Which was why he was flying solo at his insistence, the two Stony Man blacksuits in the cockpit, Michaels manning the mother of all Gatling guns in the open hatchway.
While the flying armada consisted of three Black Hawks and two Apaches, Bolan personal choice of gunship was the black helicopter special. Informed by his crew the hybrid Huey-Black Hawk was built for speed and maneuverability after a preflight check, the armament was what turned the corner in Bolan’s decision. The M-61 Vulcan Gatling gun in 20 mm was mounted on a short-legged tripod, welded into the floorboards. The revolving six-barreled cannon could spew up to 6,000 armor-piercing rounds per minute from the linkless feed in the storage drum. With the weapon in the capable hands of Michaels, the Executioner was more than confident he had all the cover from above he would require.
The rest, when he hit the ground, was up to him.
There was no point running enemy numbers through his mind, as he saw the flaming shells of two downed gunships illuminating the mist below, dozens of bodies—or what was left of them—strewed down a precipice, more certain to be pancaked on the gorge floor. The good general claimed a hundred and change in shooters, between the renegade Turks, their American counterparts and the terrorists on the glacier, with a possibility some Kurds might show up for the big event. Oxygen bottles were optional, but Thomas indicated they weren’t going much higher than two thousand feet.
So much for a potential Ark sighting.
Part of the team, more or less, but Bolan was braced for anything.
He began wondering if Braden had even made the scene when he suddenly spotted the commotion on the narrow plateau above the carnage spread around the downed Black Hawk.
He saw maybe a half-dozen men in orange jumpsuits, limping or stumbling up a snowy embankment, several of them prying weapons from the hands of bodies littering the way. With darkness falling over the mountain, it was near impossible to positively identify another group of armed stragglers lurching onto the plateau.
And it hit Bolan again.
That instinctive tug, as if he was being guided to the next battlefront by some unseen force, reaching out and grabbing him.
The Executioner relayed new orders to his blacksuits.
JABIR NAHAB FELT the panic rising around him. No, he corrected, it was a mindless rage that had gripped the three men he assumed were in charge, edging fast toward murder.
He listened as they screamed at one another about how to proceed. The Turk general was torn between his radioman and the bellowing of the ones he knew as Locklin and Hawke. The Turk demanded they wait for reinforcements, look poised to begin unloading his M-16 on the Americans who likewise, he sensed, were on the edge of cutting loose with their weapons. A do or die stand.
And where would that leave him? he wondered.
Whatever had happened back in the gorge had demolished their strategy. Now, at their moment of impending failure and doom, they were ready to turn on one another like wild beasts, backs to the corner. If they started shooting, he knew he had no choice but to attempt a bull rush through the falling bodies, a headlong dive out the door, then hurl himself at the mercy of his fellow holy warriors.
He’d explain himself, about leading the infidels here. He offered a silent prayer to Allah they showed mercy. After all, hadn’t he suffered the worst at the hands of the infidels beatings and such? Surely, it was preordained he was there, breathing free air, ready, stronger and more determined than ever to take up the sword of jihad. Assuming the infidel problem was solved, he could lead them to countless contacts, fighters who were more than willing to drive the imperial occupation force of barbarians from all of the Middle East. There were freedom fighters in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as far away as Indonesia…
They were landing on the glacier, regardless of the heated argument, where he knew the stockpile was hidden deep in a cave at the northern edge. As they touched down with a jolt, he saw Locklin pluck a mike off the wall, stab a button. His senses rocked by their shouting, rotor wash and his own cold fear, Nahab barely made out the demand Locklin boomed over the glacier from the loudspeaker. He wanted to deal, money in hand, for a portion of the stockpile. There was no need for a shooting war. They could negotiate. He was sending out one of their own to talk.
And just who might that be? Nahab bitterly thought, staring into the blackness beyond the open doorway, braced for an RPG bombardment that would blow him into a thousand pieces. Then Locklin wheeled on him, grabbed him by the shoulder and snarled, “Come here. You’re going to be my messenger. You’re going to tell your boys we’re not leaving without a big fat sweet chunk of that stockpile. Money or bullets, they can decide. Everyone will die here, no one gets squat unless they deal with us.”
