Pressure Point
Pressure Point
Don Pendleton
A WORLD GONE MADJihad strikes the heart of Indonesia in a vicious terrorist onslaught to seize control of the entire region. The collusion of local extremist factions and the most powerful global terrorist network has produced a formidable enemy with the means–and the will–to unleash genocide.As part of covert U.S. intervention in the crisis, Mack Bolan and key Stony Man operatives are tasked with finding the terrorists' stronghold and weapons of mass destruction. But time is running out and the enemy's strategy and skill are putting the odds at zero for a successful mission.Nations are under siege in a world gone insanely wrong, and Bolan is at the epicenter of the madness. But he's been there before. And there's a way out….
Moments later, an adversary appeared
But it wasn’t a member of the Lashkar Jihad or the United Islamic Front. It wasn’t even human. Instead, Bolan found himself staring at a roiling, slow-moving cloud the color of pea soup. His mind flashed on the briefing papers he’d read on the way to Samarinda: an entire work crew killed in seconds by mingling pesticide vapors.
Trapped, all Bolan could do was watch as the cloud spilled over the side of the precipice and drifted down toward him. It looked almost alive, like some deadly creature on its way to claim a hapless prey that had fallen into its web.
Already he could smell the noxious fumes and his eyes were starting to burn, as well.
This is it, he thought. At long last, his number had come up.
Other titles available in this series:
Evil Kingdom
Counterblow
Hardline
Firepower
Storm Burst
Intercept
Lethal Impact
Deadfall
Onslaught
Battle Force
Rampage
Takedown
Death’s Head
Hellground
Inferno
Ambush
Blood Strike
Killpoint
Vendetta
Stalk Line
Omega Game
Shock Tactic
Showdown
Precision Kill
Jungle Law
Dead Center
Tooth and Claw
Thermal Strike
Day of the Vulture
Flames of Wrath
High Aggression
Code of Bushido
Terror Spin
Judgment in Stone
Rage for Justice
Rebels and Hostiles
Ultimate Game
Blood Feud
Renegade Force
Retribution
Initiation
Cloud of Death
Termination Point
Hellfire Strike
Code of Conflict
Vengeance
Executive Action
Killsport
Conflagration
Storm Front
War Season
Evil Alliance
Scorched Earth
Deception
Destiny’s Hour
Power of the Lance
A Dying Evil
Deep Treachery
War Load
Sworn Enemies
Dark Truth
Breakaway
Blood and Sand
Caged
Sleepers
Strike and Retrieve
Age of War
Line of Control
Breached
Retaliation
Pressure Point
Mack Bolan®
Don Pendleton
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
—Winston Churchill
Those who promote terror against their fellow citizens sink as low as men can get. I will risk everything and stop at nothing to put these terrorists out of business. Our survival depends on it.
—Mack Bolan
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u9232b1a5-c381-5dd7-906d-dde87d9d0422)
CHAPTER TWO (#u4244984a-ca75-59c8-ab2e-942b6da95992)
CHAPTER THREE (#u362f3451-4578-5e41-8676-6dfed4545d22)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u61be7e78-9646-5e5d-bbc7-297501396942)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u42d240a1-5905-569e-a03a-834a8aa7494a)
CHAPTER SIX (#u18b2d8d7-2719-528d-9dfb-b1f6064436de)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#udce1bd8f-ff17-59c9-8f3d-57b515726339)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ub782a490-b0f9-594a-a428-869bf76d2d68)
CHAPTER NINE (#ua33b3da3-630a-5efd-9baa-c45c125cad89)
CHAPTER TEN (#uf9fa1ef3-5e56-50b2-9274-3b1181cb7506)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#uf980a1a2-7596-55d1-85f4-27122eae2c1c)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#ue745923e-4d28-5d91-be03-1a31c4d022a0)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
INDONESIA
“Okay, I think I’ve got the hang of it,” Mack Bolan said, speaking through the condensor microphone duct-taped to the inside of his gas mask.
“It gets easier once you’ve done it awhile,” Abdul Salim told him. As they both took off their masks, Salim, a decorated major who’d come up through the ranks of Indonesia’s Royal Marine Commandos, added, “The biggest thing to remember is not to hyperventilate.”
Bolan nodded. The truth was, although this particular mask was new to him, he’d worn similar protective gear on several occasions over the past few years. It was a sign of the times, a concession to the ever-increasing chance of biochemical attacks in the grim, unending war against global terrorism. Bolan missed the days when he could feel secure going into battle shielded only by the thin layer of Kevlar armor beneath his blacksuit. This day he’d even had to forgo the blacksuit in favor of a bulky, mud-colored HAZMAT suit. He’d been issued an armored vest, but it wasn’t made of Kevlar and, in comparison, felt as heavy as chain mail.
Major Salim was similarly attired. The two men were seated in the rear of a dust-covered white minibus making its way up a narrow, winding, two-lane mountain road seventeen miles north of Samarinda, capital city of Indonesia’s East Kalimantan Province on the island of Borneo. The bus was following its usual itinerary, a scenic route that led to a hilltop textile center long popular with the tourist crowd.
Those aboard the bus that day, however, were not tourists, and their ultimate destination was not the textile center, but rather a nearby storage facility managed—or mismanaged as many contended—by the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture. The other eleven men in the vehicle were members of KOPASSUS, an elite army commando unit that had seen extensive duty of late battling the rise of Islamic extremism throughout the country’s sprawling chain of islands. They, too, carried gas masks and were suited up in full HAZMAT gear. When Bolan first rendezvoused with the force at a private hangar at Samarinda’s small regional airport, the men had also been issued 10-shot, .45 ACP Heckler & Koch carbines, one of the few such weapons equipped with a trigger guard large enough to accommodate their thick protective gloves. Rounding out their gear, each soldier also carried a belt pack containing ammo clips, three flash-bang grenades and a first-aid kit loaded with ampules and various syringes for use in the event their suits were compromised during the impending raid.
This was the second time Bolan had joined forces with Abdul Salim. Several years ago they’d worked together putting down a rebel coup across the Java Sea in the province of Sumatra. That insurrection, which claimed the life of Salim’s uncle, renowned freedom fighter Ismail Salim, had been clandestinely backed by the Chinese military. Beijing was out of the picture now, but in their place an even greater threat to Indonesia’s fragile stability had emerged in the form of the notorious Lashkar Jihad. The so-called Soldiers of the Holy War had come into being as a retaliatory force against Christian militants in the Molucca Islands. Over the past two years they had grown in number and expanded their agenda proportionately, embarking on a violent campaign to seize control of the entire country, whose two hundred million Muslims constituted the world’s largest concentration of followers devoted to Islam.
The Lashkar had been formidable enough as a self-contained entity, but in recent months it had bolstered its might even further by joining ranks with the United Islamic Front, the global terrorist network cobbled together from the ranks of al-Qaeda and other kindred organizations decimated by the U.S. and its allies in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Whereas Abdul Salim had once thought his country was making headway in its efforts to eradicate terrorism within its borders, the UIF connection now tipped the scales in favor of the enemy.
Over the past two weeks both KOPASSUS and a force made up of KIPAM paratroopers had sustained heavy losses during pitched battles with jihad guerrillas in the provinces of Aceh and Sulawesi. Salim had been wounded by shrapnel in the latter attack—his right thigh still throbbed where he’d been hit—while nearly thirty others had been slain. Almost twice that many had fallen in Aceh. Salim had known most of the victims personally, and their loss weighed heavily. Though he still had his full head of coarse, wavy hair, streaks of gray had infiltrated his mane almost overnight, and his once-youthful features had been increasingly eroded by a deepening of the furrows around his eyes and mouth. The major now looked every bit his forty years, if not older, and though his resolve remained, it had been tempered by weariness. Gone was his proud assertion that the Lashkar Jihad could be eliminated by home forces alone. Much as he was loath to admit it, Salim was secretly relieved that evidence of UIF collusion had brought the U.S. back into the Indonesian fray. Perhaps, with America’s help, the terrorists could be rooted out once and for all, giving his country, for the first time in its turbulent history, a chance at peace.
A pensive silence fell over the commandos as the bus groaned its way up the mountain. Bolan, himself troubled after the long flight from Islamabad, turned from Salim and stared out through the tinted windows at the surrounding valley. Miles in the distance, tall, steeplelike derricks rose from the oil fields of Muara Badak. Farther to the south, near the seaport of Balikpapan, dark, noxious clouds spewed from several coastal refineries, further polluting a late-summer sky already shrouded with the smoke of countless slash-and-burn fires set by small farmers and large date palm conglomerates looking to clear swaths of rain forest for the planting of new crops. Most of the surrounding hills had already been cultivated. Sarong-clad laborers could be seen working thin ribbons of terraced farmland, clearly oblivious to the impending danger at the agricultural facility less than two miles uphill.
According to the classified files Bolan had skimmed through on the flight from Pakistan, over the past twenty years Indonesia’s Ministry of Agriculture had used its Samarinda mountain site to stockpile more than two hundred tons of obsolete, highly toxic pesticides. The compounds—laced with such carcinogenic agents as DDT, heptachlor and dieldrin—were not of Indonesian origin. They were imported from European manufacturers looking to rid their inventory of items banned by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Corrupt IMA officials made a fortune off the scheme, accepting bribes from the Europeans to take the outlawed agents off their hands and then passing along inflated invoices to the Indonesian government for reimbursement. A few of the herbicides had been put to use; the rest had been haphazardly stored outside Samarinda with few, if any, safeguards. FAO investigators hadn’t caught wind of the enterprise until corrosion breached several containers and unleashed a toxic cloud that had swiftly killed the compound’s entire fourteen-man day shift.
That was two months ago. In the aftermath of the initial investigation, which resulted in five arrests and two suicides within the IMA hierarchy, a Malaysian-based waste disposal firm had been hired to safely repackage the volatile chemicals for transport across the treacherous mountain passes of central Borneo to a high-tech incineration facility in Tomani. The firm had seemed efficient and conscientious enough while removing the first loads from the storage site, but less than a week ago FAO overseers had determined, much to their alarm, that barely a quarter of the loaded pesticides had actually been delivered to the incineration plant. Concern over the whereabouts of the other cargo had triggered a wide-scale investigation, and two days ago UN officials—with help from the CIA and Indonesian Military Intelligence—had confirmed their worst fears, unearthing a paper trail that linked the subcontracted transport firm, Bio-Tain Enterprises, to an affiliate of the United Islamic Front. The implications were as clear as they were odious: the UIF, frustrated by failed attempts to amass an effective nuclear and biochemical arsenal, was apparently ready to go the “dirty-bomb” route, hoping the diverted pesticides could somehow be incorporated into a weapon that could duplicate, no doubt on a far larger scale, the same fatal effect they’d had on the day-shift workers at the Samarinda facility.
Once the UN’s findings had crossed the President’s desk in Washington, they were quickly prioritized and relayed to the Virginia headquarters of Stony Man Farm. There, the covert ops brain trust—Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group, and Barbara Price, mission controller, had reviewed the data and forwarded it once again, this time via an encrypted e-mail, to Mack Bolan.
For Bolan, the timing couldn’t have been more opportune. When he’d first received the directive, he was already in Asia, attempting to track down the UIF’s founder and mastermind. Hamed Jahf-Al, a charismatic Egyptian known in some circles as the Nile Viper, had risen to the top of the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists back in June, when he was implicated in the ballroom explosion aboard a Caspian Sea cruise liner that had killed more than four hundred tourists, including sixty Americans. Jahf-Al had thus far eluded a four-country manhunt, and after three days in Islamabad the trail there had gone cold as well. Intel as to his whereabouts was conflicting, but the consensus was that the Nile Viper had fled Pakistan and was headed east. News of the UIF link to the missing pesticides, coupled with the Front’s already established collusion with the Lashkar Jihad, had given Bolan hope that in Indonesia he might once again pick up Jahf-Al’s scent, or at least that of one of his closest lieutenants.
The raid would be a start. During a quick briefing after his arrival in Samarinda, Bolan had been told that a Bio-Tain crew had shown up at the IMA facility earlier in the morning to load another shipment of pesticides, purportedly for delivery to Tomani. To the best of Major Salim’s knowledge, the transporters were unaware that they had fallen under suspicion. As such, there seemed a good chance that, once apprehended, the crew—or at least their transport vehicle—would provide evidence as to where the pesticides were being routed once they left the facility. The key was to storm the site and overpower the crew as quickly as possible, before it had a chance to realize its cover had been blown. Bolan had tackled similar missions dozens of times in the past, and Salim had assured him that most of the KOPASSUS commandos were equally seasoned. If all went well, it would be over in less than an hour.
Bolan was still staring out the window, preparing himself for the pending confrontation, when he saw two farmers suddenly glance up from their labors, shielding their eyes against a faint glare of sunlight that had somehow managed to penetrate the haze. Bolan tracked their gaze and saw two armed helicopters drifting low across the valley toward them. He wasn’t concerned. They were friendlies. He’d seen the choppers—both U.S. Black Hawks armed with .50-caliber M-2 Browning machine guns and submounted 2.75-inch rockets—back at the airport. One was being flown by a KIPAM-trained pilot, the other by Stony Man flying ace Jack Grimaldi, who had also been at the controls of the Learjet that brought Bolan to Samarinda from Islamabad. The Black Hawks were flying low for the same reason the bus had been outfitted with tinted windows: to maximize the element of surprise as they closed in on their target.
As the gunships drew nearer, Bolan glanced at his watch. Abdul Salim did the same.
“Right on schedule,” the major said, echoing Bolan’s thoughts.
Salim rose from his seat and conferred briefly with his second in command, Sergeant Umar Latek, then strode quickly down the aisle, passing along last-minute instructions to the other commandos as well as the driver. Latek, meanwhile, donned a headset linked to a portable Heaton 525 field transceiver and patched through a quick call to the three-man KOPASSUS surveillance team posted on a hillock overlooking the agri-compound. Bolan could see the sergeant’s features darken as he spoke with the team leader. As Major Salim passed by on the way back to the rear of the bus, Latek motioned him aside to pass along the news.
“Apparently the smoke from all these fires has drifted across the IMA grounds,” the major explained as he rejoined Bolan. “Our surveillance team is having trouble seeing the facility.”
Bolan stared back out the window at the dark, low-hanging soot cloud that loomed ahead of them. “Assuming they’re having the same problem at ground level, it could work to our advantage,” he stated. “Disguised or not, we’ll be better off the closer we can get before they see us coming.”
“True,” Salim conceded. “Maybe there’s some truth to that saying about every cloud having its silver lining.”
Soon the bus came to a turnoff. A posted sign indicated a left turn for those traveling to the textile center. The driver ignored the sign and continued to drive straight, downshifting to better tackle a steep rise in the grade. Bolan knew from the briefing that the agricultural facility was now less than a quarter mile up the road.
“It’s time for the masks,” Salim said. He pulled on his protective headgear and affixed the seals securing it to the rest of his HAZMAT suit. Bolan quickly did the same.
After rounding a tight corner, the bus came to a straightaway. The road leveled off slightly and it narrowed, hugging closer to the near-vertical rise of the mountain it had been carved out of. To the right, a steel guardrail, corroded by years of monsoons, separated the road from a precipitous drop into a deep, rock-choked ravine. Bolan peered into the chasm and saw a narrow, glimmering band of water swirling its way around an obstacle course of large, fallen boulders.
“The Mahakam River,” Salim told him. “It carries water from the upper mountains all the way to the delta near…”
The major’s voice suddenly trailed off. Bolan turned and saw Salim staring straight ahead, slackjawed, past the other soldiers and out the front windshield of the bus. Up ahead, less than a hundred yards away, a second vehicle had rounded yet another turn just below the smokeline and was heading downhill toward them.
“The delivery truck,” Bolan murmured through his mask.
“It’s supposed to still be at the facility! This is all wrong!” Abdul Salim called up to Sergeant Latek, “Why weren’t we alerted?”
“I don’t know,” Latek responded, his voice edged with concern. “Perhaps with all the smoke…”
“I don’t care how much smoke there is up there!” Salim ranted. “They had to be able to see the truck leaving!”
Latek had on his headset and was trying once again to raise the field agents. “I’m not getting any response.”
“I don’t like this,” Salim said.
The major was reaching for his carbine when the driver suddenly slammed on his brakes. Bolan had to grab at the nearest armrests to keep from being flung down the aisle by the abrupt stop. A torrent of curses filled the bus. Bolan couldn’t understand them, but he knew damn well what had the men so alarmed.
Up ahead, the Bio-Tain transport truck had veered from its lane and was now straddling the median as it bore down on the bus, picking up speed. With no shoulder between the guardrail and the mountain, the bus had nowhere to go to avert a head-on collision with the truck and its lethal cargo.
“A dirty bomb on wheels,” Salim mused grimly.
Eyes on the approaching vehicle, Bolan muttered, “A guided missile is more like it.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Everybody out!” Abdul Salim shouted as he and Bolan bolted to their feet. “And get your masks on! Hurry!”
Sergeant Latek yanked off his headphones and grabbed for his mask. The other commandos responded just as quickly, and once their headgear was in place, they rose in their seats and quickly unlatched the window safety catches, then leaned heavily into the hinged framework. As the windows swung downward, the men began clambering from both sides of the vehicle, clutching their assault rifles. The driver, meanwhile, wrestled determinedly with the gearshift, trying to throw the bus into reverse.
“There’s no time for that!” Salim called out. “Get out! Now!”
The driver either didn’t hear the warning or chose to ignore it. He wasn’t about to distract himself putting on a gas mask, either. Still cursing, he continued to grapple with the transmission. He finally managed to put the bus into neutral, but while trying to shift into reverse, his foot slipped off the clutch. The bus shuddered violently as the engine sputtered, then died. An eerie silence filled the bus as it began to roll slowly backward. The driver pumped at the brakes but they, like the steering, were power assisted, and with the engine out of commission, it quickly became clear he would be unable to keep the vehicle under control.
Bolan, meanwhile, shouldered open the rear emergency door. Salim shouted again for the driver to get out, but the man refused. He was still fighting the wheel when a bullet smashed through the windshield and plowed into his shoulder. His pained howl was punctuated by more bursts of gunfire. Outside the bus, one of Salim’s men took a bullet to the head and pitched forward alongside the road.
Snipers, Bolan thought. From where he stood he couldn’t see where the shots were coming from, but he guessed the Lashkar Jihad had to have positioned gunmen somewhere up on the mountain.
“Ambush!” Abdul Salim cried. Assault rifle in one hand, he moved past Bolan to the rear doorway. Another round of gunfire poured into the bus, pummeling the bench seats three feet from where the two men were standing. “Let’s go!”
Bolan cast another glance at the driver, who’d hunched over slightly but was still conscious and struggling with the steering wheel.
“He needs help.”
“There’s no time!” Salim tugged at Bolan’s arm as more gunshots poured into the bus, riddling the seats. “You’ll never make it! We have to go!”
Bolan reluctantly followed Salim out the rear exit. Both men dropped hard onto the pocked asphalt, then quickly tumbled to their right to avoid being run over as the bus continued its backward roll down the steep grade.
“Over the railing!” Salim called, vaulting the horizontal beam. Latek and a handful of the other commandos had already cleared the rail and were clinging to the uprights on the other side, sending loose rock tumbling down into the ravine as they tried to secure a footing on the sheer face of the cliff. It was more than a hundred feet straight down to the river.
Bolan hesitated astride the guardrail, leaning away from the bus as it began to drift past him. Up ahead, he saw the Bio-Tain truck closing the gap between the two vehicles. The commandos who’d exited on the mountain side of the bus had taken up positions along the road’s shoulder and were firing at snipers above them as well as at the oncoming truck. Even if they managed to take out its driver, Bolan feared the vehicle would continue on its collision course with the bus.
While his instincts told him to follow Salim over the railing, Bolan couldn’t bring himself to abandon the man still inside the bus. As the front end of the vehicle rolled past, he cast aside his rifle and sprang forward, landing on the stairwell that led into the bus. The door was closed. Bolan stabbed his gloved fingers through a gap in the rubberized insulation and tugged hard until the door folded in on itself, giving himself enough room to squeeze through.
The exertion took its toll, however. As Salim had forewarned him, Bolan’s labored breathing inside the gas mask left him feeling suddenly light-headed. Sagging against the handrail, he clawed at the mask, yanking it off. His face was layered with sweat, and his dark hair was plastered flat against his head. He doubled over and drew in a deep breath. The move saved his life, as yet another burst of gunfire took out the rest of the windshield, showering him with glass.
Bolan stood back up and peered out at the other truck, which had begun to slow. He suspected the plan to ram the bus had been aborted once the ambushers realized that most of their intended victims had abandoned the vehicle. It was a stroke of good fortune, but there was little time for rejoicing. Turning to the driver beside him, Bolan saw that the man had taken another round, this one to the neck. One look and Bolan knew he was dead.
Unmanned, the bus listed slightly to one side. There was a loud scraping sound as it began to brush against the guardrail. Bolan climbed up out of the stairwell and anchored himself as best he could alongside the fallen driver, reaching past him for the steering wheel. There was little play in the wheel, and the soldier knew he’d need better leverage to ease the bus away from the guardrail. He was concerned that the railing would soon give way under the strain and send the bus hurtling to the bottom of the ravine with him still on board.
Desperate, Bolan quickly pulled the slain driver from the seat and took his place. The steering wheel was slick with blood, but he gripped it as tightly as he could and turned it to the left. The wheel resisted at first, but finally he got enough response to guide the bus away from the railing.
Bolan shot a quick glance over his shoulder. The rear doors were still open, and he could see the roadway behind him. He was running out of straightaway, and there was no way he’d be able to maneuver the bus around the coming bend. It was unlikely the bus would even make it that far. Each time it struck another pothole or crease in the road, its course changed slightly, and no matter how hard he worked the steering wheel, Bolan suspected it was only a matter of time before the bus slammed into the mountain or took out the guardrail. Either way, the bus was a deathtrap.
