Ballistic

by Don Pendleton

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Bolan bent down to wipe his knife blade on the dead man’s pants, then sheathed it. In the treetops overhead, birds called and monkeys chattered as if nothing of great interest to them had occurred. Another life lost, more or less, meant nothing here.

  “Northeast from here,” he told Maia, after a consultation with the GPS device. “It can’t be very far ahead. There’s not much island.”

  Even so, a square mile was 640 acres, close to thirty-one hundred square yards. Walking at a steady pace, with no great obstacles before them, Bolan reckoned they could cross the wooded island in an hour, maybe less—but searching it, even if they split up, could take the best part of a day.

  More wasted time. A greater risk that targets would appear on the horizon and the Brave Wind missile would lift off, roaring toward impact with a U.S. warship.

  The GPS would have to lead them home.

  “Okay, we’re clear,” Bolan told Maia, speaking softly. She responded with a nod and fell in step behind him as he moved out from the kill site, rising ground beneath his feet that would eventually take them to the island’s high point if they kept on climbing.

  But the GPS wasn’t directing them to seek the topmost heights. Instead, it set a course for Bolan that would take them to the left, nearly due north, into the forest that cloaked most of No-Name Island. Bolan tried to picture how and where a missile would be launched from there, then gave it up, deciding anything could be accomplished with sufficient preparation and advance time.

  Who could say how long the Brave Wind plot had incubated prior to execution? Given months, weeks—even days, if you were dealing with determined workers and the right equipment—you could slash a clearing in the midst of any jungle, mount your launcher where you wanted it, and...what? Lure targets into range with some kind of enticing bait, perhaps. A radio broadcast could do it, if you let the tape run long enough for trackers to triangulate, lock onto it and move in for the kill.

  For all he knew, the lure had been deployed by now. Brognola couldn’t tell him if the Third Fleet had a target and was closing. Stony Man would have to snatch that message from the air, decode it, pass it on to Washington...by which time, it would likely be too late to help a warrior on the ground. If Bolan couldn’t find the launch site and disable the Brave Wind before it flew, then his whole Asian exercise had been a waste of time.

  As far as taking out the Brave Wind, any significant damage should keep it from landing on target—or, better yet, keep it from launching at all. Its warhead was supposed to be an explosively formed penetrator: basically a shaped explosive charge inside a metal plate, whose detonation turned the plate into a hurtling armor-piercing projectile. In this case, the warhead weighed five hundred pounds and would normally be triggered by a smart fuse.

  Unless the Executioner got to it first.

  In which case, all concerned were in for a surprise.

  * * *

  MAIA HOPED the GPS device was accurate, not leading them astray. She knew some people swore by them, but she’d had problems with them in the past, trying to navigate her way around downtown Beijing. Cooper seemed to trust it, and she trusted him, but still...

  Aside from her immediate concerns, another problem weighed on Maia’s mind. She had used Cooper’s sat phone to call the ministry from Bali’s airport and a comrade there, while seeming cagey, had delivered more disturbing news. The Deputy Assistant Minister for State Security, no less than Chou Hua Tian himself, was en route to Jakarta, and the word was that he didn’t fly alone. While nothing was confirmed—or spoken of, above a whisper—rumor had it that he was accompanied by members of the People’s Liberation Army Special Operations Forces.

  Coming, Maia presumed, to rub her out.

  Which raised a question in her mind and prompted her to make a second call, this one to a specific officer she trusted with her life. So far, at least. She’d reached him, given him the broad strokes of events since she was captured by, then rescued from, the Malay pirates. News of Chou’s departure for Jakarta spread an icy silence over the long-distance link, before her contact said that he’d look into it.

  Meanwhile, Maia followed Cooper across a tilting landscape, through the clutches of a mini forest that presumably had never seen a white man or a Chinese woman treading on its soil before. As for the rest—Saudis or Indonesians, soldiers from the Sword of Allah—well, she knew someone was here, since Cooper had killed one of their lookouts moments earlier.

