The attackers swept onto that level and executed the highest-ranking man on the floor, a first lieutenant with numerous decorations on his shirt. They shot him six times in the heart, rounded up the other personnel, locked them in a closet, then hurried down to the next level.
There was no opposition on level three. They worked their game plan and moved to level four. At first it seemed there would be no opposition there, either. Aleksandr had left the commo board and moved to meet his team on the fourth level underground.
Staff Sergeant Napoleon "Leon" Fetterson hid behind a filing cabinet as the other workers on S-4 assembled on orders. Sergeant Fetterson had put in two tours in Nam and been a POW; he knew what an enemy could do, especially one clever enough to break into the depository. Any of these goods in the wrong hands could bring instant death to thousands of people. There was no possibility that he was going to be a prisoner again… No way. He gripped his M-16.
He waited until the attackers locked his friends in the decontamination room. They'd be safe there. Just one bottle of this nerve gas could kill an entire city.
Sergeant Fetterson flicked the selector switch of his M-16 to automatic fire. The enemy wore strange uniforms, light green but not camouflage suits. Not decontam rigs, either. For just a moment when he looked at them he saw small men with Oriental faces screaming at him, slapping him around, kicking him just to see him cry out. He would never be a prisoner again, not of anyone! Sergeant Fetterson stepped from behind the cabinet, straightened and fired a burst of five rounds into the attacking force, then another burst and another until the magazine went dry.
Two of the men folded up and slammed against the wall. One returned a quick burst from a soundless weapon, but no shots hit Sergeant Fetterson. He turned his weapon at the last enemy, forgetting that he was out of ammunition. The third man threw up his hands in surrender. Sergeant Fetterson moved forward slowly, his finger still on the trigger. He had almost retrieved one of the dropped weapons, an Uzi submachine gun, when the door in front of him jolted open and another green-clad man stormed in.
Sergeant Fetterson saw only the short black weapon bucking in the man's hand. Then lead began pummeling him, jolting the empty weapon from his hand, crawling up his torso, setting his blood on fire. He saw one slug coming at his face. He watched it with fascination, felt it sting his forehead, then penetrate his skin and his skull and blast into his frontal lobes, mashing them into pulp and ripping the last traces of consciousness and life from his body.
"Where the hell did he come from?" Aleksandr screamed at the one remaining upright man. The guy shook his head, started to speak but couldn't.
"The canisters! Get them to the elevator! Quickly, man, no time left."
Aleksandr glanced at his two men on the floor. One was dead. The other would be dead in an hour.
"Come on, move!"
Aleksandr ran down the cement corridor, looking into rooms. Halfway down he found what he wanted. The room's double doors were marked: PD69 CC-HA-DXY-198.
Aleksandr opened one door and stared at the sudden-death containers inside. They were cylinders eighteen inches in diameter and six feet long. Each rested on a concrete cocoon twice that size. There were two tiers of canisters. Each concrete cradle had spaces for lift-truck loading bars to slide in and pick up the deadly poison gas canister.
Aleksandr opened the other door and waved the forklift truck inside. "Go, dammit! Go!"
It took almost ten minutes to get the first three canisters into the large elevator that served all levels. Though the power had been left on for the elevator, it would work only on levels four through one.
The elevator unloaded at a dummy shack outside the quadrangle and adjacent to a helicopter-landing pad. Truth to tell, Aleksandr had not been sure where the elevator would surface.
They unloaded the canisters onto a concrete pad and rushed back down to level four to pick up three more, all that could be contained in the elevator at one time.
When the final three canisters made it topside, the first streaks of light were filtering through the darkness in the east. Aleksandr looked at his watch. Exactly twenty minutes had elapsed since they sprayed their toxic surprise over the quad. They were on schedule.
He strode through the quad to the front door and saw fifteen people sitting on the ground in front of the flagpole. He fired a burst from his Uzi over them. He had taken the silencer off and the sudden angry sound of the machine gun brought screams of terror from the people.
