “Then we will speak English,” he said in a thick Middle Eastern accent. “For we have much to discuss.”

Davis nodded. “Indeed we do,” he said. He leaned forward, closer to Nasab so he could lower his voice when he spoke. The odor of some pungent spice filled his nostrils. He was telling himself to ignore it when another pretty Frenchwoman with long brown hair approached their table. She said something Davis couldn’t understand, but Nasab answered for them.

“I have ordered you another cup of American coffee,” the Arab said when she’d left again. “And one for myself.”

Davis nodded, cleared his throat, then glanced around him to make sure no one was paying them any attention. An elderly couple three tables away were the only other patrons on the sidewalk patio, and they hardly looked like potential police or intelligence agents. Davis scanned the office building across the street. Surveillance equipment had become so sophisticated in the past few years that a hidden microphone might be trained on them from any of the windows.

But that wasn’t the case, and he knew it. He had chosen this café at random less than ten minutes ago, and given Nasab the name and address by cell phone. Even if the French or the Americans or the Arabs were on to them, they wouldn’t have had time to get their listening gear set up.

For a moment, the two men sat silently, sizing each other up. Then Nasab asked quietly, “Do you really think this can work?” He had leaned in slightly, too, and if the look on his face meant anything, the movement was as distasteful to him as it had been to Davis. “Our philosophies of life are so very different.”

“Yes,” Davis said. “They are different. But if North Korea can work with Iran and Syria for a common goal, I don’t see why my American Rough Riders and Hamas can’t do the same thing.”

Nasab leaned back in his chair as a gentle breeze began to blow along the sidewalk. The woman on the stool behind Davis continued to sing.

“How do you propose that we join forces?” Nasab asked.

“I see things going down in two parts,” Davis said. “The first part will consist of the same things we’ve been doing separately all along. Bank robberies, random machine-gunnings at shopping malls and other areas where there are lots of easy targets, small bombs and the like.” He glanced at his watch and calculated the time difference between where he sat and Kansas City, Missouri. “Even now, some of my men are preparing to rob a bank later in the day.” He rested his arm on the table. “We’ll make sure everyone knows who it is behind the robbery, and we’ll make sure there are plenty of bodies left at the scene.”

Nasab nodded, then said out loud what all terrorists, the world over, knew in their hearts. “Each death sends horror through a thousand still-beating hearts.”

“That’s right,” Davis confirmed. “And in addition to the strikes you’ve already set up here in Europe, I’d like you to send some of your men to the U.S.” He glanced at the Hamas man’s sport coat, slacks and the rest of his Western attire. “And I’d like them to wear more-traditional Islamic clothing than you have on, if you don’t mind.”

“We can disguise ourselves as Christians and Jews when necessary,” Nasab said. “Won’t robes and headdresses draw attention to us?”

Davis almost burst out laughing. “Of course it will,” he said. “And that’s exactly what we want. It’ll scare the hell out of people, but they won’t get in your way. You’ve heard of political correctness?”

Nasab nodded. “Of course.”

“Well,” Davis went on, “the average American doesn’t know the difference between the Muslim sects, and they’ll be so afraid of offending you that you could probably hide a howitzer under your robe and no one would say anything.” He stopped talking long enough to pull a French cigarette from a crumpled package he’d purchased the day before at a tobacco shop. “They can call it political correctness if they want,” he said as he lit the tip, then cleared his throat. “I call it stupidity. But it’s a stupidity we can use to our own advantage.”

Nasab smiled his understanding.

“We’ll get the anthrax-mail thing going again,” Davis said. “But on a larger scale than whoever did it before. I don’t know who it was, but it was a damn good tactic. I want people afraid to even open their electric bill.”

“That is easily accomplished as soon as my men and I arrive in the U.S.,” Nasab said. “We already have a large supply of anthrax at our disposal. And much of it is already in the possession of our cells in America.”