Bolan lunged from the driver’s seat and sidestepped the slain driver, staggering back down into the stairwell. The door was still folded open. He braced himself in the doorway and stared down at the ground rushing past him. There was only a few feet of clearance between the bus and guardrail. It would have to do.
Pushing away from the stairwell, Bolan leaped to the ground. He landed hard and unevenly, turning his right ankle. A stabbing pain shot up his right leg as he teetered off balance, smashing into the guardrail. He tried to right himself, but his momentum worked against him.
The next thing Bolan knew, he was tumbling over the waist-high railing, beyond which lay the vast, deep maw of the ravine.
CHAPTER THREE
In Bolan’s predicament, ninety-nine men out of hundred would have crashed over the railing, locked in a deadly freefall before they so much as realized what had happened to them. By then, of course, their fate would have been sealed. Bolan, however, had a warrior’s reflexes, honed by experience on a thousand battlefields, and even as he was going over the railing, he was acting on his instinct for survival. He flung out his right arm and the moment his gloved hand came in contact with the upper edge of the rail, he curled his fingers and grabbed hold, breaking his fall. Just as quickly, he swung his other hand to the railing and clawed for purchase. The thickness of the gloves made his grip tenuous, and his feet dangled unsupported below him, but, at least for the moment, Bolan had once again cheated death.
Through the pounding of blood in his ears, the soldier could hear the crackle of gunfire and the squeal of the Bio-Tain truck’s brakes. The bus, meanwhile, drifted off the road into the side of the mountain. Bolan couldn’t see the vehicle, but it sounded as if the bus had only glanced off the rocks, which meant it was likely still on the roll and out of control. If it veered back across the road and struck the railing, Bolan knew he’d be in trouble.
Focusing his full strength on his hands and arms, the Executioner tightened his grip on the rail and began to pull himself upward. He wanted to reach a point where he could swing at least one leg back up onto the roadway. He strained hard against the pull of gravity, slowly rising up to a point where he could see the bus. As he’d feared, it was headed for the guardrail less than twenty yards to his left. He braced himself as it crashed into the barrier. The weathered uprights snapped under the impact, and a thirty-foot section of the railing gave way. The bus went airborne and began to plunge toward the base of the ravine.
Bolan was safe for the moment, but the railing he clung to had loosened and begun to sag under his weight. Freeing one hand, he reached up and hooked his left arm over the upper edge of the barrier. He tried again to swing his right leg up to the edge of the roadway, but it remained beyond reach. As he held on tightly to the railing, there was a loud crash far below him. The bus had slammed into the rocks rising up from the river, and moments later an explosion ripped through the vehicle and echoed across the valley. Bolan glanced over his shoulder and saw a black column of smoke rise from the fiery heap of twisted metal. The farmers on the other side of the river were pointing at the wreckage and shouting to one another as they began to flee their fields.
Bolan’s left arm was starting to go numb. When he tried to shift his position, the railing groaned and there was a dull crack as one of the weakened uprights began to splinter. One way or another, he needed to get off the railing fast. There was no way to get back up to the roadway, so he looked down over his shoulder, surveying the cliff face below him. Just off to his right he saw a few small trees growing out of the side of the precipice. Bolan wasn’t sure if any of them were strong enough to support him, but they were his only hope.
When yet another of the guardrail supports snapped under his weight, Bolan let go of the railing and kicked at the cliff face with his boots, directing his fall toward the trees. The first two snapped under his weight, but a third remained intact long enough for him to close his fingers around its trunk. He swung precariously to one side, extending his right foot until it came to rest on another of the trees directly below him. It felt as if the tree would support him, so Bolan took a chance and eased his grip on the overhead limb, freeing one hand. With considerable difficulty, he wriggled his hand free of his HAZMAT glove, then switched arms and did the same with the other. The tree’s bark bit sharply into his bare palms, but his grip was now more secure than it had been with the gloves.
Spread-eagled against the face of the cliff, Bolan glanced to his right. Major Salim, Sergeant Latek and the other commandos had managed to pull themselves back up to the roadway. Salim and one of the others were still crouched near the railing, trading shots with enemy gunmen up in the mountains. Between shots, the major looked Bolan’s way, then started toward him.
“Hang on!” he shouted, his cry muffled by his gas mask. Once he reached the spot where Bolan had gone over the side, he lay flat against the edge of the roadway and reached down. Even with his arm fully extended, however, Salim’s outstretched fingers remained well beyond Bolan’s reach.
“Your belt!” Bolan called up to him. “Try your belt!”
The Indonesian nodded. He rose to his knees and was unfastening his gear belt when yet another explosion sounded, this time from the roadway.
“The truck!” Salim shouted to Bolan through his mask. “The driver must’ve set off some kind of explosive device!”
Salim’s voice was silenced in midsentence. He went limp, and his arm dangled uselessly over the edge of the precipice. Bolan could still hear gunfire and assumed the major had been hit by a sniper.
Seconds passed. No one came to Salim’s aid. Bolan was stranded. The trees were holding up under his weight, but he had nowhere to go. He was trapped, and as the patter of gunfire increased up above him, he wondered if the commandos were being overrun by their ambushers. If that was the case, any second now he could expect to see one of the jihad gunners standing over him. Pinned to the side of the precipice, he’d be an easy target.
Shifting more of his weight onto his feet, Bolan freed his right hand and unzipped his HAZMAT suit. He reached inside the suit, drawing his .44 Desert Eagle from its web holster. He thumbed off the safety and pointed the pistol at the roadway, waiting for the enemy to show himself.
Moments later, an adversary appeared, but it wasn’t a member of the Lashkar Jihad or the United Islamic Front. It wasn’t even human. Instead, Bolan found himself staring at a roiling, slow-moving cloud the color of pea soup. Bolan knew the cloud had likely been unleashed by the explosion of the Bio-Tain truck. His mind flashed on the briefing papers he’d read on the way to Samarinda: an entire work crew killed in seconds by mingling pesticide vapors.
Bolan shoved his .44 back in its holster but didn’t bother to zip up his HAZMAT suit. Without the gas mask he’d yanked off while on the bus, the suit wasn’t going to do him any good.
Trapped, all Bolan could do was watch as the cloud spilled over the side of the precipice and crept toward him. It looked almost alive, like some deadly creature on its way to claim some woesome prey that had fallen into its web.
CHAPTER FOUR
As the toxic cloud drew nearer, Bolan quickly deliberated his chances of surviving a fall into the river below. Even if he managed to elude the boulders, it seemed unlikely the river was deep enough to keep him from slamming into the bottom. No. Like it or not, his best chance was to stay where he was and hope the poisonous vapors wouldn’t be as deadly as those that had killed the IMA workers. It was a faint hope. Already he could smell the cloud’s noxious fumes, and his eyes were starting to burn.
This is it, he thought. At long last, his number had come up.
The cloud was almost upon him when two shifting shadows began to sweep across the face of the precipice. When he heard the familiar, throaty drone of four 1600 horsepower turboshaft engines, Bolan felt a sudden stirring of hope.
The Black Hawks.
Bolan glanced up and saw one of the gunships bank slightly as it drifted close to him, so close that he could see the pilot, an olive-skinned Indonesian. The pilot brought the chopper to within twenty feet of the precipice and then hovered in place, its rotors whirring within a few yards of Bolan’s head. The vibration of the rotor wash nearly wrested him from the cliff, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps the Lashkar Jihad had somehow managed to seize the gunship. Then, as he glanced up, he realized that the updraft of the rotor wash was diverting the toxic cloud away from him. The cloud itself was dissipating, as well.
After a few seconds, the Black Hawk pulled away, its mission accomplished. Bolan’s eyes still burned, but the cloud had all but vanished.
The chopper drifted up over the roadway, directing its mounted guns at the sniper positions in the mountains. The second gunship came into view and hovered directly above Bolan, the sound of its rotors echoing off the cliff walls. As the soldier watched, a rope ladder began to inch out the side door. Once the ladder was fully extended, a figure emerged and began to slowly lower himself down the rungs. The man was dressed head-to-toe in HAZMAT gear and carried an extra mask similar to the one Bolan had shed.
The strength in Bolan’s arms was fading. When he tried putting more weight on the tree below him, the trunk began to snap, forcing him to hold tighter to the limb above. His fingers were going numb. He was running out of time.
“Hang tight, Striker!”
Bolan looked up. The man dangling at the bottom of the rope ladder, arm extended toward him, was his longtime colleague John Kissinger. Though officially on the Stony Man payroll as its resident weaponsmith, Kissinger was no stranger to the battlefield. He’d fought at Bolan’s side several times and had been on assignment in Islamabad with Bolan and Grimaldi when they’d received the directive to fly to Indonesia.
“How about a lift?” he shouted to Bolan above the din of the rotors.
“If you insist,” Bolan shouted back.
Once Kissinger was within reach, Bolan freed one hand and quickly transferred his grip to the other man’s wrist. Kissinger responded in kind. When the tree below finally gave way, Kissinger quickly pulled his comrade toward him. With his other hand, Bolan snatched at the ladder. Once his fingers closed around one of the rungs, he swung his right leg up, groping for a foothold.
“Almost there,” Kissinger assured him.
Bolan finally planted his foot on the bottom rung. He let go of Kissinger and grabbed hold of the ladder with both hands. On Kissinger’s signal, the chopper began to pull away from the precipice.
“Nice timing,” Bolan told him once he’d caught his breath.
“Always glad to lend a hand,” Kissinger responded. “But in the future maybe you might want to leave the wall-climbing to Spider-Man.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Jack Grimaldi was already pulling the Black Hawk out of the ravine by the time Bolan followed Kissinger into the passenger compartment. He called out a quick greeting without taking his eyes off the controls, then added, “Looks like somebody tipped off the Lashkar about the surprise party, eh?”
“Something like that,” Bolan replied, coughing slightly. His eyes were still burning. He coughed again, this time with more force. Kissinger, who’d grabbed an M-16 and positioned himself near the open doorway alongside another armed man in camou fatigues, glanced over his shoulder.
“You okay, Striker?”
Bolan nodded. “Yeah. I just caught a little whiff of that fog.”
“We better get you checked out.”
“I’ll be fine,” Bolan insisted. He was blinking harder now, however, and his eyes were reddening. Yet another cough shook through him.
“Fine, my ass.” Kissinger turned to the man next to him. “Rocky, grab that med kit and help him out.”
Although his nickname conjured up images of some towering brute straight out of the boxing ring, Raki Mochtar was, in fact, six inches shorter than either Bolan or Kissinger and weighed barely 150 pounds in full uniform. This was his first field assignment for Stony Man after two years of service with the Farm’s Virginia security detail. He’d had medical training during his stint with the Marines, but it was his family background that had earned him this, his long-sought chance to see action beyond the parameters of the Farm’s compound in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The grandson of Jakarta shopkeepers killed during a demonstration against Sukarno in the late l960s, Mochtar had visited Indonesia numerous times over the past twenty years and was as familiar with the country’s various languages and dialects as he was with its geography and culture. When asked to fly out and rendezvous with Bolan and the other covert ops in Samarinda, the thirty-year-old Mochtar jumped at the opportunity. And now, less than two hours later, here he was in the thick of things. He was eager to make the most of it.
“I’ll see what’s here,” he told Bolan, unlatching a large footlocker strapped to the cabin floor, “but if you’ve been exposed, you really need to go through a full decontamination. There’s probably a setup at the storage site, so—”
“Decon’s going to have to wait,” Bolan interrupted. “We’re in the middle of a firefight here, dammit!”
“But I’m telling you,” Mochtar persisted, “in a case of exposure, it’s vital to make sure you’ve washed off any traces of contaminants before they have a chance to work their way into—”
“Here,” Bolan interjected again, coughing as he reached past the younger soldier for a pair of surgical scissors and an intravenous bag filled with saline solution. “Let’s improvise, all right?”
Bolan shouted for Grimaldi to hold the chopper steady, then slit the top of the IV bag. Holding it high over his head, he craned his neck and quickly spilled the entire contents over his face. The saline stung his eyes but brought immediate relief. He coughed again, then cast the bag aside and told Mochtar, “Now grab some kind of antiseptic and pour it over my hands.”
Mochtar fumbled through the footlocker and uncapped a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Not wanting another reprimand, he fought back an urge to tell Bolan he ought to get out of his HAZMAT suit. Instead, he followed orders and drained the bottle as Bolan rubbed his hands in its flow.
Once he was finished, Bolan grabbed a roll of gauze. As he wiped his hands dry, he told Mochtar, “I didn’t mean to chew you out like that.”
“Not a problem,” Mochtar said. He reached into the footlocker once more, then handed Bolan a small oxygen canister rigged to a lower face mask. “This might help with that cough.”
Bolan grinned at Mochtar. “You catch on fast.”
“I’m trying,” the rookie replied. “You were right. I guess at times like this you can’t worry about going by the book.”
Bolan pressed the mask to his face and opened the canister’s feed line. He was filling his lungs with pure oxygen when the cabin resonated with the staccato blasting of Kissinger’s M-16. Grimaldi had pulled up over the mountain and Kissinger was firing at snipers perched high above the roadway.
The Executioner moved closer to the open doorway and glanced over Kissinger’s shoulder. He saw two snipers wearing the long white robes that were a trademark for the Lashkar Jihad, ducking for cover among the rocks. They were under fire not only from Kissinger, but also from the other Black Hawk. At the base of the mountain, clouds of black smoke snaked up from the bombed-out remains of the Bio-Tain delivery truck’s front cab, while ruptured containers in the rear hold continued to release clouds of toxic vapor. A handful of bodies were scattered about the roadway near the truck, some felled by the gas, others during the exchange of gunfire. Sergeant Latek and another KOPASSUS commando were crouched near a remaining section of guardrail, flanking Major Salim. Latek was firing into the mountains while the other attended to their fallen commander. Apparently Salim was still alive.
Bolan impatiently tossed aside the oxygen mask and shouted to Grimaldi, “Put her down over there by the railing.”
“Will do,” Grimaldi shouted back.
Bolan turned to Mochtar. “We’ll be upwind from whatever’s seeping out of that truck. You think we can skip the gas masks?”
Mochtar stared down at the roadway, then told Bolan, “At this elevation the wind’s always shifting. Besides, to get to Salim we’ve got to go around the truck.”
“Masks then, you’re saying.”
“Full suits would be even smarter,” Mochtar said. “And you should put on a fresh one.”
“I had a feeling you were going to say that.”
There were several unused HAZMAT suits stored in sealed packets behind the footlocker. Mochtar handed one to Bolan, telling him, “Put the gloves on before you change so you don’t recontaminate yourself.”
As he changed, Bolan asked Mochtar, “You seen combat before, Rock?”
Mochtar shook his head. “Just training exercises,” he confessed. “I’m ready, though.”
“Good,” Bolan said, “’cause if they nail you, there’s no playing dead. It’ll be the real deal.”
Mochtar finished transferring a few first-aid items into a fanny pack, then strapped the pack around his waist. “I’m ready,” he repeated.
“Then let’s do it,” Bolan said.
CHAPTER SIX
Once he’d set the Black Hawk down on the tarmac, Grimaldi left the turboshafts running and remained at the controls.
“Go get ’em, guys!” he called out to the others.
“I’ll sit tight as long as I can.”
Bolan suppressed a cough, crouched before the side door of the cabin, then leaped to the roadway, rifle in hand. Mochtar was right behind him. Kissinger dropped to the ground last, carrying a lightweight collapsible stretcher along with his assault rifle.
Almost immediately they were greeted by a hail of gunfire from overhead. The men quickly dropped and rolled to the cover of several large boulders crowding the road’s shoulder.
“Nothing like a little rain on the parade to spoil a guy’s day,” Kissinger groused.
Bolan replied, “Yeah, well, at least there’s a way to stop this kind of rain.”
He raised his rifle to his shoulder and scanned the mountainside until he had one of the snipers in his sights, then squeezed the trigger. The carbine bucked hard against his shoulder. Fifty yards up the mountain, a sniper reeled off the escarpment he’d been perched on and tumbled headlong down the steep facing, striking the road ten yards from the delivery truck.
Before seeking out another target, Bolan stole a quick glance at Mochtar. The younger man was firing uphill as well, hands steady on his rifle, no sign of fear in his eyes. Bolan was relieved. During his years in combat, he’d come across many a soldier who’d frozen when confronted with his first taste of combat. Mochtar seemed in control, though. That was one less thing to have to worry about.
“Let’s see if we can get close to Salim,” Bolan said, glancing down the road. He turned to Kissinger. “Give us some cover, Cowboy. We’ll return the favor once we reach the major.”
“Works for me,” Kissinger said, feeding another ammo clip into his rifle.
Bolan advised Mochtar, “Try to vary your speed and zigzag as best you can. Don’t make yourself an easy target.”
“Got it.”
Kissinger tapped the headset built into his helmet and said, “I don’t want to rush you guys, but Jack says the bird’s taking a few hits and he doesn’t know how long he can keep ’er down.”
Bolan looked back at the Black Hawk. He could see puffs of raised dust where gunfire was pounding the asphalt around the chopper, and several times he heard the plink of rounds glancing off the Black Hawk’s fuselage. The chopper was built to stand up under light fire, but there was no sense pushing their luck any more than necessary.
“Ready?” Bolan asked Mochtar.
“Ready.”
Bolan rose to a crouch; Mochtar did the same. The Executioner held out one hand, index finger extended, flexing his wrist for a three-second countdown. On three, he lunged forward, zigzagging up the road, staying close to the stretch of guardrail that hadn’t been taken out by the runaway bus. Mochtar followed suit, staying ten yards back. Behind them, Kissinger fired steadily into the mountains. The other Black Hawk, meanwhile, provided additional cover, sending a fierce stream of .23-caliber rounds from its Brownings at other sniper positions.
As he ran forward, Bolan surveyed the roadway, trying to account for all the men who’d evacuated the bus before its ill-fated plunge into the ravine. Latek was still crouched alongside the major with another of the commandos, and Bolan saw three men trying to make their way up the steep mountainside. Another three soldiers lay dead on the road, felled either by snipers or the poisonous fog from the delivery truck. That left two men unaccounted for. Bolan hoped they’d turn up alive, but he feared they might have fallen to their deaths at the bottom of the ravine.
As they made their way past the Bio-Tain truck, Bolan sized up the remains. He doubted the vehicle would yield any useful information, at least any time soon. The cab had been all but obliterated, and the cargo hold was clearly contaminated by ruptured tanks. Any evidence that hadn’t been destroyed by the explosion would likely be ruined once a CBR crew arrived and doused the vehicle with chemical retardant. If they wanted any answers as to where the herbicides were headed, they were going to have to take one of the snipers alive and wring the truth out of him. So far Bolan had counted at least twelve of them up in the mountains, and only three had been killed that he knew of. Judging from the steady flow of gunfire still raining down on the asphalt, Bolan figured they were going to have their hands full.
When they reached Salim, the commando leader was unconscious. Like Latek and the other soldier huddled next to him, he was still wearing his full HAZMAT suit. Mochtar spoke quickly to the others, then checked over Salim while Bolan took up position near the railing and fired into the mountains, covering Kissinger’s approach.
Once he’d finished inspecting Salim, Mochtar raided his fanny pack for a gauze pad.
Bolan asked him, “What’s the verdict?”
“He took a bullet in the neck, just above his vest,” Mochtar reported, reaching inside the major’s HAZMAT suit and pressing the gauze against the wound. “It missed the artery, but he’s losing a lot of blood. Weak pulse, too. We need to evacuate him back to Samarinda ASAP.”
“What about poisoning?” Bolan asked. “That cloud rolled right over him before it came down on me.”
“He’ll need to be tested,” Mochtar said, “but the entry hole was small, and these suits are bulky enough that a fold might’ve kept out any contaminants. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
Once Kissinger caught up with them, Bolan relayed the information, then grabbed Salim under the arms and signaled for Mochtar to take his legs so they could transfer him onto the stretcher once Kissinger unfolded it.
“We’ll carry him,” he told Mochtar. “Follow alongside so you can keep a hand on that wound.”
Latek spoke up in halting English. “We will cover you.”
“That would help,” Bolan said.
Latek spoke briefly to the other commando, then moved ahead of the group, leaving his colleague to guard the rear.
Bolan grabbed one end of the stretcher, Kissinger took the other and together they raised Salim off the ground.
“Okay, let’s move,” Bolan said.
They headed out, with Latek and the other commando firing into the mountains. Halfway back to the chopper, another commando caught up with them, providing additional protection. It wasn’t enough, however. The group had just made it past the Bio-Tain truck when they fell under cross fire from two different snipers. The commando closest to the railing was hit in the skull and pitched sharply to his right, disappearing over the barrier before anyone could get to him. Another few rounds hammered the stretcher, puncturing the fabric and thudding into Salim’s legs. The same strafing line of fire found Mochtar, and he let out a howl as several rounds plowed into his chest. He staggered but remained on his feet, wincing in pain. His armored vest had deflected the bullets, but it still felt as if he’d been struck by a jackhammer.
“Rock?” Bolan called out.
“I’m okay,” he replied hoarsely, repositioning his hand over Salim’s neck wound. “Keep going!”
They made it the rest of the way to the chopper without encountering further fire. Grimaldi left the controls and crouched before the cabin doorway. With help from the others, he pulled Salim into the cabin. Bolan and Mochtar bounded up afterward. The Executioner yanked off his mask, then switched places with Mochtar, tending to the major’s neck while the younger man inspected the gunshot wounds Salim had just taken to the legs.
“He’s in bad shape,” Mochtar said. “We need to get him to surgery, quick!”
“Anyone besides him we need to evacuate?” Grimaldi asked.
“Not that we know of,” Bolan reported. “Then I’m outta here.”
“I’ll stay,” Kissinger called up from the road. “We’ll mop up and then wait for you or hitch a ride with the other Hawk.”
“I’m staying, too,” Bolan said. “Rock, can you manage?”
