Bolan's next shot went into the chest of a Cuban. The dying flight attendant fell back into the airliner as the third shot tore into another Cuban's heart. Before the dead men fell, Bolan swept the cross hairs forward to the pilots' cabin. From his angle, he had no view of the pilots. He emptied the rifle's magazine through the fuselage and windshields, riddling the cockpit with high-velocity slugs.
A streak of fire hit the Ilyushin. The RPG tore into the side of the plane. Shards of aluminium and flaming plastic fluttered down. A hole two feet wide yawned in the plane. A second rocket hit a wing and the Ilyushin was engulfed in a ball of churning flame.
Other rockets hit the trucks. Bolan snapped a second magazine into the Dragunov and put the cross hairs on a PLO soldier cowering behind an overturned oil drum. Advancing the elevation knob one click, Bolan hit the soldier first in the back, then zeroed the rifle and hit him again in his keffiyeh.
Searching through the flaming trucks and diesel smoke, Bolan put single shots into terrorists. Rocket after rocket hit the trucks, killing concealed Palestinians, gutting the flaming hulks. Fluid from the burst oil drums flowed from the wrecks.
A Palestinian broke cover and sprinted for the rocks. Suddenly he fell. Bolan sighted on the terrorist's head but did not fire. Through the scope, Bolan watched the terrorist clutch at his throat, thrash, finally die with froth bubbling from his mouth.
A green cloud blurred Bolan's field of view. The Russian in the anti-contamination suit ran, limping, for cover. Bolan followed him with the scope, noted that he now wore a gas mask and plastic hood.
Gas! Yeah, that's what they had in those drums. Not White Death this run, but the ultimate weapon of terror. Yellow rain in Laos and Cambodia, chemicals of mass murder in Afghanistan; why not poison gas in the Americas? No one in the United Nations had been willing to face the evidence coming out of Asia. Even in the United States, the bleeding-heart humanitarians had accused the Central Intelligence Agency of manufacturing the evidence to slander the "peace-loving" Soviet Socialists.
But now the Soviets' gas exterminated their Palestinian stooges.
"Watch the one in the plastic suit!" Bolan shouted to his spotter. Then he keyed his radio. "Lieutenant! Pull your men back! Now! That's gas down there. Poison gas. Get them back!"
Barakat did not waste time acknowledging. He commanded his men to retreat. Voices called back and forth among the rocks. Bolan covered the withdrawal with his Dragunov, sending slugs into wisps of black smoke, into fluttering canvas, into dead terrorists. Anything that moved or seemed to move took a slug.
"Where's that Russian?" Bolan asked Nabih.
The teenager pointed to a cleft in the rocks as he passed the binoculars to the black-suited American. Bolan focused the lenses and saw the Russian fleeing a Phalange soldier.
"Lieutenant Barakat, call your man back." Even as Bolan radioed, he saw the soldier tackle the protective-clothed Russian.
They fought, the soldier forcing the wounded man face down on the rocks, looping a length of rope around his arms.
Then the soldier convulsed. He clawed at his throat, fell back. The Russian scrambled up and crabbed over the rocks. Then he, too, staggered and fell. His hands tore the mask from his face. He died thrashing.
"Don't go near that man's body!" Bolan shouted down the mountainside, hoping that his tone, if not his language, was understood. Bolting from concealment, he let gravity propel him down the rocks, jumping, hurdling, running a few steps, then jumping again. In seconds, Bolan stood on a ledge ten feet above the dead Phalangist.
Foam crusted the dead man's face, his eyes blindly staring into the sky. A few feet past him, the Russian sprawled on the rocks. Bolan saw several small rips in the protective covering he wore.
The gas had killed both men. Bolan wanted to take the dead Russian out for identification and laboratory examination.
And the brave Arab soldier deserved a decent burial. But Bolan knew that anyone who touched either man risked death. The squad did not even carry a body bag or plastic sheet. Bolan reached for the two white phosphorous grenades on his battle rig.
Footsteps. Bolan dropped into a crouch, his hand going for his .44 AutoMag. Lieutenant Barakat scrambled through the rocks and stopped beside him.
"Is Samir dead?"
Bolan nodded. "Does your faith allow cremation?"
"What?"
