Chain Reaction

by Don Pendleton

  “We should reach Manila in a couple of hours,” he said.

  Mitchell had been gazing out through the bubble.

  “It’ll be dark by then,” she pointed out.

  “We’ll be fine.”

  “Cooper, there don’t appear to be any parachutes in sight.”

  “There are no parachutes in helicopters.”

  “Comforting piece of information.”

  Bolan took out his sat phone and tapped in the speed dial for Stony Man. This time it was Hal Brognola who picked up.

  “Striker, what’s happening? All we know is you’re in the Philippines.”

  “I’ve been a little busy,” Bolan said.

  “You and Mitchell okay?”

  “At the moment. Right now we’re flying to Manila in a helicopter we acquired from Hegre.”

  “You need any backup?”

  “Contact Mitchell’s boss, SAC Duncan. He needs to speak to the U.S. Embassy in Manila to arrange to have someone meet and escort us in. We have the cache of diamonds hijacked in Australia. That is going to hurt Hegre. Get Mitchell and me on a flight back home. There’s more to this than just a diamond heist.”

  “It’ll be done, Striker.”

  “We’re a couple of hours out of Manila. Ask Duncan to find out where we can land safely.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “He was there,” Lise Delaware raged, her fury a palpable thing. “With that damned FBI agent. They crashed the aircraft from Hong Kong and walked out alive with the diamonds. Clayton and his team went after them. They were all killed. Last report had Cooper and the FBI woman in one of our helicopters, most likely heading for Manila. They’ll make contact with the U.S. Embassy. I know it.”

  Melchior, as ever, listened in silence, sitting motionless in the leather wing chair, his face impassive.

  As always he said nothing until the flow of words ceased and Delaware sank back in her own office seat, her anger dissipated.

  Melchior waited a few heartbeats before he spoke, fingers pressed together.

  “Even as a child you were passionate about matters that involved you personally, Lise. I recall instances where minor incidents caused an outburst.”

  “Children can be extremely volatile when they are faced with such matters.”

  “But as we grow we can control those instances, Lise. We must if we are to grow into capable adults.”

  “Dom, are you suggesting I am not a mature person?”

  Melchior saw the faintest of mocking smiles on her lips.

  “I would never consider you anything but, my dear, yet you do have a capacity for the occasional lapse.”

  Delaware’s shoulders relaxed as she leaned forward and said, “This man. Cooper. Each time he appears it is to cause me—us—more upset. There is an elusive quality about him. He appears, creates havoc, then walks away leaving chaos behind.”

  “And it is like an itch you are unable to scratch. A drift of smoke just beyond your reach.”

  “Yes. Always out of reach.”

  “Out of your control?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Which is the source of your irritation. Your stumbling block, Lise.”

  “My fault?”

  “I hesitate to call it that. But you want to be in control of every facet of life. Control is your definitive line. Never less. Which makes life difficult for you if something goes beyond your grasp.”

  Her unflinching gaze settled on Melchior. The way she stared at him made him feel uncomfortable. The moment passed quickly and she sat back.

  “So, should I take up needlepoint? Something to make me relax? Maybe painting soothing water colors.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “I know you’re right, Dom. I just get uptight when I feel I’ve let Julius down. I owe him so much. I owe him my life. Everything. Just the thought that I might be disappointing him makes me want to curl up in a dark room. Is that wrong?”

  “Just get it into your head that you will never disappoint Julius. Push that aside and keep on doing what you do best. Accept in life there will be times when it doesn’t go the way you want it to. We all have to take second best sometimes. It’s no crime and certainly no reason for feeling inadequate. Just take a step back and look at what you are achieving. The Cooper matter will be resolved in time. Don’t allow it to dominate your thoughts and actions.”

  “Easy to say. Not so easy to make the problem go away.”

  “You’ve had a bad run, Lise. There are too many negative thoughts in your head right now. You need to clear them out.”

  Delaware smiled. “Dom, I have the solution to do that. Kill that son of a bitch Cooper. When I do that, all my problems will go away.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The arrangements had been made, and after a brief stay at the U.S. Embassy, Bolan and Mitchell hitched a ride to the States with the U.S. military. Once back in Washington, Mitchell had headed to FBI headquarters to be debriefed by Duncan and to have her wound attended to. Bolan continued on to Stony Man Farm.

  Hal Brognola pushed the slim file across the War Room table in Mack Bolan’s direction. He sat back and waited while the soldier read through the intel. The Executioner’s face gave nothing away as he fully scanned the text, only his eyes moving across the pages. He took his time, knowing that every detail in the document had been painstakingly gathered by Stony Man’s cyberteam and deserved his full attention. Bolan had the greatest respect for Aaron Kurtzman’s people. As far as he was concerned they were, bar none, the best around.

  “Since your earlier involvement with Hegre, Aaron and the team have been devoting a lot of time to the matter. The little that we and the FBI had on these people, the deeper the digging went. A lot was researched on free time, too. I think Aaron especially was determined to hook on to something.”

  “That guy hates to come up empty.”

  Brognola smiled. “He’s not the only one.”

  His remark was aimed at Bolan.

  The Executioner refused to accept defeat.

