“You have ways of checking. There is no blood on my hands. And I was never in any camp. I have family back in Syria. I was a potter. My village is just north of Damascus.”
“We have your file, but whatever information you can provide that helps us verify who you are, where you’ve been and what you’ve done—”
“I understand. You will check, you will find I am not like the rest.”
Looking deep into his eyes, Bolan tended to believe him. “What do you have to tell me?”
“I have overheard them call us the chum, or the contaminants. It is what we are to them—bait, or some rabid animal they feel they can beat whenever they please.”
“Braden?”
“Him and his two sadists. You saw the others, how badly they were beaten. Dumped like garbage in their cells. No doctor.”
“Why didn’t they do the same to you?”
“I do not know. Perhaps because they believed I had nothing of value to tell. Or I found the courage, through Allah, to defy them.” The Syrian’s gaze narrowed with anger. “They would leave us alone for two, sometimes three days, strapped in a chair, but after so long in the white room you cannot keep track of time. One minute feels like an hour, an hour like a day. Our eyelids were forced open by clamps. We just sat there, naked, this light like the sun in our eyes. American rock and roll so loud it split your brain…soon you can’t stop your body from shaking…the freezing air…then you hear your own voice in your head screaming or perhaps you are screaming out loud for the noise to stop, for the light to be turned off, for the cold to end. You want to vomit, but there is no food or water in your stomach. You gag, start to choke on your own tongue. They watch for this to happen, then turn down the light, stop the noise. For a while at least.” He paused, shame and rage burning in his eyes. “I thought I would go mad for days after…still thought I was in that chair. I thought I was blind when they returned me to my cell. I prayed to Allah. Slowly, my sight came back.”
Bolan clenched his jaw. Whatever it took to defeat an armed enemy on the battlefield was one matter. When torturing defenseless prisoners, even ones known for committing atrocities, whether for information, out of spite, hatred or revenge…It robbed a man of his soul, reducing him to less than an animal.
Bolan had enough right there to cuff the Task Force Talon commander, shut Triangle down and bring in the Justice Department task force Brognola had standing by in Washington. He believed Braden was only a bit player in some larger and bloodier conspiracy. Leverage, then, to use on the weak link that was Compton? Bolan suspected he wouldn’t get the chance.
“Go on,” Bolan prompted.
“Three I know of have disappeared. They go to the white room, we never see them again. I assume they were murdered. I can give you their names.”
“I already know who they are. You said they call you the chum? That tells me Braden and his people are after something either you or the others know about. What is it?”
“I was offered money by Syrian intelligence officers, but I cannot say precisely who they were. They wanted me to haul some cargo across the border into Turkey, the northeast frontier that leads into Kurd country. I am a poor man. I needed the money for my family. I did this for them, three times. When I arrived where I was told to go, there were Turk soldiers and what I learned were Iraqi fedayeen to receive the cargo. On the last trip, one of the crates, it slipped out of the hands of one of the Iraqis and broke open at their feet. Suddenly they were running away. It would have been laughable, but then I look down, I saw artillery shells, perhaps the seals have cracked. I then know what it was I had been paid to deliver.”
And there it was, Bolan thought.
Weapons of mass destruction.
The revelation simply hurled another batch of questions and mystery into the picture.
It was the Pandora’s box of the new century.
“You were picked up at the border coming back,” Bolan said.
“By American Special Forces. I was, how you might say, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And you told none of this to Braden or anybody else?”
“No.”
“Not even under duress, when you thought you were broken by them? Or even when you were back in your cell, maybe not clear on what was real and what wasn’t?”
Bal-Ada shook his head, adamant. “No.”
One of the blacksuits interrupted. “Colonel, we have a party of three, moving with purpose looks like in the northeast sector.”
Bolan went to a window on the cabin’s portside, aware their sensors were aimed at the motor pool. Looking out, he was just in time to spot Turkle and Hanover, each TFT commando opening the door to a GMC and piling in behind the wheel. Number Three’s face Bolan had committed to memory from his intel package. No sooner was Colonel Poscalar claiming the shotgun seat in Turkle’s vehicle than the GMC was lurching ahead, a Marine stationed at the northeast edge keying open the gate.
