Thunder Down Under

by Don Pendleton

  But the thing that had always put her off was the part of Brognola’s job she didn’t want—the political part. She preferred running the show right from where she was, assisting Stony Man’s people to get the mission done, whatever it took. The promotion would remove her from the action, put her in DC when she really didn’t want to be there.

  With a blink, she came back to the here and now. Hal’s position would be a new set of challenges and she had never shied away from that. But was it the path she really wanted to take? Was it the path that was right for her?

  “I appreciate the offer, Mr. Payne, but I have to think about it before anything would be made final,” she said. “I trust you weren’t expecting an answer right here and now.”

  “Absolutely not,” he replied. “It would be a terrible idea to demand your response two minutes after letting you know about what the President has in mind. However, if I may, I urge you to give this serious thought, Barbara. Change is inevitable, and it’s better to be ahead of it than to get caught up in it and possibly get left behind.”

  Was that some kind of threat? she wondered. Payne’s tone had been matter-of-fact, and it was likely he believed what he was saying, but his words reminded her of who she was dealing with—“pencil-necked drones,” her boss often called them.

  “You make a good point, which I’ll keep in mind as I’m considering your proposal,” she said, pushing her chair back again and standing. “However, we have several irons in the fire and I have to head back.”

  “Of course,” he said as he stood. “Let me see you out.”

  Price thought of refusing but accepted the offer with a nod. Payne escorted her to the front door and waited until the car pulled up.

  He opened the door for her. “I hope to hear from you soon.”

  “You will, I assure you,” she replied. One way or another.

  She had just gotten into the car when her phone went off with an alert from Stony Man.

  Striker involved in preventing kidnapping of WN employee. Both he and intended target are unharmed. Teleconference meeting in 4 minutes.

  Attached to message was an encrypted situation report.

  “Fantastic,” she muttered before raising her voice to the driver. “Excuse me, I need to get to the heliport as soon as possible.”

  As the car surged forward, she raised the privacy screen and activated a program on her phone that let her sweep the compartment for listening devices. The program came up empty, but she still had reservations about conferencing. Opening the report, she scanned its contents, several questions forming as she read.

  When the call started, she picked up. “Barbara here. Location is not one hundred percent secure.”

  “Noted,” Brognola said. “Wait, where are you?”

  “In a car heading back to the heliport after my meeting with Mr. Payne.”

  “Oh yeah, your lunch. You’ll have to tell me how that went later,” he said. “But right now I want someone to tell me if all of Australia has gone off the deep end.”

  “Good question,” Kurtzman replied. “A better one is, what are these people trying to accomplish with these actions? I mean, if you’re going to kidnap someone, wouldn’t it be a board member or the head of the company? What agenda is served by kidnapping the CEO’s personal assistant?”

  “Unless they saw it as a way to draw out Striker,” Price said. “A feint from a different angle, used to put him off balance.”

  “Perhaps, but overall none of this makes sense to me,” Brognola groused. “These incidents aren’t following a typical pattern of engagement or accomplishment. Bottom line is that they aren’t making any sense.”

  “Agreed, Hal,” Price said. “Bear, how are you and Akira coming on the data analysis?”

  “My company-wide search has come up with a big fat zilch,” he replied. “No one at WN has any ties, no matter how far afield I looked, to the AFN or any other group. There’s no link anywhere.”

  “Are they hacking the system?” Brognola asked.

  “We’ve been monitoring their network for successful intrusions ever since the mission began,” Kurtzman said. “Other than the typical Russian and Chinese teenagers trying to break in every three seconds, there’s been no successful outside penetration of their firewall.”

  “Someone inside the company could be transmitting the data via other means, like a flash drive,” Barbara said.

  “Nope—we’ve accounted for that, as well,” he replied. “When I say we’re watching them, I mean we’re really watching them. Other than a half dozen cyber-porn addictions and about ten people addicted to watching a soap opera every day and then discussing it ad nauseam via internal chat, no one has been transferring data by any means, period.”

  “Okay, so that avenue is a bust,” Brognola said. “What else you got?”

  “Well, Akira claims he’s got something going with the drone footage at the murder site, but he won’t let me look at it yet. Gets real touchy any time I ask him about it. I figure either he’s onto something for real, or it’s so difficult to crack that he’s having trouble and doesn’t want to ask for help.”

  “Well, it damn sure better not be the latter,” Brognola said. “Let him know he’s got until 9:00 a.m. tomorrow to get some results, otherwise he’s tagging out. Got it?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Price said, making a note on her phone. “There’s got to be some other angle that we’re missing. Perhaps our target is passing hard-copy information to a contact outside. You mentioned there were protestors near the grounds. Did anyone from the company ever make contact with them?”

  “Not if they wanted to keep their job, they didn’t,” Kurtzman said. “WN filed a restraining order preventing any protestor from coming within fifty meters of their building. A companywide memo circulated last year stated that anyone caught communicating with any protest group in any way would be summarily fired. An ex-employee is currently suing the company for violating their free speech rights, but it’s too soon to tell how that will shake out.”

