With the two flanking men covering the intersection, Firke and his partner headed down a narrow alley that would give them access to the roof where the water tower was located. At the end was an industrial garbage bin, with bags of garbage piled next to it. Taking a folding grappling hook from his harness, he set the rubber-coated tines, then twirled the rope and let it fly up onto the roof. It didn’t connect the first time and came tumbling back down, smacking the team member’s hand when he tried to catch it. The second time was the charm, and soon both men had climbed the rope and were on the roof.
They reached the water tower without incident. Kepler stood guard at the base while the other man climbed a strut hand-over-hand until he reached the top. This was the crucial point—the man would have to drill a small hole into the pipe to insert the compound. Kepler alternated his glances up with a slow scan around the perimeter walls, watching for any potential trouble.
It came in the form of a door creaking open down the street. Two people slipped out of a building at the far end of the village. A young man and woman, both giggling, snuck through the silent streets, holding hands as they flitted from shadow to shadow.
The four-man squad froze. Richter listened to the conversation between them.
“Leader, I have visual on both approaching targets. Permission to fire?”
“Negative, keep them covered, but let them approach. We’ll take them out only if necessary. Tank, hold your position.” Firke melted into the shadows on the roof, holding his pistol in front of him with both hands as he disappeared.
The couple came closer, and Richter saw that they were tourists, maybe two students hooking up on a trip across Europe. They both took shelter in a darkened doorway, the man tilting the woman’s head up for a long kiss, his hand stealing down to cup her breast. She moaned and pressed her body against him, her mouth opening to his. Ordinarily, Firke wouldn’t have cared about them, but they were now blocking the escape route, and their noises might eventually attract the wall guards, which could not happen.
“Three, take them.”
Lost in each other, they didn’t notice the urban-camouflaged man emerge from the shadows and slowly creep toward them. When he was a few steps away, he aimed his silenced pistol and fired two carefully placed shots, one into the head of each. The couple, still locked in each other’s arms, collapsed to the ground. The man strode over and put one more bullet into each unmoving form. “They’re down.”
“You and Four remove the bodies. Put them in the large garbage bin at the back of the alley. Longshot, keep your eyes open for others, and sing out the moment you see anyone. Tank, resume your mission.”
Richter watched as the woman’s body was picked up and slung over the man’s shoulder as he began walking down the alleyway. Over Firke’s microphone, the faint whine of a small cordless drill could be heard in the background. At the garbage bin, he dumped the limp form inside and waited for his partner to dump the other body. The two men covered both of them with bags of garbage before returning to their original positions.
Waiting for the cry of alarm that could come at any moment, Richter scarcely remembered to breathe while Tank finished his job, dumping the viscous, black liquid into the water tank, then sealing the hole with a bit of fast-drying putty. He affixed a small, wireless camera to the top of the tank, aiming it down so that the entire street could be seen, then descended just in time to rejoin Firke. The two men tied off their rope and climbed down, then retrieved the rope at the bottom by untying the slipknot and coiling it up. They picked up their flankers and were on the way back to the sewer grate at the spot where they had first come out of the jungle.
“Mr. Firke.” Richter’s words froze the Englishman in his steps. “I want you and your other men to place at least two more cameras in other areas, so that we can get different views of the experiment. There is no need to acknowledge my orders, just do it.”
Firke didn’t say a word, but Richter sensed the fury coiled in the man, ready to be unleashed on any available target. Without a sound, he gave the commands to his other two men by hand, sending them off to place the cameras in the best vantage points they could find. Each man completed his task in less than three minutes, giving Richter three lines of sight on the main roads of the small village. It was better than he could have hoped for.
The two men retraced their steps back to their leader, who led them all to the grate and down into the pipe. They left the area without incident, re-bent the grate into place and snuck away from the village. At a rendezvous point, they waited for the sniper team to rejoin them. The six-man team jogged back to their vehicle and drove down the road a few kilometers until they came to a telephone pole that led to the village. One of the men put on climbing spikes and a tree strap, ascended the pole and cut the wires. Once that was done, the vehicle disappeared into the night.
“Mission accomplished, Doctor.” Firke had to have switched off the camera on his shoulder, for that monitor went dark right afterward.
“Don’t forget to launch the drone over the property, Mr. Firke.” Richter straightened, easing his kinked back muscles while around him the men and women drifted away, having either lost interest in what was happening or moving on to other tasks.
The doctor pulled up a chair and checked his watch: 1140. In several hours the townspeople would be up and about. He pulled his notebook closer to him and rechecked that the camera on the water tower was transmitting properly.
Now it was simply a matter of waiting for the experiment to begin.
CHAPTER SEVEN
At 0545, Mack Bolan was almost finished preparing for his insertion into Alexsandr Sevan’s walled fortress city.
The breeze was blowing even harder in the early morning hours, making him smile as he unfolded what looked like an oblong, matte-black parachute that was rounded off at both ends. Four lines led from his loose harness to the odd-shaped canopy, splitting up three times along the way to attach at equidistant points along its edge to give the pilot maximum control. The stiff wind gusted even harder, making one side of the sail flap in the night.
