Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine

by Don Pendleton

  He would kill them. But with an American weapon? A .45-caliber submachine gun?

  Images filled his mind. What would create vivid memories? Bullet-punched corpses? The report would simply say they had been killed by gunfire.

  No, he would not use the firearm. He wanted to kill in such a way as to shock even those accustomed to and calloused by death. Murder that would scream from newsprint pages. Murder that would lead to a fear of Yoshida that neither time nor distance could diminish.

  Unfolding the silk cloth wrapping his sword set, he picked up the shorter of the two swords. In feudal times, samurai always wore two swords, the longer daimo blade for fighting in the open, and the shoto blade for killing in confined spaces. The shoto also served for seppuku, when the samurai ritualistically killed himself.

  Yoshida slid the shoto blade from its sheath.

  Twelve inches of the finest steel alloyed with the holy steel from the nails of the destroyed temple of Nara. A long-dead sword smith had forged the blade under the light of a rising full moon. Yoshida saw his own face reflected in the shine of the blade.

  "With this, I cut my name into their dreams," he said aloud in Japanese.

  He packed the MAC-10 in his suitcase, and took the shoto into the night.

  Standing for minutes without moving, perceiving every sound and movement in the tropical night, he memorized the positions of the compound's sentries.

  Several guards paced the walls. Another crouched in a corner, sneaking a smoke. At the far end of the compound, a group of Russian and Cuban intelligence officers argued bitterly about the failure of Hydra.

  Let them talk. Soon I will head another Hydra, thought Yoshida. While they debate and reconsider, while they examine the details of the American victory, while they petition the bureaucrats of the Kremlin to grant permission to make more war, I will make mountains of corpses.

  But first, he thought, I must make nightmares for the Russians and their Cuban servants.

  Silent as a shadow, Yoshida moved through the night, passing the apartments of the terrorist army's sleeping officers. At the end of the apartment block, a guard paced, with every step his slung rifle tapping against a bandoleer's buckle.

  Yoshida stood behind the sentry for minutes as the young soldier's eyes swept the darkness for intruders.

  Two soldiers came from the compound gate. The sentry called out to them in Arabic, asking for a cigarette. As the sentry went to take the cigarette from his comrades, Yoshida crept from the apartments to the wall.

  Again he waited. Motionless in a shadow, he listened as soldiers passed, their boots crunching gravel not an arm's length from him. Above him, on top of the wall, other sentries paced.

  He heard the sentries on the wall talking. Easing to his full height, Yoshida grabbed the handholds on the concrete wall. Effortlessly and silently, he pulled himself to the guard walk.

  He saw two sentries only ten steps away. He moved like a snake as they talked and laughed. He slipped over the wall and dropped to the soft earth.

  A sentry stopped talking. A flashlight's beam swept the cleared perimeter around the compound. But the sentry saw nothing moving in the camp litter and the stubble of weeds. Yoshida waited until the guards above him returned to their banter, then moved on.

  Staying against the wall, he continued to the south corner of the compound. Headlights swept the parade grounds between the compound and the private residences of the senior officers. A carload of KGB guards searched the darkness with a spotlight. Yoshida froze until the car rolled past.

  Another insult. They quartered Yoshida with the common soldiers while they and their KGB bodyguards enjoyed the luxury of private showers and catered meals. Or perhaps they kept him in the compound from fear.

  The thought amused Yoshida.

  The thought that they could jail him within the compound. The thought that the sentries would keep him within the walls. The thought that their Russian guards would protect them as they slept. . .

  He heard sentries on the wall above him. He waited until they passed, then snaked across the compound perimeter to the asphalt road. His night suit black melding with the black asphalt, he crossed on his belly.

  On the other side, the roadside sloped down to a culvert tangled with vines and dead wood. Yoshida heard insects buzzing; he smelled stagnant water and rot.

  The culvert paralleled the road. Crawling along the side of the ditch, Yoshida's senses ranged in a hemisphere around him. He perceived every sound, every movement, every faint variation of gray against black.

  A rooster crowed from behind the compound's mess hall. Yoshida looked up at the sky and read the time by the position of the stars. Less than an hour remained before the sky grayed with dawn.