Nahab hesitated, then Locklin slung him out the door where he pitched to the ground, face plowing down into snow.
Beyond the whine of the gunship’s rotors, he strained his ears, but heard only ominous silence. There was no movement anywhere on the glacier, but he knew they were out there, everywhere, perhaps thirty fighters all with AKs and RPGs poised to unload. Locklin was barking for him to get moving. He shivered and got to his feet. With the snow swirling in his face, he shuddered forward, decided to raise his arms.
Surrender. Negotiate.
What else could he do?
He was looking around, sensed he was being watched, when two armed shadows came leaping over the edge of an upraised horizontal slab of rock, no more than a dozen feet in front of him. And Nahab froze at the sight of the suicide bombers as they landed, and charged.
There was screaming and cursing from the Black Hawk at the sight of the martyrs, their torsos wrapped with canisters, and Nahab—having heard the rumors—suspected what was the payload they were about to unleash. The stammer of combined autofire, his enemies leaping from the doorway behind and the horrifying reality of what was surging into their blazing weapons jolted sudden electricity through his limbs. He was bolting left, northbound, trying to put lightning distance between himself and the horror he knew was on the way, when white-hot pain tore down his side.
Nahab fell to the snow, knew he’d been shot.
He looked back, saw the martyrs forging into the pounding wave of bullets, remote boxes in hand. Crabbing ahead, mind ripped by silent screams, he heard the thunder peal its nightmare doom from behind. They were shrieking like banshees, weapons now silent, as images of how they were dying propelled him harder, faster in his scramble. He cried for deliverance from Allah, hoping he was spared from the obscene injustice of it all.
Then the hideous chemical odor washed over his senses and trapped the scream in his throat as the vapor flooded into his lungs.
27
The ghosts of battles past were calling out to him, howling in rage, groaning in misery of their mortal wounds, hungry to drag him down into the abyss. Braden believed he could hear the angry cry of the dead and the damned in the wind, feel their pain in the hot blood running from the deep gash on his scalp as he ripped off the hood and flung it away.
Failure.
Death.
And the signs of doom were everywhere. Kurds. Arabs. His own black-clad marauders, the team down to three—make that four, including his angry war dog hide—and they weren’t in the best of shape. Mauled and torn. Scorched from fire, moaning and cursing as they trudged, bleeding in the snow, weapons ready.
He saw bodies and severed limbs, puddled guts and gore wherever he navigated across the plateau. Smoking black mummies melting the snow on the promontory behind. Incredibly, he found six, maybe more of the Arabs had made the jump, a few of them crying out to him, as if he was their savior.
As if he gave a damn.
Fuck ’em.
Com link and radio gone with the blast or ripped from his head by shrapnel during the leap, he had no way to call Locklin and Hawke for a pick up. They would climb the high ground, make the glacier.
Kick some heavy ass.
He shrugged off the hellis
h memories of Afghanistan, Brazil and now this debacle, vectoring parallel to a wash, maybe eight feet deep by his reckoning. The pitiful bastards behind were about to be treated to a subgun burst, Braden thinking he should put them out of his misery. But the Arabs had armed themselves with discarded Kurd AK-47s. He heard the whining of rotor blades. Wheeling, hoping it was Locklin—
Then that heartbeat of joy was dashed to hell when the black helicopter sliced through the clouds and the door gunner cut loose with the heavy metal thunder of a Gatling gun. He was jumping into the wash, howling with rage, as he glimpsed at least two of his men obliterated into dark blossoming clouds by what he had to assume were some major league armor-piercing rounds.
He left them to disintegrate.
And he had to laugh.
The cavalry had arrived, all but sealing his doom.
Well, he wasn’t going down, at least not without a roar of lions. He found Cronin had made cover, then the commando hollered, “Grenade!”