Of all the things they’d planned about this operation at Stony Man, the insertion had been the most discussed, argued about and refined. They had simulated just about every possible method of entry, from a HALO—high altitude low opening—drop, insertion by the sewer system, posing as a tourist and entering through the front gate, and scaling the wall. In the end, they had gone with Bolan’s suggestion, initially thrown out as an off-the-cuff remark, but which gained more converts as the planning progressed. It wasn’t the surest insertion method, but because he would already be on the ground, and given the pros and cons of the other methods, it was the best way for him to reach Sevan’s house with the least chance of detection. The final deciding factor was that the majority of the security measures at the village were directed at the ground around the perimeter, with no radar or any obvious air-detection capability. Of course, it has also necessitated him taking a crash course in paragliding forty-eight hours before he left the U.S., but after ten practice runs, Bolan thought he’d gotten the hang of it, so to speak.
“How’s the weather?” Tokaido, monitoring his insertion, asked.
“Overcast and breezy,” Bolan replied. “At least I’ll have no problem getting there.”
“So, you’re still green?” The hint of doubt in the hacker’s voice was clear.
“When I’m back, you’ll have to come up with me—you’ll love it.”
“Uh, yeah, we’ll see about that.”
Bolan grinned again. Tokaido often talked a good game, but the few times he’d called the younger man on it, he had preferred to stick with what he knew best—hacking and computer infiltration. And he was among the very best, no doubt, but it was obvious that his skill set lay in a completely different direction.
Now, as he prepared for a reverse laun
ch, facing the canopy to make sure his lines were clear, Bolan felt a mix of adrenaline and anticipation, mixed with a healthy respect for what he was about to do. The wind up here was stronger than what he’d trained in, and he was already recalculating his speed toward his target, and most importantly, controlling his descent and sticking the landing once he got there. He’d be dead if he fractured an ankle or got hung up on power lines.
Bolan snugged his night-vision goggles over his eyes and checked his pistol, spare magazines and equipment in their various holsters and pouches. He took one more look at everything, weighing the pros and cons of the current conditions. His insertion window—the time just before daybreak, when guards would be tired and their perception and reaction times would be slower—was still open. But he had to go right now, before the first rays of sunlight lit the still-black horizon.
“Beginning insertion,” Bolan said. “Affirmative.”
Tokaido’s tone was all business, as well. “Good luck, Striker. Stony Man standing by.”
Taking up the slack lines, Bolan twitched them to make the sail lift into the air. The second the edge caught the steady breeze, the whole canopy inflated and shot up with a snap, making him brace himself to not get pulled off his feet. He glanced at the dim lights of the city below, the auto gating adjusting to prevent him from being blinded. When the next gust came along, he walked with it down the hill, letting the wing begin carrying him along until, with one more stop, he floated off the ground and into the night sky.
The wind off the mountains swiftly carried him high into the air. Bolan concentrated on getting enough altitude to ensure he was far enough above the sentries to avoid being spotted. Below his dangling feet, the valley was swathed in darkness, broken only by the eerie green circles of light coming from the wall. Toward the rear of the enclosure, the large villa they’d identified as Sevan’s loomed above every other building, almost topping the wall. Its large, tiled roof was Bolan’s target, and he steered toward it while keeping an eye on his variometer, which would tell him if he was leaving a strong wind current.
Maintaining his elevation wasn’t turning out to be a problem, but Bolan was a bit concerned about his forward speed. Even allowing for the stiff wind, he was approaching the village faster than he preferred and was concerned about bleeding enough off to land safely. They’d discussed aborting if the conditions weren’t right, but having gone this far, he was even more loath to come so close, only have to leave with nothing to show for his efforts.
About a kilometer out, Bolan pulled on both outer A-lines, bending the ends of the sail down in a formation called “big-ears.” This made the paraglider begin to slowly lose altitude while still heading toward the roof of the villa, exactly as he had planned.
The large, black canopy, with Bolan dangling underneath, passed silently over the rear of the village and the bored pair of thugs on that wall, close enough that he heard a brief snatch of their conversation. His auto-translator picked up the words and told him that one was complaining about not feeling well. The two men were both in the roofed guardhouse—as they had been every evening at this time—instead of patrolling. The hole in the security and the pattern of the prevailing winds across the valley were two reasons Bolan had used this approach.
Alternating his attention between the approaching roof and his variometer, he kept his approach steady, trying to bring himself down as gently as possible. Less than ten meters from the roof, the wind gusted hard, making the paraglider suddenly rise again. He tugged on his B-lines to bleed more air from his canopy, dipping down twice as fast as when he had used the “big ears” method.
Unfortunately he was also gliding right past the villa. Even though he shifted his weight hard right to bring himself around, Bolan skimmed past the edge of the rooftop, missing it by less than a meter.
“Striker?” Tokaido said. “GPS shows you’ve missed the primary landing zone. Is there a problem?”