  But in that time, they would die.

  At the far end of the parade ground, he left the culvert and entered the jungle.

  Like an island of bourgeois surburbia within the Cuban jungle, the senior officers' small houses clustered in the center of a rolling lawn. Mercury-arc streetlamps lighted the lawn. A chain link fence circled the grassy area and houses. A gated road connected the officers' park to the camp.

  KGB bodyguards manned the gate. At the end of the road, other KGB men paced around the small houses.

  The lawns required no patrols. Pressure-sensitive sensors ensured no intruder could enter without silent alarms alerting the guards.

  But the Soviet designers of the camp, in the tradition of their nation's Asian intrigues, provided for the escape of the leaders. Rising to his full height, Yoshida walked soundlessly through the jungle to the only unguarded, unprotected route to the commanders—their own emergency tunnel.

  He had paid gold for the information. Now he used it. Cutting through the palms and tropical brush and vines, he came to a slight rise a hundred yards from the officers' houses.

  Tangled vines and years of tropical debris covered the steel-plate hatch. He scraped the matting away with his hands. Though the East German engineer who designed and constructed the tunnel had told him no alarms or booby traps guarded the hatch, he took every precaution. He whisked away the leaves and soil, then felt along the edges.

  Rust flaked away. No one had touched the hatch in the two years since its installation. He hooked his fingers under an edge and lifted it away.

  He lowered himself into absolute darkness. Cold muck closed over his feet. He found the inner door. Made of sheet metal set in the tunnel's concrete, the door would withstand high-velocity bullets and small explosive charges.

  But it also had a lock.

  By touch, he inserted a spring steel wire into the keyhole. The German engineer had told him the make of the lock and the approximate date of manufacture. Yoshida needed no key. In less than two minutes, he jerked the steel door open.

  The noise of the hinges echoed in the tunnel. Yoshida felt along the frame of the door for an alarm trigger. Again, he found everything as the German had described.

  The German had explained to Yoshida the Russian reasoning behind the tunnel's lack of guards and alarms. If the commander posted guards on the tunnel, then the guards knew of the tunnel. The guards could betray or assassinate the commander. Therefore, no guards. If the commander placed alarms on the door, guards would monitor the alarm circuits. Eventually, a rat or rainwater or a short circuit would trigger an alert. Then the guards would know of the tunnel.

  With Russia's history of betrayal, intrigue and assassination, only secrecy satisfied the paranoia bred into the Russian architects. After the construction, the Russians assigned the East German engineer to projects in Ethiopia and Yemen. After six months of work in the deserts, the German wanted out. Yoshida's gold bribed border guards, and bought the young engineer a new life in Kenya.

  Yoshida followed the tunnel until he came to the second door. His fingers found oil on the hinges.

  Again, the spring steel wire opened the lock. He eased the door open, infinitely slowly. More darkness, but now he heard sounds.

  He eas
ed through the door and felt around him in the pitch darkness. He found himself in another concrete shaft, with handholds and footholds set in one side.

  Above him, he heard faint voices and movement.

  He went up the steel rungs and pressed his ear to the underside of the trapdoor. He heard footsteps in another part of the house. Waiting, listening, he heard a conversation, but only one voice.

  Somewhere in the house above him, Fedorenko raved to himself. Yoshida slipped out the small shoto blade and clenched it between his teeth. He put the top of his head against the trapdoor and gave it a slight push.

  No resistance. His head emerged under a rug in the darkness of the Russian commander's bedroom. Soundlessly, Yoshida crept under the rug and into the room.

  Curtains muted the blue white light of the security lamps outside. In the bluish glow, Yoshida slipped through the bedroom and stood at the door.

  On the other side, Fedorenko paced. He ranted in Russian as if speaking from a podium. Sometimes he was whining and pleading.

  Yoshida understood very little Russian. But like all graduates of the Soviet camps, he knew every Communist cliché and slogan. Fedorenko spoke of "inevitable socialist victory," "the relentless progress of history," "the future." Only after he had listened for a minute did Yoshida realize that Fedorenko was reliving the past.

