Sabotage

by Don Pendleton

  “You out there!” one of the gunmen called. “We see you! Come on out or the hostages get it!”

  Bolan didn’t answer.

  “I mean it!” the man called again. “Drop your guns and come out or we wax these poor bastards!”

  Still, the soldier didn’t answer.

  “Oh, shit, man,” a second voice said more quietly but still audible. “I told you, man. They ain’t the police. They couldn’t be, the way they’re shooting up the place. I’ll bet Gareth was right! I’ll bet it’s the Mob and they don’t care who they shoot!”

  “Or who we shoot!” said another voice.

  “Shut your mouths,” another of the men said forcefully in accented English. “You will maintain discipline.”

  “Up yours, Kwok!” came the first voice. “I’ve had about enough of your—”

  There was a gunshot, followed by the sound of a body hitting the floor.

  “Holy shit! He shot—”

  There was another gunshot, and another. A burst of automatic-weapons fire was followed by several more single shots. Bolan risked a glance around the corner of the doorway. He saw a single Asian man in a SCAR uniform, holding a 1911-pattern .45, standing over the bodies of the other SCAR mercenaries and the supposed hostages.

  “Come out,” Kwok said. “Face me. I will not fire. These…fools…had no business in this line of work. I grew tired of their prattle.”

  There was a raw edge to the man’s voice. He was walking the line or over it, flirting with madness.

  Bolan took a gamble. Tavor in hand, he stepped into the doorway, ready to trigger a full-auto burst if the Asian made a move.

  “I am Kwok Sun,” said the Asian.

  “Brother to Kwok Jin,” Bolan supplied.

  The Asian man’s eyes widened. “You,” he said. “Your people killed my brother.”

  “I killed your brother,” Bolan said.

  “You…” Kwok looked confused. He appeared to be looking beyond Bolan. “You are alone.”

  “More or less,” the soldier admitted. “Why? Were you expecting an army?”

  “I am surprised,” Kwok said. “For what you have done to be the work of one man is not something to take lightly.” He gestured with his pistol, but didn’t bring it up. “If I were to put this down, you would fight me man to man? For the honor of my brother?”

  “No,” Bolan said.

  Kwok looked at him curiously.

  “Put it down if you want,” Bolan said. “I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

  “I do not understand. Why tell me this?”

  “Because I’m not you,” Bolan said. “Because I remove people like you so that innocent men, women and children may go about their lives in peace.”

  Kwok snorted. “That is laughable. You are righteous on the one hand, yet on the other you tell me you would kill me rather than face me honorably.”

  “You shot your own men,” Bolan pointed out.

  Kwok shrugged. “It was a stupid plan,” he said, “and they deserved to die for their stupidity. Whether your bullets or mine, the result is the same. Any fool could see that a group…or a man…who can do what you have done would not be deterred by the presence of hostages. You are obviously ruthless.” Kwok Sun’s fingers were flexing around the grip of the .45, which was pointed at the floor.

  Bolan saw no reason to dissuade the Korean. Had there been genuine hostages, he would have been duty bound to save them. Something about this setup had smelled, however, and Kwok had confirmed it was a trick.

  “You’re ruthless yourself,” Bolan said, keeping him talking, mindful of any trick the Korean might try during the conversation. “You shot your own people. Even among paid mercenaries, that’s not exactly done.”

  “What do I care?” Kwok said. “I died when my brother died.”

  “Your brother had a choice,” Bolan said. “So do you.”

  “Then I make it,” Kwok said. “For my brother.”

  The .45 whipped up. Bolan was faster. He threw the Tavor in his hands at the Korean, who reflexively ducked. His shot went wide. That was all the opening Bolan needed. He ripped the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle from its holster and fired a single round, punching a hole in Kwok’s forehead. The Korean fell into the pile of dead men he had created.

  “Now you can be with him,” Bolan told the dead man. He retrieved the Tavor and moved on.