  Ahead of her, Cooper slowed his pace, and Maia followed suit. It could be anything. Another sentry, possibly a snake, or some fluke in the landscape that required negotiation. Only when he beckoned Maia forward did she close the gap between them, step by cautious step, until she stood beside him, touching-close, and peered around his shoulder.

  At first, she didn’t fully understand what she was seeing. In the middle distance, call it thirty yards in front of them, a clearing had been cut out of the forest, then concealed with high-strung tarps in a camouflage pattern. Beneath that false canopy, men dressed variously in fatigues and denim, mostly bearded, moved with purpose in the open space they’d carved out for themselves.

  And at the center of that space, a launching platform held the second missing Hsiung Feng III missile, aimed skyward, though it would be forced to pierce the camouflage tarp before it could escape and do its work. It seemed to her almost innocuous, just sitting there, but Maia knew the awesome power it contained and all it represented if the launch succeeded.

  But they were still in time. It hadn’t happened yet.

  Cooper edged back from the clearing, bent to put his lips beside her left ear and began to whisper rapid-fire instructions. Maia listened, nodding that she understood and would comply.

  They had one chance to do it properly, and only one. Whether they lived to see another day, what she would do about Chou’s little army in Jakarta—nothing took priority over their mission of the moment.

  Stop the Brave Wind where it sat, and no mistake.

  * * *

  NASIR AL-JARRAH LIT a brown cigarette and inhaled its smoke deeply, ignoring the glares from some of the workers around him. It wasn’t his fault that Indonesia’s Muhammadiyah group had banned Muslims from smoking in 2010. Brethren in Singapore had rejected that fatwa by an overwhelming majority of votes, and the rest of the Islamic world was divided on the subject of tobacco. His own Saudi homeland, despite its small population, was the world’s twenty-third leading consumer of cigarettes, and al-Jarrah had caught the habit early.

  Besides, with wine and liquor forbidden, what else did he have?

  Only war.

  Usmar Malik had prodded him once more to change the deadline for broadcasting their lure to the fleet, and al-Jarrah was considering it. For all his talk of patience to the others, it was true he found their time spent on the nameless island tedious, uncomfortable—a misery, in short.

  If they could only glean something of the Third Fleet’s movements from their radios, at least he’d have a fair idea of where the warships were. But so far, nothing.

  He could always try the beacon, see what happened, first ensuring that he was prepared to flee as soon as—

  “Guru! Guru! Musah!”

  Someone was shouting from the forest, and he turned to see one of their Indonesian sentries burst into the camp, wild-eyed, his shirt torn from running through dense undergrowth.

  Al-Jarrah had quickly learned that guru was the word for master, but he had to wait for Malik on the rest of it. His local second-in-command debriefed the lookout quickly and returned to al-Jarrah, frowning.

  “He says that enemies have found us, sir. One of our men is dead. Stabbed on patrol.”

  The obvious inquiry would be stabbed by whom? But if the sentry knew that, clearly, he would have explained to Malik in the first place. As for enemies,
al-Jarrah found it difficult to think that anyone had found their island hideaway. If that had been the case, where were the swooping jets? The Tomahawk cruise missiles? Stabbing spoke to him of primitive assailants, possibly some throwback tribesman from a nearby island who—

  He heard the pop and nearly recognized it, even with the babble of excited voices rising all around him. Given four or five more seconds, he could probably have named its source, but he was out of time.

  The blast that followed, although relatively modest in the scheme of warfare, sounded thunderous beneath the camouflage tarpaulins covering the launch site. Spinning toward the Brave Wind missile on its launcher, al-Jarrah saw that one of its tailfins had been sheared off at the base, leaving a wound that gaped and smoked. The missile shivered, as if seeking to escape that wound, its blue-gray shaft and white nose cone still angled toward the sky.