“No,” the younger man said. “I need you to keep pressure on that neck wound while I work on his legs. If he bleeds out much more, we’re going to lose him!”
Though reluctant to leave any battlefield before the last shot was fired, Bolan nodded to Mochtar and stayed at Salim’s side. Kissinger closed the cabin door on them, then stepped back, joining Latek and the other remaining commando.
The Black Hawk rose and angled away from the mountain. Grimaldi was making radio contact with the other chopper when he spotted the thin contrail of a projectile jetting out from the mountainside.
“Shit!” Grimaldi cursed. “Those bastards have Stingers!”
Without leaving Salim’s side, Bolan leaned toward the cabin window and stared out just as the missile slammed into the other chopper, turning it into a fireball. The shock waves were so strong that the men could feel them reverberate through their own craft.
“Fasten your seat belts, boys and girls,” Grimaldi shouted, “’cause there’s another on the way and it’s got our name on it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Chaff jam!” Bolan shouted to Grimaldi.
“Already on it,” the pilot shouted back. Groping the console in front of him, Grimaldi thumbed a row of toggle switches, releasing a half-dozen high-yield flares from the underside of the chopper. Igniting within seconds after release, the flares gave off scattered blasts of heat intense enough to rival the thermal signature of the copter’s turboshafts.
The ploy worked.
As Grimaldi banked sharply to the right, the heat sensors on the second Stinger missile were unable to distinguish between the intended target and the fiery chaff. Drawn off course, the warhead hurtled past the Black Hawk’s framework, detonating beyond the range from which it could do any damage. The chopper rode out another shock wave, this one weaker than the one that had taken out the other gunship. Back in the rear cabin, Bolan and Mochtar rocked in place, doing their best to keep Salim stable on the stretcher.
“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to take over,” Bolan told Mochtar, rising to his feet. “If I don’t get up front and lend a hand, we’re all dead.”
Mochtar shifted position, transferring one hand to the major’s neck while continuing to apply pressure to the worst of the man’s leg wounds. “I’ll do the best I can,” he told Bolan.
By the time Bolan reached the cockpit, Grimaldi had banked the chopper again and changed course, heading back toward the mountain.
“Our turn!” he snarled. “Find me a target, Striker!”
Bolan grabbed a pair of binoculars and scanned the mountains. The sniper who’d just fired at them had dropped from sight, but Bolan could see four others positioned at intervals along a slight trough in the mountain. Peering higher, he spotted a promontory jutting directly above their positions. Pointing, he told Grimaldi, “There. Aim high with the rockets and see if we can get a little help from the mountains.”
“Gotcha.” Grimaldi locked in on where Bolan had pointed and readied the Black Hawk’s 2.75-inch sub-mounted rockets for firing. “One avalanche coming up.”
The gunship shuddered faintly as the first four rockets spewed from their launch tubes and streaked toward the mountains. In quick succession, they struck the rock facing, stitch-blasting a crude line ten yards above the source of the last Stinger.
Weakened from underneath, the promontory collapsed, slamming down hard on another, larger outcropping directly below it. The second shelf gave way as well, splintering into sections and sliding into the trough. As they began to tumble down the side of the mountain, the monstrous stone slabs dislodged still more loose rock, quickly widening the slide’s path. As Bolan and Grimaldi watched, three of the snipers were swallowed up by the avalanche. Several others, hoping to avoid a similar fate, scrambled out into the open and found themselves easy targets for Kissinger and the surviving KOPASSUS troops on the ground. The tide of the battle was quickly turning.
“Nice shot,” Bolan told Grimaldi.
Grimaldi shrugged. “I just wish we’d pulled it off before we lost the other bird.”
Bolan stared at the ravine, where smoke and flames issued from the charred remains of the second Black Hawk. It had landed a little over fifty yards upstream from the fallen bus, which also continued to smolder. There was no way anyone could have survived.
Grimaldi kept his eyes on the enemy and fired a steady stream of .50-caliber rounds from the Black Hawk’s front-mounted machine gun, bringing down yet another of the snipers. He then banked the chopper, changing course so that he was flying parallel to the mountain instead of toward it.
“I want to help Cowboy with a few quick flybys,” he told Bolan. “Go ahead and check on the major.”
Bolan returned to the rear cabin. “How are we doing?” he asked Raki Mochtar.
“Better than expected,” Mochtar reported. “I’ve got the bleeding in his legs under control. The neck’s still a problem, but he’s got a chance.”
“Good. How’s the chest?”
“Smarts a little,” Mochtar said with a grimace as he tapped the area where he’d been hit. “I can live with it.”
“That’s the spirit,” Bolan said, grinning.
The Executioner was pulling off his HAZMAT gloves when there was a sudden drumming against the side of the chopper. He cursed and grabbed the nearest carbine, then lurched to the doorway and yanked the door open.
Down below, he saw a sniper firing at the chopper from a rock ledge twenty yards to the right of the avalanche. Bolan quickly returned fire, even as a stream of rounds zipped past his head, thunking into the cabin’s interior. The sniper reeled to one side, dropping his weapon. He clawed at the mountainside for support but lost his balance and was soon tumbling down the steep incline.
Down on the ground, meanwhile, Kissinger and the others had taken up positions and stayed put rather than advancing within range of the rock slide. It had been a smart decision. By the time the slide reached the roadway, its swath was nearly a hundred yards wide, and its forceful momentum was strong enough to sweep the delivery truck off the tarmac and carry it sideways to within a few inches of the guardrail. The railing creaked and listed under the slide’s weight, but held up and managed to keep the truck from going over the side with its deadly cargo.
The jostling, however, unleashed yet another cloud of poisonous gas. Kissinger, Latek and the others quickly moved out, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the truck. As they moved, they kept their eyes on the mountainside and fired at the last few remaining snipers.
Soon, for the first time since the ambush had begun, there was no enemy gunfire to contend with.
Up in the Black Hawk, Grimaldi made two more quick passes as Bolan surveyed the mountainside, spotting three bodies but no sign of movement.
“I think that’s it,” he told Grimaldi. “Let’s get the major back to the base.”
“Let me just check in with Cowboy,” Grimaldi said. He was trying to reach Kissinger on his headset when he detected movement amid the rubble high up the mountainside. “I think we got a stray up at around two o’clock,” he told Bolan.
“Swing by and see if we can take him alive,” Bolan said.
Grimaldi changed course and drifted the Black Hawk closer to the mountain. Bolan spotted the figure in the debris and raised his rifle. Once he got a better look at his target, however, he slowly lowered the weapon and shook his head with disbelief.
“I don’t believe it,” he murmured.
“What?”
“It’s a woman,” Bolan said, grabbing for the binoculars. “A tourist, from the looks of it.”
“She must have wandered over from that textile place when the fireworks started going off,” Grimaldi speculated.
“Or maybe not,” Bolan said once he got a look at the woman through the binoculars. “She might not be a tourist after all.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I thought it was a camera she was carrying, but it’s not,” Bolan replied. “It’s a gun.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Grimaldi was setting the Black Hawk on the road as Bolan finished fastening the seals on his gas mask and leaped down to the tarmac. Kissinger was leading Latek and the other surviving KOPASSUS commandos to the chopper. Two more soldiers had been wounded in the last few exchanges of gunfire. One was well enough to walk but the other was unconscious and had to be carried. They were upwind from the Bio-Tain truck. The cloud leaking from its cargo bay had dissipated, but the ground forces still wore their masks. Latek and another commando stood back from the others, assault rifles trained on the woman slowly making her way down the mountain. She’d tucked her gun back in the web holster strapped under her left arm.
“She keeps yelling that she’s an American,” Kissinger told Bolan.
“We’ll see,” Bolan said.
Grimaldi left the chopper idling and came over to help hoist the unconscious soldier into the cabin.
“He got caught up in that last billow of gas from the truck,” Kissinger explained. “I’m guessing the seals on his mask didn’t hold up.”
“I’ll get him back to the base so they can look him over,” Grimaldi stated.
Bolan looked past Kissinger at the battleground. “I think we should keep a couple men down here and make a sweep back to the compound.”
“I was going to suggest the same thing,” Kissinger said. “So far we’ve counted nineteen bushwhackers. None of them are in any shape to talk.”
“I was afraid of that,” Bolan said. From where he was standing he could see a few bodies scattered along the road and amid the piled debris from the landslide.
Further uphill, the woman continued to make her way down the steep slope. She’d lost her footing several times and was covered with dust, but she wasn’t wearing any HAZMAT gear and Bolan could see that she was in her early forties, lean and athletic, with dark, medium-length hair. She wore dark khaki cargo pants and a matching T-shirt under her holstered pistol. Staring down at the commandos covering her every move, she shouted angrily, “Point those popguns someplace else, would you? You’re making me nervous!”
Bolan frowned. “I know that voice from somewhere,” he said.
“You think so?” Kissinger replied.
When the soldiers ignored her command, the woman shouted again, “I keep telling you, I’m on your side! Doesn’t anybody here understand English?”
“I’ll be damned,” Bolan muttered, finally recognizing the voice.
He turned back to the chopper and called out to Sergeant Latek, “Go ahead and lower your rifles.”
Latek glanced at Bolan, then back at the woman. Slowly, he lowered his rifle while advising the other commando to do the same.
“Finally,” the woman called out cynically. “Thank you so much.”
Kissinger turned to Bolan. “So, who is she?”
“Take a good look,” Bolan told him. “It’s that bounty hunter we crossed paths with in Africa when we were going up against Khaddafi and the Interahamwe.”
“Are you kidding me?” Kissinger said. “Jayne Bahn?”
“That’s the one.”
“Great,” Kissinger muttered, “just what we need. It figures she’d show up. I mean, what’s the reward on Jahf-Al up to now? Twenty million?”
“Thirty, I think.”
“Hell, and here us poor chumps are tracking him down for free.” Kissinger shook his head. “What’s wrong with…Holy shit!”
Up on the hillside, a bloodied jihad warrior had suddenly materialized out of the debris and was charging Jayne Bahn, brandishing a long-bladed knife.
Bolan spotted the man, too, and started to call out a warning, but Bahn was already in motion, lurching to one side as the blade swept past, missing her by inches. Loose debris shifted under her feet, throwing her off balance. As she fell, she managed to grab hold of her attacker’s wrist. Together, they tumbled down the slope, fighting over the knife.
Bahn finally managed to knock the weapon from the man’s hand and, once they reached the level ground of the roadway, she fended off a right cross from her would-be assailant and countered with a fierce pair of karate blows. Both connected, one knocking the wind from the man’s lungs, the other striking him behind the ear with enough force to knock him unconscious.
Staggering to her feet, Bahn drew her pistol and trained it on the man’s face. When she heard Bolan and Kissinger jogging toward her, she turned to them. At first she didn’t recognize them, but once they were close enough for her to see past their masks, she smiled faintly.
“You guys,” she said. “Small world, eh?”
Kissinger yanked off his mask and stared hard at the woman. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Crashing the party,” she wisecracked. Nudging the fallen terrorist, she added, “I brought you a little something, but I didn’t have time to wrap it.”
CHAPTER NINE
“No wonder I put him out of commission so fast,” Jayne Bahn said, crouching over the Lashkar Jihad warrior she’d felled. The man, it turned out, had been shot twice prior to being caught up in the landslide, which had broken his right leg in at least two places. “I can’t believe he was able to get up and take a swipe at me with that knife of his.”
“Adrenaline,” Kissinger surmised.
“I say we put the squeeze on him till he coughs up Jahf-Al,” Bahn said.
“He’s in no shape to talk right now,” Bolan said, inspecting the man’s wounds. “With the blood he’s lost, even if he comes to, he’s going to be in shock.”
“Well, excuse me for sounding like a hard-ass,” Bahn countered, “but we’re more likely to get something useful out of him if he’s in shock than when he’s thinking straight.”
“We won’t get anything out of him if he dies on us,” Bolan stated. “We need to patch him up and get him to a hospital.”
“Let me know which one so I can send flowers,” Bahn replied sarcastically. “Maybe I’ll come by and fluff his pillows, too.”
“Listen, sweetheart,” Kissinger interrupted. “When the time’s right, we’ll get him to talk, don’t worry. And you can bet your ass we won’t do it by pampering him. Got that?”
“Temper, temper,” Bahn replied with a shrug. “Fine, have it your way.”
Kissinger glowered at the woman, then jogged over to the chopper for a stretcher and Mochtar’s med-kit. By the time they returned, Bolan had managed to staunch the flow of blood from the prisoner’s wounds. Kissinger daubed the wounds with antiseptic, then quickly dressed them and kept pressure on the bandages as Bolan helped the soldiers load the man onto the stretcher. Grimaldi was waiting to help haul him up into the chopper.
“Go ahead and get these people to the base,” Bolan told him. “We’ll finish up here.”
Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll swing back later with reinforcements and some kind of morgue unit for all the bodies.”
“Before you go, hand me a couple two-ways,” Bolan said.
Grimaldi reached into a bin near the door and pulled out two high-powered two-way radios. “Good luck,” he said, handing them to Bolan.
The soldier nodded, then called past Grimaldi to Raki Mochtar. “You did good work, Rock.”
“Thanks,” the younger man replied gratefully.
“We’ll see you back in Samarinda.” Bolan saluted the medic, then stepped back from the chopper.
Grimaldi got back behind the controls and lifted off, then drifted back out over the valley. Bolan turned back to the roadway and sized up the situation.
“The truck’s not going anywhere,” he said, eyeing the bombed-out vehicle. “I say we leave it for now and spread out.” He handed Kissinger one of the radios, telling him, “I want to check out the compound. Why don’t you and Latek secure the area, then check around for more survivors.”
“Done,” Kissinger said, taking the two-way Bolan held out to him. “What about our friend here?”
“I’ll take Ms. Bahn with me,” Bolan said.
“Not so fast,” Bahn said. “No offense, but I didn’t sign up for a tour of duty here, okay? I call my own shots.”
Bolan sighed. “Fair enough.” He grabbed a stray assault rifle lying on the ground and held it out to the woman. “I could use your help, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s more like it,” Bahn said, taking the weapon.
Bolan exchanged a quick glance with Kissinger, who rolled his eyes, then gestured to Latek and the other commandos. They began to fan out in separate directions, giving a wide berth to the Bio-Tain truck, which continued to leak faintly visible clouds of toxic gas. Bolan, meanwhile, led Bahn the other way, up the road leading to the agricultural compound.
By now the Black Hawk was beyond earshot and the road was eerily quiet. For the first time since the firefight had begun, Bolan noticed a few signs of wildlife: birds, a few small gray squirrels, and a thin black monkey scrambling back and forth along the guardrail.
“I think you can take off that mask now,” Bahn told Bolan. “It’s not like we’re trapped in some kind of enclosed space.”
Bolan took off his mask. There was a faint odor of cordite in the air and he could smell smoke from the fires across the valley, but there was nothing that smelled like the chemical stench of the cloud that had nearly enveloped him a short time ago. Bolan also realized his cough had left him, as had the stinging sensation in his eyes. He’d gotten off lucky, he figured.
They walked silently for a short distance, then Bolan asked, “Are you here on your own or still working for Inter-Trieve?”
“I-T,” she replied.
Inter-Trieve was a Washington, D.C.-based bounty agency specializing in high-profile cases involving international fugitives. Bahn had joined them five years ago after stints with the Army Rangers and CIA.
“We’re on retainer with the insurance company representing that cruise liner Jahf-Al deep-sixed last spring,” she explained. “They figure the reward money’ll help offset the claims they’re paying out.”
“Provided you bring him in,” Bolan said.
“I’ll bring him in, all right.”
“You seem pretty sure of yourself.”
“Gotta be in this line of work,” Bahn responded calmly.
“I take it you’re aware that half the free world’s tried tracking down Jahf-Al with no luck.”
“Well, maybe they didn’t try hard enough,” Bahn suggested.
Bolan wasn’t about to waste his breath arguing with her. Instead, he asked the woman how she knew about the raid. Bahn shrugged, swatting away a cloud of gnats that had appeared on the roadway.
“I have my sources,” she said.
“You think you could you be a little more specific?” Bolan asked.
“Sorry,” Bahn said. “A girl needs her secrets.”
“I’m just trying to figure out who tipped off these guys that we were coming.”
“Don’t look at me,” Bahn replied icily.
“I’m not accusing you.”
“Yeah, right.”
Once Bolan and Bahn had hiked around the next bend, the road came to a sudden end and they found themselves at the entrance to the seventy-acre IMA facility. The grounds were enclosed by an eight-foot-high cyclone fence, and the entrance gate was guarded by two uniformed men in their early twenties. The men had their carbines aimed at the new arrivals, and the guns quivered slightly in their hands. They’d obviously heard the earlier assault and seemed fearful of being dragged into the bloodshed. One of them shouted a warning in his native tongue.
“I seem to remember you speak a few languages,” Bolan murmured.
“So that’s why you wanted me to tag along, you little weasel,” Bahn taunted. “And here I thought you were after my body.”
Bolan suppressed a smile. “Business before pleasure,” he responded evenly.
Bahn called out to the guards in Bahasa Indonesian, then quickly explained what had happened back on the roadway. Once she’d finished, the men conferred briefly, then one of them raised the security bar while the other waved them past.
“That was easy enough,” Bahn whispered to Bolan. “Hell, no wonder the Lashkar had such an easy time of it.”
“Ask them how many men were on the Bio-Tain truck when it first showed up,” Bolan suggested.
The bounty hunter stopped alongside the raised bar and spoke again to the guards. Afterward, she and Bolan continued up the driveway, heading toward the storage facility, a two-story building set back a hundred yards from the gate.
“They say there were only six men on the truck,” Bahn reported, “and that includes the driver.”
“There were at least four times that many in on the ambush,” Bolan recalled.
“I know,” Bahn said. “I mentioned that, but they insist they inspected the truck coming and going and there were only six of them.”
“Then there must be a camp around here somewhere,” Bolan theorized.
“That’d be my guess, too,” Bahn said, staring past the grounds, where hazy ribbons of smoke stretched over a vast sprawl of rain forest.
As they continued up the drive, Bolan abruptly changed the subject. “Are you still on speaking terms with your ex-husband?”
Bahn was taken aback. “Excuse me?”
“Frank Dominico, right? Works CIA out of Africa.”
“I know who my ex-husband is, okay?” she retorted. “Why’d you bring him up?”
“You found out about the raid from him,” Bolan guessed.
“I already told you, my sources are confidential.”
“One phone call and I can find out for myself,” Bolan told her.
“All right,” Bahn said, sighing. “Yes, I got it from Frank. Last time we talked, I asked him where Jahf-Al might go after he snuck out of Afghanistan, and he turned me on to the whole FAO stink over the agri-compound here. It sounded like a decent lead, so I flew in a couple of days ago and started sniffing around. I got my hands on a map and figured a way to reach the compound without being seen.”
“Who’d you get the map from?” Bolan asked.
“Don’t push your luck, pal.” She sidestepped the question and pointed to her right as she went on, “I made it as far as the fence over there when I heard all hell breaking loose on the road. By the time I’d high-tailed it up over the mountain, the shooting had stopped and you guys had pretty much wrapped things up.”
“You didn’t really think you were going to find Jahf-Al here, did you?” Bolan asked.
“No,” Bahn admitted, “but I was going to plant a homing device on that truck of his and see if it would take me to him. Which is probably what you guys should’ve tried instead of trying to play John Wayne.”
“Hindsight,” Bolan said.
There were another two guards posted near the front entrance to the storage facility. As Bahn spoke to them, Bolan looked over the building. It was old and decrepit, the walls overrun with vines and the roof patched in several places with thin sheets of blue plastic. Hardly an ideal environment for storing toxic materials, he thought. There was no way he or Bahn were going to attempt to go inside the building without full HAZMAT gear.
“Okay,” Bahn said when she rejoined him. “They said the Bio-Tain crew showed up earlier than scheduled this morning and everything was routine until about an hour ago, when the driver got a call from somebody on his cab radio.”
“The tip-off,” Bolan guessed.
“Probably,” Bahn said. “Anyway, the crew stopped what it was doing and everybody piled back into the truck. The driver said something about an emergency, then drove off.”
“That’s it?”
“Not quite,” Bahn said. “Before they pulled out, apparently one of the workers kept looking up at that hilltop over there. It’s a good hundred yards from where I was hiking, so they weren’t looking at me.”
Bolan glanced up at the hill, half-hidden in shadow. The hill was covered with dense brush and dotted with small trees. Up near the crest was a rock formation that looked vaguely like a raised fist. Bolan told Bahn that KOPASSUS had stationed a surveillance team somewhere in the hills overlooking the compound, adding, “They said they were having trouble seeing the compound because of all the smoke.”
Bahn frowned and shook her head. “It was a little hazy up here, yeah, but not that bad. None of the guards mentioned that, either.”
Bolan pondered the discrepancy a moment, then got on the two-way radio to Kissinger. Cowboy reported that they’d come up empty-handed in terms of looking for other survivors. Bolan wasn’t surprised. He quickly briefed Kissinger on what he had found out, then asked to speak to Umar Latek. Once he had the sergeant on the line, Bolan asked him to think back to the call he’d made to the surveillance team.
“How clear was the reception?” he asked. “Could you tell for sure who you were talking to?”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then Latek replied, “There was some static, yes, but I am sure it was the head of the surveillance team.”
“Are you positive?” Bolan asked. “One hundred percent certain?”
Again Latek hesitated a moment. “It had to be him,” he said finally. “Who else could it have been?”
“I’m thinking the stakeout crew was jumped,” Bolan told him. “I think they were killed, and when you called, I think they squelched the frequency just enough to help mask the voice of whoever told you about the smoke making it hard to see the truck. They were covering, because the truck was already on the way, and they wanted to make sure it would take us by surprise.”
Yet again it took Latek a moment to respond. When he did, his voice was weary. “If that is the case, I am to blame for the ambush,” he told Bolan. “I should have suspected something was wrong.”