  He encountered no resistance on the fourth floor, which consisted of storage. He found several munitions lockers, which were empty, and several Pelican cases that bore rifles similar to the Remington 700 that waited with Grimaldi back at the plane. On the fifth floor the stairwell ended. He tried the fire door, but it was dogged shut from the other side.

  When he and Delaney had reconnoitered the building, he’d counted the floors from the outside. There was another floor, which meant that it was accessible only by going through the fifth floor to some other access point. The other doors had not been locked. There was a surprise waiting for him on the other side; that much was certain.

  “Cooper.” Delaney’s voice sounded in his ear. “I’ve just taken down two more sneaking out the back. You okay up there? I heard an explosion a little while ago.”

  “Okay so far,” Bolan told her. “Hold it together. I’m nearing the top, about to breach the fifth floor. The top floor can’t be reached through the stairwell, so I’m going to check for access on five.”

  “Be careful, Cooper.”

  “I’ll do my best. Stay alert down there.”

  “Any sign of Twain?”

  “Not so far. Don’t worry. If we get him, you’ve got first call on him.”

  “God, I hope we do,” Delaney said. Her voice held real hatred. Bolan ignored that and concentrated on the task at hand.

  The space was too close to use the Tavor’s grenade launcher. He had a few tricks left in his war bag, however. Removing a small C-4 charge from the bag, he placed the plastic explosive over the door handle and inserted a timed detonator. The detonator was another of Kissinger’s little toys.

  He pressed the firing stud on the detonator and backed up as far as he could, the muzzle of the Tavor aimed at the doorway.

  When the charge blew, it made his ears ring. He ignored that. The blast was enough to rock the fire door off its hinges. It fell toward the interior of the fifth floor.

  Bolan processed the fleeting glimpse of the floor beyond, counting at least a dozen armed men waiting for him.

  “Now!” someone shouted

  Bolan fired a grenade through the doorway.

  Even as the deadly 40 mm payload was flying through the air, Bolan was reloading the Tavor’s attached grenade launcher. He punched the second grenade through the opening as the first one exploded. The follow-up blast created even more havoc, as those who hadn’t been felled by the first grenade tried to fire back and were slaughtered by the second shock wave.

  Firing the Tavor on full-auto, the Executioner stepped into their midst. He pumped burst after burst into the enemy who stilled moved, dropping first one man, then another, his ruthless justice the only force in the universe at that moment.

  He stopped when there were none left to oppose him.

  The wrecked area was some sort of combination common room and mess hall. There was a large-screen television mounted on one wall, its screen spiderwebbed with bullet holes. A shot-up kitchenette occupied one corner. Several of the dead men had met their fates sprawled across what was left of the couches and loungers on the opposite wall.

  There was a doorway in the facing wall. Bolan tried the door and found it unlocked. The corridor beyond, which he checked equally carefully, was empty. At its end, a spiral staircase led upward.

  The Executioner moved slowly up the stairs, an avenging angel ascending to hell.

  The sixth floor contained a waiting room and, beyond that, an office. Bolan stepped inside the open door. A man sat in the chair behind the desk, his back turned to the Executioner.

  “Turn around,” Bolan orde
red.

  The chair swiveled slowly. “I surrender,” the man said. It wasn’t Gareth Twain.

  “Who are you?”

  “Toby,” the man said. “Toby Jones.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To kill you!” Jones shouted. He wasn’t fast enough. As his finger tightened on the trigger of the shotgun mounted underneath the desk, Bolan was diving to the left. Both barrels of double-aught buckshot splintered the doorway where the soldier had been standing. He had time to trigger a single shot from the Tavor as he ducked to the side. The round took Toby Jones in the head, killing him where he sat.

  The sudden silence engulfed him. There was no more resistance, no more enemies.

  Gareth Twain was nowhere to be found.

  Bolan stood for a moment. When no other threat presented itself, he surveyed the room. Besides the dead man, there was a laptop, which sat abandoned and running on a side table. Only when he stepped closer to it did he realize that, despite losing Twain, he and Delaney had caught a break.