  Al-Jarrah felt his heart stop for a moment, then resume its beating with a stutter-step that left him short of breath. A secondary blast, and he was bellowing with rage, his voice lost in the greater noise of solid propellant exploding, hurling fragments of the missile’s fuselage across the clearing. Staggered by the shock wave, al-Jarrah dropped to his hands and knees, cursing the day when he was born.

  * * *

  MAIA COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. After all that she had risked and suffered, all she’d done to reach this moment, Cooper had brought the Brave Wind down in seconds flat. One shot from his grenade launcher had maimed the missile, rendered it inoperable, then the fuel had caught and detonated with a roar that deafened her. Concussion from the blast had knocked down most of the assembled guards and workers, several of them transformed into flaming twists of blackened flesh, but most were struggling to their feet again, shaking their heads, groping for weapons they had dropped.

  Now was the time to take them.

  Even deaf and shaken from the blast, Maia was able to control her trembling hands and aim her weapon. From the cover of the treeline, she dropped one man, then another, before anyone caught on to what was happening. Dazed as they were, however, some of those before her had to have been trained soldiers, for they bounced back from their shock and started laying down a spray of automatic fire that raked the forest. Marking her position, she supposed, from the direction that her first two victims fell.

  And it was close. The fire from half a dozen AK-47s ripped through shrubbery, slashed bark from ancient trees and filled the air with humming death. Maia lay prone behind one of the forest giants, waiting out the storm, knowing that if she stayed in place too long they had a chance to flank her, and she wouldn’t know they’d done it until searing bullets cut her down.

  She rolled out, staying low, wincing as stones beneath the forest’s leafy carpet dug into her knees, ribs, elbows. Dimly, as if they were miles away instead of yards, she heard the men who meant to kill her shouting back and forth among themselves. They would be cautious moving in, but driven by the rage and disappointment of their grand scheme’s demolition. Eager for a bloodletting to compensate for loss.

  Maia reached a point where large roots heaved out of the earth and formed a natural depression, heaved herself across one of the brawny tentacles and rolled into the swale between them. Seconds later, she heard running footsteps closing from her left and right together, one hunter a little slower than the other. Angrily, they spoke back and forth, rushing to meet each other at the spot where she had dropped from sight.

  It was an all-or-nothing moment. Maia drew her pistol, switched it to her left hand, while she clutched the submachine gun with her right. Bracing her heels, she lurched up from the ground with arms outstretched, firing in both directions, barely seeing targets as they froze stock-still, surprised.

  Both of her guns were silencer-equipped, their coughing sounds inconsequential by comparison to the screams, the roar of flames and automatic weapons firing from the camp behind her. Still, the silent bullets found their marks, two shooters twitching from the impact, crying out in pain and impotent frustration as they died and crumpled to the forest floor.

  Stop wasting time, Maia thought, as she scrambled from her makeshift foxhole and prepared to join the fight once more.

  * * *

  THE BRAVE WIND MISSILE’S warhead detonated with a bang that rocked the forest clearing and sent shrapnel skyward, ripping through the tarps that masked the clearing like a charge of buckshot tearing sheets on a clothesline. It also dropped a couple more of the camp’s dazed defenders, shot through with chunks of red-hot metal as they were recovering from their initial shock.

  Disposing of the missile had been Bolan’s first priority. Whatever happened after that, whether they won or lost, the mission would be rated a success. He might not get a chance to update Brognola, but one way or another, when the Hsiung Feng III wasn’t used against a U.S. ship at sea, the point would get across. The Sword of Allah would be claiming no jihadic victories from this attempt to wound the West.

  But taking down the missile wasn’t all of it. Somewhere in the confusion of the forest compound, Bolan reasoned that he’d find the individuals who had conceived and carried out the hijacking, with the destruction of the Shenyang, the Eiland Koningin and their respective crews. As long as he had strength and ammunition left, eliminating them was job two on his list to make the mission a clean sweep.

  And it was time to hunt.