Bolan tried to assure the sergeant that if his suspicions were correct, Latek’s mistake had been an honest one. But Latek was inconsolable. He continued to berate himself until Bolan finally interjected, asking the sergeant to put Kissinger back on. He told Cowboy to stay put until Grimaldi returned or sent back another chopper.
“And keep an eye on Latek,” he concluded. “Poor guy sounds like he’s ready to commit hara-kiri.”
“I’ll try talking to him,” Kissinger said. “What’s your plan?”
“I want to find out what happened to that surveillance team,” Bolan said, staring up at the rock formation atop the hillock. “Then we’re going to start looking around for the hole our ambushers crawled out of.”
CHAPTER TEN
When asked about possible routes to the top of the hill, the IMA guards directed Bolan to a series of switch-backs leading from a rear entrance to the storage facility. The crisscrossed paths twisted their way around tall patches of wild grass, brambly thickets and scattered stands of gnarled trees. As Bolan and Bahn made their way up the incline, they could see, off to their right, the distant mountains of central Borneo. The peaks, some of them nearly ten thousand feet high, were barely visible through the smoky haze, which by now had stretched itself across the entire length of the valley rain forest.
Soon they came upon a firebreak, a thirty-yard-wide band of land hacked clear of brush and vegetation. It ran perpendicular to the switchbacks and stretched in both directions for as far as Bolan could see.
“We take a left here, right?” he said, trying to recall the directions the guards had given them.
Bahn nodded. “Yeah, we follow this for about two hundred yards, then there’s supposed to be another trail that leads up to the peak.”
The firebreak was on a slope but the ground was soft, making it easy to walk. There were no signs of boot prints, fresh or otherwise. The break was within plain sight of the storage facility, and there was no way anyone could have used it without being spotted.
“Assuming Jahf-Al’s here in Indonesia,” Bahn said, changing the subject, “what do you think his agenda is? Other than hiding out, I mean.”
Bolan shrugged. “The UIF already has a toehold here. If he can tap into the Muslim unrest, Indonesia’s got the makings of a great power base.”
“True,” Bahn said, “but the Lashkar Jihad’s already pretty much cornered the market on the extremist action. I know they’ve cut some kind of deal with the UIF, but I don’t think stepping aside and letting Jahf-Al run things was part of it. He and Pohtoh aren’t exactly buddy-buddy from what I understand.”
“That’s the way I hear it, too,” Bolan said.
Moamar Pohtoh was the Muslim firebrand who’d risen to head of the Lashkar Jihad after his predecessor, Halim Alwyi, had been gunned down in a Sulawesi shootout over a year ago. It was Pohtoh who’d widened the group’s agenda while at the same time consolidating power by killing off a number of Alwyi’s top-ranking subordinates. Pohtoh was no stranger to Jahf-Al, either, and there was supposedly bad blood between the two men dating back to the late 1990s, when they’d trained together at an al-Qaeda terrorist camp in the Afghanistan mountains of Tora Bora. Pohtoh, who hailed from the slums of Jakarta, was purportedly as suspicious of Jahf-Al’s bourgeois Cairo upbringing as he was of the Egyptian’s motivation for creating the United Islamic Front. The Indonesian strongman had gone on record as little as six months ago claiming that Jahf-Al was less interested in the cause of Islam than that of amassing power and trying to rival the infamy of Osama bin Laden. Given the antipathy between the two men, many had been surprised when it had come out that the Lashkar Jihad was accepting input from the UIF.
“Must be a strange bedfellows thing,” Bolan guessed. “They probably figured they had more to gain by focusing on common ground instead of haggling over their differences.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened,” Bahn conceded.
By now they’d followed the firebreak nearly a hundred yards. Suddenly Bolan stopped and held out a hand, signaling for Bahn to do the same. She heard it, too: a rustling in the brush to their right. In unison, they both dropped to a crouch and raised their assault rifles, aiming into the foliage. The sound continued, growing louder and moving closer. Finally they could begin to make out the shadowy outline of three figures moving through the brush toward them.
“I’ve got the one in front,” Bahn whispered, nestling her finger against the trigger. “I say we don’t give them the first shot.”
Bolan shifted his aim toward the rear figures, then stopped and whispered back, “Hold your fire.”
“Look, maybe you’ve got a vest on under that suit of yours, but I don’t,” Bahn told him. “I’m not going to just wait here like some sitting duck for them to—”
“They’re monkeys,” Bolan stated.
“Call them what you like, I—”
“Orangutans,” Bolan said. “They’re orangutans.”
“What?” Bahn said, not willing to let down her guard.
But as she took a closer look into the brush, she realized Bolan was right. Three orangutans, all immature males, loped downhill a few more yards, then peered out through the branches. Bahn lowered her rifle and slowly stood, shaking her head.
“Makes sense,” she said. “I saw a preserve marked out on the map. Somewhere down there in the rain forest.”
The orangutans continued to stare at Bolan and Bahn but made no move to show themselves any further.
“Scram!” Bahn snapped at them. “We’re busy here!”
“Let’s just leave them alone,” Bolan said. He turned his back to the creatures and resumed hiking along the firebreak. Bahn picked up a stone and threw it into the brush to the right of the creatures. When the orangutans refused to budge, she shrugged and quickly caught up with Bolan.
“Smug little bastards,” she grumbled.
“They probably knew they could take you out if they wanted to,” Bolan taunted.
Bahn scowled at him.
A few minutes later they reached the trail rising up from the firebreak. It was narrow, and they made their way single file, Bolan leading the way. Small trees rose up on either side of them, strangler figs trailing long, woody vines from their lower branches. The large tree Bolan had seen from the ground loomed ahead. They followed the trail toward it and were soon in sight of the fistlike rock formation. For the first time, they also began to see boot prints on the path before them. Whoever had made them had come upon the trail by way of the brush. The tracks led upward.
“Looks like three different sets,” Bolan commented.
“Well, unless those orangutans were wearing boots, my money’s on the ambushers,” Bahn said.
Bolan nodded. “Let’s find out.”
Assault rifles raised into firing position, they continued up the last few dozen yards of trail and soon found themselves at the base of the rock formation.
“Well, looks like you were right about them being jumped,” Bahn told Bolan, staring at the grisly tableau before them.
The three-man KOPASSUS surveillance team lay dead in the grass, facedown, blood caked to their scalps where they’d been shot. Lying on its side a few yards away from the bodies was a transceiver similar to the one Bolan had seen Latek use on the bus.
Bahn crouched over one of the victims and inspected his wounds.
“Small caliber,” she said. “I’d guess 9 mm.”
“Handguns with sound suppressors,” Bolan said.
“Which would explain why I didn’t hear anything,” Bahn said, speculating as to what had happened. “They popped these guys, then they sent the truck on its way and fed that sergeant that crap about it being too smoky to see anything.”
“I want to check something else,” Bolan said, stepping over one of the bodies. He inspected the rock formation, then set his rifle aside and climbed up to the top. He looked around briefly, then climbed back down.
“No problem seeing the storage facility,” he reported, “but the road’s nowhere in sight.”
“Meaning what?”
Bolan pointed at the slain commandos. “I think these guys were killed outright,” he said. “No interrogations.”
“Okay, I follow that much,” Bahn said. “Where are you going with this?”
“Just hear me out,” Bolan said. “All right. We’ve got these guys being killed right around the time the truck leaves the facility, right?”
“Right.”
“Think about it,” Bolan said. “They can’t see the road from here, so how did they know we were coming? And even if they did see us, we were in that bus. It would’ve looked like we were just another bunch of tourists headed for the textile center.”
“Which brings us back to them being tipped off,” Bahn said. “They knew the raid was going down even before they jumped the surveillance team here, which is why they knew enough to get on the radio with that story about the smoke so you’d think the truck was still at the compound.”
“Exactly,” Bolan said.
“The big question is, who squealed to them?” Bahn asked.
“Hard to say,” Bolan replied. “You’ve got a lot of people in the loop on this. Besides KOPASSUS, you’ve got the CIA, Indonesia Military Intelligence, the FAO—”
“And you guys,” Bahn said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bolan countered.
“Easy, big fella,” she told him. “I’m just calling ’em as I see ’em. Why should we assume your guys are all clean?”
“I trust them a hell of a lot more than I do you,” Bolan said.
“Somehow I don’t think that’s saying a lot,” Bahn said. “Let’s try to be objective, okay? Have you guys taken on any new people recently? Anybody who might have some kind of ulterior motive?”
“No, of course not.”
But even as the words were coming out, Bolan realized there had, indeed, been a recent addition to the crew.
Raki Mochtar.
But could he be a spy? It didn’t seem possible. True, Mochtar had an Indonesian background, but he’d passed all the necessary security checks before being taken on as a blacksuit, and before being approached for this assignment he’d undergone even more scrutiny. Each time he’d checked out clean. But, then, Bolan also recalled a few other times when Stony Man Farm had suffered security breaches from within; in nearly every instance the culprit had been someone supposedly beyond reproach. Could this be another one of those cases?
“Well?” she prompted.
Bolan didn’t answer her. Instead, he grabbed his two-way and started to signal Kissinger. Before he could raise Cowboy, however, he and Bahn heard another rustling in the brush, this time twenty yards to their right.
“Chimps ahoy,” Bahn murmured, glancing over her shoulder.
A gunshot suddenly ripped through the foliage, just missing Bahn and ricocheting off the rock formation behind her. Instinctively she dived to the ground and scrambled along with Bolan to the far side of the rock. A second shot rang out, rousing the dirt to their right.
“Okay, maybe it’s not the monkeys after all,” she said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As quickly as it had begun, the shooting stopped. An unnerving silence lingered in its wake. Rifles raised, Bolan and the woman crouched at opposite ends of the rock formation, covering themselves from as many angles as possible. Peering out into the brush, they waited, listening for advancing footsteps, the sound of a weapon being reloaded. Something. Anything.
“Come on!” Bahn whispered hotly. “Show yourselves, dammit!”
She was answered by more silence. Then, finally, several seconds later, there was renewed commotion in the brush. Footsteps and a snapping of twigs. The sounds were receding, however, not drawing closer. Whoever had fired at them was in retreat.
“Sounds like a loner,” Bolan murmured.
Bahn nodded. “He runs off after a couple warning shots? What’s up with that?”
“Could be he’s out of ammo,” Bolan said. “Or maybe he’s going to try to circle around and have another go at us.”
“Let him try,” Bahn said, clenching her rifle.
The sounds in the brush continued to fade. Whoever shot at them was headed back toward the far valley, away from the access road and storage facility. Bolan was deliberating their next move when his two-way radio crackled to life. It was Kissinger.
“What’s going on there? Over.”
Bolan grabbed the radio and quickly explained what had happened, then asked Kissinger, “Where are you? Over.”
“Sergeant Latek found a path up the mountain while we were scouting around,” Kissinger explained. “We’re up on the ridgeline, about a quarter mile from you. I got a glimpse of you up on the rock formation, but the shooting started before I could patch in. Over.”
“Whoever it is, they’re bound for the rain forest,” Bolan told him. “We’re going after them. Why don’t you head over and give us a little backup? Once you reach the rock formation, it should be easy to pick up our trail. Over.”
“We’re on our way. Out.”
Bolan clicked off, then rose to his feet. “Let’s go.”
He and Bahn split up and ventured into the brush. Bolan used the barrel of his rifle to clear his way through the bramble, but the thorns still managed to nick him constantly, sometimes piercing the material of his HAZMAT suit. Bahn, navigating the brush twenty yards to his right, was under similar attack, and without the protection of a suit the pricking took a harder toll, prompting a near-constant stream of epithets.
Finally Bolan reached a small clearing where a set of footprints came to a stop and then doubled back on themselves.
“Over here,” he called out softly.
When Bahn caught up with him, Bolan was holding a pair of bullet casings he’d found in the dirt. They were still warm and reeking of cordite.
“It’s a .22,” he said, holding out the shells for Bahn to see. “Revolver, probably.”
“Explains why he was so stingy with his shots,” Bahn guessed. She plucked a thorn from her forearm and rubbed at the faint smear of blood it had produced. “How about we skip the trailblazing and just stick to the path he made?”
Bolan nodded and led the way. They had followed the footprints another twenty yards, when Bahn suddenly reached past Bolan into the bramble, removing a few strands of black, curly hair glistening with blood.
“Methinks it’s the hair of his chinny chin chin,” she mused.
“Then we’re on the right track,” Bolan said. He started to move on, but she put a hand on his shoulder, motioning for him to stop.
“How about if I lead for a change?” Bahn proposed. “Nothing against that nice ass of yours, but I’d kinda like to see where we’re going. You’ll have an easier time looking over my shoulder than the other way around.”
“If you’re walking in front, what makes you think I’ll be looking at your shoulder?” Bolan replied, doing his best to keep a straight face.
“Ooh, naughty boy.” As she stepped past Bolan to take the lead, Bahn smiled up at him. “Try to be a gentleman, would you? At least until we can find a nice hotel room?”
They continued through the underbrush, doing their best to track their fleeing attacker. It was slow going. The grass and bramble grew thicker as they made their way along the slope, and several times they lost sight of the shooter’s footprints and had to scout for other signs as to which way he’d fled: snapped branches, bent wildflower stalks, more stray hairs or a scrap of cloth claimed by the thornbushes. At one point they thought they’d spotted someone up in the trees, but it turned out to be another of the orangutans, using strangler vines for support as it moved from limb to limb with deceptive ease.
“Maybe we should try that,” Bahn suggested, prying loose yet another thorn from her forearm. “You know, ‘Me Jayne, you Tarzan.’”
“I don’t think so,” Bolan said.
After a few more minutes of navigating through the unforgiving foliage, the two finally emerged into a clearing and found themselves on a broad, flat promontory, not unlike the one Grimaldi had blasted to create the landslide on the other side of the mountain. Before them lay the north valley. Bolan quickly dropped to his stomach and motioned for Bahn to do the same.
“We’re like sitting ducks out on this ledge,” he whispered.
“I’ll take my chances,” Bahn said. “Beats the hell out of having to pick those damn thorns out of my hide all the—”
Bolan squeezed her arm, silencing her, then pointed downhill. Bahn shifted her gaze, just in time to see a young, bearded man frantically making his way down the slope to the valley floor, where the foliage was even denser than up on the hill. One second the man was in clear sight, scrambling through knee-high ferns and wild rhododendrons; the next he’d vanished into the greenery without a trace.
“So much for heading him off at the pass,” Bolan said.
“We might as well wait for the others.”
As they waited, Bolan looked over the jungle. The valley was easily thirty miles wide and half that distance across, and every square inch of the land seemed veiled by a canopy of trees. The only exception was the foothills on the far side of the valley, where flames could be seen raging through a section of the forest, giving off a thick, dark column of smoke. Beyond the next rise, Bolan could see other, similar columns, all adding to the hazy shroud that stretched over them, blotting the afternoon sun so that it seemed nothing more than a dim bulb. Bolan could smell the smoke. It was so strong his eyes began to burn again. Once more he found himself fighting back a cough.
“It’s worse than smog during rush hour in L.A.,” Bahn said, stifling a cough of her own.
They continued their vigil atop the promontory for another ten minutes, but there was no further sign of their enemy. Finally they heard a crackling in the brush behind them, followed by a radio call from Kissinger telling them to hold their fire.
“It’s just us.”
“Stay put,” Bolan told him. “We’ll come to you.”
They retreated from the ledge and backtracked into the brush until they met up with Kissinger, Latek and two of the KOPASSUS commandos. They’d all long since shed their HAZMAT masks, and Bolan looked quickly into each man’s eyes for signs of treachery. Each of the commandos returned his gaze unflinchingly, then Latek and one of the others moved past Bolan and headed toward the promontory.
“Flyboy made it back to Samarinda in one piece,” Kissinger reported, “but apparently there’s a nick in the chopper’s fuel line, so it’ll be awhile before he can get it airborne again.”
“How about another chopper?” Bolan asked.
“He’s trying to roust one from the military over in Balikpapan,” Kissinger said, “but that’ll take time, too.”
“How’s the major holding up?”
“He’s under the knife at the city hospital,” Kissinger said. “They say it’s going to be a long surgery, and they don’t like his chances. That prisoner we took in is in the OR too, but his prognosis isn’t much better. The others got by with quick patch-ups. They’ve probably already been released.”
Bolan took Kissinger aside and whispered, “If they haven’t been, I think we should have Jack and Rock try to keep an eye on them.”
“Why’s that?”
Before Bolan could pass along his theory about a spy having tipped off the Lashkar about the raid, Latek returned from the promontory and called out, “I see some smoke.”
“That’s not exactly ‘Stop the presses,’” Bahn told him. “There’s smoke everywhere you look.”
“Close by,” Latek said. “Just down the hill.”
Bolan told the others to stay put, then motioned for Kissinger to come with him. When they reached the escarpment, Bolan dropped once again to the ground and inched forward to a point from which he could see back down into the valley. Kissinger did the same.
A hundred yards away, a thin, serpentine finger of white smoke rose through the trees.
“Too small for a slash-and-burn,” Kissinger murmured.
“It’s in the direction the shooter was headed,” Bolan said. “I’m thinking campsite.”
“If that’s the case, we’re in business,” Kissinger said.
They crawled back into the brush. Bolan told Bahn and Latek, “If we’re going to try to hit them, this is the time, before they head any deeper into the forest.”
“I’m with you,” Bahn said.
Latek nodded. “What is the plan?”
Bolan thought it over, then laid out a basic strategy. When he was finished, Latek spoke briefly to the other commandos. As they steeled themselves for what lay ahead, one of the men clenched his assault rifle tightly and murmured something in Javanese.
“What’d he say?” Bolan asked Bahn as they prepared to enter the forest.
“Roughly translated,” she said, “It’s show time.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Who turned off the lights?” Kissinger whispered.
He’d taken less than a dozen steps into the rain forest, but it was as if he’d crossed time zones to a place where the sun had already set. Engulfed in a bleak twilight, he and the others found themselves surrounded by a preternatural world of looming, shifting shadows.
“Let’s take it slow till our eyes adjust,” Bolan advised.
“No argument there,” Cowboy replied.
The group had split up before entering the forest. Jayne Bahn had paired up with one of the commandos while, somewhere off to Bolan and Kissinger’s right, Sergeant Latek and the other commando had already forged ahead and disappeared from sight.
The ground beneath Bolan’s and Kissinger’s feet was a soft, peatlike layer of decomposed vegetation that padded each step they took. Not that anyone could have heard them above the cacophony. The noise surrounding the men was almost deafening. Up in the treetops, orangutans and smaller monkeys howled to one another, competing with the caterwaul of unseen birds and buzzing of insects, and the unsettling moan of the wind filtering through the upper branches.
And then there was the river, lapping and gurgling its way through the forest. Adding to the sensory overload was a cloying scent of exotic, overripe fruit. The smell was every bit as strong as that of the damp peat and, for the first time since stepping off the plane in Samarinda, Bolan realized he was unable to detect the smell of smoke. So much for sniffing their way to the enemy campfire, he thought to himself.
“Let’s stay close to the river,” he suggested. “Odds are they pitched camp near it.”
Kissinger followed Bolan. Their eyes continued to become accustomed to the darkness, and once they reached the river they were able to make out scores of boot prints along the banks. The tracks led in both directions.
“Seems like we want to keep heading north,” Kissinger whispered. “The other way’s going to take us back out of the forest.”
“You’re right,” Bolan agreed. “North it is.”
As they continued along the river, the men spotted pigs milling near the water’s edge. As Bolan and Kissinger drew closer, they quickly scattered, squealing their way into the undergrowth. The commotion spread as a flock of small dark-feathered birds burst out of the brush with a flurry of beating wings. The men froze momentarily, rifles at the ready, wary that their position had been given away.
“I don’t know about you,” Kissinger muttered, “but this place gives me the creeps.”
Bolan nodded. He was looking out at the river.
“Look at the water,” he said.
Kissinger took another step closer and peered into the current. The water had a reddish coloring to it.
“It’s not blood, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Kissinger said. “I remember reading about tannic acid or something like that in the peat. It gets leeched into the water and turns it—”
“I’m not talking about the color, Cowboy,” Bolan interrupted, pointing farther upstream. “I meant that slick over there.”
Kissinger shifted his gaze and spotted a wide, luminescent clot suspended on the water. Even in the relative darkness, the shape gleamed, rainbowlike, as it drifted toward them.
“Gotta be some kind of fuel spill,” Kissinger surmised. “Outboard motor, most likely. I’ll bet you anything these guys use some kind of boat to haul in supplies and any other—”
Kissinger’s voice was drowned out by a faint, sudden boom. Seconds later, a vibrant flash illuminated the jungle, momentarily blinding both men with its fiery brilliance.
“Take cover!” Bolan yelled.
Even as he was shouting the warning, Bolan was lunging away from the river and rolling into the nearby foliage. His instincts were once again on target. As he and Kissinger scrambled for cover, the forest around them thundered with the incessant rattle of automatic gunfire. The fusillade was so loud and persistent it quickly drowned out all other sounds save for the muffled thud of bullets plowing into the peat banks where the two men had been standing a moment before.
“You all right?” Kissinger whispered to Bolan.
“Yeah. So far at least.”
The flare tumbled through the upper branches of the nearby trees, then dropped straight down to the forest floor, even as another was taking its place, bathing the forest with another blast of harsh light. Bolan blinked his eyes several times, then peered out through the foliage and saw enemy gunmen up in the trees, firing down at the intruders.
Soon there was yet another burst of light, this one down near the river’s edge eighty yards from where Bolan and Kissinger had taken cover.
“Flamethrower,” Bolan said.
“Oh, man,” Kissinger groaned. “Something tells me that fuel spill was no accident.”
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Don Pendleton
A WORLD GONE MADJihad strikes the heart of Indonesia in a vicious terrorist onslaught to seize control of the entire region. The collusion of local extremist factions and the most powerful global terrorist network has produced a formidable enemy with the means–and the will–to unleash genocide.As part of covert U.S. intervention in the crisis, Mack Bolan and key Stony Man operatives are tasked with finding the terrorists' stronghold and weapons of mass destruction. But time is running out and the enemy's strategy and skill are putting the odds at zero for a successful mission.Nations are under siege in a world gone insanely wrong, and Bolan is at the epicenter of the madness. But he's been there before. And there's a way out….