  The laptop’s password had been entered. It was unlocked.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Grimaldi had landed them at Midway rather than O’Hare International, saying something about traffic patterns and muttering a few choice profanities in conjunction with whatever authorities governed the local airspace. The Farm had arranged for yet another rental vehicle to be available to them. Delaney and Bolan had found the Ford F-150 waiting for them, and in the truck bed Bolan found a care package that included ammunition, grenades and a few other gems from Stony Man’s armorer. He was grateful for the field resupply.

  Delaney had been sullen since discovering that Twain had slipped their grasp somehow. They couldn’t have missed him by much. Toby Jones’s identity had come back from the Farm after Price had Kurtzman and the team run his photo. The man was one of Twain’s top operatives, having served under the Irish mercenary for longer than almost any of his other known associates. Jones’s presence indicated that Twain had likely been close by. How he had gotten away was still a mystery. Delaney hadn’t wanted to talk about it, and Bolan didn’t blame her. Probably she was wondering if she’d missed something, if she’d somehow failed to stop the killer she had sought for so long.

  The Farm had produced identity matches for several of the dead SCAR operatives. Most of them came back with military histories, criminal rap sheets, or both. Most of the Asians were as yet unidentified, but Kurtzman had managed to dig up a dossier on one of them. He was another Chinese special forces operator, also declared dead about a year previously, Price had informed Bolan in her call to him.

  “It’s very likely,” she had said, “that the Chinese are involved with Trofimov. How deep we don’t yet know, but it looks damning.”

  “Can we do anything about it?” Bolan asked.

  “Not officially,” Price said, “though Hal said there are a couple of angles he can work. We may yet get buy-in from the Man. You know how delicate things are with the Chinese right now. There are a lot of apple carts Hal can’t afford to upset. He’s hoping to find a way anyway, though.”

  “Tell him I wish him luck,” Bolan had said. He’d closed the connection not long after, thinking that he didn’t envy Brognola the byzantine world of international politics.

  Twain’s laptop had proved to be a gold mine of information. Specifically, it detailed the production quantities and laboratory locations for an extensive illegal drug operation. Notes appended to these indicated projected dispositions abroad. It was obvious the drug shipments were, for the most part, intended for dissemination among military bases and thus military personnel. The hub of the drug distribution, and the location of the heroin production, was just outside Chicago, Illinois. There were cryptic references to the manufacture of the meth amphetamine being brought in and distributed alongside the heroin, but there were no clues to the location of the meth lab or labs. While it would have been nice to have complete information, Bolan was satisfied with what they’d managed to get: a solid lead to the next step in Trofimov’s terrorist chain, namely the distribution center for his drug operation.

  Now they were rolling to the GPS coordinates provided in Twain’s computer. The truck’s GPS system was taking them to a destination just outside Chicago, in a suburban neighborhood that wasn’t as congested as some. Delaney, who had been very somber for most of the trip, talking quietly now and then on her cell phone, finally broke her silence with Bolan.

  “Do you think Twain will surface again?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bolan told her truthfully. “Now that he knows he’s being targeted directly, there is a very good chance he’ll go to ground and stay there until he thinks the heat has blown over. I know that’s exactly what you don’t want to hear, but it’s the truth.”

  “Thank you for your honesty, Cooper,” Delaney said, then sighed. “I just wish I knew how the bastard got past us!”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it,” he said. “If we had time to search the building more thoroughly, we may well have found a secret exit, something leading out that we couldn’t have detected. It’s common enough, and someone like Twain would be cagey enough to have an exit route planned in case he was trapped.”

  “It does fit his profile,” Delaney agreed. “Cooper, I just… I have to get him.”

  “I know,” Bolan said. “Believe me, I do.”

  She looked over at him as he drove. “When I took this assignment,” she said, “I didn’t realize I would be heading into a war zone.”

  “Didn’t we have this conversation?”

