Lethal Payload

by Don Pendleton

  “You think Feresteh did it.”

  “The only other likely suspects are Dr. Dutronc and Dr. Poulain. Both of them are native Frenchmen, both with unimpeachable security records. Dr. Seth is a Hindu, and very unlikely to be lying, much less cooperating with Muslim extremists.”

  “Feresteh doesn’t give off the vibe.”

  Erulin’s voice grew nasty. “I am sure Dr. Mohammedkhani gave you a good vibe in bed. But it is you who are running around French Guiana claiming terrorist plots of massive proportions. You and I both know that the only use a terrorist has for cobalt is to sheath it around a nuclear weapon to make a dirty bomb. She has the background, she had the means, she has the talent, and given her past, I am assuming she has the motivation. Two thousand kilograms of cobalt were acquired illegally, and now they are missing.”

  Bolan accepted every word Erulin said, but his instincts told him she was wrong. “Something’s missing.”

  “Can’t you Americans ever accept the fact that you might be wrong!” Erulin erupted. “What if I told you that last year Dr. Mohammedkhani became a fully licensed multiengine pilot, and is currently working on her helicopter qualification?”

  “It would make her a very able woman.”

  “Yes, but what if I also told you she is a member of the Kourou Shooting Club, and owns a .32-caliber Unique target pistol?”

  Bolan’s stomach tightened.

  “And what if I told you that after this weekend’s launch she is scheduled to fly to the United States to an aerospace conference in Washington, D.C.?”

  Bolan turned back to look at the sleeping figure between the dunes.

  “The President of France will be there for his own meeting with your President.”

  Bolan’s hand went to his pistol. The rocket scientist would not have to ram her plane into the White House. She would not even have to get particularly near it. All that would be required would be to get airborne over the D.C. area in a plane and detonate a weapon. Sheathed in cobalt, even a tactical nuke would kill most everyone in the capital in gruesome fashion.

  Erulin’s voice went dead. “Dr. Mohammedkhani is coming in. Dead or alive, but she is not getting on a plane to the U.S. I am letting you know out of professional courtesy, and personally, I advise you to leave French Guiana. There is talk in my department of bringing you in and having you…interrogated. I appreciate your efforts, and that you saved my life, but I am only field coordinator, and you have pissed off all the wrong people above my pay class.”

  Bolan’s eyes never left the sleeping woman. “You’re not telling me everything.”

  “We have gone over deployment schedules in the Jungle Warfare camp. Particularly training missions led by Babacar. Almost all of them were teams made up of the Muslim legionnaires. We believe they have set up a base in the jungle. We have photographed it by satellite.”

  “Take me there.”

  “That would be highly irregular. The Jungle Warfare Camp is in lockdown status.” Her voice grew bitter. “I have been ordered to stand down and wait for the strike team to be sent from Paris. They will be here in four hours.”

  “Tell your superiors you went to meet me. Tell them you did it under pretense to bring me in. Then we go on a detour. After that, I’ll be happy to debrief your superiors on everything we have on our side.”

  Erulin was silent as she slowly overcame her better judgment. “Tell me where Dr. Mohammedkhani is. I will dispatch people to pick her up. She will only be held. I will work with you for the remaining hours on your hunch. That is the best I can do. Then it will be beyond my hands”

  “Done.”

  “Meet me at the space center.” Erulin’s voice brightened slightly. “I have a helicopter there.”

  THE JUNGLE FLEW BY in a solid green carpet beneath the Dauphin helicopter. The aircraft roared barely inches above the jungle canopy. Flights of multicolored birds burst from the treetops, and bats blasted upward in flapping black clouds in the helicopter’s wake. Bolan had left Mohammedkhani back at her house and the chopper had been hot on the pad and Erulin waiting for him at the space center when he arrived. Erulin’s gaze flicked down to her instruments. “We should be getting close.” She followed the path a river cut through the rain forest.

  “How far are we from the Jungle Warfare camp?”

  “About a hundred kilometers. We are in the center of French Guiana. There is nothing out here but jungle. Even the Indians do not come here. There is nothing but snakes and spiders, leopards, piranha, leeches and crocodiles here.” Her shoulders twitched. “Only legionnaires would come to a place like this.”