Moments later, an adversary appeared
But it wasn’t a member of the Lashkar Jihad or the United Islamic Front. It wasn’t even human. Instead, Bolan found himself staring at a roiling, slow-moving cloud the color of pea soup. His mind flashed on the briefing papers he’d read on the way to Samarinda: an entire work crew killed in seconds by mingling pesticide vapors.
Trapped, all Bolan could do was watch as the cloud spilled over the side of the precipice and drifted down toward him. It looked almost alive, like some deadly creature on its way to claim a hapless prey that had fallen into its web.
Already he could smell the noxious fumes and his eyes were starting to burn, as well.
This is it, he thought. At long last, his number had come up.
Other titles available in this series:
Evil Kingdom
Counterblow
Hardline
Firepower
Storm Burst
Intercept
Lethal Impact
Deadfall
Onslaught
Battle Force
Rampage
Takedown
Death’s Head
Hellground
Inferno
Ambush
Blood Strike
Killpoint
Vendetta
Stalk Line
Omega Game
Shock Tactic
Showdown
Precision Kill
Jungle Law
Dead Center
Tooth and Claw
Thermal Strike
Day of the Vulture
Flames of Wrath
High Aggression
Code of Bushido
Terror Spin
Judgment in Stone
Rage for Justice
Rebels and Hostiles
Ultimate Game
Blood Feud
Renegade Force
Retribution
Initiation
Cloud of Death
Termination Point
Hellfire Strike
Code of Conflict
Vengeance
Executive Action
Killsport
Conflagration
Storm Front
War Season
Evil Alliance
Scorched Earth
Deception
Destiny’s Hour
Power of the Lance
A Dying Evil
Deep Treachery
War Load
Sworn Enemies
Dark Truth
Breakaway
Blood and Sand
Caged
Sleepers
Strike and Retrieve
Age of War
Line of Control
Breached
Retaliation
Pressure Point
Mack Bolan®
Don Pendleton
Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
—Winston Churchill
Those who promote terror against their fellow citizens sink as low as men can get. I will risk everything and stop at nothing to put these terrorists out of business. Our survival depends on it.
—Mack Bolan
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u9232b1a5-c381-5dd7-906d-dde87d9d0422)
CHAPTER TWO (#u4244984a-ca75-59c8-ab2e-942b6da95992)
CHAPTER THREE (#u362f3451-4578-5e41-8676-6dfed4545d22)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u61be7e78-9646-5e5d-bbc7-297501396942)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u42d240a1-5905-569e-a03a-834a8aa7494a)
CHAPTER SIX (#u18b2d8d7-2719-528d-9dfb-b1f6064436de)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#udce1bd8f-ff17-59c9-8f3d-57b515726339)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ub782a490-b0f9-594a-a428-869bf76d2d68)
CHAPTER NINE (#ua33b3da3-630a-5efd-9baa-c45c125cad89)
CHAPTER TEN (#uf9fa1ef3-5e56-50b2-9274-3b1181cb7506)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#uf980a1a2-7596-55d1-85f4-27122eae2c1c)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#ue745923e-4d28-5d91-be03-1a31c4d022a0)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
INDONESIA
“Okay, I think I’ve got the hang of it,” Mack Bolan said, speaking through the condensor microphone duct-taped to the inside of his gas mask.
“It gets easier once you’ve done it awhile,” Abdul Salim told him. As they both took off their masks, Salim, a decorated major who’d come up through the ranks of Indonesia’s Royal Marine Commandos, added, “The biggest thing to remember is not to hyperventilate.”
Bolan nodded. The truth was, although this particular mask was new to him, he’d worn similar protective gear on several occasions over the past few years. It was a sign of the times, a concession to the ever-increasing chance of biochemical attacks in the grim, unending war against global terrorism. Bolan missed the days when he could feel secure going into battle shielded only by the thin layer of Kevlar armor beneath his blacksuit. This day he’d even had to forgo the blacksuit in favor of a bulky, mud-colored HAZMAT suit. He’d been issued an armored vest, but it wasn’t made of Kevlar and, in comparison, felt as heavy as chain mail.
Major Salim was similarly attired. The two men were seated in the rear of a dust-covered white minibus making its way up a narrow, winding, two-lane mountain road seventeen miles north of Samarinda, capital city of Indonesia’s East Kalimantan Province on the island of Borneo. The bus was following its usual itinerary, a scenic route that led to a hilltop textile center long popular with the tourist crowd.
Those aboard the bus that day, however, were not tourists, and their ultimate destination was not the textile center, but rather a nearby storage facility managed—or mismanaged as many contended—by the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture. The other eleven men in the vehicle were members of KOPASSUS, an elite army commando unit that had seen extensive duty of late battling the rise of Islamic extremism throughout the country’s sprawling chain of islands. They, too, carried gas masks and were suited up in full HAZMAT gear. When Bolan first rendezvoused with the force at a private hangar at Samarinda’s small regional airport, the men had also been issued 10-shot, .45 ACP Heckler & Koch carbines, one of the few such weapons equipped with a trigger guard large enough to accommodate their thick protective gloves. Rounding out their gear, each soldier also carried a belt pack containing ammo clips, three flash-bang grenades and a first-aid kit loaded with ampules and various syringes for use in the event their suits were compromised during the impending raid.
This was the second time Bolan had joined forces with Abdul Salim. Several years ago they’d worked together putting down a rebel coup across the Java Sea in the province of Sumatra. That insurrection, which claimed the life of Salim’s uncle, renowned freedom fighter Ismail Salim, had been clandestinely backed by the Chinese military. Beijing was out of the picture now, but in their place an even greater threat to Indonesia’s fragile stability had emerged in the form of the notorious Lashkar Jihad. The so-called Soldiers of the Holy War had come into being as a retaliatory force against Christian militants in the Molucca Islands. Over the past two years they had grown in number and expanded their agenda proportionately, embarking on a violent campaign to seize control of the entire country, whose two hundred million Muslims constituted the world’s largest concentration of followers devoted to Islam.
The Lashkar had been formidable enough as a self-contained entity, but in recent months it had bolstered its might even further by joining ranks with the United Islamic Front, the global terrorist network cobbled together from the ranks of al-Qaeda and other kindred organizations decimated by the U.S. and its allies in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Whereas Abdul Salim had once thought his country was making headway in its efforts to eradicate terrorism within its borders, the UIF connection now tipped the scales in favor of the enemy.
Over the past two weeks both KOPASSUS and a force made up of KIPAM paratroopers had sustained heavy losses during pitched battles with jihad guerrillas in the provinces of Aceh and Sulawesi. Salim had been wounded by shrapnel in the latter attack—his right thigh still throbbed where he’d been hit—while nearly thirty others had been slain. Almost twice that many had fallen in Aceh. Salim had known most of the victims personally, and their loss weighed heavily. Though he still had his full head of coarse, wavy hair, streaks of gray had infiltrated his mane almost overnight, and his once-youthful features had been increasingly eroded by a deepening of the furrows around his eyes and mouth. The major now looked every bit his forty years, if not older, and though his resolve remained, it had been tempered by weariness. Gone was his proud assertion that the Lashkar Jihad could be eliminated by home forces alone. Much as he was loath to admit it, Salim was secretly relieved that evidence of UIF collusion had brought the U.S. back into the Indonesian fray. Perhaps, with America’s help, the terrorists could be rooted out once and for all, giving his country, for the first time in its turbulent history, a chance at peace.
A pensive silence fell over the commandos as the bus groaned its way up the mountain. Bolan, himself troubled after the long flight from Islamabad, turned from Salim and stared out through the tinted windows at the surrounding valley. Miles in the distance, tall, steeplelike derricks rose from the oil fields of Muara Badak. Farther to the south, near the seaport of Balikpapan, dark, noxious clouds spewed from several coastal refineries, further polluting a late-summer sky already shrouded with the smoke of countless slash-and-burn fires set by small farmers and large date palm conglomerates looking to clear swaths of rain forest for the planting of new crops. Most of the surrounding hills had already been cultivated. Sarong-clad laborers could be seen working thin ribbons of terraced farmland, clearly oblivious to the impending danger at the agricultural facility less than two miles uphill.
According to the classified files Bolan had skimmed through on the flight from Pakistan, over the past twenty years Indonesia’s Ministry of Agriculture had used its Samarinda mountain site to stockpile more than two hundred tons of obsolete, highly toxic pesticides. The compounds—laced with such carcinogenic agents as DDT, heptachlor and dieldrin—were not of Indonesian origin. They were imported from European manufacturers looking to rid their inventory of items banned by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Corrupt IMA officials made a fortune off the scheme, accepting bribes from the Europeans to take the outlawed agents off their hands and then passing along inflated invoices to the Indonesian government for reimbursement. A few of the herbicides had been put to use; the rest had been haphazardly stored outside Samarinda with few, if any, safeguards. FAO investigators hadn’t caught wind of the enterprise until corrosion breached several containers and unleashed a toxic cloud that had swiftly killed the compound’s entire fourteen-man day shift.
That was two months ago. In the aftermath of the initial investigation, which resulted in five arrests and two suicides within the IMA hierarchy, a Malaysian-based waste disposal firm had been hired to safely repackage the volatile chemicals for transport across the treacherous mountain passes of central Borneo to a high-tech incineration facility in Tomani. The firm had seemed efficient and conscientious enough while removing the first loads from the storage site, but less than a week ago FAO overseers had determined, much to their alarm, that barely a quarter of the loaded pesticides had actually been delivered to the incineration plant. Concern over the whereabouts of the other cargo had triggered a wide-scale investigation, and two days ago UN officials—with help from the CIA and Indonesian Military Intelligence—had confirmed their worst fears, unearthing a paper trail that linked the subcontracted transport firm, Bio-Tain Enterprises, to an affiliate of the United Islamic Front. The implications were as clear as they were odious: the UIF, frustrated by failed attempts to amass an effective nuclear and biochemical arsenal, was apparently ready to go the “dirty-bomb” route, hoping the diverted pesticides could somehow be incorporated into a weapon that could duplicate, no doubt on a far larger scale, the same fatal effect they’d had on the day-shift workers at the Samarinda facility.
Once the UN’s findings had crossed the President’s desk in Washington, they were quickly prioritized and relayed to the Virginia headquarters of Stony Man Farm. There, the covert ops brain trust—Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group, and Barbara Price, mission controller, had reviewed the data and forwarded it once again, this time via an encrypted e-mail, to Mack Bolan.
For Bolan, the timing couldn’t have been more opportune. When he’d first received the directive, he was already in Asia, attempting to track down the UIF’s founder and mastermind. Hamed Jahf-Al, a charismatic Egyptian known in some circles as the Nile Viper, had risen to the top of the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists back in June, when he was implicated in the ballroom explosion aboard a Caspian Sea cruise liner that had killed more than four hundred tourists, including sixty Americans. Jahf-Al had thus far eluded a four-country manhunt, and after three days in Islamabad the trail there had gone cold as well. Intel as to his whereabouts was conflicting, but the consensus was that the Nile Viper had fled Pakistan and was headed east. News of the UIF link to the missing pesticides, coupled with the Front’s already established collusion with the Lashkar Jihad, had given Bolan hope that in Indonesia he might once again pick up Jahf-Al’s scent, or at least that of one of his closest lieutenants.
The raid would be a start. During a quick briefing after his arrival in Samarinda, Bolan had been told that a Bio-Tain crew had shown up at the IMA facility earlier in the morning to load another shipment of pesticides, purportedly for delivery to Tomani. To the best of Major Salim’s knowledge, the transporters were unaware that they had fallen under suspicion. As such, there seemed a good chance that, once apprehended, the crew—or at least their transport vehicle—would provide evidence as to where the pesticides were being routed once they left the facility. The key was to storm the site and overpower the crew as quickly as possible, before it had a chance to realize its cover had been blown. Bolan had tackled similar missions dozens of times in the past, and Salim had assured him that most of the KOPASSUS commandos were equally seasoned. If all went well, it would be over in less than an hour.
Bolan was still staring out the window, preparing himself for the pending confrontation, when he saw two farmers suddenly glance up from their labors, shielding their eyes against a faint glare of sunlight that had somehow managed to penetrate the haze. Bolan tracked their gaze and saw two armed helicopters drifting low across the valley toward them. He wasn’t concerned. They were friendlies. He’d seen the choppers—both U.S. Black Hawks armed with .50-caliber M-2 Browning machine guns and submounted 2.75-inch rockets—back at the airport. One was being flown by a KIPAM-trained pilot, the other by Stony Man flying ace Jack Grimaldi, who had also been at the controls of the Learjet that brought Bolan to Samarinda from Islamabad. The Black Hawks were flying low for the same reason the bus had been outfitted with tinted windows: to maximize the element of surprise as they closed in on their target.
As the gunships drew nearer, Bolan glanced at his watch. Abdul Salim did the same.
“Right on schedule,” the major said, echoing Bolan’s thoughts.
Salim rose from his seat and conferred briefly with his second in command, Sergeant Umar Latek, then strode quickly down the aisle, passing along last-minute instructions to the other commandos as well as the driver. Latek, meanwhile, donned a headset linked to a portable Heaton 525 field transceiver and patched through a quick call to the three-man KOPASSUS surveillance team posted on a hillock overlooking the agri-compound. Bolan could see the sergeant’s features darken as he spoke with the team leader. As Major Salim passed by on the way back to the rear of the bus, Latek motioned him aside to pass along the news.
“Apparently the smoke from all these fires has drifted across the IMA grounds,” the major explained as he rejoined Bolan. “Our surveillance team is having trouble seeing the facility.”
Bolan stared back out the window at the dark, low-hanging soot cloud that loomed ahead of them. “Assuming they’re having the same problem at ground level, it could work to our advantage,” he stated. “Disguised or not, we’ll be better off the closer we can get before they see us coming.”
“True,” Salim conceded. “Maybe there’s some truth to that saying about every cloud having its silver lining.”
Soon the bus came to a turnoff. A posted sign indicated a left turn for those traveling to the textile center. The driver ignored the sign and continued to drive straight, downshifting to better tackle a steep rise in the grade. Bolan knew from the briefing that the agricultural facility was now less than a quarter mile up the road.
“It’s time for the masks,” Salim said. He pulled on his protective headgear and affixed the seals securing it to the rest of his HAZMAT suit. Bolan quickly did the same.
After rounding a tight corner, the bus came to a straightaway. The road leveled off slightly and it narrowed, hugging closer to the near-vertical rise of the mountain it had been carved out of. To the right, a steel guardrail, corroded by years of monsoons, separated the road from a precipitous drop into a deep, rock-choked ravine. Bolan peered into the chasm and saw a narrow, glimmering band of water swirling its way around an obstacle course of large, fallen boulders.
“The Mahakam River,” Salim told him. “It carries water from the upper mountains all the way to the delta near…”
The major’s voice suddenly trailed off. Bolan turned and saw Salim staring straight ahead, slackjawed, past the other soldiers and out the front windshield of the bus. Up ahead, less than a hundred yards away, a second vehicle had rounded yet another turn just below the smokeline and was heading downhill toward them.
“The delivery truck,” Bolan murmured through his mask.
“It’s supposed to still be at the facility! This is all wrong!” Abdul Salim called up to Sergeant Latek, “Why weren’t we alerted?”
“I don’t know,” Latek responded, his voice edged with concern. “Perhaps with all the smoke…”
“I don’t care how much smoke there is up there!” Salim ranted. “They had to be able to see the truck leaving!”
Latek had on his headset and was trying once again to raise the field agents. “I’m not getting any response.”
“I don’t like this,” Salim said.
The major was reaching for his carbine when the driver suddenly slammed on his brakes. Bolan had to grab at the nearest armrests to keep from being flung down the aisle by the abrupt stop. A torrent of curses filled the bus. Bolan couldn’t understand them, but he knew damn well what had the men so alarmed.
Up ahead, the Bio-Tain transport truck had veered from its lane and was now straddling the median as it bore down on the bus, picking up speed. With no shoulder between the guardrail and the mountain, the bus had nowhere to go to avert a head-on collision with the truck and its lethal cargo.
“A dirty bomb on wheels,” Salim mused grimly.
Eyes on the approaching vehicle, Bolan muttered, “A guided missile is more like it.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Everybody out!” Abdul Salim shouted as he and Bolan bolted to their feet. “And get your masks on! Hurry!”
Sergeant Latek yanked off his headphones and grabbed for his mask. The other commandos responded just as quickly, and once their headgear was in place, they rose in their seats and quickly unlatched the window safety catches, then leaned heavily into the hinged framework. As the windows swung downward, the men began clambering from both sides of the vehicle, clutching their assault rifles. The driver, meanwhile, wrestled determinedly with the gearshift, trying to throw the bus into reverse.
“There’s no time for that!” Salim called out. “Get out! Now!”
The driver either didn’t hear the warning or chose to ignore it. He wasn’t about to distract himself putting on a gas mask, either. Still cursing, he continued to grapple with the transmission. He finally managed to put the bus into neutral, but while trying to shift into reverse, his foot slipped off the clutch. The bus shuddered violently as the engine sputtered, then died. An eerie silence filled the bus as it began to roll slowly backward. The driver pumped at the brakes but they, like the steering, were power assisted, and with the engine out of commission, it quickly became clear he would be unable to keep the vehicle under control.
Bolan, meanwhile, shouldered open the rear emergency door. Salim shouted again for the driver to get out, but the man refused. He was still fighting the wheel when a bullet smashed through the windshield and plowed into his shoulder. His pained howl was punctuated by more bursts of gunfire. Outside the bus, one of Salim’s men took a bullet to the head and pitched forward alongside the road.
Snipers, Bolan thought. From where he stood he couldn’t see where the shots were coming from, but he guessed the Lashkar Jihad had to have positioned gunmen somewhere up on the mountain.
“Ambush!” Abdul Salim cried. Assault rifle in one hand, he moved past Bolan to the rear doorway. Another round of gunfire poured into the bus, pummeling the bench seats three feet from where the two men were standing. “Let’s go!”
Bolan cast another glance at the driver, who’d hunched over slightly but was still conscious and struggling with the steering wheel.
“He needs help.”
“There’s no time!” Salim tugged at Bolan’s arm as more gunshots poured into the bus, riddling the seats. “You’ll never make it! We have to go!”
Bolan reluctantly followed Salim out the rear exit. Both men dropped hard onto the pocked asphalt, then quickly tumbled to their right to avoid being run over as the bus continued its backward roll down the steep grade.
“Over the railing!” Salim called, vaulting the horizontal beam. Latek and a handful of the other commandos had already cleared the rail and were clinging to the uprights on the other side, sending loose rock tumbling down into the ravine as they tried to secure a footing on the sheer face of the cliff. It was more than a hundred feet straight down to the river.
Bolan hesitated astride the guardrail, leaning away from the bus as it began to drift past him. Up ahead, he saw the Bio-Tain truck closing the gap between the two vehicles. The commandos who’d exited on the mountain side of the bus had taken up positions along the road’s shoulder and were firing at snipers above them as well as at the oncoming truck. Even if they managed to take out its driver, Bolan feared the vehicle would continue on its collision course with the bus.
While his instincts told him to follow Salim over the railing, Bolan couldn’t bring himself to abandon the man still inside the bus. As the front end of the vehicle rolled past, he cast aside his rifle and sprang forward, landing on the stairwell that led into the bus. The door was closed. Bolan stabbed his gloved fingers through a gap in the rubberized insulation and tugged hard until the door folded in on itself, giving himself enough room to squeeze through.
The exertion took its toll, however. As Salim had forewarned him, Bolan’s labored breathing inside the gas mask left him feeling suddenly light-headed. Sagging against the handrail, he clawed at the mask, yanking it off. His face was layered with sweat, and his dark hair was plastered flat against his head. He doubled over and drew in a deep breath. The move saved his life, as yet another burst of gunfire took out the rest of the windshield, showering him with glass.
Bolan stood back up and peered out at the other truck, which had begun to slow. He suspected the plan to ram the bus had been aborted once the ambushers realized that most of their intended victims had abandoned the vehicle. It was a stroke of good fortune, but there was little time for rejoicing. Turning to the driver beside him, Bolan saw that the man had taken another round, this one to the neck. One look and Bolan knew he was dead.
Unmanned, the bus listed slightly to one side. There was a loud scraping sound as it began to brush against the guardrail. Bolan climbed up out of the stairwell and anchored himself as best he could alongside the fallen driver, reaching past him for the steering wheel. There was little play in the wheel, and the soldier knew he’d need better leverage to ease the bus away from the guardrail. He was concerned that the railing would soon give way under the strain and send the bus hurtling to the bottom of the ravine with him still on board.
Desperate, Bolan quickly pulled the slain driver from the seat and took his place. The steering wheel was slick with blood, but he gripped it as tightly as he could and turned it to the left. The wheel resisted at first, but finally he got enough response to guide the bus away from the railing.
Bolan shot a quick glance over his shoulder. The rear doors were still open, and he could see the roadway behind him. He was running out of straightaway, and there was no way he’d be able to maneuver the bus around the coming bend. It was unlikely the bus would even make it that far. Each time it struck another pothole or crease in the road, its course changed slightly, and no matter how hard he worked the steering wheel, Bolan suspected it was only a matter of time before the bus slammed into the mountain or took out the guardrail. Either way, the bus was a deathtrap.
Bolan lunged from the driver’s seat and sidestepped the slain driver, staggering back down into the stairwell. The door was still folded open. He braced himself in the doorway and stared down at the ground rushing past him. There was only a few feet of clearance between the bus and guardrail. It would have to do.