  Munoz the Cuban had once persuaded Fedorenko to teach Yoshida chess. Fedorenko had explained the rules and the movements of the pieces. He told Yoshida he saw the chess game as a metaphor of the world struggle. For the same reason Fedorenko studied the victories of great chess masters, he studied history, "to find pathways to victory," the Russian explained.

  On the other side of the door, Fedorenko relived that scene.

  "History guides us. The lesson of history dictate my actions. To create the future."

  Yoshida had ended the chess lesson by sweeping the board with a thrash of his hand. Neither the Cuban nor the Russian ever attempted to force their philosophies on him again.

  Silent, smiling at the thought of the joke he would play, Yoshida waited. He held one of the Russian's shirts from the back of a chair; he had it wadded in his hand.

  Fedorenko finally stepped into the bedroom. As he reached for a pack of cigarettes, Yoshida jammed the wadded shirt deep into the Russian's mouth and threw him face down on the bed.

  To reduce his prisoner's struggles as he sat on him, he twisted the Russian's arms backward until they broke. Then he tied Fedorenko spread-eagled to the four corners of the heavy bed.

  In his bad Russian, he rebutted Fedorenko's lecture of months before. "Forget the past and future. History tells us nothing. There is no future."

  Then he played with Fedorenko's body, yet left the quivering, choking mass of raw flesh and agony still living. Whoever found the mutilated, dying Russian would never forget the image. Yoshida started toward the bungalow where Munoz slept.

  As he slipped out the Russian's door, he heard a blast of automatic fire.

  A VIPER ROCKET punched through a line of parked trucks. Gasoline and oil flashed into flame. The Cuban and Palestinian sentries shot blind into the night with their Kalashnikovs. The burning gasoline had silhouetted the sentries for McCarter. . .

  Lying atop the wall behind the stacked corpses of the sentries, McCarter stroked the trigger of the Fabrique Nationale M-249, sending precise two-and three-round bursts into the compound below him.

  Every burst killed. In the confusion of the inferno and shooting and running, the guards died before they spotted the English machine gunner firing from the wall walkway.

  Kalashnikovs flashed from the windows of rooms and barracks. Slugs pocked walls, killed running sentries, zipped away into the night. Midway along the compound wall, Encizo crouched in the protection of a sandbagged guard post. With his M-16 /M-203's 40mm grenades, he methodically eliminated the officers. The skills of all the years of an adult life came to the fore in Encizo in this latest assault on his native land. A lifetime of trying to live right, by the mind and by the sword, both at once, inextricably, had led to these strange moments beyond all sanction. He put a single grenade through each room's window, alternating fragmentation with white phosphorous.

  In the chaos and noise, the flat metallic "whang" of the grenades from Encizo's M-203 went unnoticed by the defenders. They continued firing at shadows.

  A group of Palestinians, some in their underwear, one in floral print pyjamas, dashed from the barracks and took cover in the darkness between the officers' apartments. As one man surveyed the scene around them, McCarter dropped him with a three-shot burst to the head.

  Others saw the flash of the M-249 and sent a storm of AK fire at the Englishman. Slugs tore into the dead men that McCarter used as sandbags. He stayed down as the jackals emptied their Russian autorifles at him.

  Encizo put a phosphorous grenade in their midst. Clawing at the specks of metallic fire burning into their bodies, the terrorists thrashed in the dirt. Around them, white phosphorous flamed and smoked. McCarter, going to war with the same high and moral aim that lead to victory in three wars for England this century, gave each terrorist the mercy of a careful burst.

  BUT MCCARTER AND ENCIZO commanded only one side of the compound in their fields of fire. Officers and soldiers who evacuated the smoke and flames of their quarters found shelter between the barracks and the camp offices. Assembling their men in squads, officers organized a defense.

  An officer in midnight-blue silk pyjamas buckled a bandoleer of magazines around his chest and took a squad of Al Fatah fighters to the rear of the compound. Dodging from cover to cover, from doorway to doorway, they reached the back of the buildings without a casualty.