“Good,” Davis said. “And I want to begin a food-poisoning campaign. It’s easy enough for someone to walk through the fruit-and-vegetable section of any supermarket and inject fresh foods with the poison of their choice.” He stopped talking as the waitress set their coffee on the round metal table. He didn’t open his mouth again until she had turned to go back into the café and was well out of earshot. “Even one death like this’ll make all of America afraid to eat anything that didn’t come out of an airtight can.”

Nasab smiled. “I like the plan so far,” he said. “Then, perhaps once they have quit eating fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and other foods, we can plant men in the canneries. Your Americans will be less suspect than my darker-skinned brethren, and they can poison the canned food, making your countrymen afraid to eat anything.” He paused, chuckled and took a sip of coffee. When he had replaced the coffee cup in its saucer, he said, “And what is the final part of your plan?”

Davis leaned even closer. “Part two?” He grinned. “We attack and destroy the very heart of the American government.” He went on to tell Nasab the exact site, and what he had planned as a joint strike by the Rough Riders and Hamas. “Not as many people will die as they will in the events leading up to it,” he finished. “But just think about the symbolic shock to the United States. No one will ever feel safe again, even in their homes. They’ll know that if we can get in there, we can get in anywhere.”

The smile remained on Nasab’s face. “It will be a true jihad,” he said quietly.

“For you, yes,” Davis said. “I’ve been calling it the Night of Hell. My men are already in America, so they’ll be easy enough to move to the attack sites. You have men in cells all over the country, as well. But I’d like you to start bringing in even more. Through Mexico is always a good way—you’ve proved that. And the Canadian border is still unguarded for the most part. There are dozens of back roads you can take, and no one will even know your men are here. And don’t forget the coasts—both Atlantic and Pacific. One ship pulling up to an isolated spot can off-load hundreds of Hamas operatives.” He paused for a sip of coffee. “You’ll need to bring your own small arms for the most part. If you run short, I can arm some of your men. But I don’t have enough rifles or sidearms for all of Hamas. And we’ll need as many of those suicide-bomb vests of yours as you can smuggle in.”

Nasab frowned. “Your men are going to use them?”

Davis laughed out loud. “Of course not,” he said. “Killing ourselves isn’t quite our thing. But it’s yours, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Ibrahim Nasab said slowly, “it is one of the tactics we employ when necessary, yes. And it is a path directly to Paradise.”

“In any case, suicide bombings are what you’re most famous for, aren’t they?” Davis continued. “The World Trade Center and the Pentagon? All your buddy Bin Laden missed that day was the White House with that last flight. And you’ve blown up thousands of people—including the bombers themselves—in smaller ops against Israel and other spots around the world.”

“You expect all of the suicides to come from my men?” Nasab asked.

“Like I said,” Davis replied. “It’s what you do, isn’t it?”

The Arab forced a smile. “Yes,” he said. “It is what we do. But why stop with the vests? We have small backpack nuclear bombs in our possession. One is all it would take.”

Davis shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I want this to be a surgical strike. Controllable. Besides destroying ninety percent of the United States infrastructure—which we’ll need once we step in and take the reins—a nuke would indiscriminately kill my men, as well as yours.”

An expression of loathing and disrespect curled Nasab’s lips into a frown. “So you do not mind if my men die, only your own?”

“Exactly,” Davis said. “But don’t forget it was you guys wrote the rules on suicide bombings, not us. We don’t do suicide. Or windows.”

The puzzled look returned to Nasab, the joke obviously lost on him.

A long pause followed as the men finished their coffee. Finally, seeing only tiny black grounds in the bottom of his cup, Davis said, “Then it’s decided, right? My American Rough Riders and Hamas will work together for our common goal—the attacks leading up to the big one, and then the one we’re calling the Night of Hell. I’m not kidding myself—it won’t bring the American government completely down. But it ought to drop it to its knees, and from there we may be able to pound it on into the ground.” He started to stick out his hand to shake Nasab’s, then drew it back, remembering whom he was dealing with.

Nasab had almost lifted his own hand. But now he dropped it again. “You have called it the Night of Hell. We have been referring to it simply the American jihad.”