"Down on your faces!" he bellowed at them. "Lie down, all of you! If anyone moves, he dies. Right now!"
Aleksandr fired another burst and watched the Americans cowering on the ground. He waved at his man standing on the roof and motioned for him to come down. They both went back to the helicopter pad.
They had three minutes. The two choppers had better arrive on time. If this was any kind of a secure installation, it would have hourly check-ins by phone or radio and codes of some kind.
He looked to the north. Nothing yet. Quickly he went over the rest of the plans. The two big choppers would settle down in exactly two minutes and three canisters would be loaded in each. Then the helicopters would take the men and vanish south, but make a large circle and head north. In three hours they would cross the unmarked and unguarded boundary between the United States and Canada. From then on it was a matter simply of shipping industrial chemicals.
He sent the roof guard to get Sergei.
Aleksandr suddenly saw two helicopters with no markings of any kind swinging along the contours of the ground. They lifted slightly to clear the wires, then settled down side by side near the chopper pad just outside the compound. He was surprised how large they were, but the weight of the canisters required them to be that size. He didn't know what kind these helicopters were; that had been left to the air experts.
In ten minutes all three canisters were loaded and tied down securely. Aleksandr spoke to the man who had stood guard on the roof. The man was an American, the last one he had hired.
"We won't be needing you anymore, Lewis," Aleksandr said.
"But you told me it would be for a month, a job for a month at a thousand a week."
"Looks like something is wrong with that weapon," Aleksandr said. He reached for the Uzi, and Lewis handed it to him. The leader checked the bolt, found a round in the chamber and shrugged. Aleksandr lifted the muzzle of the short weapon and sent five rounds into Lewis's chest.
The mercenary died before he knew he was hurt. He jolted backward from the force of the rounds and sprawled on the concrete with only a touch of a frown on his young face.
Aleksandr stepped through the open door of the chopper. He made sure Sergei and his last man were on board his helicopter, then without a backward glance at the dead man, gave a thumbs-up motion with his hand and the birds lifted off.
5
Mack Bolan heard helicopters. Then they came into view, two of them, low, hedgehopping, never more than thirty or forty feet off the green valley floor. Both had twin rotors, and as far as he could see neither had any markings. Not even NC civilian markings.
They were headed north and moving at top speed. They were soon out of sight.
He had just moved into position above the dairy farmhouse. It seemed the same as on the previous afternoon. No cars were visible. One of the doors of the big barn was partially open. No one walked guard at the gate, but the two dogs still prowled.
A screen door slammed at the rear of the structure. It was just after 5:00 a.m., and the dawn had arrived a mere five minutes earlier, giving the choppers and the small hills a bright, electric look.
Bolan lay in the grass for one last look at the target, then loaded an HE round, sat up and braced his feet on the ground in front of him. He boosted the Redeye to his shoulder, set the range and zeroed in on the front door of the farmhouse.
The round went off with much the same sound and feel of the old 3.5 bazookas, an intense swooshing. Equal amounts of force were expelled out bot
h ends of the tube, blasting a rolling pall of smoke and dust behind him and slamming the Redeye high-explosive missile forward. There was no need for a test round. The first shot went through the top of the gate and exploded against the front door of the house, lifting the second floor inches above its support and leaving the front of the house sagging.
Bolan was on his feet at once, the big weapon abandoned. His M-16 on automatic, he charged down the hill, running now, the Sixteen on his hip chattering off 3-round bursts of assault fire as he went.
He slammed the second magazine in as he approached the gate, which had been blown off its hinges. He charged through the blasted door into the still-smoking living room. The body of a man was sprawled over a plush chair opposite the door. His left arm had been blown off at his shoulder, and the side of his head was shredded with hot metal. A TV set gaped at the Executioner with the picture tube and protective glass front both shattered inward.