  “Well, anyone can set up a dead drop to pass information to a person who knows where to look, and short of performing strip searches on every employee, they could still be passing information to third parties,” the big Fed said. “If we can’t contain the leak, then it seems our only other option is to capture one of these mystery assailants and find out what they know.”

  Kurtzman sighed. “Well, it hasn’t exactly been for lack of trying. The motorcycle riders escaped and none of the bad guys survived this latest incident.”

  “Striker took out all of them?” Brognola asked.

  “Well...yeah,” Kurtzman said. “I mean, a carful got turned into paste when they ran head-on into a semi. Another one got shot and bled out at the side of the road and the last one took three to the chest when she tried to shoot Striker after he’d tracked her and the kidnapping victim to an isolated house.”

  “But we have bodies now. Military records, arrest records. These people have to exist on paper somewhere, right?” Price asked.

  “Already doing the standard searches off what I could get, however, I don’t know how long the Melbourne coroner’s office is going to take to perform their autopsies. Probably won’t have prints on file I can use for another day or so. Unless Striker manages to take prints on-site.”

  “If he does, let me know,” Brognola told Price. “If he doesn’t send prints within the next hour or so, I want you to get in touch with the US Consulate in Melbourne and have them put some pressure on the government to move this investigation to the top of their pile. If we can find a jacket on some of these people, we can finally move this thing along.”

  Price’s car had pulled into the heliport parking area. “Right, Hal. I’m heading back to the Farm now. Unfortunately the time difference means I won’t reach anyone until later today here, but I’ll try to get them moving as s
oon as someone is in the office down there.”

  “Damn time difference,” Brognola grumbled. “If the Australian government wants us to bail them out, then their people will have to do some of the work on their end. Anyone got any other ideas?”

  Neither Price nor Kurtzman had any flashes of inspiration. “All right, then, Barbara, let’s conference when you’re back on-site. Given this escalation, I want to know if we should consider sending backup to Striker.”

  “I’ll work up an assessment, Hal,” she said as she disconnected and got out of the car. Trotting to the waiting helicopter, she barely had time to think about Brognola’s cryptic comment regarding her lunch meeting.

  He had a wealth of resources and he probably already knew everything she and Payne had talked about, she thought with a wry grin as she climbed aboard and settled in for her flight to Stony Man. But if he didn’t know, he would soon enough.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Four hours after he had shot the kidnapper, Bolan leaned up against a Melbourne police cruiser and sighed wearily.

  The yard around him was filled with cars of different types, many with flashing lights. There were several Mobile Patrol vehicles, most of them arriving about ten minutes after the shooting was all over. They had just been beaten there by the paramedics, whom Bolan had called after making sure the kidnapper was dead, freeing Cindra Tate and helping her outside, and then then discovering that Bert Williams, although seriously wounded, was very much alive, thanks to his ballistic vest. “Never leave home without it,” he’d cracked through wheezes of pain.

  Bolan and Tate had ransacked the kitchen and put pressure on his wounds with kitchen towels and duct tape. When the ambulance roared up, they’d left him in the care of the professionals and had turned to face the new onslaught of both Wallcorloo’s security team as well as the police. After some not-quite-good-natured ribbing about who had jurisdiction on the case, it was agreed that the police would lead, but WN would be treated as practically equivalent to the cops. That sounded like an odd arrangement to Bolan, but it wasn’t his country, so however they wanted to divvy up the responsibility of figuring out who’d done this was fine with him.

  Both sides shared setting up a perimeter and keeping the local media off-site, which Bolan appreciated. The last thing he needed was more press coverage about his activities here.

  Then came the interviews. Bolan and Tate were separated—at least, they were each taken to a different SUV—and questioned about what had happened that evening. There were at least four separate inquiries, each with a different person asking the same questions. Bolan had nothing to hide as it pertained to the night’s events, and he answered the questions in the same matter-of-fact tone every time. By the last Q&A, however, he was stifling a yawn, with everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, not to mention the jet lag from his flight, finally starting to catch up with him.

  He stayed awake, however, in case he had to back up Tate’s story. She had been badly shaken but unhurt. The worst part of it, she had said, was when the kidnapper had started shooting at Bert Williams, since she’d figured she might be next. Matt Cooper coming up those stairs had been the best surprise of her life. She was looked over by the paramedics before they’d taken Williams to the hospital, and pronounced fit, although they said she might have a mild case of shock, and said she could come back with them if she liked. Tate politely turned them down, saying at the very least she had to get her car back home.

  And just when everything looked to be more or less wrapped up for the night, the Wallcorloo MPOs and the police nearly got into it again about what to do with Bolan. The MPOs said he had acted under the jurisdiction of WN’s security policy, since he had been riding with an official member of their security team. The police returned that WN’s security force wasn’t an umbrella that extended to anyone who got in a car with a WN employee, and as such he should be taken into custody pending a hearing.