Pushing away from the stairwell, Bolan leaped to the ground. He landed hard and unevenly, turning his right ankle. A stabbing pain shot up his right leg as he teetered off balance, smashing into the guardrail. He tried to right himself, but his momentum worked against him.
The next thing Bolan knew, he was tumbling over the waist-high railing, beyond which lay the vast, deep maw of the ravine.
CHAPTER THREE
In Bolan’s predicament, ninety-nine men out of hundred would have crashed over the railing, locked in a deadly freefall before they so much as realized what had happened to them. By then, of course, their fate would have been sealed. Bolan, however, had a warrior’s reflexes, honed by experience on a thousand battlefields, and even as he was going over the railing, he was acting on his instinct for survival. He flung out his right arm and the moment his gloved hand came in contact with the upper edge of the rail, he curled his fingers and grabbed hold, breaking his fall. Just as quickly, he swung his other hand to the railing and clawed for purchase. The thickness of the gloves made his grip tenuous, and his feet dangled unsupported below him, but, at least for the moment, Bolan had once again cheated death.
Through the pounding of blood in his ears, the soldier could hear the crackle of gunfire and the squeal of the Bio-Tain truck’s brakes. The bus, meanwhile, drifted off the road into the side of the mountain. Bolan couldn’t see the vehicle, but it sounded as if the bus had only glanced off the rocks, which meant it was likely still on the roll and out of control. If it veered back across the road and struck the railing, Bolan knew he’d be in trouble.
Focusing his full strength on his hands and arms, the Executioner tightened his grip on the rail and began to pull himself upward. He wanted to reach a point where he could swing at least one leg back up onto the roadway. He strained hard against the pull of gravity, slowly rising up to a point where he could see the bus. As he’d feared, it was headed for the guardrail less than twenty yards to his left. He braced himself as it crashed into the barrier. The weathered uprights snapped under the impact, and a thirty-foot section of the railing gave way. The bus went airborne and began to plunge toward the base of the ravine.
Bolan was safe for the moment, but the railing he clung to had loosened and begun to sag under his weight. Freeing one hand, he reached up and hooked his left arm over the upper edge of the barrier. He tried again to swing his right leg up to the edge of the roadway, but it remained beyond reach. As he held on tightly to the railing, there was a loud crash far below him. The bus had slammed into the rocks rising up from the river, and moments later an explosion ripped through the vehicle and echoed across the valley. Bolan glanced over his shoulder and saw a black column of smoke rise from the fiery heap of twisted metal. The farmers on the other side of the river were pointing at the wreckage and shouting to one another as they began to flee their fields.
Bolan’s left arm was starting to go numb. When he tried to shift his position, the railing groaned and there was a dull crack as one of the weakened uprights began to splinter. One way or another, he needed to get off the railing fast. There was no way to get back up to the roadway, so he looked down over his shoulder, surveying the cliff face below him. Just off to his right he saw a few small trees growing out of the side of the precipice. Bolan wasn’t sure if any of them were strong enough to support him, but they were his only hope.
When yet another of the guardrail supports snapped under his weight, Bolan let go of the railing and kicked at the cliff face with his boots, directing his fall toward the trees. The first two snapped under his weight, but a third remained intact long enough for him to close his fingers around its trunk. He swung precariously to one side, extending his right foot until it came to rest on another of the trees directly below him. It felt as if the tree would support him, so Bolan took a chance and eased his grip on the overhead limb, freeing one hand. With considerable difficulty, he wriggled his hand free of his HAZMAT glove, then switched arms and did the same with the other. The tree’s bark bit sharply into his bare palms, but his grip was now more secure than it had been with the gloves.
Spread-eagled against the face of the cliff, Bolan glanced to his right. Major Salim, Sergeant Latek and the other commandos had managed to pull themselves back up to the roadway. Salim and one of the others were still crouched near the railing, trading shots with enemy gunmen up in the mountains. Between shots, the major looked Bolan’s way, then started toward him.
“Hang on!” he shouted, his cry muffled by his gas mask. Once he reached the spot where Bolan had gone over the side, he lay flat against the edge of the roadway and reached down. Even with his arm fully extended, however, Salim’s outstretched fingers remained well beyond Bolan’s reach.
“Your belt!” Bolan called up to him. “Try your belt!”
The Indonesian nodded. He rose to his knees and was unfastening his gear belt when yet another explosion sounded, this time from the roadway.
“The truck!” Salim shouted to Bolan through his mask. “The driver must’ve set off some kind of explosive device!”
Salim’s voice was silenced in midsentence. He went limp, and his arm dangled uselessly over the edge of the precipice. Bolan could still hear gunfire and assumed the major had been hit by a sniper.
Seconds passed. No one came to Salim’s aid. Bolan was stranded. The trees were holding up under his weight, but he had nowhere to go. He was trapped, and as the patter of gunfire increased up above him, he wondered if the commandos were being overrun by their ambushers. If that was the case, any second now he could expect to see one of the jihad gunners standing over him. Pinned to the side of the precipice, he’d be an easy target.
Shifting more of his weight onto his feet, Bolan freed his right hand and unzipped his HAZMAT suit. He reached inside the suit, drawing his .44 Desert Eagle from its web holster. He thumbed off the safety and pointed the pistol at the roadway, waiting for the enemy to show himself.
Moments later, an adversary appeared, but it wasn’t a member of the Lashkar Jihad or the United Islamic Front. It wasn’t even human. Instead, Bolan found himself staring at a roiling, slow-moving cloud the color of pea soup. Bolan knew the cloud had likely been unleashed by the explosion of the Bio-Tain truck. His mind flashed on the briefing papers he’d read on the way to Samarinda: an entire work crew killed in seconds by mingling pesticide vapors.
Bolan shoved his .44 back in its holster but didn’t bother to zip up his HAZMAT suit. Without the gas mask he’d yanked off while on the bus, the suit wasn’t going to do him any good.
Trapped, all Bolan could do was watch as the cloud spilled over the side of the precipice and crept toward him. It looked almost alive, like some deadly creature on its way to claim some woesome prey that had fallen into its web.
CHAPTER FOUR
As the toxic cloud drew nearer, Bolan quickly deliberated his chances of surviving a fall into the river below. Even if he managed to elude the boulders, it seemed unlikely the river was deep enough to keep him from slamming into the bottom. No. Like it or not, his best chance was to stay where he was and hope the poisonous vapors wouldn’t be as deadly as those that had killed the IMA workers. It was a faint hope. Already he could smell the cloud’s noxious fumes, and his eyes were starting to burn.
This is it, he thought. At long last, his number had come up.
The cloud was almost upon him when two shifting shadows began to sweep across the face of the precipice. When he heard the familiar, throaty drone of four 1600 horsepower turboshaft engines, Bolan felt a sudden stirring of hope.
The Black Hawks.
Bolan glanced up and saw one of the gunships bank slightly as it drifted close to him, so close that he could see the pilot, an olive-skinned Indonesian. The pilot brought the chopper to within twenty feet of the precipice and then hovered in place, its rotors whirring within a few yards of Bolan’s head. The vibration of the rotor wash nearly wrested him from the cliff, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps the Lashkar Jihad had somehow managed to seize the gunship. Then, as he glanced up, he realized that the updraft of the rotor wash was diverting the toxic cloud away from him. The cloud itself was dissipating, as well.
After a few seconds, the Black Hawk pulled away, its mission accomplished. Bolan’s eyes still burned, but the cloud had all but vanished.
The chopper drifted up over the roadway, directing its mounted guns at the sniper positions in the mountains. The second gunship came into view and hovered directly above Bolan, the sound of its rotors echoing off the cliff walls. As the soldier watched, a rope ladder began to inch out the side door. Once the ladder was fully extended, a figure emerged and began to slowly lower himself down the rungs. The man was dressed head-to-toe in HAZMAT gear and carried an extra mask similar to the one Bolan had shed.
The strength in Bolan’s arms was fading. When he tried putting more weight on the tree below him, the trunk began to snap, forcing him to hold tighter to the limb above. His fingers were going numb. He was running out of time.
“Hang tight, Striker!”
Bolan looked up. The man dangling at the bottom of the rope ladder, arm extended toward him, was his longtime colleague John Kissinger. Though officially on the Stony Man payroll as its resident weaponsmith, Kissinger was no stranger to the battlefield. He’d fought at Bolan’s side several times and had been on assignment in Islamabad with Bolan and Grimaldi when they’d received the directive to fly to Indonesia.
“How about a lift?” he shouted to Bolan above the din of the rotors.
“If you insist,” Bolan shouted back.
Once Kissinger was within reach, Bolan freed one hand and quickly transferred his grip to the other man’s wrist. Kissinger responded in kind. When the tree below finally gave way, Kissinger quickly pulled his comrade toward him. With his other hand, Bolan snatched at the ladder. Once his fingers closed around one of the rungs, he swung his right leg up, groping for a foothold.
“Almost there,” Kissinger assured him.
Bolan finally planted his foot on the bottom rung. He let go of Kissinger and grabbed hold of the ladder with both hands. On Kissinger’s signal, the chopper began to pull away from the precipice.
“Nice timing,” Bolan told him once he’d caught his breath.
“Always glad to lend a hand,” Kissinger responded. “But in the future maybe you might want to leave the wall-climbing to Spider-Man.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Jack Grimaldi was already pulling the Black Hawk out of the ravine by the time Bolan followed Kissinger into the passenger compartment. He called out a quick greeting without taking his eyes off the controls, then added, “Looks like somebody tipped off the Lashkar about the surprise party, eh?”
“Something like that,” Bolan replied, coughing slightly. His eyes were still burning. He coughed again, this time with more force. Kissinger, who’d grabbed an M-16 and positioned himself near the open doorway alongside another armed man in camou fatigues, glanced over his shoulder.
“You okay, Striker?”
Bolan nodded. “Yeah. I just caught a little whiff of that fog.”
“We better get you checked out.”
“I’ll be fine,” Bolan insisted. He was blinking harder now, however, and his eyes were reddening. Yet another cough shook through him.
“Fine, my ass.” Kissinger turned to the man next to him. “Rocky, grab that med kit and help him out.”
Although his nickname conjured up images of some towering brute straight out of the boxing ring, Raki Mochtar was, in fact, six inches shorter than either Bolan or Kissinger and weighed barely 150 pounds in full uniform. This was his first field assignment for Stony Man after two years of service with the Farm’s Virginia security detail. He’d had medical training during his stint with the Marines, but it was his family background that had earned him this, his long-sought chance to see action beyond the parameters of the Farm’s compound in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The grandson of Jakarta shopkeepers killed during a demonstration against Sukarno in the late l960s, Mochtar had visited Indonesia numerous times over the past twenty years and was as familiar with the country’s various languages and dialects as he was with its geography and culture. When asked to fly out and rendezvous with Bolan and the other covert ops in Samarinda, the thirty-year-old Mochtar jumped at the opportunity. And now, less than two hours later, here he was in the thick of things. He was eager to make the most of it.
“I’ll see what’s here,” he told Bolan, unlatching a large footlocker strapped to the cabin floor, “but if you’ve been exposed, you really need to go through a full decontamination. There’s probably a setup at the storage site, so—”
“Decon’s going to have to wait,” Bolan interrupted. “We’re in the middle of a firefight here, dammit!”
“But I’m telling you,” Mochtar persisted, “in a case of exposure, it’s vital to make sure you’ve washed off any traces of contaminants before they have a chance to work their way into—”
“Here,” Bolan interjected again, coughing as he reached past the younger soldier for a pair of surgical scissors and an intravenous bag filled with saline solution. “Let’s improvise, all right?”
Bolan shouted for Grimaldi to hold the chopper steady, then slit the top of the IV bag. Holding it high over his head, he craned his neck and quickly spilled the entire contents over his face. The saline stung his eyes but brought immediate relief. He coughed again, then cast the bag aside and told Mochtar, “Now grab some kind of antiseptic and pour it over my hands.”
Mochtar fumbled through the footlocker and uncapped a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Not wanting another reprimand, he fought back an urge to tell Bolan he ought to get out of his HAZMAT suit. Instead, he followed orders and drained the bottle as Bolan rubbed his hands in its flow.
Once he was finished, Bolan grabbed a roll of gauze. As he wiped his hands dry, he told Mochtar, “I didn’t mean to chew you out like that.”
“Not a problem,” Mochtar said. He reached into the footlocker once more, then handed Bolan a small oxygen canister rigged to a lower face mask. “This might help with that cough.”
Bolan grinned at Mochtar. “You catch on fast.”
“I’m trying,” the rookie replied. “You were right. I guess at times like this you can’t worry about going by the book.”
Bolan pressed the mask to his face and opened the canister’s feed line. He was filling his lungs with pure oxygen when the cabin resonated with the staccato blasting of Kissinger’s M-16. Grimaldi had pulled up over the mountain and Kissinger was firing at snipers perched high above the roadway.
The Executioner moved closer to the open doorway and glanced over Kissinger’s shoulder. He saw two snipers wearing the long white robes that were a trademark for the Lashkar Jihad, ducking for cover among the rocks. They were under fire not only from Kissinger, but also from the other Black Hawk. At the base of the mountain, clouds of black smoke snaked up from the bombed-out remains of the Bio-Tain delivery truck’s front cab, while ruptured containers in the rear hold continued to release clouds of toxic vapor. A handful of bodies were scattered about the roadway near the truck, some felled by the gas, others during the exchange of gunfire. Sergeant Latek and another KOPASSUS commando were crouched near a remaining section of guardrail, flanking Major Salim. Latek was firing into the mountains while the other attended to their fallen commander. Apparently Salim was still alive.
Bolan impatiently tossed aside the oxygen mask and shouted to Grimaldi, “Put her down over there by the railing.”
“Will do,” Grimaldi shouted back.
Bolan turned to Mochtar. “We’ll be upwind from whatever’s seeping out of that truck. You think we can skip the gas masks?”
Mochtar stared down at the roadway, then told Bolan, “At this elevation the wind’s always shifting. Besides, to get to Salim we’ve got to go around the truck.”
“Masks then, you’re saying.”
“Full suits would be even smarter,” Mochtar said. “And you should put on a fresh one.”
“I had a feeling you were going to say that.”
There were several unused HAZMAT suits stored in sealed packets behind the footlocker. Mochtar handed one to Bolan, telling him, “Put the gloves on before you change so you don’t recontaminate yourself.”
As he changed, Bolan asked Mochtar, “You seen combat before, Rock?”
Mochtar shook his head. “Just training exercises,” he confessed. “I’m ready, though.”
“Good,” Bolan said, “’cause if they nail you, there’s no playing dead. It’ll be the real deal.”
Mochtar finished transferring a few first-aid items into a fanny pack, then strapped the pack around his waist. “I’m ready,” he repeated.
“Then let’s do it,” Bolan said.
CHAPTER SIX
Once he’d set the Black Hawk down on the tarmac, Grimaldi left the turboshafts running and remained at the controls.
“Go get ’em, guys!” he called out to the others.
“I’ll sit tight as long as I can.”
Bolan suppressed a cough, crouched before the side door of the cabin, then leaped to the roadway, rifle in hand. Mochtar was right behind him. Kissinger dropped to the ground last, carrying a lightweight collapsible stretcher along with his assault rifle.
Almost immediately they were greeted by a hail of gunfire from overhead. The men quickly dropped and rolled to the cover of several large boulders crowding the road’s shoulder.
“Nothing like a little rain on the parade to spoil a guy’s day,” Kissinger groused.
Bolan replied, “Yeah, well, at least there’s a way to stop this kind of rain.”
He raised his rifle to his shoulder and scanned the mountainside until he had one of the snipers in his sights, then squeezed the trigger. The carbine bucked hard against his shoulder. Fifty yards up the mountain, a sniper reeled off the escarpment he’d been perched on and tumbled headlong down the steep facing, striking the road ten yards from the delivery truck.
Before seeking out another target, Bolan stole a quick glance at Mochtar. The younger man was firing uphill as well, hands steady on his rifle, no sign of fear in his eyes. Bolan was relieved. During his years in combat, he’d come across many a soldier who’d frozen when confronted with his first taste of combat. Mochtar seemed in control, though. That was one less thing to have to worry about.
“Let’s see if we can get close to Salim,” Bolan said, glancing down the road. He turned to Kissinger. “Give us some cover, Cowboy. We’ll return the favor once we reach the major.”
“Works for me,” Kissinger said, feeding another ammo clip into his rifle.
Bolan advised Mochtar, “Try to vary your speed and zigzag as best you can. Don’t make yourself an easy target.”
“Got it.”
Kissinger tapped the headset built into his helmet and said, “I don’t want to rush you guys, but Jack says the bird’s taking a few hits and he doesn’t know how long he can keep ’er down.”
Bolan looked back at the Black Hawk. He could see puffs of raised dust where gunfire was pounding the asphalt around the chopper, and several times he heard the plink of rounds glancing off the Black Hawk’s fuselage. The chopper was built to stand up under light fire, but there was no sense pushing their luck any more than necessary.
“Ready?” Bolan asked Mochtar.
“Ready.”
Bolan rose to a crouch; Mochtar did the same. The Executioner held out one hand, index finger extended, flexing his wrist for a three-second countdown. On three, he lunged forward, zigzagging up the road, staying close to the stretch of guardrail that hadn’t been taken out by the runaway bus. Mochtar followed suit, staying ten yards back. Behind them, Kissinger fired steadily into the mountains. The other Black Hawk, meanwhile, provided additional cover, sending a fierce stream of .23-caliber rounds from its Brownings at other sniper positions.
As he ran forward, Bolan surveyed the roadway, trying to account for all the men who’d evacuated the bus before its ill-fated plunge into the ravine. Latek was still crouched alongside the major with another of the commandos, and Bolan saw three men trying to make their way up the steep mountainside. Another three soldiers lay dead on the road, felled either by snipers or the poisonous fog from the delivery truck. That left two men unaccounted for. Bolan hoped they’d turn up alive, but he feared they might have fallen to their deaths at the bottom of the ravine.
As they made their way past the Bio-Tain truck, Bolan sized up the remains. He doubted the vehicle would yield any useful information, at least any time soon. The cab had been all but obliterated, and the cargo hold was clearly contaminated by ruptured tanks. Any evidence that hadn’t been destroyed by the explosion would likely be ruined once a CBR crew arrived and doused the vehicle with chemical retardant. If they wanted any answers as to where the herbicides were headed, they were going to have to take one of the snipers alive and wring the truth out of him. So far Bolan had counted at least twelve of them up in the mountains, and only three had been killed that he knew of. Judging from the steady flow of gunfire still raining down on the asphalt, Bolan figured they were going to have their hands full.
When they reached Salim, the commando leader was unconscious. Like Latek and the other soldier huddled next to him, he was still wearing his full HAZMAT suit. Mochtar spoke quickly to the others, then checked over Salim while Bolan took up position near the railing and fired into the mountains, covering Kissinger’s approach.
Once he’d finished inspecting Salim, Mochtar raided his fanny pack for a gauze pad.
Bolan asked him, “What’s the verdict?”
“He took a bullet in the neck, just above his vest,” Mochtar reported, reaching inside the major’s HAZMAT suit and pressing the gauze against the wound. “It missed the artery, but he’s losing a lot of blood. Weak pulse, too. We need to evacuate him back to Samarinda ASAP.”
“What about poisoning?” Bolan asked. “That cloud rolled right over him before it came down on me.”
“He’ll need to be tested,” Mochtar said, “but the entry hole was small, and these suits are bulky enough that a fold might’ve kept out any contaminants. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
Once Kissinger caught up with them, Bolan relayed the information, then grabbed Salim under the arms and signaled for Mochtar to take his legs so they could transfer him onto the stretcher once Kissinger unfolded it.
“We’ll carry him,” he told Mochtar. “Follow alongside so you can keep a hand on that wound.”
Latek spoke up in halting English. “We will cover you.”
“That would help,” Bolan said.
Latek spoke briefly to the other commando, then moved ahead of the group, leaving his colleague to guard the rear.
Bolan grabbed one end of the stretcher, Kissinger took the other and together they raised Salim off the ground.
“Okay, let’s move,” Bolan said.
They headed out, with Latek and the other commando firing into the mountains. Halfway back to the chopper, another commando caught up with them, providing additional protection. It wasn’t enough, however. The group had just made it past the Bio-Tain truck when they fell under cross fire from two different snipers. The commando closest to the railing was hit in the skull and pitched sharply to his right, disappearing over the barrier before anyone could get to him. Another few rounds hammered the stretcher, puncturing the fabric and thudding into Salim’s legs. The same strafing line of fire found Mochtar, and he let out a howl as several rounds plowed into his chest. He staggered but remained on his feet, wincing in pain. His armored vest had deflected the bullets, but it still felt as if he’d been struck by a jackhammer.
“Rock?” Bolan called out.
“I’m okay,” he replied hoarsely, repositioning his hand over Salim’s neck wound. “Keep going!”
They made it the rest of the way to the chopper without encountering further fire. Grimaldi left the controls and crouched before the cabin doorway. With help from the others, he pulled Salim into the cabin. Bolan and Mochtar bounded up afterward. The Executioner yanked off his mask, then switched places with Mochtar, tending to the major’s neck while the younger man inspected the gunshot wounds Salim had just taken to the legs.
“He’s in bad shape,” Mochtar said. “We need to get him to surgery, quick!”
“Anyone besides him we need to evacuate?” Grimaldi asked.
“Not that we know of,” Bolan reported. “Then I’m outta here.”
“I’ll stay,” Kissinger called up from the road. “We’ll mop up and then wait for you or hitch a ride with the other Hawk.”
“I’m staying, too,” Bolan said. “Rock, can you manage?”
“No,” the younger man said. “I need you to keep pressure on that neck wound while I work on his legs. If he bleeds out much more, we’re going to lose him!”
Though reluctant to leave any battlefield before the last shot was fired, Bolan nodded to Mochtar and stayed at Salim’s side. Kissinger closed the cabin door on them, then stepped back, joining Latek and the other remaining commando.