  Bolan pointed. “There.”

  A finger of creek broke off from the river and traced a path through the jungle. It opened out into a pond and a small clearing and disappeared again. At the edges of the clearing, the trees were strung with camouflage netting. Erulin slowly orbited the camp and then broke off and did a larger orbit around the jungle surrounding it.

  Bolan shook his head. There could be an entire regiment of foreign legion deep reconnaissance commandos pointing their rifles at them and they’d never know it.

  Erulin seemed to read his mind. “You are the one who did not wish to wait for the strike team.” She brought the helicopter back to the clearing. The Dauphin’s landing gear slid out and Erulin set her down.

  Bolan slid out of the helicopter. He had not had time to pick up a full warload. Nor was he going to trust any gun he hadn’t personally fired. The ancient Thompson was cradled in his hands with a 50-round drum in place. He carried both of the silenced Berettas he’d taken from the mosque. His pockets were full of grenades.

  Erulin jumped out of the pilot’s seat and scooped up a FAMAS assault rifle. Bolan scanned the area. He had seen a million such camps before. There was a clearing suitable for a single helicopter, a water source, and a few benches and tables hewn out of logs beneath the cover of the trees. It was a typical rest and resupply area for troops on maneuvers in friendly territory. The threshing of the rotor blades and the leaves and dirt it kicked up ruined any opportunity to pick up on sound or movement. Bolan glanced at the ground. There were many boot prints in the soft earth. All of their treads matched the legionnaire pattern he had observed in Suriname. Most of the tracks looked several days old.

  Bolan moved beneath the trees.

  It took only moments to find the bunker.

  Earth had been mounded over the sunken log construction so that it looked like little more than a rise in the soil of the jungle. A very wide double door of heavy, unfinished beams formed the entrance. The ground in front of it had been rolled flat by something very heavy. The Thompson hammered the padlock from the oversize door with a single burst. There were no steps, but a shallow ramp ran down into the darkness. A ramp wide enough to accommodate heavy pallets. There was a generator, but Bolan did not turn it on. He took out his flashlight as he entered and played it over the interior. The bunker was a single low, wide room. The floor was packed earth, the walls were held in place by planking and the ceilings by beams of tree trunk hewn directly from the surrounding forest.

  It was job a squad of men could easily have done with hand tools over the course of several “training deployments.” There were crates and boxes toward the back. Erulin descended the ramp, shining her own flashlight around the bunker. Bolan found a rifle crate for six weapons. Three rifles were gone. Three FAMAS assault rifles were still packaged. Several thousand rounds of .223-caliber ammunition were stacked next to the rifles in canisters, some of them opened. Bolan found a suitcase filled with euros. A pair of French Mistral man-portable, surface-to-air-missile systems stood in the corner. Their tripods and optical units were in place. Both launch tubes had a missile loaded and ready to go. “We were lucky no one was here to meet us,” he said.

  “I do not think our presence here matters anymore.” Erulin knelt in an empty corner. She traced her fingers through the dirt.

  Bolan came over and found the dirt was compacted and marked o
ver a broad, six-foot by four-foot area, as if it had borne a very heavy weight. Bolan squatted and took a bit of the dirt between his fingers. The soil of the bunker was dark and slightly moist. Bolan shone his flashlight over his fingers. Intermixed with the dark dirt were flecks of bright blue.

  Cobalt-blue.

  The cobalt was no longer simply missing. It had been deployed.

  Bolan rose. “I have to contact my people.”

  He stopped as he heard the sound of a FAMAS rifle selector switch flicking to full-auto behind him. Bolan stood still for a moment. The .45-caliber slugs in his submachine gun would not pierce her soft body armor. His own armor was not rated against a .223-caliber rifle bullet on its best days, and his armor had taken a severe beating over the past seventy-two hours.

  Erulin spoke very quietly. “I have orders to take you in for interrogation.”

  Bolan slowly turned. He kept his muzzle pointed toward the floor even as he gauged the head shot. “I’m not going.”

