Wednesday’s Wrath

by Don Pendleton

  Something was stirring in those tortured eyes. She said, “You really are Mack Bolan.”

  He replied, “Call me what pleases you. But, dammit, help me save this day.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Just be as honest with me as I’ve been with you.”

  “No games?”

  “Please no games,” he said with a solemn smile.

  Another silence descended.

  Bolan finished his cigarette and put it out.

  Grimaldi rapped lightly at the door with his fingertips. Bolan told him, “A moment, Jack,” and peered insistently at the girl.

  She sighed and asked, “What can I tell you?”

  “You can tell me everything you know about Phil and, uh, this captain.”

  Grimaldi tapped again and called through the door, “Time is getting short, Colonel.”

  The lady slumped and rested a weary head on arms stretched across the desk. “Okay, friend,” she whispered. “Let him in. I’m going to tell a story to shock your toes. But remember … I am not a traitor.”

  No, she was not a traitor. Nor even a dumb broad. She was simply a lady who’d had a problem with sexual fantasies. But not her own.

  The Cobra lifted away, and Grimaldi uttered his first whole words since they had left the security office. “Did you buy all of that?” he growled.

  “I bought it, yeah,” Bolan replied quietly.

  He bought it, sure, because there was nothing else to do with a story so sad, so bizarre, so damned humanly tragic. Mary had met Phil Jordan shortly after she came to work at the test center, during one of his frequent visits to the facility. She was a graduate of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, but her roots were sunk deeply into the earth around Alamogordo and she’d considered herself highly fortunate to find a good job at the test center.

  The families of both mother and father traced their own roots in this land to a time when it all belonged to Mexico. Her father was of Mexican descent and owned a small parcel of land, which had survived in the family from a large Spanish grant. Her mother was a Mescalero Apache, and her mother’s mother had been born on the reservation near Alamogordo.

  None of that had any particular relevance to the present state of affairs except as a setting for a Mexican-Indian girl of humble beginnings who’d managed to struggle through four years of higher education, land an excellent job with a career appointment in U.S. government service, and meet the “man of her dreams”—an erudite intellectual, highly placed in that same government service.

  It had developed into more of a nightmare, though, than a dream come true.

  Mary had known for a long time that her relationship with Phil Jordan was going nowhere. It was almost entirely a sexual relationship: “If you could call it sex. A lot of it wasn’t. It was … I don’t know what to call it, but it was not sex. Not for me.”

  The guy apparently had some rather kinky hang-ups. But she’d thought she loved him. And she’d hung on to the hope that she would one day bring him around somehow to a normal relationship.

  Perhaps that was why she had accepted such indignities from the guy for such a damned long time.

  “The first thing he pulled on me like that,” she told Bolan and Grimaldi, “I thought I would die of shame. And I thought that he had to have a terribly low opinion of me to … to expect me to go along with anything like that. But it got easier as time went on. And I blame only myself. Phil never even tried to rationalize any of it to me, never asked for understanding. I was the one who rationalized, tried to explain … to myself.”

  What she had tried to explain to herself would no doubt have provided ripe meat for a team of psychiatrists.

  On their very first intimate date the guy took her to a motel, made love to her all the way through the precoital embrace, then backed away at the crucial moment and brought in another guy from outside—a total stranger to Mary—to stand in for him while he looked on.

  A stunt like that could, yeah, make a girl feel a bit unsure of herself—and of her man.

  “I knew he had a problem,” she explained. “My mistake was in thinking I could help him overcome it.”

  But things never got much better for Mary Valdez. There was infrequent moments when she and Jordan “got it on very nicely, almost normally,” but always preceded by some degrading, humiliating stunt for Mary.

  “He started bringing the captain around about a year ago. That’s all he ever called him—the captain. I never heard the man’s name until today. But we’d played games many times before, involving military titles. Once he dressed me in a full uniform—an officer’s uniform with general’s stars. He ripped the crotch out of the trousers and wanted me to bend over. Well, you know what he wanted to do. I talked him into just pretending he was doing it and we got it on pretty well that time.”

  Dismal, yeah, sad and tragic. Mary Valdez’s “honesty session” would have played better from a psychiatrist’s couch or confessional booth. But even that side of the story had given Bolan a valuable insight into the problems of the moment—and the rest of it, that part involving “the captain,” was extremely valuable.

  It was interesting, for example, to know that Jordan and Harrelson had been close acquaintances for at least a year.

  It was interesting, also, to learn of some of the joint interests shared by those two during the course of that year.

  “So where do we go from here?” Grimaldi asked “the colonel” when they had lifted away from the headquarters building.

  Bolan replied, “Think you have those recognition codes pretty well doped out?”

  The pilot had spent the early afternoon shaking down that Cobra and discerning her secrets. He told Bolan, “I’m pretty sure, yeah.”

  “Sure enough to try that range camp in the northern zone of Bliss?”

  Grimaldi shrugged and replied, “What do we have to lose but our lives? You’re buying it as a hot spot, eh?”

  Bolan was buying that, yes.