A groan came from the next room and Bolan charged down the hall to the door. Cautiously he entered, the M-16 leading, and saw a man on a single bed, his arm gashed and bleeding. The wounded man had no weapon.
"Where are the others?" Bolan barked.
Frightened eyes looked up. "Gone." He was a kid, no more than eighteen. His eyes pleaded. "Can you stop the blood?"
. Bolan darted back to the hall, went through the rest of the rooms, one by one working up to the second floor. There was no one else in the house. The blast would have drawn anyone from the other buildings.
Bolan returned to the boy in the bedroom, opening a first-aid pouch on his web belt. He disinfected the long gash, then wrapped it tightly to stop the bleeding.
As he worked, he questioned the survivor.
"Where did the others go?"
"I'm not sure. They all flew out of here about four-fifteen. Some of them weren't very good on those ultralights."
"You know about those things?"
"Yeah. That's my specialty. I taught two of those guys to fly. They wouldn't tell me where they were going. But I heard one of them say something to the others about Binder. Why would they go to the chemical plant?"
The black-clad warrior checked his watch. It was five-twenty.
"Did they have weapons?"
"Yeah. Short, stubby little things with silencers on them. And they had special tanks on the planes with pressure bottles and some chemicals. I saw them practicing with them once."
"Is there a car here that runs?"
"My bike's outside. A Honda 450."
"Stay here. I'll be back. Don't destroy any scrap of paper, anything. What was your job here after they left?"
"Told me to clean up the place, gather everything together and burn it."
"They weren't coming back?"
"No."
"Wait here."
Bolan grabbed the keys to the motorcycle. Outside he stripped off his weapons and webbing and pushed them under some wreckage from the house. He jumped on the cycle and gunned down the lane. Once you have ridden a motorcycle, you never forget how.
He took the corner into the wider gravel road and a mile later was on the blacktop road leading to the Binder facility. More like Hellbinder, he thought to himself.
Once, not so long ago, a Chinese secret agent in New York had said to Bolan, "You remind me of a highbinder. Do you know that term? A highbinder was a hatchet man for the tongs. He killed people with a hatchet. When there was trouble in Chinatown," the guy had chuckled, "they sent for the highbinder to ax the problem."
Mack had set the man straight. "I'm nobody's paid assassin," he'd said. "The people you're talking about were enforcers, killing people who refused protection. I kill for justice."
"Then we have another name that describes your life, if not your work," grinned the Chinese spook. "You live in a world we call a hellbinder — a world that is being attacked from every direction at once!"
True, Bolan had thought. And the name came back to him now, an echo of the name of the chemical plant. The Binder facility would unleash the stormy conditions of a hellbinder for sure…
Before Bolan reached the place, he heard sirens. At first he thought they were fire trucks, then he saw they were ambulances, coming from the opposite direction, from Emmett.
When he arrived at the chemical plant there was a cordon of uniformed military around the entrance. No one was being admitted. The men were grim, the weapons loaded.
"Move on!" a furious second lieutenant snapped at Bolan.
The Executioner brought the motorcycle parallel to the soldier and grabbed his arm with a grip that would not be shaken off. The young officer gazed wide-eyed at him. Bolan growled. "I've got family working in there. What are those helicopters landing for?"
"There were some military people hurt! That's all I can say… Move along, or I'll put you under military arrest," the officer blustered.
Bolan looked up as the whup-whup-whup of four large Army choppers came down from the sky. The choppers vanished, landing behind the two-story building. They were CH-47 Chinooks, Bolan noted, big, double-rotor birds that could haul forty-four combat troops ready for war.
The nightfighter rode slowly past the building, then made a U-turn on the blacktop roadway and came back. He saw a squad of eight soldiers wearing fatigues jogging around the corner of the quad, all combat ready with M-16s at high port.
He watched as the troopers replaced the class-B uniformed men and women on the front line. A sergeant pushed back his steel helmet and quickly ordered twenty-four men into position across the twin driveways of the chemical plant.