  All the security lights had gone black. Only the intermittent flares of gasoline flames lit the area. The officer scanned the open ground and the wall for comrades. He saw no one. The attackers had killed every fighter standing guard. He called one of his soldiers forward and directed him to dash across the open ground to the base of the wall.

  Only seventeen years old, inexperienced in battle, the soldier hesitated. His officer put a Kalasnikov muzzle against his back and ordered him on.

  The boy sprinted, dodging and weaving for his life. No bullets came. Throwing himself against the wall, he panted, fear and exertion drying his throat. The next man ran through the darkness.

  One by one, the squad reached the wall, their officer sprinting last. From time to time, flames soared above the barracks, lighting the squad where they crouched against the compound wall. But they stayed low to the dirt. No bullets from the attackers found them.

  Their officer ordered them up the wall, directing two men to boost the others to the walkway. As the first soldier stepped onto the braced arms of two others, a couple of small objects fell from the wall.

  In a flare of flame light from the burning trucks, they all looked down and saw the grenades that killed them.

  Gary Manning crept along the wall's walkway, watching for more kills. To quote Mack Bolan, he thought, tonight is the night—every night.

  LYONS FOLLOWED THE CAR in the sights of his M-249 machine gun. Flames soared above the compound, the pulsing light illuminating a Russian behind the steering wheel, plus another Soviet in the car holding a radio microphone to his mouth.

  Lyons waited until the car screeched to a stop on the parade ground before killing the Russians. He flicked the trigger to shatter the car's windows with a quick burst, then put two more bursts into the interior. He sighted one last time and put three steel-cored high-velocity 5.56mm slugs into the gas tank.

  The exploding car lit the parade ground. From Lyons's position on the east, he had a field of fire from the front of the terrorist compound, across the entire parade ground, to the commander's and staff's private houses at the north end of the base.

  Watching for targets, he heard the auto fire dying away inside the walled compound. It could not be over already. High-altitude reconnaissance had photographed barracks and buildings for a f
orce of perhaps a thousand soldiers.

  Even as he wondered, an explosion of auto fire tore the night. Screaming, shouting, a mob of terrorists surged from the compound gates. In a coordinated breakout, squads of Palestinians, Cubans and Africans swept the walls with long bursts of Kalashnikov fire, while the others ran for the darkness of the surrounding jungle.

  They gained only the escape of death. Lyons swept the parade ground with the M-249, long bursts dropping entire groups of terrorists. With the cool, emotionless, mortal sadness that cannot help but chill even the fires of victory, Carl Lyons was reluctantly but inevitably a man of his hour again. By the light of the burning KGB sedan, he put slugs into running terrorists, into crawling wounded, into silhouettes that motioned other terrorists on.

  But Kalashnikovs returned his fire. Prone in the hard dirt of the parade ground, they fired at the muzzle-flash of the machine gun decimating their force.

  A Libyan with an RPG cocked his launcher and sent a rocket at the unseen gunner.

  The rocket shrieked over Lyons. It exploded in the palms behind him. He keyed his hand-radio, shouted into the mouthpiece.

  "Somebody! Kill the one with the rocket launcher!"

  Another launch flashed. The warhead fell short and to the side, but the explosion threw the ex-LAPD cop over.

  Numb with shock, his left ear screaming, Lyons stared up at the graying sky. Kalashnikov fire zipped over him, slugs ripping through the trees above him. Pain came in a wave. He touched his ringing ear, and his hand came away slick with blood.

  He rolled back onto his stomach. He righted his M-249. Yet another rocket flashed from the launcher. Slamming his face into the dirt, Lyons felt the warhead rush past him.

  The blast dropped a palm, the tall spindly trunk crashing through branches and vines behind him.

  "You gotta die, rocket man!" Lyons screamed out. He sighted on the forms sprawled on the parade ground, swept them again and again with slugs, the bursts kicking up lines of dust, throwing corpses over, killing wounded.

  The Libyan rose to one knee and sighted on Lyons once more. Seeing the kneeling silhouette, Lyons jerked the muzzle around and sprayed the guy with a long burst, slugs ripping through the man's chest and gut, doubling him over as he triggered the rocket.