“American jihad,” Davis said. “Night of Hell. Same thing.”

Nasab nodded. “We have one major strike planned right here, tomorrow night in France. It will come the next day after your bank robbery in America, and can serve as one of the attacks leading up to the big night.”

Davis nodded. “We’ve got a few things already planned in the U.S., too. In the meantime, start smuggling your operatives across the border.”

“It is agreed,” Nasab said. “But what are we to do once our joint mission is accomplished?”

Davis stood up, leaving several euros on the table next to his empty cup. Nasab followed him to his feet. “We’ll have to work something out between us,” he said. “But there’s no sense worrying about that now.”

Nasab nodded hesitantly.

Davis could see on the Arab’s face that they were thinking the same thing.

Once the Night of Hell was over, the alliance between them would end. And it would become time for Hamas and the Rough Riders to start killing each other. But that didn’t matter right now. And by the time it did, Benjamin Franklin Davis’s other plan—the one about which Nasab was completely unaware—would have corrected the problem.

“We’ll stay in touch by cell phone,” Davis said as the two men left the sidewalk café and began walking down the street. “My electronics expert has worked on them, and they’re all but untappable.”

“When do we begin?” Nasab asked as they passed a florist’s shop and the pleasant odor of freshly cut spring flowers filled their nostrils.

Davis glanced at his watch. The bank robbery should be well under way by now. “We already have, my friend,” he said. “We already have.”

1

The huge windowpane closest to the bank’s front doors shattered, the tiny shards glistening like snowflakes as they fell through the bright sunlight. But before they had hit the ground, the bank robber in green coveralls and navy blue ski mask dropped the 9 mm Uzi and toppled to the pavement, dead.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, crouched behind the Kia he was using as cover. Up and down the row of cars parked outside the bank in Kansas City, Missouri, SWAT operatives in dark blue BDU blouses and matching pants had their own rifles pointed toward the building.

Bolan had used up most of his 30-round magazine from the M-16 A-2 in taking out the window and the would-be bank robber, and now he shoved a fresh box mag into the rifle. The robbers still inside the bank and the cops behind the cars exchanged gunfire. If the gunfire continued long enough, Bolan knew it would accomplish nothing except getting the hostages inside the building killed.

Turning to the ruddy-complexioned SWAT captain next to him, the Executioner yelled, “Tell your men to cease-fire, Tom! If we don’t establish some kind of dialogue fast, the good guys still inside are going to get killed.”

“Cease-fire!” the captain screamed. Leaning his chin toward the microphone clipped to the epaulet on his left shoulder, he flipped a switch on his nylon utility belt and repeated the order. “Cease-fire!”

As the roar of the gunshots died down, Bolan thought about the strange situation in which he now found himself. He had been at Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorist command post and training grounds. In addition to fielding top-notch assault teams like Able Team and Phoenix Force, Stony Man handpicked exceptional soldiers and police officers from the U.S. and friendly nations for advanced combat training. These men were flown to the Farm blindfolded, then left the same way—never knowing exactly where they’d been or who had trained them. What they did know was that they’d never received such pragmatic or intense instruction anywhere else in the world.

Tom Glasser, the sturdily built Kansas City captain next to the Executioner, had just completed a Stony Man session. When a local snitch informed the Kansas City PD of the upcoming bank robbery planned by the Rough Riders—a faction of the American Nazi Party—Glasser and Bolan had been flown straight from Stony Man Farm.

Bolan let the bolt on his M-16 slide home, chambering a round. The air seemed eerily quiet now. He watched quietly as a uniformed officer, hunkered low beneath the vehicles, approached Glasser’s other side. When he was near enough, the uniform whisper-shouted a phone number.

Glasser wasted no time pulling a cell phone from a nylon carrier on his belt and tapping in the number. A second later, he had one of the bank robbers on the line.

“All right,” he said into the instrument. “Let’s cut the formalities. What do you want in exchange for the hostages?” He thumbed another button and activated the speakerphone so Bolan could hear the other end of the conversation, too.

