A Galil, Bolan knew.
He saw the soldier on the far end of the truck tumble out into unprotected view. The soldier did not need protection now. Most of his back was blown out from an exit wound.
The other soldier ducked out to seek new cover in front of the vehicle.
When the merc terrorist was in his sights, the Executioner offered him his worth, a shower of hot lead and a free ticket to hell.
Then the merc, Hohlstrom, emerged from the front door of Fahima's and Bushir's inn. Hohlstrom held his Galil assault rifle at port arms. Bolan saw that the other man appeared every bit as aware of the danger around them as did Bolan himself.
Bolan approached the Swede. The two men were alone in the darkness.
"That's one I owe you, man," said Bolan.
The burly merc gave an easy shrug.
"Forget it. We need to have a few words in private, Colonel."
Bolan felt a spinal shiver.
"You must have me confused with someone else."
"I don't think I do, Colonel Phoenix."
Bolan's fists wrapped tighter around the Galil. He could see that Hohlstrom did not miss the response.
Hohlstrom's free hand was on his holstered side arm.
"Explain, guy."
"Steady," said the Swede. "I know who you are and why you're here. And you don't stand a chance in hell of living another thirty minutes."
12
The tableau held for taut seconds between Mack Bolan and Hohlstrom, the Swedish merc. The two men stood there eyeballing each other in the shadows of Bishabia.
The Huey choppers in the nearby villa were scheduled to take off within five minutes. They were Mack Bolan's last chance to reach Eve.
Hohlstrom knew Bolan's true identity. He knew that Bolan was not Rideout, professional merc.
"You're the Israeli agent," said Bolan. "Let's have it one piece at a time while we're moving." The muzzle of his rifle hovered menacingly as they entered the inn. Hohlstrom kept pace as the two men moved quickly toward the storage room where Bolan had found Fahima and Bushir — and the secret tunnel. "How much do you know about me?"
"I know that you are Colonel Phoenix and that you head an operation code named Stony Man," replied Hohlstrom. "You must be here for the same reason as I."
"Tell me the reason."
"You're here to stop Jericho. We can work together."
"I don't think so. You'll have to delay your mission. There's another angle I'm working."
They entered the tunnel, but not before Bolan set down the Largo-Star. It would be real hard explaining that away. He was counting on his and Hohlstrom's arrival to come so close to the lift off that Kennedy's subordinate, Doyle, would have no time for questions or explanations.
Hohlstrom evidently knew the way into the tunnel from his own intel probes.
"My mission is to destroy the shipment in the lead chopper, whatever it is," said Hohlstrom.
"Then it's a suicide mission."
They were jogging now, single file through the tunnel, Bolan leading the way.
"I'm going to blow that copter to hell, one way or another," insisted Hohlstrom. "The cargo is a product of your government's Nuclear Chemical and Biological program. It cannot be allowed to fall into Arab possession. Libya and terrorism sleep together, you know that." The guy's voice grew especially hard. "There must be no more holocausts in this generation. It cannot be allowed to happen."
Bolan tried a new tack. His last one before having to nullify this harmful ally.
"Hohlstrom, listen. The angle I'm working... we've got an agent in the middle of this. But Jericho knows. He has the woman."
"Woman?"
"A lady named Eve Aguilar. She's a good human being, Hohlstrom." Bolan could see the guy turning it over. He pressed on. "I cannot leave her inside to die. I've got air backup behind me. We may be able to pull that cargo out intact or destroy it and stop any deal between Jericho and Shahkhia, and rescue the woman as well. This doesn't have to be a suicide job for you."
A moment's hesitation from the merc.
Time had slipped away altogether. Hohlstrom could not be allowed to stand in Bolan's way.
They had Eve.
Hohlstrom hesitated, finally nodded.
"Okay, Phoenix. If they've got the woman, we'll get her out safely. If the thing breaks wrong... then we do it my way."
"You try to do it your way," corrected Bolan. "Me, I'll play it as it comes."