The Black Hawk rose and angled away from the mountain. Grimaldi was making radio contact with the other chopper when he spotted the thin contrail of a projectile jetting out from the mountainside.
“Shit!” Grimaldi cursed. “Those bastards have Stingers!”
Without leaving Salim’s side, Bolan leaned toward the cabin window and stared out just as the missile slammed into the other chopper, turning it into a fireball. The shock waves were so strong that the men could feel them reverberate through their own craft.
“Fasten your seat belts, boys and girls,” Grimaldi shouted, “’cause there’s another on the way and it’s got our name on it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Chaff jam!” Bolan shouted to Grimaldi.
“Already on it,” the pilot shouted back. Groping the console in front of him, Grimaldi thumbed a row of toggle switches, releasing a half-dozen high-yield flares from the underside of the chopper. Igniting within seconds after release, the flares gave off scattered blasts of heat intense enough to rival the thermal signature of the copter’s turboshafts.
The ploy worked.
As Grimaldi banked sharply to the right, the heat sensors on the second Stinger missile were unable to distinguish between the intended target and the fiery chaff. Drawn off course, the warhead hurtled past the Black Hawk’s framework, detonating beyond the range from which it could do any damage. The chopper rode out another shock wave, this one weaker than the one that had taken out the other gunship. Back in the rear cabin, Bolan and Mochtar rocked in place, doing their best to keep Salim stable on the stretcher.
“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to take over,” Bolan told Mochtar, rising to his feet. “If I don’t get up front and lend a hand, we’re all dead.”
Mochtar shifted position, transferring one hand to the major’s neck while continuing to apply pressure to the worst of the man’s leg wounds. “I’ll do the best I can,” he told Bolan.
By the time Bolan reached the cockpit, Grimaldi had banked the chopper again and changed course, heading back toward the mountain.
“Our turn!” he snarled. “Find me a target, Striker!”
Bolan grabbed a pair of binoculars and scanned the mountains. The sniper who’d just fired at them had dropped from sight, but Bolan could see four others positioned at intervals along a slight trough in the mountain. Peering higher, he spotted a promontory jutting directly above their positions. Pointing, he told Grimaldi, “There. Aim high with the rockets and see if we can get a little help from the mountains.”
“Gotcha.” Grimaldi locked in on where Bolan had pointed and readied the Black Hawk’s 2.75-inch sub-mounted rockets for firing. “One avalanche coming up.”
The gunship shuddered faintly as the first four rockets spewed from their launch tubes and streaked toward the mountains. In quick succession, they struck the rock facing, stitch-blasting a crude line ten yards above the source of the last Stinger.
Weakened from underneath, the promontory collapsed, slamming down hard on another, larger outcropping directly below it. The second shelf gave way as well, splintering into sections and sliding into the trough. As they began to tumble down the side of the mountain, the monstrous stone slabs dislodged still more loose rock, quickly widening the slide’s path. As Bolan and Grimaldi watched, three of the snipers were swallowed up by the avalanche. Several others, hoping to avoid a similar fate, scrambled out into the open and found themselves easy targets for Kissinger and the surviving KOPASSUS troops on the ground. The tide of the battle was quickly turning.
“Nice shot,” Bolan told Grimaldi.
Grimaldi shrugged. “I just wish we’d pulled it off before we lost the other bird.”
Bolan stared at the ravine, where smoke and flames issued from the charred remains of the second Black Hawk. It had landed a little over fifty yards upstream from the fallen bus, which also continued to smolder. There was no way anyone could have survived.
Grimaldi kept his eyes on the enemy and fired a steady stream of .50-caliber rounds from the Black Hawk’s front-mounted machine gun, bringing down yet another of the snipers. He then banked the chopper, changing course so that he was flying parallel to the mountain instead of toward it.
“I want to help Cowboy with a few quick flybys,” he told Bolan. “Go ahead and check on the major.”
Bolan returned to the rear cabin. “How are we doing?” he asked Raki Mochtar.
“Better than expected,” Mochtar reported. “I’ve got the bleeding in his legs under control. The neck’s still a problem, but he’s got a chance.”
“Good. How’s the chest?”
“Smarts a little,” Mochtar said with a grimace as he tapped the area where he’d been hit. “I can live with it.”
“That’s the spirit,” Bolan said, grinning.
The Executioner was pulling off his HAZMAT gloves when there was a sudden drumming against the side of the chopper. He cursed and grabbed the nearest carbine, then lurched to the doorway and yanked the door open.
Down below, he saw a sniper firing at the chopper from a rock ledge twenty yards to the right of the avalanche. Bolan quickly returned fire, even as a stream of rounds zipped past his head, thunking into the cabin’s interior. The sniper reeled to one side, dropping his weapon. He clawed at the mountainside for support but lost his balance and was soon tumbling down the steep incline.
Down on the ground, meanwhile, Kissinger and the others had taken up positions and stayed put rather than advancing within range of the rock slide. It had been a smart decision. By the time the slide reached the roadway, its swath was nearly a hundred yards wide, and its forceful momentum was strong enough to sweep the delivery truck off the tarmac and carry it sideways to within a few inches of the guardrail. The railing creaked and listed under the slide’s weight, but held up and managed to keep the truck from going over the side with its deadly cargo.
The jostling, however, unleashed yet another cloud of poisonous gas. Kissinger, Latek and the others quickly moved out, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the truck. As they moved, they kept their eyes on the mountainside and fired at the last few remaining snipers.
Soon, for the first time since the ambush had begun, there was no enemy gunfire to contend with.
Up in the Black Hawk, Grimaldi made two more quick passes as Bolan surveyed the mountainside, spotting three bodies but no sign of movement.
“I think that’s it,” he told Grimaldi. “Let’s get the major back to the base.”
“Let me just check in with Cowboy,” Grimaldi said. He was trying to reach Kissinger on his headset when he detected movement amid the rubble high up the mountainside. “I think we got a stray up at around two o’clock,” he told Bolan.
“Swing by and see if we can take him alive,” Bolan said.
Grimaldi changed course and drifted the Black Hawk closer to the mountain. Bolan spotted the figure in the debris and raised his rifle. Once he got a better look at his target, however, he slowly lowered the weapon and shook his head with disbelief.
“I don’t believe it,” he murmured.
“What?”
“It’s a woman,” Bolan said, grabbing for the binoculars. “A tourist, from the looks of it.”
“She must have wandered over from that textile place when the fireworks started going off,” Grimaldi speculated.
“Or maybe not,” Bolan said once he got a look at the woman through the binoculars. “She might not be a tourist after all.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I thought it was a camera she was carrying, but it’s not,” Bolan replied. “It’s a gun.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Grimaldi was setting the Black Hawk on the road as Bolan finished fastening the seals on his gas mask and leaped down to the tarmac. Kissinger was leading Latek and the other surviving KOPASSUS commandos to the chopper. Two more soldiers had been wounded in the last few exchanges of gunfire. One was well enough to walk but the other was unconscious and had to be carried. They were upwind from the Bio-Tain truck. The cloud leaking from its cargo bay had dissipated, but the ground forces still wore their masks. Latek and another commando stood back from the others, assault rifles trained on the woman slowly making her way down the mountain. She’d tucked her gun back in the web holster strapped under her left arm.
“She keeps yelling that she’s an American,” Kissinger told Bolan.
“We’ll see,” Bolan said.
Grimaldi left the chopper idling and came over to help hoist the unconscious soldier into the cabin.
“He got caught up in that last billow of gas from the truck,” Kissinger explained. “I’m guessing the seals on his mask didn’t hold up.”
“I’ll get him back to the base so they can look him over,” Grimaldi stated.
Bolan looked past Kissinger at the battleground. “I think we should keep a couple men down here and make a sweep back to the compound.”
“I was going to suggest the same thing,” Kissinger said. “So far we’ve counted nineteen bushwhackers. None of them are in any shape to talk.”
“I was afraid of that,” Bolan said. From where he was standing he could see a few bodies scattered along the road and amid the piled debris from the landslide.
Further uphill, the woman continued to make her way down the steep slope. She’d lost her footing several times and was covered with dust, but she wasn’t wearing any HAZMAT gear and Bolan could see that she was in her early forties, lean and athletic, with dark, medium-length hair. She wore dark khaki cargo pants and a matching T-shirt under her holstered pistol. Staring down at the commandos covering her every move, she shouted angrily, “Point those popguns someplace else, would you? You’re making me nervous!”
Bolan frowned. “I know that voice from somewhere,” he said.
“You think so?” Kissinger replied.
When the soldiers ignored her command, the woman shouted again, “I keep telling you, I’m on your side! Doesn’t anybody here understand English?”
“I’ll be damned,” Bolan muttered, finally recognizing the voice.
He turned back to the chopper and called out to Sergeant Latek, “Go ahead and lower your rifles.”
Latek glanced at Bolan, then back at the woman. Slowly, he lowered his rifle while advising the other commando to do the same.
“Finally,” the woman called out cynically. “Thank you so much.”
Kissinger turned to Bolan. “So, who is she?”
“Take a good look,” Bolan told him. “It’s that bounty hunter we crossed paths with in Africa when we were going up against Khaddafi and the Interahamwe.”
“Are you kidding me?” Kissinger said. “Jayne Bahn?”
“That’s the one.”
“Great,” Kissinger muttered, “just what we need. It figures she’d show up. I mean, what’s the reward on Jahf-Al up to now? Twenty million?”
“Thirty, I think.”
“Hell, and here us poor chumps are tracking him down for free.” Kissinger shook his head. “What’s wrong with…Holy shit!”
Up on the hillside, a bloodied jihad warrior had suddenly materialized out of the debris and was charging Jayne Bahn, brandishing a long-bladed knife.
Bolan spotted the man, too, and started to call out a warning, but Bahn was already in motion, lurching to one side as the blade swept past, missing her by inches. Loose debris shifted under her feet, throwing her off balance. As she fell, she managed to grab hold of her attacker’s wrist. Together, they tumbled down the slope, fighting over the knife.
Bahn finally managed to knock the weapon from the man’s hand and, once they reached the level ground of the roadway, she fended off a right cross from her would-be assailant and countered with a fierce pair of karate blows. Both connected, one knocking the wind from the man’s lungs, the other striking him behind the ear with enough force to knock him unconscious.
Staggering to her feet, Bahn drew her pistol and trained it on the man’s face. When she heard Bolan and Kissinger jogging toward her, she turned to them. At first she didn’t recognize them, but once they were close enough for her to see past their masks, she smiled faintly.
“You guys,” she said. “Small world, eh?”
Kissinger yanked off his mask and stared hard at the woman. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Crashing the party,” she wisecracked. Nudging the fallen terrorist, she added, “I brought you a little something, but I didn’t have time to wrap it.”
CHAPTER NINE
“No wonder I put him out of commission so fast,” Jayne Bahn said, crouching over the Lashkar Jihad warrior she’d felled. The man, it turned out, had been shot twice prior to being caught up in the landslide, which had broken his right leg in at least two places. “I can’t believe he was able to get up and take a swipe at me with that knife of his.”
“Adrenaline,” Kissinger surmised.
“I say we put the squeeze on him till he coughs up Jahf-Al,” Bahn said.
“He’s in no shape to talk right now,” Bolan said, inspecting the man’s wounds. “With the blood he’s lost, even if he comes to, he’s going to be in shock.”
“Well, excuse me for sounding like a hard-ass,” Bahn countered, “but we’re more likely to get something useful out of him if he’s in shock than when he’s thinking straight.”
“We won’t get anything out of him if he dies on us,” Bolan stated. “We need to patch him up and get him to a hospital.”
“Let me know which one so I can send flowers,” Bahn replied sarcastically. “Maybe I’ll come by and fluff his pillows, too.”
“Listen, sweetheart,” Kissinger interrupted. “When the time’s right, we’ll get him to talk, don’t worry. And you can bet your ass we won’t do it by pampering him. Got that?”
“Temper, temper,” Bahn replied with a shrug. “Fine, have it your way.”
Kissinger glowered at the woman, then jogged over to the chopper for a stretcher and Mochtar’s med-kit. By the time they returned, Bolan had managed to staunch the flow of blood from the prisoner’s wounds. Kissinger daubed the wounds with antiseptic, then quickly dressed them and kept pressure on the bandages as Bolan helped the soldiers load the man onto the stretcher. Grimaldi was waiting to help haul him up into the chopper.
“Go ahead and get these people to the base,” Bolan told him. “We’ll finish up here.”
Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll swing back later with reinforcements and some kind of morgue unit for all the bodies.”
“Before you go, hand me a couple two-ways,” Bolan said.
Grimaldi reached into a bin near the door and pulled out two high-powered two-way radios. “Good luck,” he said, handing them to Bolan.
The soldier nodded, then called past Grimaldi to Raki Mochtar. “You did good work, Rock.”
“Thanks,” the younger man replied gratefully.
“We’ll see you back in Samarinda.” Bolan saluted the medic, then stepped back from the chopper.
Grimaldi got back behind the controls and lifted off, then drifted back out over the valley. Bolan turned back to the roadway and sized up the situation.
“The truck’s not going anywhere,” he said, eyeing the bombed-out vehicle. “I say we leave it for now and spread out.” He handed Kissinger one of the radios, telling him, “I want to check out the compound. Why don’t you and Latek secure the area, then check around for more survivors.”
“Done,” Kissinger said, taking the two-way Bolan held out to him. “What about our friend here?”
“I’ll take Ms. Bahn with me,” Bolan said.
“Not so fast,” Bahn said. “No offense, but I didn’t sign up for a tour of duty here, okay? I call my own shots.”
Bolan sighed. “Fair enough.” He grabbed a stray assault rifle lying on the ground and held it out to the woman. “I could use your help, if you don’t mind.”
“That’s more like it,” Bahn said, taking the weapon.
Bolan exchanged a quick glance with Kissinger, who rolled his eyes, then gestured to Latek and the other commandos. They began to fan out in separate directions, giving a wide berth to the Bio-Tain truck, which continued to leak faintly visible clouds of toxic gas. Bolan, meanwhile, led Bahn the other way, up the road leading to the agricultural compound.
By now the Black Hawk was beyond earshot and the road was eerily quiet. For the first time since the firefight had begun, Bolan noticed a few signs of wildlife: birds, a few small gray squirrels, and a thin black monkey scrambling back and forth along the guardrail.
“I think you can take off that mask now,” Bahn told Bolan. “It’s not like we’re trapped in some kind of enclosed space.”
Bolan took off his mask. There was a faint odor of cordite in the air and he could smell smoke from the fires across the valley, but there was nothing that smelled like the chemical stench of the cloud that had nearly enveloped him a short time ago. Bolan also realized his cough had left him, as had the stinging sensation in his eyes. He’d gotten off lucky, he figured.
They walked silently for a short distance, then Bolan asked, “Are you here on your own or still working for Inter-Trieve?”
“I-T,” she replied.
Inter-Trieve was a Washington, D.C.-based bounty agency specializing in high-profile cases involving international fugitives. Bahn had joined them five years ago after stints with the Army Rangers and CIA.
“We’re on retainer with the insurance company representing that cruise liner Jahf-Al deep-sixed last spring,” she explained. “They figure the reward money’ll help offset the claims they’re paying out.”
“Provided you bring him in,” Bolan said.
“I’ll bring him in, all right.”
“You seem pretty sure of yourself.”
“Gotta be in this line of work,” Bahn responded calmly.
“I take it you’re aware that half the free world’s tried tracking down Jahf-Al with no luck.”
“Well, maybe they didn’t try hard enough,” Bahn suggested.
Bolan wasn’t about to waste his breath arguing with her. Instead, he asked the woman how she knew about the raid. Bahn shrugged, swatting away a cloud of gnats that had appeared on the roadway.
“I have my sources,” she said.
“You think you could you be a little more specific?” Bolan asked.
“Sorry,” Bahn said. “A girl needs her secrets.”
“I’m just trying to figure out who tipped off these guys that we were coming.”
“Don’t look at me,” Bahn replied icily.
“I’m not accusing you.”
“Yeah, right.”
Once Bolan and Bahn had hiked around the next bend, the road came to a sudden end and they found themselves at the entrance to the seventy-acre IMA facility. The grounds were enclosed by an eight-foot-high cyclone fence, and the entrance gate was guarded by two uniformed men in their early twenties. The men had their carbines aimed at the new arrivals, and the guns quivered slightly in their hands. They’d obviously heard the earlier assault and seemed fearful of being dragged into the bloodshed. One of them shouted a warning in his native tongue.
“I seem to remember you speak a few languages,” Bolan murmured.
“So that’s why you wanted me to tag along, you little weasel,” Bahn taunted. “And here I thought you were after my body.”
Bolan suppressed a smile. “Business before pleasure,” he responded evenly.
Bahn called out to the guards in Bahasa Indonesian, then quickly explained what had happened back on the roadway. Once she’d finished, the men conferred briefly, then one of them raised the security bar while the other waved them past.
“That was easy enough,” Bahn whispered to Bolan. “Hell, no wonder the Lashkar had such an easy time of it.”
“Ask them how many men were on the Bio-Tain truck when it first showed up,” Bolan suggested.
The bounty hunter stopped alongside the raised bar and spoke again to the guards. Afterward, she and Bolan continued up the driveway, heading toward the storage facility, a two-story building set back a hundred yards from the gate.
“They say there were only six men on the truck,” Bahn reported, “and that includes the driver.”
“There were at least four times that many in on the ambush,” Bolan recalled.
“I know,” Bahn said. “I mentioned that, but they insist they inspected the truck coming and going and there were only six of them.”
“Then there must be a camp around here somewhere,” Bolan theorized.
“That’d be my guess, too,” Bahn said, staring past the grounds, where hazy ribbons of smoke stretched over a vast sprawl of rain forest.
As they continued up the drive, Bolan abruptly changed the subject. “Are you still on speaking terms with your ex-husband?”
Bahn was taken aback. “Excuse me?”
“Frank Dominico, right? Works CIA out of Africa.”
“I know who my ex-husband is, okay?” she retorted. “Why’d you bring him up?”
“You found out about the raid from him,” Bolan guessed.
“I already told you, my sources are confidential.”
“One phone call and I can find out for myself,” Bolan told her.
“All right,” Bahn said, sighing. “Yes, I got it from Frank. Last time we talked, I asked him where Jahf-Al might go after he snuck out of Afghanistan, and he turned me on to the whole FAO stink over the agri-compound here. It sounded like a decent lead, so I flew in a couple of days ago and started sniffing around. I got my hands on a map and figured a way to reach the compound without being seen.”
“Who’d you get the map from?” Bolan asked.
“Don’t push your luck, pal.” She sidestepped the question and pointed to her right as she went on, “I made it as far as the fence over there when I heard all hell breaking loose on the road. By the time I’d high-tailed it up over the mountain, the shooting had stopped and you guys had pretty much wrapped things up.”
“You didn’t really think you were going to find Jahf-Al here, did you?” Bolan asked.
“No,” Bahn admitted, “but I was going to plant a homing device on that truck of his and see if it would take me to him. Which is probably what you guys should’ve tried instead of trying to play John Wayne.”
“Hindsight,” Bolan said.
There were another two guards posted near the front entrance to the storage facility. As Bahn spoke to them, Bolan looked over the building. It was old and decrepit, the walls overrun with vines and the roof patched in several places with thin sheets of blue plastic. Hardly an ideal environment for storing toxic materials, he thought. There was no way he or Bahn were going to attempt to go inside the building without full HAZMAT gear.
“Okay,” Bahn said when she rejoined him. “They said the Bio-Tain crew showed up earlier than scheduled this morning and everything was routine until about an hour ago, when the driver got a call from somebody on his cab radio.”
“The tip-off,” Bolan guessed.
“Probably,” Bahn said. “Anyway, the crew stopped what it was doing and everybody piled back into the truck. The driver said something about an emergency, then drove off.”
“That’s it?”
“Not quite,” Bahn said. “Before they pulled out, apparently one of the workers kept looking up at that hilltop over there. It’s a good hundred yards from where I was hiking, so they weren’t looking at me.”
Bolan glanced up at the hill, half-hidden in shadow. The hill was covered with dense brush and dotted with small trees. Up near the crest was a rock formation that looked vaguely like a raised fist. Bolan told Bahn that KOPASSUS had stationed a surveillance team somewhere in the hills overlooking the compound, adding, “They said they were having trouble seeing the compound because of all the smoke.”
Bahn frowned and shook her head. “It was a little hazy up here, yeah, but not that bad. None of the guards mentioned that, either.”
Bolan pondered the discrepancy a moment, then got on the two-way radio to Kissinger. Cowboy reported that they’d come up empty-handed in terms of looking for other survivors. Bolan wasn’t surprised. He quickly briefed Kissinger on what he had found out, then asked to speak to Umar Latek. Once he had the sergeant on the line, Bolan asked him to think back to the call he’d made to the surveillance team.
“How clear was the reception?” he asked. “Could you tell for sure who you were talking to?”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then Latek replied, “There was some static, yes, but I am sure it was the head of the surveillance team.”
“Are you positive?” Bolan asked. “One hundred percent certain?”
Again Latek hesitated a moment. “It had to be him,” he said finally. “Who else could it have been?”
“I’m thinking the stakeout crew was jumped,” Bolan told him. “I think they were killed, and when you called, I think they squelched the frequency just enough to help mask the voice of whoever told you about the smoke making it hard to see the truck. They were covering, because the truck was already on the way, and they wanted to make sure it would take us by surprise.”
Yet again it took Latek a moment to respond. When he did, his voice was weary. “If that is the case, I am to blame for the ambush,” he told Bolan. “I should have suspected something was wrong.”
Bolan tried to assure the sergeant that if his suspicions were correct, Latek’s mistake had been an honest one. But Latek was inconsolable. He continued to berate himself until Bolan finally interjected, asking the sergeant to put Kissinger back on. He told Cowboy to stay put until Grimaldi returned or sent back another chopper.
“And keep an eye on Latek,” he concluded. “Poor guy sounds like he’s ready to commit hara-kiri.”