Bolan gathered up the smaller of his two war bags.
Plan B, he knew, had just gone into effect.
12
The road they took to Ciudad del Este was Brazil 277. Most certainly, he thought, their way was not paved with good intentions, if he judged the America’s dark overtures accurately. For damn sure, Colonel Miguel Poscalar was in no mood for a leisurely sightseeing jaunt, if such a thing was even possible. Traffic, by itself, was hassle and headache enough. Every contraption on wheels, from donkey carts, horse-drawn taxis, bicycles to gaudy rust-bucket tour buses, clogged the main inbound artery, with enough squall, between braying animals and blaring horns, to ignite the throbbing fire behind his mirrored eyes. If that wasn’t enough to keep the aggravation steaming, the driver-bagman, Turkle, wasn’t inclined to answer questions, as in precisely where was their first stop and to meet whom. When he wasn’t watching the GPS console mounted on the dashboard, Braden’s henchman muttered curses at the congestion, or flung a monosyllabic grunt whenever Poscalar framed a question.
Bitter annoyance at being treated like a second-class citizen in his own country was serving only to swell the pulsing heat in his brain. Normally, Poscalar would look forward to a soujourn to Ciudad del Este. His familiar stomping grounds had many contacts and connections, underground and above, spread through what was known as the shopping mecca of South America. His seedy affiliations, he knew, were his primary usefulness to serve Braden. Here, they—meaning usually thieves and con artists, he thought—sold everything from watches to spiderweb lace to fake Inca artifacts, to every contraband imaginable, any vice desirable for ready cash. They also plotted, launched and commanded country, contintent and even worldwide criminal enterprises. All things considered, Ciudad del Este was the devil’s playground, and woe to those who could not match violence for violence, treachery for treachery, illicit dollar for dollar. Poscalar conceded there was, however, much money to be made here, nothing but good times on tap.
Not so this night, he feared. No dice or poker, no whoring, no drinking the night away, or indulging in some Bolivian marching dust, lolling in Jacuzzi, a teenaged girl on each arm. At that moment, he found life could not seem more unjust. And Poscalar could be sure the henchman did not believe in mixing business with pleasure.
He torched a Cuban cigar with a lighter and looked into the sideview mirror. Why had the other henchman, he wondered, chosen to ride alone? Where was the commando-thug he knew as Hanover? It would be impossible to make out the duplicate GMC, just the same, what with all the tour buses, bumper-to-bumper congestion and peasants on foot, many of them human pinballs darting in and out of traffic like some game of chicken on foot. Idiot peasants. With the waning sun casting shadows over the highway, blanketing the neo-colonial dwellings dotting the hills to the north, everything began to look the same to Poscalar.
Dark and forbidding.
The henchman cursed, checking his watch. Time was irrelevant at that point, Poscalar decided. By the time they finally got their act together at Camp Triangle—callbac
ks and such to nail down the particulars of several meets—easing into the eastern outer limits of the city, nightfall was assured. Whoever was waiting for the henchman on the other end would either keep, bolt, or have a few choice words whenever they arrived.
Not his problem. Or was it?
Poscalar willed himself to relax. There was the future to consider, after all, when this sordid, mysterious business with the Yankee commandos was finished. Granted, if not for his hefty cut of the U.S. aid package delivered to his comrades for their support of Camp Triangle, it would prove a monumental stretch to complete the estate he was having built outside the capital. Only four days earlier, he recalled, he was drinking tequila, a snoot full of Bolivian flake, with the architects poring over blueprints, debating how to squeeze in the horse-racing track next to the golf course he had dreamed of for years. There were other ventures on the board, to be sure, beyond erecting his own palace and personal playground, but he needed quick, fat cash to keep the dreams alive. One hundred thousand for one night’s work—and this was no milk run, he suspected—wasn’t going to land him the keys to his kingdom. Still, there were other financial avenues open to a man with his ambition and status, who had all the right contacts, wielded the power to back up whatever move he chose to make.