  It would have been easy to admit he fought a war that never ended, a war that couldn’t be won. But Bolan didn’t see it that way. He fought his battles one by one, took on his enemies as they made their presence known and cut them down. He would never quit. He could not quit. He neither sought, nor wallowed in glory. That was not his reward. The satisfaction came from seeing the opposition fall back, no matter how small the steps were. And he would keep doing that as long as he was able.

  * * *

  THE WAR ROOM door slid open to admit Aaron Kurtzman and the tall figure of Dr. Huntington Wethers. Kurtzman was the top man of the Stony Man cyberteam, and Wethers one of his most dedicated people. Kurtzman rolled his wheelchair into position at the conference table and Wethers took a chair across from him. A telephone conferencing unit sat on the table.

  Kurtzman had been confined to the wheelchair since a covert strike against Stony Man, some years back. The wounds he had received during the attack had left him paralyzed from the waist down, but hadn’t diminished his dedication to his profession. Kurtzman was a cybergenius. The generous black-bag funding diverted to Farm operations had allowed him to equip the cybersection with the most up-to-date computing systems around. He was constantly adding to the hardware. It gave him the ability to gather whatever intel was needed.

  Kurtzman had assembled a small, but dedicated team of cybertroops. Their combined skills and ability to seek out the information needed by Bolan and the Stony Man action teams were legendary—though what they achieved was never broadcast beyond the walls of the Farm.

  “Okay, Aaron, this is your call, so go ahead,” Brognola said.

  “I have to tell you this is all down to Hunt,” Kurtzman said, glancing at the man facing
him across the table. “If he hadn’t picked up the initial trace and dug into it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. He should give the briefing.”

  “I got lucky,” Wethers said quietly.

  He was a modest man, who never took much credit for his own successes. He was a team player. Always neatly dressed, the African-American looked more like a conservative banker than a former professor of cybernetics.

  Barbara Price entered the War Room and quickly took a seat.

  “Okay, people,” Brognola said. “You’ll have me in tears if this goes on. Hunt, run it by us.”

  “From the intel Striker passed to us after his first run-in with Hegre, I ran every computation I could on what we had, which wasn’t a great deal. All we really had was the name Hegre and the dead from the final shootout. I ran identity checks on the facials the FBI took, reached out to every database we had a way into.”

  “Some even the FBI haven’t got,” Kurtzman added quickly.

  “I picked up on this guy Greg Rackham. Ex-military. From his ID I cross-checked and we came up with three more names. All were associates of Rackham. It seems they were all on the fringe of criminal activity until they vanished from sight. This must have been when they became involved with the Hegre organization. We’ve learned that Hegre is an extremely reclusive setup and stays out of the spotlight. But it exists and because it exists, it can be tracked.”

  “We couldn’t figure out the origin of the name,” Bolan said. “You have any more data on that?”

  Hunt Wethers allowed himself a brief smile. “I think I have a lead on that. I ran some in-depth searches on Rackham’s facial identity. Anything and everything. I put his picture on a continuous search and simply let it run. Nothing for a few weeks in fact. Came up with a number of images worldwide. Traffic cams. Security footage. To be honest I was getting tired of seeing his image coming up. Then the money shot. A shot of Rackham with a young woman. Her description fit the one you gave us of the woman you came across at the viral bust, Lise Delaware. I isolated the image, enhanced it. Came up with a pretty sharp shot.”

  The photo materialized on one of the wall-mounted screens. Bolan took a quick look and confirmed the identity.

  “That’s her,” he said. “Great work, Hunt.”

  “I used the image to generate a further search. Came up with a number of correlations. Had to backtrack between social security databases. Passports. Then birth certificates.”

  While Wethers spoke, Kurtzman activated one of the other wall screens and brought up a number of images. He used a laser pointer to highlight them.

  “Lise Delaware,” Wethers said, “is in her early thirties, which ties in with the data we’ve gained. Her mother, married name Delaware, died when the girl was fourteen. Rose Delaware was a longtime depressive. She had struggled with it for years and from medical reports she was pushed over the edge by the divorce proceedings from Lise’s father.

  “Police reports indicate the girl came home from school and found her mother dead in the bathroom. She had cut her wrists and bled out. Now this is where it gets really interesting,” Wethers said. “Lise was basically abandoned by her father. A benefactor stepped in and took Lise to his home and raised her. Lise’s mother was his sister. So the new man in Lise’s life was her uncle, Julius Hegre.”

  “What do we know about this Julius Hegre?” Bolan asked.

  “Not much more than the information on the screens,” Wethers said. “The guy is pretty secretive about himself and his criminal business dealings. Outwardly he runs a group of highly successful financial enterprises. The group invests, trades, has connections in multifaceted dealings. Hegre is a distant figure. His criminal activities are camouflaged by his legitimate businesses. Hegre stays out of the headlines. He knows a lot of powerful people, but no one knows much about him. He communicates through his subordinates. Quite a shadowy figure. He moves around a great deal. Even has his own aircraft. Has homes in New York. A mansion in the Hamptons. Other locations. I haven’t learned very much more about him but I would guess he’s a clever man.”