The raspy cough of a heavy cigarette smoker sounded over the speakerphone. “Every damn penny we’ll be hauling out of this bank,” the bank robber declared. “And five million more for the inconvenience you’ve caused us.” The voice paused and took in a hacking breath. “After that, the usual. A chopper big enough to take thirty people—that’ll include some of the hostages—to the airport, a plane full of fuel ready to take off and a pilot who isn’t a disguised cop.” The man coughed again. “We find a weapon of any kind on him, or anything else that makes us think the flyboy’s a pig, and we’ll blow his head off.”

Glasser looked toward Bolan. Even though he was technically in charge of this operation, the SWAT commander had just spent a month enduring the most rigorous cutting-edge training he’d had in his career, and Bolan had taught several of those classes. Hostage negotiation had been one of them.

Bolan answered the unasked question by silently mouthing the words, “You know what to do. Stall.”

“I don’t have the authority to meet your demands,” Glasser said into the cell phone. “It can be done. But it’s going to take time.”

“You’ve got time,” the man across the street rasped. “Twenty minutes.”

“I can’t even get clearance for the chopper and plane in that length of time,” Glasser said. “Let alone raise five million bucks for you.”

“Well, you’d better try,” the gravelly voice snapped. “Because each minute you’re late means another dead hostage.” There was a pause, then a low, phlegm-sounding chuckle. “I’ll just shoot them, then toss them out the front window you guys blew out so you can see them.” He finished with, “You’ve now got nineteen minutes.” The line clicked dead.

Glasser cut the call at his end and turned once again toward the Executioner. He had known Bolan as Matt Cooper while training at the Farm, and still did. “Any suggestions, Cooper?” he said.

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Get on the phone and start trying to get clearance for the chopper and plane. And check with the local Secret Service field office. See how much counterfeit money they’ve got on hand.” He looked the burly man in the eye. “These guys aren’t going to have the time or the equipment to check out good fakes, and it’ll be a lot easier than trying to talk any other bank or rich individual into gambling with five million real dollars.”

Glasser nodded and began tapping numbers into his phone.

Rising to his feet, the Executioner stayed low, bending over to whisper into Glasser’s ear. “You’re never going to make the twenty-minute deadline,” he said.

Glasser had just hung up the phone. “I know,” he said.

“And if the guys inside are from the Rough Riders, they aren’t bluffing,” Bolan said just as quietly. He remembered a recent intelligence report that Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman—Stony Man Farm’s chief computer expert—had put together about this militant faction of the American Nazi Party. The Rough Riders were suspected in several murders and—like so many homegrown American terrorist groups—relied on bank robbery as their primary means of support.

“Do we know how many hostages are inside?” the Executioner asked.

Glasser shook his head as he touched the cell phone to his ear for the next call. “Not exactly,” he said. “There’ll be twenty to thirty employees, plus however many customers happened to be there at the wrong time.”

Bolan nodded and started to move past the man.

Glasser reached out and grabbed Bolan’s arm. “Where are you going?” he asked.

The Executioner squatted again. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “And if you don’t know it, you can’t accidentally give it away to the enemy.” He paused for a deep breath, then went on. “Just conduct this operation as if I wasn’t here. But when you hear shots fired inside the bank again, move your men in as fast as possible. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“And give me one of those two-ways so I can keep track of you,” the Executioner said.

Glasser waved at one of his SWAT men, a slender sergeant with dark brown hair. “Give Cooper here your radio and mike,” he said. “Then go back to the van and get another one for yourself.”

The sergeant didn’t even bother to ask who Cooper was. Jerking the radio from his belt and the microphone from his shoulder, he handed them over.

The Executioner snapped the radio onto his belt, checked the earpiece connection, then shoved the tiny plastic receiver into one ear. He clipped the microphone to the shoulder of his blacksuit. He looked at his watch.

Not quite ninety seconds had passed since the raspy voice inside the bank had given them their twenty-minute deadline.