They reached the bottom of the stairs leading up to Kennedy's office. Hohlstrom came forward to Bolan's side.
"All right, guy. For now... you call it."
"Your people don't have any idea where we're headed?"
"None. That's why I've waited this long. I want to tear their whole thing down."
"Then we'll tear it down together," said the Executioner.
The conversation had taken less than two minutes.
The men moved up the stairway to the sliding panel into what had been Kennedy's office.
As the iciness of ascending combat-readiness flowed through him, Mack Bolan reflected on the allies with whom this mission had brought him into contact.
Fahima and Bushir. Lansdale. And now Hohlstrom.
And maybe Death.
Death was an ally when it kissed the other side.
On this mission, Death had been no ally at all. Thatcher had known of approaching death and sold out to get money for his family. Fahima had lost her father. Death was all around.
Mack Bolan had to find Eve Aguilar before she too was kissed by the Reaper.
He would tear down the walls of Jericho's world, whatever the man was hiding, to spare her from a bloody end.
That was Bolan's Something Big.
Jericho's Something Big was a nuisance factor he would eliminate en route to his supergoal.
The Executioner was on a collision course with a whole bunch of shit that stood in his way, and he would blast open a path for himself every inch of that way.
A path of rescue from distress — a high path, blazed by sacred fires.
13
April Rose was at the main communications console in the mission-control area of Stony Man Farm.
She ignored an urge to look at the time digits on the rectangular clock beside her, as she had promised herself she would when she caught herself glancing at it three times in one minute only a short while ago.
So far... nothing. No action pattern, no holding pattern, nothing since Jack had parted from Bolan at the airstrip outside Tunis.
Grimaldi was now on call aboard a U.S. carrier cruising the Med.
And April Rose was waiting, keeping vigil...
She looked at the clock anyway. 1430 hours.
With the six-hour time difference, that made it 2030 hours Libyan time.
April Rose was the person whose job was to keep the massive, complex mechanism of Stony Man Farm functioning smoothly. She was also a woman who happened to be very much in love with Mack Bolan.
She tried valiantly to keep her worry under wraps, the way most of the men did who worked around her. She tried not to be a woman.
But it didn't work.
She fretted about Mack Bolan every time her man took off on a new mission in this new war against the forces of international horror.
Hal Brognola came into the room. Stony Man Farm's DC liaison did not directly confront April's inquiring look.
Hal sank into a swivel chair by a smaller console. He stared straight ahead without speaking. He held an unlit cigar between his fingers, but both the stogie and April seemed utterly forgotten.
After a minute, she quietly said, "Hal, what is it?"
He looked at her.
"I just spoke with Layton, the major who's handling this out of the Pentagon's NCB office. Internal Affairs pushed for a briefing and called me in."
"Do we know what it is that Jericho has?"
Brognola finally lit his cigar, but slowly, methodically, as if concentrating on the smallest detail
of the procedure.
"The bad news that Jericho has is a live virus called Strain-7. It is a pneumonic virus that has been developed to thrive on dry viscera. Its presence in the human body forces the body's water content to places of maximum dehydration from the heat of body friction. This dries out the flesh real nice for Strain-7. For the victim, it's either death from thirst in ten to twelve minutes, or drowning, literally, from the water intake you need to beat the dehydration fever. That takes two or three minutes.
"The worst minutes imaginable. And the stuff can infect entire populations in days or even hours. It would be an appalling end."
"It's ours, this virus, isn't it?" April asked coldly.
"Yes, April. Well, it was. But it isn't anymore. Now it's Jericho's." The stocky man sat stiffly in the swivel chair, turning the seat idly, in fact nervously. "Okay, we admit it, it's government stuff, acquired from a scientist in the NCB group. The army has been storing it mainly as a resource to assist in the development of its antidote by the government. The original scientist who produced the stuff, as a byproduct of his NCB work, is dead. Died of dehydration. Took about an hour..."
"Hal, why does our country get involved in a horror like that?"
