Contagion Option

by Don Pendleton

  “No. But there are demolitions of old munitions,” Bolan answered. “One problem.” He lifted a small monocular to his eye. The compact telescope showed trucks overloaded with crates and palettes. “They’re stuffed.”

  Graham accepted the monocular and took a look. “Pretty dodgy setup.”

  “Almost as if they were carrying twice as much as what they should,” Bolan said. “But one thing’s concerning me.”

  “Those aren’t American-size artillery shells,” Graham said as he looked at one crate. “More like Soviet.”

  Bolan nodded. “And the crew setting up the trucks are ignoring that little discrepancy.”

  “Think it might be leftover from Iraq or Afghanistan?”

  “Not in that amount,” Bolan replied. “And take a closer look at the shells.”

  “Not Arabic…some kind of Kanji.”

  “Like Japanese…”

  “Or Korean,” Graham finished.

  Bolan’s jaw set firmly. “If these guys aren’t involved in the conspiracy, then they must have pudding for brains.”

  “The Korean shells are detonated, while the outdated, but still usable American munitions are sent on to another location?” Graham asked.

  Bolan put his monocular away. “Exactly. Those must be part of Mojo’s handpicked crew.”

  “Let’s pay them a little visit, then, so we can get back to Stretch,” Graham suggested.

  Bolan checked for any sign of other soldiers in the area, his Walther slipping into his hand. “Take the right flank.”

  The Executioner and Graham separated and closed in on the weapon smugglers.

  STAN READER RACED down the stairwell, Pave hot on his heels. He vaulted a rail and dropped fifteen feet to a lower landing, hitting the floor in a crouch to absorb the weight of the sudden stop. He was tempted to pull his suppressed handgun, but so far he’d been lucky enough to avoid attracting the attention of the facility security.

  However, it would only be a matter of a few more minutes before someone discovered the office worker that Pave had killed with a single blow, or the torn door to the stairwell. Reader thought that jamming the handle would have bought him some time, but Pave’s shoulder had proved a battering ram that even the reinforced metal of the fire-resistant door couldn’t stop.

  Reader cut onto the second floor of the laboratory complex and found a cubicle farm. He disappeared into the darkened office; the morning shift hadn’t arrived at a little after 0600. He slipped into one cubicle before the stairwell exploded open, hinges tearing under Pave’s thundering assault.

  Reader, for an instant, wondered if even the power of the suppressed .40 would stop the rampaging hulk on his heels.

  Pave glanced around, his tiny eyes glinting in the half light when his cell phone warbled. Reader clenched down more tightly, fingers wrapped around the wooden grips of his Skorpion revolver. Thinking better of using the gun, he reached for his PDA and thumbed it to “clone” mode to listen in on the cellular signal.

  Finally the incessant ringtones of the phone cut through Pave’s rage.

  “What?” Pave rumbled. “I’ve got Reader on base…”

  “Why in the hell did you kill—” came Stevens’s raging yell before Pave’s words cut through. “Reader? He’s here? Get back to the lab.”

  “But he’s down here,” Pave said into the phone, venturing out into the cubicle farm. “And if he’s here…”

  “If he’s here, then so are the others. Somehow they slipped through security,” Stevens noted. “We’re evacuating now.”

  Pave glanced around and backed toward the stairwell. “All right.”

  “Meet me at the helipad. We’re heading to our fallback,” Stevens said.

  Pave turned and lurched into the stairwell.

  Reader stood and took off after Pave. He tested his earphone communicator, and then noticed that the ear wire had been torn when he’d scurried out of Pave’s lethal grasp a second time. He cursed and plugged the communicator into his PDA.

  “Striker, Kirby. Hurry up, they’re onto us,” he announced.

  BOLAN HEARD Reader’s warning just before the men loading up the trucks reacted to one man’s announcement. They pulled out concealed handguns, scanning in a ring around them for incoming threats.

  Bolan leveled the P-99 and fired a single shot into the forehead of one of the BDU-clad conspirators, the .40-caliber hollowpoint round chewing through skull bone and blossoming like a copper-and-lead flower in brain tissue. The gunman jerked violently, a stream of blood and pulped nerve tissue jetting out of the bullet hole. Bolan swung toward a second smuggler who opened fire into the rafters after guessing where the lethal shot had originated, shouting that the infiltrators were behind them.