The innocents inside had roughly eighteen and a half minutes.

Police cars completely surrounded the bank. Three of the building’s four sides faced streets, and here the vehicles were lined up practically bumper to bumper. To the rear of the bank—beyond the drive-through windows—was a housing complex. Here, the police cars had pulled directly onto the grounds beyond the windows, doing their best to provide a buffer zone between the innocent residents in their houses and the miscreants in the bank. Behind the circle of cars knelt uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives and the rest of Glasser’s SWAT crew, each of the men training a weapon on the bank.

Moving to the rear of the bank, Bolan sprinted for one of the marked units separating the bank from the residential area. But no shots followed him.

Dropping down behind the black-and-white patrol car, Bolan found himself next to a portly patrolman resting his Glock 21 across the hood and aiming it toward the drive-through window into the bank. The man’s uniform cap had been discarded and lay next to him on the ground. Coarse but sparse red-and-gray hair stuck up from his receding hairline and balding pate.

The patrolman glanced at Bolan, then back to the bank.

“You seen any activity through that teller’s window since you’ve been here?” Bolan asked.

The patrolman nodded. “Some. There’s a guy with a ski mask just out of sight below the glass. He pops his head up every few seconds and—” The blue head suddenly appeared as the officer spoke. “There! You see him?”

Bolan nodded. “You see anyone else?”

The balding man shook his head. “Just him.”

The Executioner drew back slightly, taking in the rear of the bank as a whole. The First Fidelity Bank was a one-story building. Awnings covered the three drive-up windows with brick columns supporting what looked like shake-shingle roofs. He wondered whether they would support his two-hundred-plus pounds.

He suspected he was about to find out.

“What’s your name?” Bolan asked the cop next to him.

“Coleman,” said the man. “Call me Ron.”

“You might want to hold back on that familiarity until you hear the rest of what I’m about to say,” Bolan told him.

“Huh?”

“You wearing a vest, Coleman?” Bolan asked.

“You better believe it,” said the man with the sparse red-and-gray hair. “I’ve got a wife and kids I like to go home and see every night.”

“Shock plate inserted?” Bolan asked.

“Right over the old ticker. Thickest steel they make ’em in.” The KCPD officer’s voice was starting to sound suspicious now. “Why?”

“Because I need to use you as a decoy,” the Executioner said. “I’m going up on the roof. And if that blue ski mask happens to pop up at the wrong time and see me, it’ll ruin what I have in mind.”

Now the patrolman’s voice took on a true tone of trepidation. “What is it you expect me to do?”

“Just get up and start walking toward the window. If Mr. Ski Mask shows his head or a weapon or both, take cover behind one of those brick columns. I just need his attention on you and not me.”

“In other words, if someone has to get shot you’d rather it be me than you?”

“No,” Bolan said. “It’s just the way this thing has to go down, that’s all. If you don’t want to do it, say so now. I’ll try to think of something else.” He glanced at his watch. “But I’ve only got eleven minutes to come up with it and pull it off.” He paused, then finished with, “So, Coleman. What’ll it be?”

Bolan could see the concern on the man’s face as he weighed his responsibilities to the job versus those to his family.

“All right,” Coleman finally said. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do.” He paused, then added, “And you can still call me Ron.”

The Executioner smiled. It was a brave man he was working with.

“When I give you the word, just stand up and start walking directly toward the window. If you see the ski mask, make tracks for the brick column. After that, just stay where you are.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Coleman asked.

“Scaling the wall. But don’t look my way under any circumstances. I need that lookout’s attention focused on you, or the inside of the bank’s going to look like a Chicago slaughterhouse.”

Coleman reached up and adjusted his vest, making sure the steel plate was in place. “Makes me wish I’d sprung for the steel-plated jockstrap you can get with these things,” he said. “But what the hell. I’ve already got three kids and the wife and I were talking about a vasectomy anyway.” He turned to face the Executioner. “Say when.”