  Mary Valdez had spent a weekend there, precisely three weekends earlier, as the “guest” of Harrelson and Jordan.

  As the guest of both, yeah. And a whole damn company of horny troopers.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  GOING FOR IT

  The Fort Bliss access to the White Sands range served primarily the army’s air defense training command. A couple of range camps just south of the Sands provided launch facilities for ground-to-air missiles in conjunction with drone targets operating in the restricted airspace above White Sands. Those range camps were not continually operational, but saw occasional periods of inactivity between training missions.

  According to the readout from April’s computer summaries, the camps had been inactive for the past six weeks—and were to present date. So an anomaly had emerged from the study. Two batteries of ground-to-air missiles had been dispatched to the area ten days ago for “non-launch exercises” and were presumably still in the area, though there was no “read” for scheduled exercises or for personnel to conduct those exercises.

  Several other interesting results had emerged from the studies, involving other areas of the White Sands Missile Range, but the Fort Bliss training camps were the nearest at hand, and also there now existed substantiating proof, of a sort, that something unusual was occurring at one of those camps.

  So a look at Fort Bliss was a logical first step in the sequence. And it yielded the first blood of this potentially bloodsoaked afternoon.

  A small clump of weathered buildings on the desert east of the Organ Moutains marked the spot—and again Bolan was struck by the “bandit camp” parallel with the Old West, though this time the stronghold was a small desert town and the outlaws carried thunderbirds in braces instead of six-guns on the thighs. A dozen or so men were visible within the encampment. Also a jeep, several weapons-carriers, and two of the huge transporters used as mobile launch platforms for ground-to-air missiles.

  It was going to be a touchy situation. It had to be. First
ly, Harrelson’s troops were certain to have been alerted to the attack at Tularosa Peak and to the missing Huey. All of the strongholds would most likely be sensitive to any visit from the air, and especially in a gunship.

  Also it was at least an even bet that the word had gotten around concerning the presence of an important emissary from the east on a secret mission for the White House.

  Either way it read for these guys at Bliss, it was not to be a duck-soup operation for Bolan’s team.

  “No radio contact,” Grimaldi reported as they approached the camp. “They’re playing it close.”

  Which right away ruled out a couple of options for the visiting team. “Get into PA range and hold,” Bolan instructed his pal, the pilot.

  “We’ll be sitting ducks, you know,” Grimaldi advised as he skidded the big bird into a hover at one hundred feet up, one hundred feet out.

  Bolan growled, “Just keep the eyes open, Jack.” He cut in the PA system and called to the ground. “Camp Strong. Flying Heart above. We’re coming down to parley. Give us a sign.”

  He said to Grimaldi, “Hope you’ve got those signs doped right.”

  “Don’t make any long range plans on that,” the pilot replied nervously.

  But they got their “sign” after a short delay: two quick flares from a Very pistol fired from the porch of a central building.

  “I guess that’s close enough,” Grimaldi decided. “The card shows two circles as the proper response. I guess those circles could mean flares.”

  Bolan said, “Put her down, then. Do you see the set?”

  “I see it, yeah.”

  The “set” was a triangulated fire team, two men each arranged at two, six, and ten o’clock around the edge of the campground. The guys were standing casually in relaxed attitudes, but each carried what appeared to be a Stoner 63A1 light machine gun and had drifted into that set position, which would allow maximum adjustment according to developing need.

  The gunship settled gently and Grimaldi quickly powered-off to a ground-idle. He released his belt as he told Bolan, “Better let me take the point. They may like my looks better than yours. Besides, I never got along too well with those fifties.”

  Bolan had to accept that judgment. He replied, “Play it cool, Jack. And go with my cue.”

  “Right.”

  The remarkable guy grabbed a Stoner off a rack beside the hatch—a weapon identical to those awaiting him on the ground—and affixed a 150-round drum. He slung the machine gun from the shoulder, muzzle down, and went out to “parley” with the strongmen of Camp Strong.

  That was a code name, of course. It was just one of those unhappy facts of warfare that they’d had to come in so close before they could make that identification. If the bogus soldiers had responded to the radio signal, the Cobra could have held away and smoked them neatly from a safe distance. The antiaircraft missiles on the transporters showed no signs of launch readiness and it was even doubtful that they could be employed at such close range. Those babes were radar-guided and could smoke a plane long before human senses could perceive it. With those birds nested away, though, it would have been a far neater operation from an airborne Huey.

  But this was not an airborne gunship. She was on the ground inside a hostile camp and Bolan’s old pal, the amazing flyman, was moving off alone into a den of predators.

  And now Bolan knew how this good friend must have felt during those many anxious occasions when it had been Bolan out there afoot on savage turf while Grimaldi waited and watched.

  Yeah. They, too, die a little who but wait and watch.

  But Jack Grimaldi was not going to die even a little this time and Mack Bolan was not one to wait and watch beyond a crucial moment.

  He was following with narrowed eye the progress of the choreography out there, willing with mind alone the movements a few degrees this way, a few degrees that, sucking in the breath of life as though somehow there would be none left to suck if one false step were made.