“Let you know in a second—” Bolan whispered as he fought for control. He had lost too much altitude now and was in danger of either getting entangled in power lines or gliding into the side of a building. Releasing the B-lines, he pushed hard on his speed bar with his foot, decreasing the angle of attack on the wing’s leading edge in a desperate attempt to gain height.
It worked—sort of. Entering the airspace of what looked like a wide, main road that ran through the village, Bolan felt the wind channeled here shove him up—straight toward the wall of a house. Easing up on the speed bar, he lifted his legs as high as he could, narrowly avoiding smacking the top of the roof. He missed, but now out of the air channel, he began losing altitude again.
“Striker? You’re still moving. What’s your sitrep?” Tokaido asked.
A pancake, if I don’t find a place to set down soon, Bolan thought but didn’t say. Instead he was looking for any place he could set down without injuring himself in the next few seconds. The village sloped down from here, and Bolan saw what looked like a small, three-story hotel coming up. A large water tank took up a third of the flat roof, but it was his best chance—hell, his only chance—to land, and he took it, aiming for the flat expanse and pulling on his B-lines again to begin coming down.
The induced stall averaged a drop rate of about 5 meters per second, but as he got closer, it seemed the roof was rushing up even faster at Bolan. At the same time, he was sailing over the building and there was a very real danger he was going to overshoot his landing zone again.
Gritting his teeth, Bolan pulled even harder on the B-lines, spilling that extra bit of air and causing him to come down with a thump on the rooftop. The moment he landed, Bolan hit the ground in a forward shoulder roll, heedless of entangling himself in the lines. The canopy snapped and fluttered around him, but the moment he stopped moving, he quickly gathered in the paraglider before a guard happened to catch sight of the mass of flapping black cloth.
“Striker, are you all right?” Kurtzman was on the line now. “What is your sitrep, over?”
Entangled in a shroud of canopy and lines, Bolan was still listening for shouts or any sign that his entry had been detected. Only when he didn’t hear any sort of alarm or doors opening did he whisper, “Striker is down. Overshot primary landing zone, had to go for secondary. No injuries.” He began to stuff the paraglider into his backpack.
“You’re a good half klick from your target and you have to improvise a way past his house guards. And the sun’s about to come up.”
Bolan glanced east and confirmed Kurtzman’s biggest concern—the sky on the horizon was already shaded with pink and orange from the oncoming daybreak. “Then I better move out.”
“Striker, you don’t think we should abort?”
“Absolutely not, Bear. Look, I’m here now. Even if we called it off, I’d have to get out somehow anyway, so I might as well get what I came for before I do.” Bolan shrugged out of his harness and added it to the backpack, which he hid beneath one of the water tower’s steel legs.
“Well, watch your ass,” Kurtzman said. “The way this op started, it wouldn’t surprise me if you tripped, fell off the roof and broke your neck.”
Despite the circumstances, Bolan couldn’t help grinning at the very real concern he heard under Kurtzman’s grumbling. “Have I ever told you how much I love your optimistic attitude, Bear?”
“No, ’cause you know better.”
“Exactly. Striker out.” Trotting to the side of the building, Bolan tested the seemingly sturdy ceramic drainpipe that went all the way to the ground. When it didn’t move under his weight, he swung a leg over, braced his feet on the wall and gripped the pipe with both hands as he descended to the ground. Halfway down, the pipe shifted enough to make him stop and wait in case it was coming loose. It didn’t move again, and Bolan reached the alleyway without further incident.
At this hour the town was still quiet, although Bolan saw light
s coming on in various windows as the populace began to wake up. There were still plenty of shadows to hide in, and Bolan made the best of it, flitting from darkness to darkness, all the while keeping an eye on the walls overhead.
He covered the distance to Sevan’s villa in less than ten minutes and took a position in a narrow alley between what appeared to be a bakery—the smell of bread baking filled his nostrils—and what looked to be either an abandoned or holiday house for someone, with tightly shuttered windows and a securely locked door.
Bolan’s attention, however, was on the front gate made from thick, black iron bars that guarded the entrance to Sevan’s estate. The rest of the perimeter was enclosed by an eight-foot-high stone fence that had matching vertical iron bars at the top, which were themselves topped by welded spikes sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle. Two guards paced back and forth in front of the gate. Unlike the slackers on the wall, both these guys looked alert and ready. He studied the pair for a few minutes, noticing that although they were definitely on guard, they also seemed oddly distracted. One shook his head every few seconds, as if trying to clear it. The other kept wiping his forehead and cheeks with his sleeve. Viewing them in the monochromatic night vision, Bolan couldn’t tell if either man was flushed or showed any other signs of incapacitation.
“Striker to Stony Man, I’m going to need that security window and camera break, after all,” he muttered as he melted back into the shadows. “West wall, corner.”
“Roger that, Striker,” Tokaido replied. “What is your position?”
By the time the hacker finished replying, Bolan was at the rear corner of the empty house. As he knew from the overhead view, the road cornered at the fence and followed the perimeter. “Ten meters away.”
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