It was true, he had to admit, grimacing in anger as Braden’s harsh rebuke echoed through his mind, he had made a small fortune, thanks to the Bolivian cocaine he allowed the traffickers to import across the border and funnel through his own network of distributors. If not him, he reasoned, then another officer from back east or in the Triangle region would step up and provide safe haven, free rein for the narcotraffickers to unload metric tonnage worth billions U.S. If not him, clipping about five million U.S. annually from the Bolivians—a mere pittance if he stewed about it—then his dream of owning his own hotel-casino in Rio would never see glorious fruition. If a man didn’t have dreams, he thought, he might as well be dead.
Yet there were headaches and human error wherever he turned these days. Just to name one problem, there was the toxic cargo he was warehousing for Braden. The Yankee swore it was worth more than its weight in gold or all the cocaine in the Andes. That, if he could find buyers—terrorists—he could cut himself in on the sale, with Braden presumably having his own designs for a large portion of the toxic store. Swimming in shark-infested waters would be preferable in his mind than dealing with Mideast fanatics. If he was found even indirectly responsible for turning Brazil or Paraguay into Baghdad or the Gaza Strip, no amount of bribery would save him from a firing squad. Where there too many un-seemly business endeavors tripping over too many unstable feet, he knew, trouble was never far behind. Was there, then, an ill wind at his own back?
One way or another, it would be a relief to hang up this night’s business in the closet, get on with building his empire, securing retirement, look forward to simply enjoying the golden years of song, dance, wine, and wealth. He didn’t trust Braden and his thugs any farther than he could spit. Whatever their agenda—and it involved treason of some type against their own country, he suspected—he wanted nothing more than to wash his hands of them. They were bad men, he decided, worse even than those death squad policemen he commanded, but what he—they—did was business, something of an act of salvation to assure Brazil didn’t spiral into criminal anarchy, sure to be followed by a mass uprising, where revolution might find him losing more than career, wealth and status. The anxious truth was that he needed, for the moment, at least, both his death squad contacts and the Yankees.
But for how long? And to what end?
Poscalar decided his first order of business was to arm himself. What worried him the most was being kept in the dark about why and for what they needed his men. It had the foul odor of blood spilled before the night was out, and getting his own hands dirty at this stage—where the world, or his corner of it, was almost his to own—only held the sour prospect of dimming the light on his future.
Ahead, he found they were easing onto the east edge of Avenue Monsenor Rodriguez, shabby neo-colonial buildings rising down the long, wide boulevard that was choked with traffic, boutiques, sidewalk merchants and their stalls. He realized he was fingering his crucifix when he heard the henchman say, “Yes. Yes. I understand. I copy.”
Poscalar saw the bagman punching the keyboard on the GPS console. It flickered into two screens, side by side, one of which Poscalar recognized as a radar monitor. Suddenly the henchman slammed on the brakes. At the last instant, Poscalar spotted a man running in front of the vehicle. He thrust a hand on the dashboard to keep from smashing the cigar into teeth, which might likewise have been snapped off. Glaring, he thought the henchman grinned, but the expression whipped away, from the rear to side view glass. When he began searching the skies through the windshield, Poscalar felt his anxiety ratchet up. Turkle was muttering into his headset how he copied, grunting, he assumed, to Braden. Poscalar checked the darkening heavens above, west and north. He thought he glimpsed a dark splotch beyond the high-rise apartments, too far north to make out with any firm detail, there then gone, but he was sure it was a helicopter.
Poscalar watched as Turkle hung the radio on his belt, one leg pressing the money bag against his seat. “Is there something you wish to tell me?” Poscular asked.
“Everything’s under control, Colonel.”
“Then why do you keep watching the sky? Are we being followed?”
“If that’s true, it’s nothing Hanover or I can’t handle.”
Poscalar grunted. He fingered his crucifix, suddenly wishing to a God he hadn’t prayed to since he was a boy that he shared the henchman’s confidence.