  Conflicting emotions played across the woman’s face. She sighed bitterly as she lowered the muzzle of her rifle. “I know. Take the helicopter. I will call for extraction. I will tell them…” She looked away. “I will tell them you overpowered me.”

  Bolan nodded and left the bunker. He climbed behind the stick of the Dauphin and powered up her engines. The rotors beat the sky and the chopper lifted off the ground. As he brought the nose of the helicopter around, his eyes flew wide.

  Valentjin Islamov stood next to Erulin. Beside him, Babacar had set down the firing tripod of a Mistral missile system and slid into the chair. Islamov waved cheerily.

  Bolan rammed the throttles forward into emergency power.

  Erulin pursed her perfect lips against her fingers and blew Bolan a kiss goodbye.

  The helicopter’s twin engines roared over the soldier’s head as the rotors clawed for altitude. Treetops scraped the bottom of the fuselage and dipped the Dauphin’s nose. Bolan banked desperately. The helicopter swooped forward but not fast enough. He threw a glance backward. A smear of yellow fire trailing black smoke flew after him just above the trees. It was moving at sickening speed.

  The Dauphin was a commercial aircraft. It had no infrared flares or countermeasures. The Executioner rammed the stick to the right and the landing gear ripped through the treetops as the chopper banked radically. Bolan kept the throttles full, but the Dauphin was already giving him everything she had. If the missile had locked, the only advantage he had was that the range was point-blank and his helicopter could turn much harder than the missile as it accelerated to Mach 3.

  Bolan yanked his stick to the left and turned into the missile’s path and tried to outturn it. The Dauphin screamed as it redlined beyond tolerance into a turn it had not been designed for. Bolan gritted his teeth as—

  The helicopter spun 360 degrees in the air as something struck it. The airframe shuddered as three kilograms of high explosive embedded with hundreds of tungsten steel balls ripped through the tail boom like shredding paper. Red lights lit up across the instrument board. Smoke poured out of the vents. Bolan did not have to look back to know he no longer had a tail rotor.

  The helicopter was completely out of control.

  Dr. Mohammedkhani was not going to be terminated, nor even arrested. She would unknowingly do her job and make sure the upcoming launch went off perfectly. Dr. Seth was the enemy. Bolan suspected he was not the Hindu he pretended to be. Kurtzman was right. There had been no modifications to the rocket or any special reentry vehicle built. The weapon was the satellite itself, built by Dr. Seth’s team. It would fall, with much less accuracy than a guided rocket; but even if it missed Washington, D.C., completely, some part of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard would be turned into a radioactive wasteland.

  Bolan knew that he himself was about to officially die in a tragic helicopter accident while working in cooperation with Action Direct.

  Nothing was going to interfere with the upcoming launch.

  These thoughts burned across Bolan’s mind in the half second it took the Dauphin’s composite rotor blades to snap off against the treetops. The tailless, rotorless burning airframe plowed down through canopy trailing fire into the jungle below.

  16

  The camouflaged men appeared out of the rain forest like phantoms. They were armed to the teeth. The man with the sniper rifle hung back and scanned the surroundings with his optical sight. Two men with rifle grenades fixed to the muzzles of their weapons fanned out to put the area in crossfire.

  Islamov, Babar and Knock-Knock approached the burning wreck of the helicopter in a widely spaced crescent formation. Javanese gunmen flared out behind them.

  The Dauphin was burned out, blackened and still oozing smoke.

  “Babar.” Islamov jerked his chin forward. “Knock-Knock.”

  The two legionnaires circled the hulk from opposite sides. Both men began poking in the wreckage with their bayonets. The Vietnamese quickly held up a Beretta, its grips melted by heat. Babar fished out a Thompson submachine gun with a shattered stock. The huge African straightened as he made out the blackened lump of a grenade that hadn’t cooked off under one of the crumpled seats. He made rapid gestures at Knock-Knock, and the two men backed away from the crash.

  Islamov spoke. “And?”

  “There is no body, Commander.” Babar looked around. “Though I fail to see how a man could live through such a crash.” He shrugged. “The windows are shattered. Perhaps he was thrown clear.”