Spotting the steel egg as it bounced up damn near in Cronin’s lap, Braden was hauling himself the other way when the lethal baseball blew. He was airborne on the tails of fire, heard himself scream as flying steel piranhas chewed up his backside.
The stink of cordite and blood swam in his nose, as he landed on a slab of rock. The horrible racket of that Gatling gun thundered on, Arabs on the plateau getting shoved through the meat grinder. Smoke drifted over his head, boiling down the wash, as he grimaced against fresh waves of fire racing down his back. He sensed a presence and hauled in his weapon as the tall shadow seemed to materialize out of the darkness and the smoke. He was bringing up the HK 33, when he hesitated, recognizing the manner in which the black wraith moved, made out those familiar icy blue eyes burning back at him from behind the hangman’s hood.
Stone.
And he sounded off a final bitter chuckle, finger taking up slack on the HK’s trigger but Washington’s black op SOB opened fire, drilling the ultimate and last failure through his chest.
ZHABAT WEPT. It wasn’t so much from the pain, but the horror he found between his legs. Someone had shot him. He raged at the unknown source of his nightmare, when he’d clung to the ledge of the outcrop. One or several rounds through his ass, it didn’t matter. Whoever the devil, he had blown off his manhood, balls and all.
He screamed as he reached down, saw his intestines sliding through his fingers, the yellow-red-brown mass like gruesome serpents in the glowing halo of firelight.
Oh, Allah, how could this be? Why?
Blubbering, he crawled through the snow, trailing tears and blood, crying out in a voice of pure agony and anguish, demanding to know of Allah why he hadn’t left him behind in Brazil, spared him this most shameful of fates.
He was jolted by screams other than his own. Out on the plateau, he saw his brother jihadists being dismembered by the furious thunder and lightning of a massive machine gun with spinning barrels. He stared up the black helicopter, the doomsday weapon and the black-clad demon manning it. He was frozen by the sight of bodies erupting like giant gore-filled balloons, men literally blown to bits of meat and gristle out of their shoes.
The roar of that revolving weapon, the pounding rotor wash sliced white-hot agony through his brain.
He screamed, vomited, then slithered back to the relative safety of the outcrop, pried an AK-47 from the hand of severed arm along the way.
The trumpet of doom abruptly stopped. He heard the sound of his bitter weeping, retching, spitting. He searched the plateau, peering into the wafting spirals of smoke and mist. The chopper rose.
He was sure he spotted a big armed shadow, somewhere in the smoke, believed it was headed his way, but the figure was there, then gone, as if the pall had absorbed him into invisibility.
“Help me! I’m wounded!” he shouted. “Help me!”
And he sobbed on, lifted the AK-47.
The shadow parted the smoke to his right, the massive assault rifle with fixed grenade launcher rising. He heard the weapon roar.
IT WAS A BAD WAY TO DIE. The way he understood it, recalling how his science crew and weapons engineers had explained the effects during litmus tests on Kurd subjects, a fifteen-syllable enzyme in the nervous system—acetyl-something—was fried on first whiff. Nervous system in vapor lock, there was instant heart and respiratory meltdown, though he’d witnessed such fierce convulsions a victim could break his own bones as he suffocated, burning up from within in mindless agony. Colorless, odorless and invisible, a dollop the size of a pinhead could kill a dozen men within minutes, depending on wind, grouping of victims and such. The trick was prolonging the potency of the agent once it was dispersed. Requisite thickeners were added to slow evaporation. There were nonpersistent and persistent agents, he knew, the former made useless by the simple donning of a HAZMAT suit, the latter capable of contaminating an area for days.
He knew the VX dropping the enemy on the glacier was somewhere in-between.
Rising from behind his boulder, Mohammed could fairly assume he owned the mountain. He liked the sound of that, as he rolled it back through his head. Mohammed of the Mountain. Careful, he cautioned himself. The arrogance of the enemy had gotten them killed. And negotiate? For what? Even if they had all the money in the world, he wasn’t about to be duped by their treachery.