"Anyone who touches his body dies. It's either fire—" Bolan held up a phosphorous grenade "—or he rots there."
"Give him the grace of fire."
Bolan tossed the grenade. His accuracy and the grenade's phosphorous allowed only ashes and blackened bits of metal and bone to remain where the young soldier had died.
Marching toward their rendezvous with the helicopter that would take them to safety in the south, Bolan looked back. Smoke and flames rose from the wreckage of the Cuban Ilyushin, and from the gutted trucks. Nothing lived on the hell ground of the airfield.
A victory.
But Bolan did not exult in the destruction of the gang and their horrible cargo. The victory cost too much. The death of the Phalange fighter—a college student, a volunteer in the struggle against the terrorists preying on his country and people—saddened the American warrior.
What had they stopped here? Who did the young man save with his death? A garrison of young draftees in El Salvador? A town in Guatemala? A Honduran army base?
Who had the Cubans intended to gas?
6
Jamaica
Thursday
2:00 p.m.
(1900 Greenwich mean time)
NEON COLORED HER SUN-BLEACHED HAIR. Carl Lyons watched the young blond woman lean into the taxi window to pay the driver. She was chic in her white linen slacks, white tube top and dark tan. Behind her, the neon of the private disco flashed in patterns that created dancers in motion.
She entered the club, but Lyons stayed in his rented car. There was no need to follow her. He knew who she would call. He knew where they would go. Rosario Blancanales and Gadgets Schwarz waited at a mountain airstrip. In an hour's time, when a plane carrying a million dollars’ worth of cocaine landed at the airstrip, Able Team would spring an ambush on the blond drug dealer and her gang.
A cacophony of voices and disco rhythms blasted his ears. Lyons turned down the volume of the transceiver on the seat beside him. He grinned as he thought of the blonde's obsessive efforts to avoid surveillance—skipping from taxi to taxi, dodging through hotel lobbies, innumerable glances over her shoulder—while every step of the way she carried a combination mini-transmitter and directional finder in the plastic handle of her clutch bag.
"Hey, mon!" A Jamaican in a doorman's uniform leaned in the curb side window. "Park de car. You worn in here, you meet de girls. Dey cool you."
"No thanks," Lyons replied. "I'm waiting for my wife. "
The elegant doorman grinned. "She coom in, too! Maybe she meet a boy she like."
Laughing, Lyons threw the car into gear and merged with the traffic. Tourists wandering across the avenue stopped the cars for a moment. In front of Lyons, four elderly visitors in an open jitney waved to friends, their white hair and pastel sport-shirts and sundresses lurid with neon light. A few car lengths past the door to the private disco, Lyons cut into a parking space and waited.
He thought of Mack Bolan, of Mack's Stony Man operation back in Virginia and the many Able Team missions already racked up in the name of America versus terrorism; he thought of America.
Despite the sultry evening, Lyons wore a sports coat. He had no choice. The sports coat covered his Colt Python. Sweat ran from his chest and armpits as he listened to snatches of conversation inside the disco.
The noise receded, the disco throb dropping to a distant beat in the background. He heard the voice of Carla, the blond gangster: "It's time. You ready?"
She was telephoning her partner. Touching his Transceiver's channel switches, Lyons turned on the mini-transmitter hidden in the imitation ivory grips of the man's ni
ckel-plated snub-nosed .38 revolver. The day before, Gadgets had crept into the couple's plush cabana, and as they made love in the Jacuzzi, he had exchanged one of the revolver's grips. Now, as the two smugglers talked, Lyons monitored both ends of the telephone conversation.
"Sure am, hon'. You see anything unusual?" "Nothing. You?"
"No, babe. Had the eye in the back of my head open all day long. Be there in a minute."
Music and bar noise blasted Lyons's ears again. He heard the clink of glasses, laughter, then the sounds faded. He heard men's voices.
Glancing in the rear-view mirror, Lyons saw the blonde in white waiting at the curb. A long-haired, bearded man in a cream polyester suit stopped in a white Chevrolet. Lyons keyed a transmitter and lifted the microphone to his lips. "Calling the mountains. The lovers are taking a drive."
Static hissed from the speaker. Lyons had to strain to hear Gadgets’ words. "This is the Wizard. Repeat, please. Repeat message."