“I’ll try talking to him,” Kissinger said. “What’s your plan?”
“I want to find out what happened to that surveillance team,” Bolan said, staring up at the rock formation atop the hillock. “Then we’re going to start looking around for the hole our ambushers crawled out of.”
CHAPTER TEN
When asked about possible routes to the top of the hill, the IMA guards directed Bolan to a series of switch-backs leading from a rear entrance to the storage facility. The crisscrossed paths twisted their way around tall patches of wild grass, brambly thickets and scattered stands of gnarled trees. As Bolan and Bahn made their way up the incline, they could see, off to their right, the distant mountains of central Borneo. The peaks, some of them nearly ten thousand feet high, were barely visible through the smoky haze, which by now had stretched itself across the entire length of the valley rain forest.
Soon they came upon a firebreak, a thirty-yard-wide band of land hacked clear of brush and vegetation. It ran perpendicular to the switchbacks and stretched in both directions for as far as Bolan could see.
“We take a left here, right?” he said, trying to recall the directions the guards had given them.
Bahn nodded. “Yeah, we follow this for about two hundred yards, then there’s supposed to be another trail that leads up to the peak.”
The firebreak was on a slope but the ground was soft, making it easy to walk. There were no signs of boot prints, fresh or otherwise. The break was within plain sight of the storage facility, and there was no way anyone could have used it without being spotted.
“Assuming Jahf-Al’s here in Indonesia,” Bahn said, changing the subject, “what do you think his agenda is? Other than hiding out, I mean.”
Bolan shrugged. “The UIF already has a toehold here. If he can tap into the Muslim unrest, Indonesia’s got the makings of a great power base.”
“True,” Bahn said, “but the Lashkar Jihad’s already pretty much cornered the market on the extremist action. I know they’ve cut some kind of deal with the UIF, but I don’t think stepping aside and letting Jahf-Al run things was part of it. He and Pohtoh aren’t exactly buddy-buddy from what I understand.”
“That’s the way I hear it, too,” Bolan said.
Moamar Pohtoh was the Muslim firebrand who’d risen to head of the Lashkar Jihad after his predecessor, Halim Alwyi, had been gunned down in a Sulawesi shootout over a year ago. It was Pohtoh who’d widened the group’s agenda while at the same time consolidating power by killing off a number of Alwyi’s top-ranking subordinates. Pohtoh was no stranger to Jahf-Al, either, and there was supposedly bad blood between the two men dating back to the late 1990s, when they’d trained together at an al-Qaeda terrorist camp in the Afghanistan mountains of Tora Bora. Pohtoh, who hailed from the slums of Jakarta, was purportedly as suspicious of Jahf-Al’s bourgeois Cairo upbringing as he was of the Egyptian’s motivation for creating the United Islamic Front. The Indonesian strongman had gone on record as little as six months ago claiming that Jahf-Al was less interested in the cause of Islam than that of amassing power and trying to rival the infamy of Osama bin Laden. Given the antipathy between the two men, many had been surprised when it had come out that the Lashkar Jihad was accepting input from the UIF.
“Must be a strange bedfellows thing,” Bolan guessed. “They probably figured they had more to gain by focusing on common ground instead of haggling over their differences.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened,” Bahn conceded.
By now they’d followed the firebreak nearly a hundred yards. Suddenly Bolan stopped and held out a hand, signaling for Bahn to do the same. She heard it, too: a rustling in the brush to their right. In unison, they both dropped to a crouch and raised their assault rifles, aiming into the foliage. The sound continued, growing louder and moving closer. Finally they could begin to make out the shadowy outline of three figures moving through the brush toward them.
“I’ve got the one in front,” Bahn whispered, nestling her finger against the trigger. “I say we don’t give them the first shot.”
Bolan shifted his aim toward the rear figures, then stopped and whispered back, “Hold your fire.”
“Look, maybe you’ve got a vest on under that suit of yours, but I don’t,” Bahn told him. “I’m not going to just wait here like some sitting duck for them to—”
“They’re monkeys,” Bolan stated.
“Call them what you like, I—”
“Orangutans,” Bolan said. “They’re orangutans.”
“What?” Bahn said, not willing to let down her guard.
But as she took a closer look into the brush, she realized Bolan was right. Three orangutans, all immature males, loped downhill a few more yards, then peered out through the branches. Bahn lowered her rifle and slowly stood, shaking her head.
“Makes sense,” she said. “I saw a preserve marked out on the map. Somewhere down there in the rain forest.”
The orangutans continued to stare at Bolan and Bahn but made no move to show themselves any further.
“Scram!” Bahn snapped at them. “We’re busy here!”
“Let’s just leave them alone,” Bolan said. He turned his back to the creatures and resumed hiking along the firebreak. Bahn picked up a stone and threw it into the brush to the right of the creatures. When the orangutans refused to budge, she shrugged and quickly caught up with Bolan.
“Smug little bastards,” she grumbled.
“They probably knew they could take you out if they wanted to,” Bolan taunted.
Bahn scowled at him.
A few minutes later they reached the trail rising up from the firebreak. It was narrow, and they made their way single file, Bolan leading the way. Small trees rose up on either side of them, strangler figs trailing long, woody vines from their lower branches. The large tree Bolan had seen from the ground loomed ahead. They followed the trail toward it and were soon in sight of the fistlike rock formation. For the first time, they also began to see boot prints on the path before them. Whoever had made them had come upon the trail by way of the brush. The tracks led upward.
“Looks like three different sets,” Bolan commented.
“Well, unless those orangutans were wearing boots, my money’s on the ambushers,” Bahn said.
Bolan nodded. “Let’s find out.”
Assault rifles raised into firing position, they continued up the last few dozen yards of trail and soon found themselves at the base of the rock formation.
“Well, looks like you were right about them being jumped,” Bahn told Bolan, staring at the grisly tableau before them.
The three-man KOPASSUS surveillance team lay dead in the grass, facedown, blood caked to their scalps where they’d been shot. Lying on its side a few yards away from the bodies was a transceiver similar to the one Bolan had seen Latek use on the bus.
Bahn crouched over one of the victims and inspected his wounds.
“Small caliber,” she said. “I’d guess 9 mm.”
“Handguns with sound suppressors,” Bolan said.
“Which would explain why I didn’t hear anything,” Bahn said, speculating as to what had happened. “They popped these guys, then they sent the truck on its way and fed that sergeant that crap about it being too smoky to see anything.”
“I want to check something else,” Bolan said, stepping over one of the bodies. He inspected the rock formation, then set his rifle aside and climbed up to the top. He looked around briefly, then climbed back down.
“No problem seeing the storage facility,” he reported, “but the road’s nowhere in sight.”
“Meaning what?”
Bolan pointed at the slain commandos. “I think these guys were killed outright,” he said. “No interrogations.”
“Okay, I follow that much,” Bahn said. “Where are you going with this?”
“Just hear me out,” Bolan said. “All right. We’ve got these guys being killed right around the time the truck leaves the facility, right?”
“Right.”
“Think about it,” Bolan said. “They can’t see the road from here, so how did they know we were coming? And even if they did see us, we were in that bus. It would’ve looked like we were just another bunch of tourists headed for the textile center.”
“Which brings us back to them being tipped off,” Bahn said. “They knew the raid was going down even before they jumped the surveillance team here, which is why they knew enough to get on the radio with that story about the smoke so you’d think the truck was still at the compound.”
“Exactly,” Bolan said.
“The big question is, who squealed to them?” Bahn asked.
“Hard to say,” Bolan replied. “You’ve got a lot of people in the loop on this. Besides KOPASSUS, you’ve got the CIA, Indonesia Military Intelligence, the FAO—”
“And you guys,” Bahn said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bolan countered.
“Easy, big fella,” she told him. “I’m just calling ’em as I see ’em. Why should we assume your guys are all clean?”
“I trust them a hell of a lot more than I do you,” Bolan said.
“Somehow I don’t think that’s saying a lot,” Bahn said. “Let’s try to be objective, okay? Have you guys taken on any new people recently? Anybody who might have some kind of ulterior motive?”
“No, of course not.”
But even as the words were coming out, Bolan realized there had, indeed, been a recent addition to the crew.
Raki Mochtar.
But could he be a spy? It didn’t seem possible. True, Mochtar had an Indonesian background, but he’d passed all the necessary security checks before being taken on as a blacksuit, and before being approached for this assignment he’d undergone even more scrutiny. Each time he’d checked out clean. But, then, Bolan also recalled a few other times when Stony Man Farm had suffered security breaches from within; in nearly every instance the culprit had been someone supposedly beyond reproach. Could this be another one of those cases?
“Well?” she prompted.
Bolan didn’t answer her. Instead, he grabbed his two-way and started to signal Kissinger. Before he could raise Cowboy, however, he and Bahn heard another rustling in the brush, this time twenty yards to their right.
“Chimps ahoy,” Bahn murmured, glancing over her shoulder.
A gunshot suddenly ripped through the foliage, just missing Bahn and ricocheting off the rock formation behind her. Instinctively she dived to the ground and scrambled along with Bolan to the far side of the rock. A second shot rang out, rousing the dirt to their right.
“Okay, maybe it’s not the monkeys after all,” she said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As quickly as it had begun, the shooting stopped. An unnerving silence lingered in its wake. Rifles raised, Bolan and the woman crouched at opposite ends of the rock formation, covering themselves from as many angles as possible. Peering out into the brush, they waited, listening for advancing footsteps, the sound of a weapon being reloaded. Something. Anything.
“Come on!” Bahn whispered hotly. “Show yourselves, dammit!”
She was answered by more silence. Then, finally, several seconds later, there was renewed commotion in the brush. Footsteps and a snapping of twigs. The sounds were receding, however, not drawing closer. Whoever had fired at them was in retreat.
“Sounds like a loner,” Bolan murmured.
Bahn nodded. “He runs off after a couple warning shots? What’s up with that?”
“Could be he’s out of ammo,” Bolan said. “Or maybe he’s going to try to circle around and have another go at us.”
“Let him try,” Bahn said, clenching her rifle.
The sounds in the brush continued to fade. Whoever shot at them was headed back toward the far valley, away from the access road and storage facility. Bolan was deliberating their next move when his two-way radio crackled to life. It was Kissinger.
“What’s going on there? Over.”
Bolan grabbed the radio and quickly explained what had happened, then asked Kissinger, “Where are you? Over.”
“Sergeant Latek found a path up the mountain while we were scouting around,” Kissinger explained. “We’re up on the ridgeline, about a quarter mile from you. I got a glimpse of you up on the rock formation, but the shooting started before I could patch in. Over.”
“Whoever it is, they’re bound for the rain forest,” Bolan told him. “We’re going after them. Why don’t you head over and give us a little backup? Once you reach the rock formation, it should be easy to pick up our trail. Over.”
“We’re on our way. Out.”
Bolan clicked off, then rose to his feet. “Let’s go.”
He and Bahn split up and ventured into the brush. Bolan used the barrel of his rifle to clear his way through the bramble, but the thorns still managed to nick him constantly, sometimes piercing the material of his HAZMAT suit. Bahn, navigating the brush twenty yards to his right, was under similar attack, and without the protection of a suit the pricking took a harder toll, prompting a near-constant stream of epithets.
Finally Bolan reached a small clearing where a set of footprints came to a stop and then doubled back on themselves.
“Over here,” he called out softly.
When Bahn caught up with him, Bolan was holding a pair of bullet casings he’d found in the dirt. They were still warm and reeking of cordite.
“It’s a .22,” he said, holding out the shells for Bahn to see. “Revolver, probably.”
“Explains why he was so stingy with his shots,” Bahn guessed. She plucked a thorn from her forearm and rubbed at the faint smear of blood it had produced. “How about we skip the trailblazing and just stick to the path he made?”
Bolan nodded and led the way. They had followed the footprints another twenty yards, when Bahn suddenly reached past Bolan into the bramble, removing a few strands of black, curly hair glistening with blood.
“Methinks it’s the hair of his chinny chin chin,” she mused.
“Then we’re on the right track,” Bolan said. He started to move on, but she put a hand on his shoulder, motioning for him to stop.
“How about if I lead for a change?” Bahn proposed. “Nothing against that nice ass of yours, but I’d kinda like to see where we’re going. You’ll have an easier time looking over my shoulder than the other way around.”
“If you’re walking in front, what makes you think I’ll be looking at your shoulder?” Bolan replied, doing his best to keep a straight face.
“Ooh, naughty boy.” As she stepped past Bolan to take the lead, Bahn smiled up at him. “Try to be a gentleman, would you? At least until we can find a nice hotel room?”
They continued through the underbrush, doing their best to track their fleeing attacker. It was slow going. The grass and bramble grew thicker as they made their way along the slope, and several times they lost sight of the shooter’s footprints and had to scout for other signs as to which way he’d fled: snapped branches, bent wildflower stalks, more stray hairs or a scrap of cloth claimed by the thornbushes. At one point they thought they’d spotted someone up in the trees, but it turned out to be another of the orangutans, using strangler vines for support as it moved from limb to limb with deceptive ease.
“Maybe we should try that,” Bahn suggested, prying loose yet another thorn from her forearm. “You know, ‘Me Jayne, you Tarzan.’”
“I don’t think so,” Bolan said.
After a few more minutes of navigating through the unforgiving foliage, the two finally emerged into a clearing and found themselves on a broad, flat promontory, not unlike the one Grimaldi had blasted to create the landslide on the other side of the mountain. Before them lay the north valley. Bolan quickly dropped to his stomach and motioned for Bahn to do the same.
“We’re like sitting ducks out on this ledge,” he whispered.
“I’ll take my chances,” Bahn said. “Beats the hell out of having to pick those damn thorns out of my hide all the—”
Bolan squeezed her arm, silencing her, then pointed downhill. Bahn shifted her gaze, just in time to see a young, bearded man frantically making his way down the slope to the valley floor, where the foliage was even denser than up on the hill. One second the man was in clear sight, scrambling through knee-high ferns and wild rhododendrons; the next he’d vanished into the greenery without a trace.
“So much for heading him off at the pass,” Bolan said.
“We might as well wait for the others.”
As they waited, Bolan looked over the jungle. The valley was easily thirty miles wide and half that distance across, and every square inch of the land seemed veiled by a canopy of trees. The only exception was the foothills on the far side of the valley, where flames could be seen raging through a section of the forest, giving off a thick, dark column of smoke. Beyond the next rise, Bolan could see other, similar columns, all adding to the hazy shroud that stretched over them, blotting the afternoon sun so that it seemed nothing more than a dim bulb. Bolan could smell the smoke. It was so strong his eyes began to burn again. Once more he found himself fighting back a cough.
“It’s worse than smog during rush hour in L.A.,” Bahn said, stifling a cough of her own.
They continued their vigil atop the promontory for another ten minutes, but there was no further sign of their enemy. Finally they heard a crackling in the brush behind them, followed by a radio call from Kissinger telling them to hold their fire.
“It’s just us.”
“Stay put,” Bolan told him. “We’ll come to you.”
They retreated from the ledge and backtracked into the brush until they met up with Kissinger, Latek and two of the KOPASSUS commandos. They’d all long since shed their HAZMAT masks, and Bolan looked quickly into each man’s eyes for signs of treachery. Each of the commandos returned his gaze unflinchingly, then Latek and one of the others moved past Bolan and headed toward the promontory.
“Flyboy made it back to Samarinda in one piece,” Kissinger reported, “but apparently there’s a nick in the chopper’s fuel line, so it’ll be awhile before he can get it airborne again.”
“How about another chopper?” Bolan asked.
“He’s trying to roust one from the military over in Balikpapan,” Kissinger said, “but that’ll take time, too.”
“How’s the major holding up?”
“He’s under the knife at the city hospital,” Kissinger said. “They say it’s going to be a long surgery, and they don’t like his chances. That prisoner we took in is in the OR too, but his prognosis isn’t much better. The others got by with quick patch-ups. They’ve probably already been released.”
Bolan took Kissinger aside and whispered, “If they haven’t been, I think we should have Jack and Rock try to keep an eye on them.”
“Why’s that?”
Before Bolan could pass along his theory about a spy having tipped off the Lashkar about the raid, Latek returned from the promontory and called out, “I see some smoke.”
“That’s not exactly ‘Stop the presses,’” Bahn told him. “There’s smoke everywhere you look.”
“Close by,” Latek said. “Just down the hill.”
Bolan told the others to stay put, then motioned for Kissinger to come with him. When they reached the escarpment, Bolan dropped once again to the ground and inched forward to a point from which he could see back down into the valley. Kissinger did the same.
A hundred yards away, a thin, serpentine finger of white smoke rose through the trees.
“Too small for a slash-and-burn,” Kissinger murmured.
“It’s in the direction the shooter was headed,” Bolan said. “I’m thinking campsite.”
“If that’s the case, we’re in business,” Kissinger said.
They crawled back into the brush. Bolan told Bahn and Latek, “If we’re going to try to hit them, this is the time, before they head any deeper into the forest.”
“I’m with you,” Bahn said.
Latek nodded. “What is the plan?”
Bolan thought it over, then laid out a basic strategy. When he was finished, Latek spoke briefly to the other commandos. As they steeled themselves for what lay ahead, one of the men clenched his assault rifle tightly and murmured something in Javanese.
“What’d he say?” Bolan asked Bahn as they prepared to enter the forest.
“Roughly translated,” she said, “It’s show time.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Who turned off the lights?” Kissinger whispered.
He’d taken less than a dozen steps into the rain forest, but it was as if he’d crossed time zones to a place where the sun had already set. Engulfed in a bleak twilight, he and the others found themselves surrounded by a preternatural world of looming, shifting shadows.
“Let’s take it slow till our eyes adjust,” Bolan advised.
“No argument there,” Cowboy replied.
The group had split up before entering the forest. Jayne Bahn had paired up with one of the commandos while, somewhere off to Bolan and Kissinger’s right, Sergeant Latek and the other commando had already forged ahead and disappeared from sight.
The ground beneath Bolan’s and Kissinger’s feet was a soft, peatlike layer of decomposed vegetation that padded each step they took. Not that anyone could have heard them above the cacophony. The noise surrounding the men was almost deafening. Up in the treetops, orangutans and smaller monkeys howled to one another, competing with the caterwaul of unseen birds and buzzing of insects, and the unsettling moan of the wind filtering through the upper branches.
And then there was the river, lapping and gurgling its way through the forest. Adding to the sensory overload was a cloying scent of exotic, overripe fruit. The smell was every bit as strong as that of the damp peat and, for the first time since stepping off the plane in Samarinda, Bolan realized he was unable to detect the smell of smoke. So much for sniffing their way to the enemy campfire, he thought to himself.
“Let’s stay close to the river,” he suggested. “Odds are they pitched camp near it.”
Kissinger followed Bolan. Their eyes continued to become accustomed to the darkness, and once they reached the river they were able to make out scores of boot prints along the banks. The tracks led in both directions.
“Seems like we want to keep heading north,” Kissinger whispered. “The other way’s going to take us back out of the forest.”
“You’re right,” Bolan agreed. “North it is.”
As they continued along the river, the men spotted pigs milling near the water’s edge. As Bolan and Kissinger drew closer, they quickly scattered, squealing their way into the undergrowth. The commotion spread as a flock of small dark-feathered birds burst out of the brush with a flurry of beating wings. The men froze momentarily, rifles at the ready, wary that their position had been given away.
“I don’t know about you,” Kissinger muttered, “but this place gives me the creeps.”
Bolan nodded. He was looking out at the river.
“Look at the water,” he said.
Kissinger took another step closer and peered into the current. The water had a reddish coloring to it.
“It’s not blood, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Kissinger said. “I remember reading about tannic acid or something like that in the peat. It gets leeched into the water and turns it—”
“I’m not talking about the color, Cowboy,” Bolan interrupted, pointing farther upstream. “I meant that slick over there.”
Kissinger shifted his gaze and spotted a wide, luminescent clot suspended on the water. Even in the relative darkness, the shape gleamed, rainbowlike, as it drifted toward them.
“Gotta be some kind of fuel spill,” Kissinger surmised. “Outboard motor, most likely. I’ll bet you anything these guys use some kind of boat to haul in supplies and any other—”
Kissinger’s voice was drowned out by a faint, sudden boom. Seconds later, a vibrant flash illuminated the jungle, momentarily blinding both men with its fiery brilliance.
“Take cover!” Bolan yelled.
Even as he was shouting the warning, Bolan was lunging away from the river and rolling into the nearby foliage. His instincts were once again on target. As he and Kissinger scrambled for cover, the forest around them thundered with the incessant rattle of automatic gunfire. The fusillade was so loud and persistent it quickly drowned out all other sounds save for the muffled thud of bullets plowing into the peat banks where the two men had been standing a moment before.
“You all right?” Kissinger whispered to Bolan.
“Yeah. So far at least.”
The flare tumbled through the upper branches of the nearby trees, then dropped straight down to the forest floor, even as another was taking its place, bathing the forest with another blast of harsh light. Bolan blinked his eyes several times, then peered out through the foliage and saw enemy gunmen up in the trees, firing down at the intruders.
Soon there was yet another burst of light, this one down near the river’s edge eighty yards from where Bolan and Kissinger had taken cover.
“Flamethrower,” Bolan said.
“Oh, man,” Kissinger groaned. “Something tells me that fuel spill was no accident.”
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Don Pendleton
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A WORLD GONE MADJihad strikes the heart of Indonesia in a vicious terrorist onslaught to seize control of the entire region. The collusion of local extremist factions and the most powerful global terrorist network has produced a formidable enemy with the means–and the will–to unleash genocide.As part of covert U.S. intervention in the crisis, Mack Bolan and key Stony Man operatives are tasked with finding the terrorists′ stronghold and weapons of mass destruction. But time is running out and the enemy′s strategy and skill are putting the odds at zero for a successful mission.Nations are under siege in a world gone insanely wrong, and Bolan is at the epicenter of the madness. But he′s been there before. And there′s a way out….