  The shooter didn’t know exactly where Bolan or Graham were at, but the fact that he was cutting loose with a Beretta was enough of a reason to cut him down, before he got lucky with a wild shot or a ricochet. Bolan punched a pair of .40-caliber manglers into the man’s chest, the powerful slugs chewing through muscle and bone to drill through to the vulnerable arteries and lung tissue beneath. The gunman collapsed, his pistol clattering to the concrete floor.

  Graham, from his vantage point, took out a third of the smugglers with two .40-caliber rounds to the base of his neck. With his head severed from his spine by the heavyweight slugs, the third target twisted violently firing his pistol into the concrete floor.

  Alarms exploded in the predawn silence, and the Executioner cursed the end of their stealth mission.

  He’d intended to take out most of the enemies quickly and quietly, grabbing one of the drivers to interrogate about the final destination of Stevens’s shipment of lethal warheads. However, the mastermind’s warning had turned this from a swift strike into a two-way gun battle, and the traitorous soldiers below didn’t have silencers. Their pistol fire put the entire base on alert.

  Bolan tagged another man in the leg, the powerful 180-grain slug snapping the fleeing conspirator’s femur. The man flopped to the ground, his pistol bouncing loose from stunned fingers as the others clambered onto the trucks. The four trucks tore out of the loading dock, their heavy cabs and thick tires immune to even the power of the silenced pistols they carried, due to their military construction. Without a rifle or a grenade launcher, there was no way that the Executioner could have slowed the enemy vehicles as they hightailed out of there.

  But, they had one prisoner. The man crawled toward his fallen pistol, but Graham put a bullet into the gun from his vantage point, tossing the mangled weapon farther out of the prisoner’s grasp. Bolan raced to a ladder and slid down the rails to the floor.

  Graham followed suit, only a few seconds slower.

  Bolan grabbed the wounded man by the collar and tugged him to his knees, so that his weight would half rest on the shattered thighbones. As agony cut through the conspirator, Bolan grabbed the man’s jaw and squeezed his face, applying pressure.

  “Where are those trucks going?” Bolan asked.

  “To the demolitions range,” he answered, trying to play dumb. Suddenly he jerked, and his eyes bulged in pain. Bolan looked down to see that Graham had kicked him in the broken leg. A burbling scream, accompanied by a flood of spittle, poured out over Bolan’s hand. “Ah, Jesus! Please don’t!”

  Bolan let go of the man and stepped back. “Sorry. But if you’re going to do this hard, I’m going to let Killer here twist your legs off.”

  Graham bent and grabbed the prisoner’s ankle, the one to the broken leg, and pulled up. The conspirator thrashed violently.

  Bolan scanned in the distance. Two Jeeps full of Dugway security forces were rolling on them. The doomsday numbers were running down, because there was no way he was going to shoot legitimate soldiers defending the installation.

  “Park City!” the man howled. “The trucks are going to Park City! Major Nelson has a place a few miles east of there!”

  “Major Nelson?” Graham asked. He turned the prisoner’s ankle, and Bolan he
ard bone grate against bone in the man’s thigh.

  “Major Nelson is the guy in charge of the smuggling…” the conspirator sobbed. “He’s got an airfield attached to his place in the hills.”

  “Mojo’s cover identity,” Bolan surmised.

  “Yeah…Mojo,” the prisoner gasped. “Please…please…stop hurting my leg…”

  Graham let go with a sneer. “Stretch…”

  “They’re getting on a stealth helicopter, Kirby!” Reader called over their communicator. “We’ll lose them!”

  “They’re headed for Park City,” Bolan announced. “Find us some transportation.”

  “Transportation, right,” Reader answered. “But security alerts are going off all over.”

  “We’ll have to find our own way out,” Bolan returned.

  The security Jeeps drew closer, and a sentry aimed an M-16 at them. Bolan grabbed Graham by the arm and the two of them ducked back into the loading dock. As they disappeared, rifle fire chopped after them.