"They--are—on—their—way. They—are—coming."
"Message received. All systems go."
The Chevrolet sped past Lyons. "On my way. Over."
Staying a safe distance behind the car, Lyons followed the smugglers from the city, the steady beep-beep-beep of the DF unit leading him.
Once they had left Kingston behind, the couple's car stopped on the shoulder of the highway. The mini-mike carried their words to Lyons, alerting him to the stop.
Switching off his lights, Lyons parked to watch them check the suitcases in the trunk of the car. Their conversation told him the suitcases contained $1,000,000 U.S. in fifties and hundreds.
Moving again, they resumed their nervous conversation. Lyons listened as they talked of condominiums in Utah and Malibu, hundred-thousand-dollar certificates of deposit, and investments in "front" businesses.
The road cut through sugarcane fields and banana groves, the lush growth sometimes walling in the highway. Fewer cars passed as the highway led into the hills. The scents of flowering citrus and spices perfumed the warm night.
Half an hour out of Kingston, the white Chevy turned east on a gravel road. Lyons drove on past the turnoff.
He keyed his transmitter. "Come in, reception party. This is a tourist from Virginia."
Gadgets’ voice answered him. Only two miles separated them; the static was gone. "You don't have to talk in code," Gadgets said. "We're scrambled. Totally secure."
"Hey, that's not code. I talk like that all the time," Lyons said. "You ready? The ones with the money just left the highway."
"The doper soldiers are waiting at the airstrip. Pol's in position. I'll wait here for your signal." "Maybe five minutes. I'm at the gate now. Over."
Swerving off the highway, Lyons stopped at a steel pipe barring a plantation's rutted private road. He jumped out of the car and went to open the old padlock with the crude key he had made earlier in the day. But he did not need the key.
The gate's rusty lock hung open, smashed. He turned the lock in his hand, examining it in the glare of the car's headlights. Someone had hit the old padlock several times with a steel tool. Lyons dropped to one knee, studied the mud and ruts of the plantation road. He saw the deep tracks of a heavy truck.
The truck had splashed scummy water from the ruts. Lyons watched tiny rivulets of water trickle from the ruts into the truck's tracks. The truck had passed through the gate only a few minutes before. What would Bolan have made of this?
Lyons considered the possibilities. Could it have been a freight truck, hauling bananas from the groves? No. Able Team had checked on the plantation; the harvest was weeks away, and plantation workers would not need to break the lock. Police? The gang had paid off the local constables. Soldiers? Impossible; Able Team's mission had the cooperation of the Jamaican government.
In fact, Able Team had more than total cooperation. To the government, Able Team did not exist. This was not the standard surveillance-and-seizure operation against drug traffickers. Able Team had no interest in the dopers. They might escape, they might die. Able Team wanted the pilot of the plane and his passenger.
Though the plane flew Bolivian cocaine from a Colombian airfield, Stony Man's South American informants had identified the pilot and passenger as Cubans. They were officers in the Cuban secret police, and they had a twofold assignment: first, to expedite the movement of vast quantities of marijuana, cocaine and heroin through the defenses of the United States, with the goal of poisoning American society; and two, to take the profits earned by the drug sales and distribute the millions of dollars to terrorist gangs throughout the hemisphere.
Able Team's mission: capture the Cubans.
The mission had gone like clockwork . . . until Lyons saw the smashed lock and tracks. But he had no more time for questions. That truck might be carrying police or soldiers or another drug gang. Lyons had to warn Gadgets and Blancanales. He switched off the car's headlights, then keyed the transmitter. "Wizard, we got a problem."
"What's up?"
"I don't know." Lyons described what he had found.
"Maybe another crew of dopers," Gadgets said. "There are airstrips all over these hills. You want to abort?"
"Not yet. Maybe it's nothing. I'll check it out. Over."
Lyons could not risk continuing in the car. He reversed it and parked some distance from the gate. Stripping off his sweat-dampened leisure suit, the moist tropical air cool on his body, he slipped into a black cotton jump suit. Combat cosmetics on his face, hair and hands turned him into a shadow.
Then he strapped on his weapons.