  “Straight ahead, Jack … straight ahead,” he muttered to himself—then, “Okay, okay … there! Now!”

  Two people in dirty fatigues were moving forward to meet him as Grimaldi stepped from the shadow of the gunship. Both wore sergeant’s stripes and had obviously been involved in some sort of mechanical chores very recently. Their hands were blackened with oil or grease, much of which had found its way onto the clothing. These two also packed army forty-fives in military harness at the waist and the faces wore uncertain greetings.

  Grimaldi moved on toward them with both hands plainly unencumbered and called forward, “Hey! You ’bout ready?”

  Both “sergeants” came to a halt and one of them called back, “What’s with the off-again, on-again bullshit? What is it this time?”

  Grimaldi, also, halted and took a quick look around. The fire team was moving in, closing the encirclement—the two at six o’clock edging up toward oh-five-hundred to get a better alignment on Grimaldi past the tail of the Cobra. He called up, “We couldn’t raise you on the radio. What’s the matter?”

  Other guys were moving into view, now, from the scattered buildings. This was obviously a technical crew primarily, not too heavy in the combat infantry department. All wore side-arms but the only real combat weapons in sight were the Stoners with the fire team. The other guys were all soiled and had sweated through their fatigues, disgruntled-looking and idly curious about the visitation.

  The sergeant with greasy hands was shouting at Grimaldi, “One minute you say radio silence, the next you say you can’t raise us. Are you people sure you know what we’re doing?”

  Grimaldi began moving slowly forward again, grinning and waving his hands against the noise from the idling rotors. Those boys on the fire teams were technical specialists, sure, who’d never learned the finer nuances of hellground tactics. They were folding in toward the middle, trying to get close enough to overhear the vocal exchanges through the other noise, their attention focused on the man on the ground instead of on that deadly Cobra.

  Grimaldi had honed his hellground tactics to a survival art, thanks. And he knew what that formidable man left behind at the flex-fifty was waiting for, and hoping for, and praying for.

  And, yes, it was as though the two minds were one. Grimaldi could feel the breath congealing in his lungs as the strike perimeter constricted. He had calculated the flex zone of the fifty and extrapolated from that his own zone of responsibility—and it was almost a subliminal quiver flashing between single-minded partners that set the thing in motion.

  The Cobra’s big fifty crackled through the rotor sounds and sent fire lacing into that east perimeter; at the same precise moment, Grimaldi flung himself into a whirling reach for Stoner power. His own little five-fifty-six was chattering into the upper circle like a stagger-step behind Bolan’s fire, reaching for the zone beyond the flex and finding immediate meat.

  The whole damned fire team was down and gone in the initial flash of the strike as that blazing partnership proved its promise.

  The two sergeants in the greeting party died with greasy hands and full holsters, their chests popped open and spraying life’s own ruptured lubricants under the steel-jacketed impact of heavy bullets from a hot fifty.

  The other guys were running and yelling in every direction—and it was so goddam easy, it was brutal.

  The big magnificent warrior came charging out of the Cobra with a Stoner in his strong paws and a new drum of ammo for Grimaldi—and they went a’hunting … and took no prisoners.

  It was not a time for prisoners.

  At issue, after all, was not the value of individual human lives but the security and well-being of the entire human family.

  So, no, it was not a time for prisoners.

  And they took none.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BIG FLY, LITTLE SKY

  “Alice this is Striker on channel Bravo. Do you read?”

  Brognola’s good voice echoed back strongly on the special tactical net. �
�Alice here, Striker. Go.”

  “Strike your chart at coordinates Delta Four. That’s a hot spot just gone cold.”

  “Got it, right, Delta Four. Anything there for me?”

  “Yeah, a double nest of chicks on wheels awaiting bye-bye. You should make a point to get there first.”

  “We’ll see to it,” came the response. “Where away are you now?”

  “We’re headed for the big fly. A-OK here. Striker gone, off the channel.”

  Grimaldi announced through the intercom, “Ten more minutes to Holloman. What do you expect to find there?”

  “Many wings,” Bolan replied, “and big ones. They have to get this stuff out of here somehow and the sky is the only way to go.”

  “It will take some damned big planes,” Grimaldi agreed. “And lots of them. Sounds kind of nutty to me.”

  “These things always sound nutty until they work,” Bolan reminded him. A moment later, he added, “The transport angle is the whole game, Jack. It’s one thing to waltz these weapons around White Sands. Something else quite again, though, to get them out of the country and tucked away somewhere beyond recovery.

  “Still sounds nutty.”

  “Sure it does. So did the first hijack of an airliner. Things like that work because they’re nutty. Nobody would think of it, until they do.”

  “Well, listen,” Grimaldi said, “those birds back there at Camp Strong are tucked away for transport now. But they’d just got that way. Did you see the stuff in the operations shack?”

  Bolan muttered, “I saw it, yeah.”

  “Damn right.” A moment later: “They had delineated target sectors and the whole smash. I took some training with one of those outfits, once. And that wasn’t there just for show, in case someone happened along. I think those guys had a fire mission. I think they’d planned on using those birds, right there.”