  STAN READER WATCHED impotently as Pave and Stevens boarded the stealth helicopter and took off. He drew his silenced Walther and opened fire, but the Kevlar hull plates reflected the bullets as easily as they reflected radar emissions. The aircraft whirled and the pilot smirked at Reader before nosing the ship up and into the early morning sky. Reader emptied the pistol, but the chopper was already out of range. He reloaded and looked around.

  He was out of breath from trying to keep pace with Pave, the bodyguard’s long legs driving him along with all the grace and speed of an out-of-control locomotive. Reader shook his head, wondering where in the hell he was going to get a vehicle to get out of Dugway and take off after Stevens.

  Bolan had said that they were en route to Park City.

  Reader frowned.

  “That’s why I thought I was being watched,” he muttered as he scanned for available transportation.

  There weren’t many options. Trying to get a Jeep past the security checkpoints would require a miracle once the alerts locked down the gates. He’d need something the size of the two-and-a-half ton trucks that were normally used for transportation.

  From his vantage point at the helipad, he saw a line of trucks accelerate away from the munitions store point. There were five of them, and they zipped past Dugway security team Jeeps racing toward the warehouse.

  Reader looked at the hangars and saw another of the stealth helicopters. He raced toward it, hoping that he would be able to get it working. He didn’t have a clue as how to hot-wire a chopper, but at least it was better than nothing.

  MACK BOLAN SWUNG around the side of the loading dock doors with his .44 Magnum Taurus and triggered a single massive slug into the grille of one of the racing Jeeps. The powerful 240-grain bullet punched through the sheet metal of the Jeep and plowed through the engine housing, disrupting pistons. Smoke poured from the hood as the vehicle bled off speed.

  The security team in the second Jeep, however, reacted quickly, pulling to a halt by the stalled first vehicle, riflemen in the back cutting loose with their M-16s to pepper the spot where Bolan had fired from. The Executioner, however, had fallen back, looking around for options to get out of the warehouse. He turned to see Kirby Graham climb into the forklift. Its diesel engine thrummed and he ran the vehicle up toward them.

  “We won’t have any protection,” Graham admitted, “but they’re wheels.”

  “I slowed the teams, but we don’t have long,” Bolan told him. “Grab that pallette over there.”

  Graham glanced and spotted that the pallette that Bolan had indicated was loaded with mortar shells. “If they take a shot at us…Oh, yeah…”

  “They’ll hold their fire once they recognize what we’re hauling. Those things will make a big dent in the warehouse if they go off,” Bolan explained. He hopped onto the back of the forklift as Graham picked up the pallette.

  “Let’s hope they’re not trigger-happy,” Graham mentioned as he threw the forklift into gear and wheeled around. The pallette made it hard to see from the driver’s seat. Bolan, however, had a better vantage point from his position on the back. The Executioner held on to the .44 Magnum pistol, in case he needed to keep the heads down from the security team.

  As they lurched into the open, one of the security men bellowed through a bullhorn.

  “Halt! Throw down your weapons!”

  Bolan leveled his weapon at the crate of mortar shells. He replied to the Dugway sentries in his loudest parademarch bellow. “This is three hundred pounds of high explosives with impact fuses!”

  The security team’s rifles wavered for a moment.

  “Back off!” Bolan ordered, his big six-inch-barreled revolver, shiny and massive, very obvious as it was pointed at the mortar shells. “You’re well within the blast radius!”

  Graham glanced at the revolver in Bolan’s hand. His finger was off the trigger, and the pistol wasn’t cocked. There was no chance that he could accidentally send a .44 slug into the deadly payload on the forks of their lift. But from their distance, the riflemen protecting Dugway wouldn’t be able to see that.

  “Hit reverse and back around the warehouse,” Bolan said. “If we get too far from the other munitions, they might risk taking a shot at us.”

  “But with us behind the cover of the warehouse we’ll be okay…for a few moments,” Graham responded.

  “Buying some time for Reader to pull a miracle,” Bolan mentioned.

  Graham threw the gearbox into reverse, backing the forklift away from the security Jeeps. He heard more engines. “Who’s coming?”

  “Two Hummers,” Bolan responded. “With mounted machine guns.”