  At that Bolan grimaced, knowing he would probably have to play his trump card. Locating the police officer in charge, he pulled him aside, handed over a small card and suggested he call the number in private. The officer had gotten into an SUV and closed the door. Fifteen minutes later he got out, walked over, shook Bolan’s hand and said, “He’s all yours, mates.”

  They did let him know that they would probably be in touch with some follow-up questions, but otherwise he was free to leave with the MPOs, which was exactly what Bolan wanted to do.

  There was a bit more evidence collection and clean-up, which Bolan gratefully didn’t have to participate in. They set him up in one of the SUVs, where he busied himself sending high-resolution scans of the kidnapper’s fingerprints to Stony Man.

  He’d heard from the police that most of the other bodies weren’t suitable for identification. The victims of the semi crash were little more than charred flesh and bone now, the Range Rover driver was dead, too, bled out at the side of the road, but they were getting prints off him, as well. Hopefully the Stony Man team could finally catch a break on one of these people, he thought.

  At long last, however, both Tate and he were free to go. He approached her as she was getting out of the SUV. “Hey, how are you doing?”

  She took a long, shuddering breath. “For someone who’s been shot at and kidnapped in the last twenty-four hours, yeah, I’m okay. I’d just like to get back home and crawl into bed and sleep for about a week. What about you?”

  Bolan grinned. “Same here. Look, maybe I heard wrong, but are you really going to drive your car back home?”

  She glanced at her Kia, which had been brought out of the outbuilding and was being examined for evidence. “I was going to try, but...I’m not sure I should. Everything seems a bit...off-kilter right now, you know?”

  Bolan nodded. “I do. I need a lift back and was going to hitch a ride with an MPO, but if you want, I could drive you and your car back to your place with an MPO following us, then once you’re safe and sound, I’ll head to my hotel. How does that sound?”

  Her look of relieved gratefulness nearly lit up the night. “That sounds great. Thank you.”

  “All right, I think they’re just about done with your car, so why don’t you head over there, and I’m going to find someone to follow us back to your house.”

  Tate did so, and Bolan found the ranking WN officer on the scene, a man named Ian Travis who had sat in on the second round of questions with him. Bolan let him know about the plan and, although initially skeptical, Travis agreed to let two men follow Tate and him to her residence and then escort him to his hotel.

  Officer Travis might have been a bush guide or big-game hunter in his younger days, and tonight he brought all of that focus to setting up their transport. “I want double confirmation from both my people as well as you, Mr. Cooper, once Ms. Tate is home safe and when you’re back at your hotel, you hear me?” he said, pinning everyone he spoke to with eyes as piercing as Bolan’s. “If I don’t get both confirmations, then I’m gonna come down there myself to find out what’s going on, and believe me, nobody wants that.

  “And you two—” He pointed at the escort team. “When they get on the road, these two do not leave your sight for one moment. I don’t care if you have to run red lights, smash through barricades or jump a raised drawbridge, you stay on them every meter of the way. Does everyone understand my directives?”

  The small group nodded then split up to get into their cars. Bolan headed to Tate’s and, after adjusting the seat for his six-foot-three-inch frame, he got in and drove away from the farmhouse.

  Tate had already input her home address for the onboard navigation system, so all he had to do was follow the turn-by-turn directions. She was quiet the whole way home, often staring out the window. It turned out that she lived not too far from the area they had ended up in and, after about a twenty-minute drive, he pulled up to an unassuming apartment building with most of the
lights off at that hour.

  “We’re here,” he announced. “You got a parking space somewhere?”

  “Around the back. Number 27.”

  He pulled in, with the WN SUV following at a respectful distance, found her space and parked the car. “Is there someone you can stay with for the next few days?”

  “I—I have a roommate...she’s probably worried sick about me right now.” She looked up at the second floor, then back at him, her eyes overflowing with tears from the stress of what had happened to her. “You don’t think...they might come after me—”

  That’s when the dam burst. Her words turned into choked sobs as the enormity of what she had gone through finally crashed down on her psyche.

  Bolan had seen this many times before and he put a hand on her shoulder. With a strangled cry, she threw herself into his arms and, for a long time, they just sat there, with her sobbing uncontrollably and him comforting her as best as he could.

  Eventually her cries trailed off into sniffles and then a deep sigh. She pulled away from him and wiped her nose with a tissue from the box that had been attached to her visor. “God, I must look a mess.”

  “No, Cindra, you look great for someone who’s just endured what you’ve gone through,” Bolan replied. “Trust me, your reaction is completely normal after such a high-stress event, and there’s nothing to be worried or ashamed about.”

  “Really? Ever since it ended, I just...felt like I should have been able to do something against that woman. I kept replaying the events in my mind, asking myself why I didn’t do this or that.”

  “That’s also natural, and it’s okay to examine those feelings. The simple answer—even though I know you won’t like it—is that although you’ll run what happened through your mind as many times as you want to, the truth is there was nothing you could do in that situation. But the important thing is that you don’t let it prevent you from living the rest of your life that starts tomorrow, okay?”