"Ask the boys in the NCB outfit," grunted the fed. "As chief of security at the base where the virus was being stored, Thatcher was able to divert the junk to Houston under military guard. It was loaded on a private jet — Jericho's jet, we now know — and Jericho's merc security force was standing by to take it over when that jet landed in Libya."
April felt a sense of terror.
"God help the Mideast if that virus falls into Libyan hands," she murmured. "God help us all."
"You can see why Mossad has an interest in this," said Hal. "Jesus Christ, sometimes I wish I only knew enough to be chasing street hoods like in the old days."
April turned back to the communications console.
"I'm going to contact Jack Grimaldi," she said, "and see if there's any possible way to reach Mack with this."
Hal's stogie was in need of a light again, and again he forgot about it. "We have nothing on Eve Aguilar to pass along to him, right?" he said.
"Right," replied April as she activated the sending unit. "The Traveler was the last we know for sure that Eve was alive."
* * *
Jack Grimaldi stood at the rail along a deserted stretch of flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Fearless. The supercarrier was cruising Mediterranean waters, 130 miles off Libya's Gulf of Sidra, on White House sanctioned maneuvers. The Fearless glided as smoothly as a skater on ice. The dark sea, far below Grimaldi, was a choppy panoply of sparkling wet stars and moonlight that mirrored the night sky overhead.
The Fearless was a floating city. The warship was home to five thousand sailors and airmen for months at a time. The five-deck seagoing airport was a warren of passages, offices, shops, mess halls and crew quarters; a numbering system had been devised to keep people from getting lost. Someone had mentioned to Grimaldi that the Eiffel Tower, if laid on its side, would overhang the flight deck by only five feet.
The Stony Man flyboy was smoking a cigarette, trying to relax.
The angled black flight deck was quiet at this hour. The big flattop's two-hundred-thousand horsepower engines, turning her four shafts with their seventy-thousand-pound propellers, could not be heard up here. The incessant roaring, banging and hissing of steam catapult launches and the thumping and snapping of cable-arrested landings, which had been going on since Grimaldi's airlift to the ship from Tunis via a Sikorsky 70L shipboard helicopter, had only minutes ago been called to a halt until more exercises tomorrow morning.
Grimaldi experienced a momentary sense of oneness with the Med, the alluring but historically much fought-over sea.
He could not relax.
That moon overhead, that same panoply of stars, shone down on Mack Bolan at this moment, wherever he was.
If he was still alive.
No way could Grimaldi relax, knowing what he did.
Grimaldi was joined at the rail by an admiral named Fieldhouse. The task force commander was the only man onboard the Fearless who knew what Grimaldi knew.
"They told me in Communications that you had to speak with me, Mr. Grimaldi."
Jack did not take his eyes away from the panorama of Mediterranean night.
"What are my chances of violating Libyan airspace without detection? I've got to reach him."
Fieldhouse paused to frame a reply, balancing the odds in his mind. He nodded at the moonwashed expanse of sea.
"The Gulf of Sidra is where two of our planes made hot contact with two of Libya's Su-22s a while back. Soviet-built fighter planes. Those Sus are at the bottom of that gulf right now. Our intel is that Khaddafi's training program hasn't kept up with the technology he's been acquiring. Yes, his army and airforce do have the equipment to spot you coming in. But whether they actually spot you, and how quickly they respond... well, I'd say you stand a chance of getting in and out again if you fly low. Not a good chance, but some chance. What do you need?"
Grimaldi tossed his cigarette butt over the rail.
He had needed some few minutes alone after receiving the communique from Stony Man Farm. He came up here from the ship's communications room, had filled his lungs with gulps of ocean air and half a cigarette. It was enough.
He could handle it.
"What have you got that will get me in fast under their radar grid and punch hard when I get there, Admiral?"
"My recommendation would be our new Boeing 1041 multirole V/STOL," said Fieldhouse. "We have two of them below, on twenty-four standby-one of them without markings.''
"What kind of armament?"