  The chaos helped him. Coming out of cover, through the smoke and haze, finding his adversaries shaken and disoriented, Bolan let his autorifle do the talking, spitting 5.56 mm NATO rounds in short precision bursts. He wasn’t taking prisoners, had no more need of anyone to grill for information. It came down to scorched earth now, ensuring that the men behind this waking nightmare never had a chance to try again.

  Of course, they weren’t all down and out. In fact, most were recovering their senses as he broke out of the treeline, spotting individuals and dropping them as they woke up to yet another danger in their midst. Most of the camp’s inhabitants were armed, if not exactly ready to defend themselves. The first one who got off a shot missed Bolan by at least a yard, then died trying to get it right the second time around.

  By then, others were scrambling for whatever cover they could find, taking advantage of the dark smoke from the missile’s immolation, some retreating toward the trees, while others tried to put the flaming wreckage of the Brave Wind and its launching platform in between themselves and Bolan.

  All good efforts. None sufficient to outwit the Executioner.

  Bolan wasn’t keeping score—notching a gun had never been his thing—and there’d been no time for a head count of the camp’s inhabitants when he’d arrived with Maia. Still, he had a feeling for the numbers, running low, making sure to double-check the bodies as he passed them, to prevent a rude surprise. If he went down this day, it wouldn’t be because he let a dead man shoot him in the back.

  And there would be dead men aplenty by the time his work was done.

  * * *

  USMAR MALIK KNEW a losing proposition when he saw one. Prepared as he had been for martyrdom in God’s name, he saw no value in the simple act of dying, once the mission was aborted and had no hope of success. No missile meant no death blow to the Great Satan’s Pacific Fleet. The cause—at least for now—was lost.

  Malik was getting out.

  The speedboats waited for him, one equipped with a homing device that would draw fighter planes, but he had switched the small black box from his boat to Nasir al-Jarrah’s. Both were cigarette high-performance boats, built for offshore power racing, identical in all respects except that one was painted blue, the other green. Al-Jarrah had stashed his small homing device inside the blue boat, but Malik had switched it to the green.

  Why not, when al-Jarrah meant to betray him? Where was the brotherhood in that?

  And al-Jarrah had fled the killing field already. Malik saw him go, flitting through s
moke and flames to reach the treeline while his men died all around him, none presumably aware that they had been abandoned by their fearless leader. Malik could have stayed to lead them, sacrificed himself to help Nasir escape, but why should he?

  An officer led by example, and Malik was following his master’s lead.

  Armed only with a Skorpion machine pistol and two spare magazines of .32 ACP ammunition, Malik scuttled after Nasir al-Jarrah, hoping no one would see him go. Their soldiers—anyway, the few who still survived—were busy fighting for their lives, but Malik thought about the enemy, wondered how many of them lurked around the forest camp, and whether one of them was tracking him right now.

  If so, would they pursue him? He wore nothing to identify himself as second-in-command of the missile launch team, no special uniform or insignia. He had been knocked around by the explosions, just like everybody else, clothes torn and dirtied, his face smeared with a residue of soot and grime. Malik supposed he looked like any other frightened peasant in the circumstances, a disguise—though unintentional—that might help him escape.

  He needed time and luck. If only—

  When the bullet struck him like a hammer blow beneath one shoulder blade, Malik gasped a cry of pain and sprawled facedown on stinking leaf mold. Spastic fingers lost their purchase on the Skorpion, and he had no idea where it had gone.

  Behind him, footsteps cautiously approached. His slayer, coming to confirm the kill. Malik wondered if he had strength to fight and got his answer as a strong hand rolled him over on his back, great bolts of agony turning his limbs to rubber while he sobbed.

  “Speak English?” asked the rifleman who towered over him.

  “Ye—yes.”

  “Leaving the party early,” the gunman said. “Who is—or was—in charge?”

  Malik considered lying, even claiming credit for himself to help al-Jarrah, but what would be the point? What did he owe the Saudi, after all?

  “That way.” He pointed toward the cove, across the island. “Boats. Escaping.”