Bolan slung his M-16 A-2 over his shoulder and waited until the blue ski mask made another quick appearance, then disappeared. “Now!” he said under his breath and rose to his feet at the same time Coleman stood up. Coleman rounded the trunk, and the Executioner cut in front of the front bumper as both men made their way toward the building.

Bolan was running, Coleman walking—as he’d been instructed. So the Executioner reached the brick column supporting the carport several steps in front of the man. Sprinting at full speed, he lifted his right knee almost to his chin as his leather-and-nylon combat boot hit the bricks. His momentum carried him upward, and he got one more step with his left boot before he felt gravity beginning to overcome his own velocity.

Reaching skyward, the Executioner got his fingertips just over the edge of the shake-shingle roofing.

A second later, he had pulled himself up and out of sight on top of the carport.

No sooner had he risen to his knees than he heard several shots fired below him. Looking down, he saw Coleman driven back a step as the rounds clanged off the steel plate in his vest. But the balding cop he didn’t let that stop him. Before the man inside the window could fire again, he dived behind the brick column.

Bolan leaned over the side and looked down. He could see Coleman sitting with his back against the bricks, the sparse and spiky reddish-gray hair pointing straight up at the top of the carport. The Executioner whispered downward, “Ron, you okay?”

The KCPD patrolman was savvy enough not to look upward when he answered. “If you call feeling like you just took three straight hooks to the chest from Buster Douglas okay, then yeah—I’m just peachy.”

The Executioner chuckled. At least the man was out of danger now. He could sit out the rest of this encounter. “Okay,” he said. “Stay where you are.”

Bolan looked down at his wrist. He had a little under ten minutes before the hostages started dying. Switching on the microphone mounted to his shoulder, Bolan realized he had no call letters or numbers of his own, and he didn’t know what Tom Glasser’s were, either. So he said simply, “Cooper to Glasser. Cooper to Glasser. Come in, Glasser.”

“SWAT 1,” Glasser’s voice came back. “This is Glasser, Cooper. You got a call name?”

The Executioner lowered his voice until he suspected it could barely be heard on the other end of the line. “I go by Striker, SWAT 1. And I’m on the roof,” he whispered. “Have you had any more contact with the subjects inside?”

“Negative, Striker,” Glasser came back. He was whispering, too. “But we’ve got the funny money on the way here, compliments of the Secret Service.”

“How about the chopper?” Bolan asked.

“We’re trying to find one big enough. And that’s not easy if you don’t go to the military.”

Bolan immediately understood the reason behind the SWAT captain’s words. The regular military was forbidden from taking action in police matters inside the U.S., and most of the time that was a good thing—it ensured that America would not become a military state ruled by its armed forces. But there were exceptions to that rule, when the use of the armed forces seemed like the only logical answer.

This was one of them.

“See if you can go through the state’s National Guard,” the Executioner said. “If they don’t have a chopper big enough on hand, they ought to be able to get one from the regular army.” He paused and felt his eyebrows furrow as he thought further. “And use this as an excuse to stall some more. Call into the bank on your cell phone and explain the problem with the chopper. See if you can buy some more time.”

“Affirmative, Striker,” Glasser said. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Negative, SWAT 1,” Bolan said as he made his way carefully across the shingled roof one shaky step at a time. “And the fact that I’m up top is for your ears only. We can’t expect fifty men—no matter how good they are—to keep from glancing up and being seen by the bad guys.”

“Roger, Striker,” Glasser said. “That intel stays in-house.”

Bolan finally made it off the carport roofs and onto the flat tar roof of the bank proper. His eyes skirted the building, seeing ventilation shafts, heat and air-conditioning equipment, and a variety of other pipes and housings sticking up out of the dirty black surface. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the building, staying just far enough from the edge that his head couldn’t be seen by the police officers on the ground.

He had meant what he’d told Glasser. All it would take would be for one of the Rough Riders below him to see one cop straining his eyes toward the roof to know someone was above them. Then the element of surprise would be gone.

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Hell Night

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Hell Night

Don Pendleton

Contents

Prologue

1

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