"The 1041 has air-to-air and air-to-surface missile capability. Unfortunately it's not equipped with cannon or machine guns. But with a flight speed of about Mach 0.8, I'd say she's your best bet for the kind of hit you seem to have in mind." The navy man studied the Stony Man pilot with a long look. "This is a very bizarre mission, Mr. Grimaldi."
Grimaldi grunted grim acknowledgment. "It's a bizarre world, Admiral. I'll take your advice. The 1041 it is. Lead the way, please."
Fieldhouse moved down to the principal hangar belowdecks.
Grimaldi tossed one last look over his shoulder at the dark beauty of the Med. He wondered if the sea would still sparkle in the moonlight and reflect those stars the way it did right now — after everyone was dead.
Yeah. Everyone.
Strain-7 — No one knew for sure exactly what it was capable of. The worst possible guess, of course, was that it had the capability of killing off every human being on the face of the earth...
It was very literally a matter of life and death for most of the planet that Mack Bolan now held in his hands.
And Mack did not know it.
Ah, friend, soldier, go carefully in this night. This dark night in your endless war.
Jack Grimaldi knew that his best friend was walking a lonely trail now, and that he was risking all because he did not want to further endanger Eve Aguilar's life; and yes, Grimaldi could identify with that. The pilot was a man of well-defined, fiery Italian temperament who appreciated completely the powers of love and caring that were the lifeblood of his race and the driving force of a bigger-than-life dude named Mack Bolan. The guy would've made a damn good Italiano.
Grimaldi and Fieldhouse entered the cavernous hangar of the Fearless. Planes, men, activity, the smell of grease and oil were everywhere. Noise echoed off the towering steel walls.
Fieldhouse angled off to make arrangements for Grimaldi's briefing and takeoff.
Grimaldi walked over to the plane he would be flying into Libya. He checked out the aircraft with a growing sense of approval.
The two-passenger V/STOL boasted a forty-one-foot wingspan, and a fuselage length of about forty-eight feet. The aircraft was shiny and new, without markings, and Grimaldi hoped he could bring her back in the same condition. The Boeing 1041 was excellent. It would d
o, hell yeah.
Jack Grimaldi was finished sitting on his tail.
14
Bolan and Hohlstrom moved toward Doyle who awaited them by one of the gun-ships. Four of Kennedy's mercs were already aboard the second gun-ship. Three men had climbed aboard the copter that carried the cargo. Bruner and Teckert were aboard the aircraft that Doyle stood next to. The ground throbbed and the air thundered with the powerful whistling of revving turbines.
As Rideout and Hohlstrom approached, Doyle called out to them loud enough to be heard above the waves of sound.
"Where the hell have you guys been? Queer for each other or somethin'?" With a wave of his arm, the guy gave out the orders. "Get in the fuckin' chopper. You guys are riding with Teckert and Bruner. Move it!"
Doyle turned and jumped aboard the mother ship. He slammed shut the side hatchdoor. Seconds later, the aircraft shuddered and lifted off. It was immediately followed by gunship number two.
Bolan and Hohlstrom climbed into the chopper where Bruner and Teckert were waiting. Bolan closed the side door. The pilot raised his collective pitch control lever and the third big bird lifted off.
Bolan could see the floodlit grounds of the villa recede beneath them. The Huey cleared the walls, then heeled over and slid gently away into the Sahara night, traveling in what Bolan determined to be a southerly direction.
Like the other men, Bolan had grabbed a wallstrap for support. He glanced at Bruner and Teckert, then at Hohlstrom, but the constant high-pitched whine from the copter's transmission directly overhead made any conversation difficult.
The pilot reached the desired altitude, about three thousand feet. The climb leveled off into a smooth forward cruise.
Bolan gazed beyond the Huey's Plexiglas windows and saw that the three choppers were maintaining a loose formation, twelve to fifteen rotor widths apart, with the two gunships slightly higher to either side of the copter that transported Doyle and the cargo.
Bolan's Galil was strapped over his left shoulder. His belt was equipped with grenades. His right hand never drifted far from the Browning hi-power riding low at his right hip.
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