BOLAN WASN’T SURE WHY, but he turned south, allowing Turkle and Poscalar to go their own way for the time being. At least three stops he knew of were on the hit parade, but the Executioner had a gut feeling two or three more safehouses were going to leave bodies chalk-lined by the authorities before he evacced by chopper. Unless it went to hell on round one, and his War Everlasting screeched to its final bloody stop.
He was driving toward the deep southeastern corner of the city. He already knew who but, more importantly, what waited at the end of the line, a faint but mounting angry stir in his heart assuring him he couldn’t jumpstart the blitz any more pure and right. If the promised payments matched shooters inside, Bolan figured twelve or thirteen hardmen, tops were on-site. He had a few moments to spare assessing his situation.
Michaels was left to patrol the skies and track Turkle and Hanover as best he could, but Bolan had to believe there weren’t too many GMCs with blacked out windows roving the city. With his own GPS monitor, the locations of the meets already nailed down and Michaels above, Bolan knew the only factor that would keep him from a date with dispatching death was the snail’s pace traffic. Or the police.
Stop number one would surely get the cannibal avalanche tumbling, he knew, but then what? It didn’t escape the warrior that Braden surely knew he’d bolted Camp Triangle, now in pursuit, with questionable motives. That his quarry would be alerted they were being tracked was something Bolan counted on. Whether or not he, in fact, was being led into ambush, Bolan hoped they pushed panic buttons, just the same, started shooting without warning, erasing all gray from the equation.
Bolan took in the compound on the slow roll, unimpressed with what he viewed at first look. Nothing by way of surveillance—sat dishes or antennas on the roofline—nor even mounted cameras that he could detect on the retaining wall. It told him the targets were arrogant, had the local authorities well-greased or both. Turning into a cul-de-sac, he spotted the narrow mouth of an alley, midway around the dead end block ringed three-quarters by squat dark structures, which at first hard look appeared abandoned.
The Executioner backed the GMC into the dark void, hoping for a quick and easy getaway when the smoke began to clear. Shutting down all systems, satisfied the immediate area was free of stragglers or watching eyes, Bolan fell out. Quickly he pulled on the knee-lengt
h black leather trench coat. It was custom made courtesy of the Farm, outfitted with deep pockets and slits on both sides to store extra clips, webbing lined down each wing to hold grenades. For urban combat, passing at first glance as a regular citizen out for an evening stroll, it was as good as it would get. Weighed down and bulked out with enough ammo to start a small war, Bolan factored in a slight reduction in speed and agility. He intended to compensate for that with one last piece of hardware.
Pocketing the keys, hauling out the M-16 with full clip and a 40 mm HE round set to fly, Bolan gave the Paraguay haven for Brazilian policia militar a last look. The good news was that it set alone from other nearby structures, park and promenade, all revelry and traffic nightmares safe from collateral damage for what he had in mind. It looked to be little more than a two-story warehouse, wooden shutters closed, but two sentries were standing guard at the front door, smoking, gold-bricking, passing a small tray or glass pane between them, each one taking turns stuffing a tube up their nose. The party boys, though, were armed with HK G-3 assault rifles. From the cell intercepts, Bolan had a strong clue what was inside the walls, but all questions would be answered in short order.
The Farm had managed to run down a name from the intercept with Poscalar and faxed him the cannibal’s pedigree, with mug shot, spelling out his crimes and known associates likewise believed to be on the lam and inside those walls. Aside from drug trafficking, bribery and corruption, the Poscalar stooge was wanted back in Rio for multiple counts of murder. From rival drug dealers to street urchins it apparently made little difference who they butchered, and it seemed the cannibal in question had a love for setting places and things, but especially orphaned urchins, on fire.
Under the roof in this dark secluded corner of Ciudad del Este Bolan strongly suspected at least a full squad of Brazilian death squad military police was gathered. That in mind, he reached inside the GMC, delved into his war bag on the passenger floor. Why not? he decided. If he was going to make noise enough to blast open the gates of hell, why not bring his little friend to the party, make sure what went down stayed down.
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