The Executioner spun the wheel on the Honda and roared back toward the Soviet spy headquarters.
Within the hour Bolan and the wounded man, who said that his name was Paul, took the house apart. All they found were some scraps of paper with Spanish writing on them and one or two notes in English. One of them mentioned San Salvador.
The dead man in the living room had been with the group since Paul joined them two weeks before. He and Paul were to have finished cleaning up here, and the older man was meant to join the others. Paul was to have been paid off and put up in town. It wasn't clear where the other man was to have gone.
Bolan looked at the dead man on the floor again. He must have been a KGB enforcer. His pockets revealed a great deal. He had a driver's license in the name of Georgi Smith. The wallet also contained an address in Vancouver, British Columbia, six hundred dollars and an airline ticket from Boise to Vancouver.
The Executioner looked at the evidence and knew they were ahead of him. The San Salvador connection rankled. What exactly had this Russian taken from the depository? He needed more information.
Paul had already filled him in on names. One of the leaders was Aleksandr Galkin, and the second in charge was a Sergei something.
"Are we going to call the sheriff?" Paul asked. "We can't just leave this body lying here."
Bolan knew what to do next, not through any rational process but by instinct, a deep sense a man develops in combat necessary for survival.
The warrior explained to Paul what he had become involved in. Then he tapped the body on the floor.
"Was he helping you in the cleanup?"
"No. He just gave the orders."
"And once you had the place clean of any leads, he would have killed you and ridden your bike to Boise."
"Killed me? You're kidding!" Paul eyed the dead man. "He was kind of a friend. His English wasn't very good, but he didn't push me around."
"He was KGB. An enforcer. A hired killer. He'd shoot you dead and eat lunch off your chest before your body had cooled."
Paul shook his head, disbelieving.
"Believe it, kid. Now take whatever is yours, then ride your bike out of here and forget you ever came."
Bolan took some cash from the dead man's wallet. He handed it to Paul. "Here are your wages. Now beat it."
The Executioner watched the kid ride down the lane, toward the blacktop road and disappear. Then he took the scraps o
f paper and the Vancouver address, picked up his M-16 and jogged up the hill.
Half an hour later he had the Redeye hidden in the compartment of the camper and was headed for Emmett. By now there would be plenty of talk in town about what had happened at the chemical plant.
Bolan found a phone booth, used his Calling Card number and dialed the Stony Man Farm complex where he could never go again. An unfamiliar voice answered. Bolan asked if the Bear was there. A moment later the familiar growl assured Bolan he had the right man.
'This is your far West correspondent," Bolan said. "What the hell happened to the chemical industry?"
"Plenty. Even after the warning, they got clobbered and stripped. Six guys, six ultralight aircraft and two big choppers. Don't know who, but they knew what they wanted. They took out only one item, PD69CC-HA-DXY-198. They took six six-foot canisters. Each one weighs almost two thousand pounds. That's a recently developed duplex nerve gas."
"A bad one, Bear?"
"A superbad one. A liquefied gas, highly compressed. When it's released into the atmosphere, the droplets explode into a ten-thousand-to-one volume of gas. It descends as a killer fog, heavier than air. It attacks the central nervous system of all vertebrates, and brings a quick death — but agonizing — in ten to fifteen seconds. There is no antidote, even if there were time to effect a cure."
"I was near the place just now,"
"What in hell is going on, West Coast?"
"I'd say Canada for transshipment and El Salvador for end use. Just a guess."
"Better than anything we have. I'll keep you out of this as usual. You flying away?"
"Soon as I can come up with a piece of paper."
"Ordinarily…"
"Hey, forget it. Things are different now. Thanks, Bear. I'm moving."
Bolan hung up, got in the camper and drove. His first stop was a parking garage in Boise, the biggest one in town. He figured the camper might be there for a while. Before he left, he packed a suitcase with enough clothes to make him look like a tourist and, regrettably, laid aside all his weapons. Customs.
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