Fools. Dead ones at that.
The second Black Hawk vanished in a roiling fireball as his fighters slammed the gunship with a slew of RPG warheads, blasting it all over the glacier, nothing but flying, smoking wreckage and minced human flesh smearing the snow and ice. Between rotor wash, wind gusts and explosions, they were out of harm’s way of VX extermination, though he caught a faint whiff of what smelled like pesticide.
He was walking down the incline, pleased with the utter destruction of fools who would dare believe they could deceive him when the first of several explosions tore through the glacier, freezing him in midstride. They wore four gunships, according to his spotters, the Apache and the last Black Hawk down, so what in the—
Mohammed began charging for the cave entrance, shouting at his troops to fall back, secure the stockpile, when he spotted two Apaches streaking in from the southwest, Chain guns roaring, Hellfires flaming away from rocket pods.
THE STOREKEEPERS didn’t stand a chance.
Hellfires, Chain gun and Black Hawk minigun annihilation were pounding the slopes on all points around the glacier, mangled figures flying, or sliced and diced where they stood their ground.
Not a hope in the hell where they were going.
The Executioner bounded out the door, quarter-inch spikes on his combat boots digging into the ice pack as he began picking off targets with his M-16, dropping two hardmen out of the gate, twin whirling dervishes that dropped out of sight behind snow-covered boulders now slick with crimson. With Thomas already alerted to his arrival, Bolan left Michaels to a sweep on his six. Platoon strength blacksuits, he saw, began mopping up on foot as they chased down rabbits or shot the terrorists where they roosted.
Gas mask on, Bolan marched double-time for the cave, as he found squad-strength blacksuits with protective covering penetrating the natural armory provided by the brute force of Mother Nature. The glacier swathed in firelight, visibility was not a problem, as the Executioner picked out two more enemy guardians and waxed them where they fired, one o’clock, above the maw.
Down and out.
Sporadic bursts trailed the warrior into the cave. He patched through to Thomas, rolling on, as the strike force fanned out before him. Moments later, as he closed on a huge bowl-shaped depression, the general intercepted him before he descended into an armory that would lay to rest the mystery of the WMD.
It was quite the cache. First look, and Bolan figured a few thousand shells of various size and shape.
When Bolan saw the bald black man strip off his gas mask, he followed the all-clear.
Thomas appeared his usual seething self as he barked into his com link, then turned on Bolan. “Nice of
you to make the show, Colonel Stone.”
The Executioner glanced away from Thomas, saw a three-man team, trailed by the Turk MIT threesome sweep past and descend into the WMD armory. One of the men had a backpack strapped around his shoulders. Bolan began to understand the absence of HAZMAT teams.
Unbelievable, he thought. All the dead, the innocent, the good and the wicked, gone to the next world, whether to seek out or cover the truth. Kicking down one door after another to get to the truth himself. In the here and now, at the end of the road where the answers stood before him. And it was all destined to be nuked up the mountain.
It felt wrong.
Bolan watched as the man set the pack down in front of the first row of standing shells and ripped away its Velcro covering. He then inserted a key, a series of red-lit numbers flashing up. Bolan sounded a grim chuckle as the man began punching in the access code.
“You find something amusing about all this?” Thomas growled.
“Is this a political or a military call?”
“Both. Neither. I got my orders, straight from CENTCOM, if you care to read them.”
Bolan let the M-16 hang by his leg. “I’ll take your word on that.”
“Damn straight you will. I don’t know who you are or how you got dipped in presidential honey, but it’s my party from here on. I suggest you evac. Plenty of time, thirty minutes and counting as of this moment, for you to make our refuel pit stop on the way back to Incirlik. Then this mountain goes up and buries this garbage with the help of eight kilotons.”
Bolan slowly shook his head, grunted.
“You got a problem with this?”
“I have lots of problems, General.”
“Don’t make me one of them. What you see about to happen here is something you will take to the grave with you—how that happens is up to you. Understood?”
Triangle of Terror Page 18