  “He is not dead until we find his body.”

  Babar examined the impenetrable canopy above. The helicopter had ripped a swath down to the jungle floor, but bats, eagles and monkeys could be feasting on the American’s broken body, hung up on any one of the arboreal tiers, and they would never know it. “We did not bring climbing spikes, Commander.”

  Knock-Knock was kneeling a few feet from the wreckage. “We will not need them.”

  Islamov stalked forward. “What have you found?”

  Knock-Knock held up his hand. There were thin streaks of red on it. “Blood.” He pointed into the trees. “He went that way.”

  Babar stared into the dense jungle. “He is without food or water and a hundred kilometers from the camp. He is hurt. Perhaps we should let the jungle kill him rather than risk the men.”

  Islamov nodded and jerked his head where Knock-Knock had pointed. “Fan out. Find him. Assume he is armed.”

  BOLAN WAS HURT. He wasn’t sure how badly, but the situation was bad enough. His side was torn. Only his body armor had prevented him from being disemboweled. He was bleeding, and his stomach and chest radiated bands of pain that made it hard to breathe. His left eye was closed. The right eye was going in and out of focus. The blood pouring into it wasn’t helping. The last two fingers of his left hand were broken. He checked the loads of the Beretta he’d managed to keep hold of during the crash. There were fifteen rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber

  He had a hand grenade.

  He needed a rifle.

  He also needed food, water and medical attention. Bolan checked his watch. He needed to get to the space center in Kourou within the next sixty hours, or barring that, to find a phone. The Jungle Warfare camp was sixty-two miles away through trackless jungle. He had a vague idea that there was a town twenty-five or thirty miles west, but his mental map of inland French Guiana was vague, at best. Bolan licked his split lips. He was already parched.

  The Executioner tore strips from the hem of his shirt and tied his broken fingers together.

  He watched from cover as the legionnaires began to follow his trail. He eyed the FRF-1 sniper rifle with a marksman’s hunger. The legionnaires were fanning out, and already they were predicting his course. Most fools would have run. Islamov wasn’t stupid enough to think Bolan a fool. They would be expecting him to double back toward the temporary camp where there were weapons and supplies. Bolan began ghosting the legionnaires. He’d had little time since the crash. The legionnaires swif
tly came to the place where he had started trying to cover his tracks. They knew Bolan had some French, so they used Arabic as their battle language to deny Bolan intelligence. There were eighteen opponents. He figured at least half of them were Javanese in legion uniform.

  Bolan pulled the pin from his remaining grenade.

  Knock-Knock knelt where Bolan’s blood trail stopped. He gauged the ground ahead trying to pick up the trail again. Knock-Knock suddenly looked back in alarm.

  Bolan lobbed his grenade.

  Knock-Knock lost his Arabic as the dark object sailed overhead through the trees. “Grenade!”

  Men dived for cover among the tree trunks. Bolan leaped on top of one of the Javanese. The man grunted as the Executioner’s knee drove into his back. The grenade detonated with a whip-crack. Bats and birds exploded shrieking and cawing from the trees. Monkeys screamed in fear and outrage at the alien sound. A human screamed in agony, and others shouted back and forth in Arabic, Javanese and French. Automatic rifles sent lead spraying in all directions. Bolan’s sound suppressed Beretta coughed twice. The man beneath him went limp. Bolan cut the straps of the man’s knapsack and web gear and grabbed his rifle.

  Islamov shouted to his men to cease-fire. The Javanese auxiliaries did not have legion discipline, and they continued to fire off long bursts at shadows beneath the trees. Bolan was less than a shadow as he crawled backward using a fallen a log for cover. Bullets cracked in supersonic flight inches over his head and ripped through the foliage. The enemy was not firing for effect, they were firing in panic. Islamov was roaring in French and Arabic at the top of his lungs.

  Bolan pulled the big fade back into the jungle with his prizes.

  “HE HAS A RIFLE.” Babar stood over the Javanese soldier’s body and shook his head. “He has rifle grenades.”

  Cigarette nodded unhappily. “He has food and water.”