  “The security team would have told them about the mortar shells, right?” Graham asked, accelerating backward toward the corner of the warehouse.

  “Duck!” Bolan shouted.

  Heavy weapons fire chattered and one of the wheels of the forklift exploded out from under the vehicle. Graham tried to recover as the bottom of the vehicle scraped and ground on the concrete, and he watched helplessly as the crate of mortar shells tumbled off the tines of the forklift. Bolan grabbed him by the collar and hauled him out of the driver’s seat.

  The two men scrambled, using the crippled forklift for cover. The Hummers accelerated, racing past the bulk of the wounded vehicle, .50-caliber machine guns tracking them as they disappeared behind the corner.

  In another few moments, the Dugway security men would have a clear shot at Bolan and Graham, and there was no way that even their body armor could slow down the lethal power of the heavy machine guns.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The helicopter was fueled and ready for action. As opposed to the black-hulled, no-tail rotor version of the Bell JetRanger that Mojo and Pave escaped on, this was a teardrop-shaped Hughes 500D, also equipped with the cylindrical tail boom. Stan Reader crawled into the cockpit and looked it over. It was ready to fly, but sitting inside the hangar, it would require a small tow-cart to roll it out into the open.

  Reader didn’t have enough time for that. He didn’t even have time to work off the standard checklist. He wished desperately that he’d spent more time on this particular model of helicopter, having only a total of twenty five hours training with the little craft. He had one thousand hours certification with the JetRanger model.

  The engine turned over on the first try and Reader powered up the throttle. Out of the domed windshield, he spotted two machine-gun-armed Jeeps racing across the tarmac toward the munitions warehouse, and Reader’s stomach twisted.

  He fired up the collective to takeoff speeds and the Hughes, smaller and more nimble than he was used to, popped into the air twenty feet. Luckily, he regained control of the bird before smashing the rotors into the roof structure of the hangar. The doors were open, but Reader swallowed hard.

  It would be like threading a needle with a Mack truck. The agile Little Bird twitched as he adjusted the joystick, and he pushed the collective to full power. He nosed the Hughes down and rac
ed forward.

  Bolan and Graham wouldn’t have much time, not with the heavy security vehicles racing for them. He had to get out.

  The stick wobbled against his grasp, but Reader held it steady, roaring through the hangar doors. The NOTOR boom bounced behind him against the top of the entrance, and through the top of the cockpit dome, he could see how close the top lip of the entrance had come to his rotors. But now, he saw only cloudy skies above him and he put the 500D into a powerful climb, building speed and momentum as he swung the aircraft into an arc. The helicopter twisted under his control and he swung toward the Hummers.

  In the distance, he could see two antlike figures on a forklift, backing away with a payload of crates hanging on its forks.

  Whatever was on the palette had to have been something that would give the Dugway security riflemen some pause. He switched on the radios and heard a soldier announce that the forklift was loaded with mortar shells with impact fuses.

  The gunners in the Hummers popped into position behind their heavy machine guns.

  “I’m going to take out the wheels,” one announced. “I have a clear shot.”

  “Take it,” the security chief announced.

  Another radio signal cut through Reader’s hearing.

  “Bio-Two, Bio-Two, you have not filed a flight plan!” Dugway Central Air Traffic Control announced. “Stay out of munitions warehouse area! Security aircraft are to arrive in area within thirty seconds.”

  Reader looked out the window and saw two fat, beetle-shaped Black Hawk UH-60 helicopters hanging in the air. Door guns hung lazily on their sides, ready to lay down fields of fire in case the infiltrators tried to escape with the lethal munitions from the warehouse.

  In the distance, he noticed the convoy of two-and-a-half-ton trucks blasting through the gates.

  “Bio-Two! Bio-Two! Return to pad!” Dugway CAT repeated.

  “Alert! Convoy breaching perimeter defenses!” another security man’s voice called. “Not stopping. Not responding to warning shots.”

  Reader accelerated the Hughes over the tops of the two machine-gun-armed Hummers, blinding the men on the heavy weapons with the whipping winds from his rotor wash. He could see the forklift, overturned. Graham and Bolan, though, were crouched beside the warehouse, shaken but otherwise unharmed.