  “Anything from other agencies?” Bolan asked.

  “The FBI hasn’t broken through the barriers Hegre has put up.”

  “But Stony Man has?” Bolan suggested.

  Kurtzman chuckled. “Don’t spoil the surprise,” he said.

  “I decided to go for any weak spots in the Hegre chain,” Wethers said. “The lower I went the cracks started to show. But the icing on the cake was when I came up with a trace from Mossad.”

  Wethers nodded in Price’s direction. She leaned across and tapped in a number to one of the phones on the table. As it dialed out they could all hear as it was transmitted through the conference unit sitting on the table. It was picked up after a couple of rings.

  “Agent Sharon?” Price said.

  “Shalom.”

  Bolan said, “Ben, this is Cooper.”

  “How are you, my friend?”

  “Good. Last I heard you were suffering from some war wounds.”

  “Thanks to your people, I was pulled out of that terrorist camp.”

  Phoenix Force had come across Sharon being held captive during a mission in the Middle East. He had been flown to a U.S. Navy ship and treated before being returned to Israel, badly dehydrated and having lost weight. He had also suffered a fractured arm while in the hands of the enemy.

  “They have good medical treatment back home.”

  “And very pretty nurses, I hear,” Price said.

  “We must never forget the nurses,” Sharon stated. “Now, it seems we have mutual interests in a currently developing matter.”

  “An intermediary group we suspect of brokering deals for Iran,” Bolan said.

  “Hegre? An organization you had contact with some time back. A deal with the North Koreans?”

  “It was our first involvement with Hegre. Even though the deal didn’t go through, our information on the group was thin. Our people have only recently pulled out information about Hegre. The name of the man running it is Julius Hegre, and a woman named—”

  “Delaware?”

  Bolan smiled. He could always depend on Mossad to have a handle on any situation. The Israeli security force had excellent intel.

  “Lise Delaware. We only recently found out she is related to Julius Hegre. He’s her uncle. Our cyberteam discovered that he took her under wing when she was young, and it looks like he recruited her into the family business. From my dealings she runs interference for Hegre, and does it well.”

  “That we hadn’t uncovered yet,” Sharon admitted.

  “We’ll send you what we have,” Brognola promised.

  “There has been a rumor the Iranians have been looking to increase their supply of uranium to process,” Sharon said. “Their range of centrifuges has been increased at their biggest enrichment plant.”

  “I believe the centrifuges at Nantaz have been upgraded to the IR-2m,” Wethers said.

  “Yes. The IR-2m has improved performance,” Sharon said. “It can process enrichment much faster. Reports say Iran will soon have enough enriched uranium to create a nuclear device, despite what they are telling world leaders. The more centrifuges they have, the more product they can process.”

  “More, bigger, this gets crazier,” Price said.

  “My exact feelings,” Sharon told her. “But we can’t escape the facts. And facts tell us a consignment of uranium yellowcake has been stolen from a rail shipment in Kazakhstan.”

  Yellowcake was the term used to refer to the uranium powder, packed in barrels for delivery to processing facilities.

  “This only came to light in the past couple of days,” Sharon added. “Duplicate barrels were found at the port of departure after storage in a warehouse. A dozen. It wouldn’t have come to the attention of the warehous
e staff if a forklift hadn’t hit a stack and brought the barrels down. Couple of them burst open and spilled the contents. No uranium. Just salt.”

  “Any suspects?” Bolan asked.

  “Local authorities are investigating but nothing so far.”

  “For our part we have come up with a single name. An individual known to arrange deals involving contraband. This man has contacts in the Middle East, Asia and even Russia. Henrick DeJong. Originally from South Africa—”

  Kurtzman interrupted. “Sorry, Ben, but that name is one we recently came across ourselves. A cell phone that Cooper brought back from China. DeJong was on the call list.” Kurtzman spread his big hands. “It was on my list to bring up during this meeting.”

  “If DeJong has contacts within Hegre, does contract work for them,” Bolan said, “it could be a way in for us. Find DeJong, and we might find Hegre.”

  “The cell contact?” Brognola said.

  “Let me find out,” Kurtzman said and made an internal call.

  “Have you made that phone number from the cell Cooper brought in? The one with DeJong’s name against it?”

  Akira Tokaido’s voice came over the conference unit. “I was just going to call you,” he said. “It’s a Moscow number. A night club in the city, Babushka, which is run by a guy called Sergei Lubinski. I ran a make on him through the criminal files of the Moscow police. Pretty unsavory. He has a finger in a number of rackets in the city. And he has a reputation as a transporter. He can move anything for a price. Moscow cops have him down as being part of a bigger organization, but they’ve never been able to make a solid connection.”

  “Thanks,” Kurtzman said. “Keep working on that link.”

  “Could that connection be our reclusive Hegre?” Price said. “Their way of having an active conduit in the city?”

  “One more thing,” Sharon said. “Ayatollah Fikri. He’s extremely radical and spends a lot of his time delivering statements about the evil of the West and the need for true Muslims to wage war against it. He’s no friend of Israel either. We made a connection between Fikri and a money trace funneling a research program looking at uranium enhancement. One that hasn’t been publicized.”