  “I mean it, Cooper,” she said. “Do you realize just how much I would have to answer for if not for whoever it is that’s covering for you out of Washington? My boss at the Bureau tells me some serious pressure is being brought to bear from D.C., and whatever isn’t being used to keep the Bureau or a dozen other agencies off you is being used to keep me out of the fray. He was, frankly, amazed.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Seriously, Cooper,” she said. “Who are you? Who do you work for, really? Don’t hand me that Justice Department line. It’s deeper than that. I spotted you for a military man from the first moment I saw you. Level with me.”

  Bolan looked at her, then returned his eyes to the road. “There’s a lot I can’t and won’t tell you,” he finally said. “But yes, I’m former military. And right now, I fight a war. Every day. I fight a war against those who are chipping away at our nation and at our Constitution, at those who seek to destroy this country from within and from without. The Trofimovs and the Twains of the world, and countless others like them.”

  “You do work for the government, don’t you?”

  “I have an arm’s-length relationship with the government,” Bolan admitted. “But I do what I do under government auspices, yes. Most of my assignments are provided by the government.”

  “Most?”

  “Delaney,” Bolan said. “Jennifer. I’m a patriot. I fight for this nation, and for all those citizens of it who can’t or won’t, for whatever reason, fight for themselves. The enemy doesn’t play by the rules. The enemy will gladly commit murder and a hundred other crimes. The enemy won’t stop, doesn’t feel pity and never feels shame. The enemy has to be met and overwhelmed with superior force. That’s where I come in. That’s what I do.”

  Delaney thought about that for a long time. As they were nearing their destination, she said, “All right, Cooper. I’m in.”

  “You always were,” Bolan told her. “You just didn’t know to admit it to yourself.”

  They stopped a few blocks from the target address.

  “Déjà vu,” Delaney said.

  “Sound tactics are sound tactics.” He shouldered his duffel bag. His war bag was again in place across his shoulder, with his field jacket covering his weapons and disguising his blacksuit.

  “So now what?” She fidgeted, making sure her MP-5 K was hidden under her jacket.

  “The target is a house,” Bo
lan said. “We’ll just do a little house cleaning.”

  The house was a dilapidated ranch, with entrances front and rear, the rear a fenced-in yard sheltered on three sides by similarly enclosed yards overgrown with trees and scrub. A wide driveway at the side of the house led to an attached two-car garage. Bolan imagined that would make a suitable improvised loading dock for the distribution of the large quantities of drugs.

  He had Delaney wait and walk down the opposite side of the street, looking as casual as possible, while he did a quick recon around the target house.

  “All right,” he said, rejoining Delaney. He reached down with his free hand and held hers. She looked up at him, startled.

  “What…?”

  “Just relax,” Bolan said, smiling and not looking directly at her, “and pretend we’re out for a nice, romantic stroll.”

  She got what he was driving at and did her best to look like she meant to be right where she was. The two of them walked past the front of the target house, still on the opposite side of the street.

  “What next?” she asked.

  “I don’t see any sentries,” Bolan said. “The windows are all blacked out behind the closed blinds. I don’t see any evidence of surveillance cameras, though they could be so small we’d never detect them. I think you should go around front and simply ring the bell. I’ll go around the back and see if I can’t make my own way while you distract them.”

  “I’ve seen what happens when you go in the front door,” she said. “I’m fresh out of rocket-propelled grenades.”

  “Don’t worry,” Bolan said. “You’ll do fine.”

  “I’ll try to keep my head down,” she said.

  They split up. Bolan looked left, then right, making sure no one was watching him. Then he vaulted first one, then a second fence, finally moving up and behind the target house. He was careful in walking across the small, enclosed yard. It was possible, though not likely, that the property was booby trapped. He didn’t think the chances were good. Anything that would stop him from sneaking up on the house would also detonate if it encountered a stray dog or a curious kid, and that sort of thing would blow the cover of those inside in short order. No, he figured they would keep a low profile, and that meant their defenses would all be inside the house itself, beyond prying eyes and at a lower risk for false alarms.