First, his Colt Python in its shoulder holster. Then the Colt Government Model reengineered for silence by Bolan's Stony Man weapon smith, Andrzej Konzaki. Finally, a CAR-15, a lighter commando version of the standard M-16.
He touched the pockets of the jump suit to check his speed loaders, magazines, knife and hand-radio.
Then he left the highway, jogging over the ruts and mud of the plantation road.
Moved by gentle evening winds, ink-black banana leaves swayed against the star-strewn night sky. Lyons moved as fast as he dared through the darkness, sometimes slowing to a walk and groping his way, sometimes sprinting a starlit stretch.
He carefully walked the curves in the road, listening, drawing long breaths through his nose, hoping to catch the sound or odour of the truck. Clouds of mosquitoes found him. He waved them away as he moved on.
A mile from the highway, he came to a plank bridge over a stagnant stream. Paralleling the stream, a path angled from the road, zigzagging up the hillside to cross and recross the water. Lyons left the road, walked a few steps up the path, then stopped.
Crouching in the darkness, he listened for a few seconds to the night sounds of the tropical mountain-side. Wind rustled leaves against leaves. Insects flitted past. One moment the warm fetid odour of the stream drifted around him, then the soft wind swept the stink away with cool air that carried the scent of recent rain and flowers.
Lyons slipped a tiny penlight from his front pocket. He cupped his hand over it as he swept the faint glow over the trail's mud. Earlier in the day, he had flattened and smoothed a few feet of the trail. Now he examined the footprints. He saw only the tracks of an adult in sandals and two barefoot children.
A truck engine revved, then fell to a steady throb as the driver low-geared. Lyons snapped off the tiny light.
Avoiding the open area of the footpath, he hurried up the mountainside to a bend in the trail. The truck's headlights appeared on the road. A man in camouflage fatigues leaned out of the truck cab's passenger-side window, sweeping the mountainside with a spotlight. The light found the trail that led away from the road. The soldier slapped the roof of the cab, shouted.
Lyons recognized Arabic. As he lifted his hand-radio, he watched twenty camouflaged soldiers with Kalashnikov rifles jump from the back of the truck. No more thinking about Mack Bolan; now the decisions were up to him.
BLANCANALES WAITED. Cool mud oozed through his black suit’s p
ants and shirt. The matting of mud and weeds beneath him sucked at his elbows when he shifted his weight. He stared through binoculars at several members of the drug gang.
Only a hundred feet from him, four of them stood in a group, talking. They flicked the beams of their flashlights onto their maps or watches every few seconds. Another four of the gang's gunmen paced the perimeter of the airfield.
Focusing the binoculars on the far end of the field, Blancanales saw a gunman adjusting the gas flow of a camp lantern. A makeshift runway beacon, it hung on the end of a six-foot stick driven into the pasture. This beacon was the fourth. Blancanales had watched during the last hour as the gang installed lanterns at the other corners of the landing area, propping up the lanterns and testing them, then turning off the gas flow.
The light from the fourth lantern illuminated an expanse of the grassy pasture and first rows of banana trees bordering the flat field. Then the light died, returning the area to starlit darkness. Blancanales heard the gunman run across the pasture, shouting, "Ready!"
"Me too," Blancanales whispered. Invisible where he lay at the side of the landing strip, Blancanales waited for the Cubans to arrive in the plane. In front of him, an arm's reach away, was a three-switch radio detonator. To his side was an M-16/M-203 rifle/grenade launcher. He wore a silenced Beretta 93-R at his belt, a 9mm subsonic round in the chamber. The moment the Cubans stepped from the cabin of the plane, Blancanales would pop a surprise.
"Wizard! Politician!" Lyons's voice called through the earphone in Blancanales's left ear. He could not risk speaking. He clicked the "transmit" key on his hand-radio twice. He heard Gadgets answer, "Politician's too close to them. Can't talk. What's going on?"
"I'm on the other side of the hill from you," Lyons said, "where the trail meets the road to the banana farm. We got company."
"The truck?"
"It just pulled up. I counted twenty soldiers with AKs getting out. I don't know who they are, but they're talking Arabic and—"
"Could they be Jamaican military?"
"Negative. They're Arabs. They're standing around in the light arguing. I can see their faces. Some of them have those rag headdresses on, like in Egypt."
Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine Page 3
