Lethal Payload

by Don Pendleton

  The man stared at Bolan’s weapon where it lay and then at the empty holster on Bolan’s thigh. “Pistol, asshole.”

  Bolan kept his hands open and down by his hips. “I gave it to Famke.”

  The man sneered and stepped out of the stairwell. “Where are your Australian SAS friends?”

  Bolan had immense respect for the Australian SAS, but they were on the Indian Ocean side of Java and had chosen the wrong island. When Bolan’s intel told him where the bad guys were, he hadn’t had time to wait.

  “I’m alone,” Bolan said.

  The man shook his head in disgust. “American cowboy asshole.”

  Bolan remained silent.

  The man gave Bolan’s weapon system an appreciative look and kicked it into a far corner of the room.

  In a split second Bolan’s hand was behind his back. He twisted and shoved the snub-nosed Smith & Wesson forward in a fencer’s lunge. The kidnapper raised his rifle, but Bolan was already in motion. He aimed and squeezed the trigger.

  The gunman’s head snapped back as if he had taken a hard jab to the jaw. His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the matting.

  “Diwangkara!” a voice shouted from the cellar. The voice rose in urgency. “Diwangkara!”

  “Diwangkara’s dead,” Bolan said as he crossed the matting and reclaimed his rifle. He crouched by the hatchway. “And so are you, unless Pieter Ryssemus walks up those stairs now.”

  “Preacherman injured,” was the reply.

  “So carry him.” Bolan put a fresh magazine into the carbine and racked the action. “Like your life depended on it.”

  Bolan took a fragmentation grenade from his belt and pulled the pin. He retained the grenade with his fingers clamped on the cotter lever. He tossed the pin down the stairs and listened to it clink on the steps. He took a moment to let that sink in downstairs. “Dutch Intelligence and the Australians want the missionaries.” Bolan let that sink in for a moment, as well. “You come up right now and bring Pieter Ryssemus with you, alive, or you’ll join Diwangkara.”

  Waiting for the response, Bolan monitored the noises outside. Adamsite was a persistent gas, and its effects lasted for hours, but the island was several kilometers in diameter, and he by no means had control of it.

  “I come up,” the man in the cellar said.

  “Do it slow.”

  The timbers of the stairs creaked.

  Pieter Ryssemus appeared in the hatchway. Bolan stayed stone-faced as the missionary staggered up the steps. He was a tall man, but his upper body listed in an ugly fashion from a broken collarbone. He was missing several fingers, and his body was covered with burns, bruises and wounds. The missionary had been tortured, not by professional interrogators or even amateurs wanting information. He had been tortured by those who had given in to their hatred. They had tortured the old man for the pleasure it had given them.

  There was a Swedish Carl Gustav submachine gun pressed to the old man’s temple. The kidnapper stood behind the Dutchman, using his prisoner as a shield. He held Ryssemus’s injured arm cruelly twisted behind his back. Most of the terrorist was hidden behind the missionary’s body. His eyes glared over the top of his weapon, and he wore a red turban like the rest of his sect. Tattoos crawled up the corded muscles of his forearms. Ryssemus flinched as the gun muzzle was rammed even harder into his skull. The terrorist smiled and revealed missing teeth.

  “Drop your gun, GI.”

  The laser sight on Bolan’s carbine clicked on with pressure from his hand, and a red dot appeared just below the kidnapper’s turban.

  “Drop yours,” Bolan replied.

  The man’s hand whitened on the grip of the submachine gun. “Drop your gun!” he screamed.

  Bolan frowned and lowered his rifle slightly.

  The terrorist grinned. He did not notice the red laser dot came to rest on his gun hand. “Now, GI, you—”

  Brass sprayed as the action of Bolan’s carbine clicked. The Swedish submachine gun fell from the shredded remnants of the terrorist’s hand. Ryssemus fell from his grip as the kidnapper’s eyes widened in horror at the sight of his wound.

  The expression became his death mask as Bolan put a 3-round burst through his chest.

  The kidnapper tumbled down the stairwell. Pieter Ryssemus collapsed on the floor. Bolan moved swiftly down the stairs. The terrorist lay sprawled in the lower chamber. Bloodstains on the floor and the fetid air of human suffering attested to what the lower room had been used for. Bolan found the pin from his grenade and replaced it. He scanned the room swiftly and took several maps, documents and a cell phone. He knelt beside the dead man and peered at his arm intently. Among the writhing tribal tattoos was a distinctive shield. An Asiatic dragon coiled across the background. Superimposed over the dragon was a very western looking cartoon owl. Above the owl was a tiny, stylized parachute canopy.

  The dead man was also wearing dog tags.

  Bolan memorized the tattoo. He snapped the dog tags from around the man’s neck and took the knife that was sheathed in his sash.

  The soldier went back up the stairs. The old man groaned. “Famke?”

  “She’s safe. She’s waiting for us.” Bolan surveyed the missionary grimly. He was in bad shape. “Sir, can you walk?”

  “I prayed to God for salvation, and you came.” He clasped Bolan with his good arm and struggled to rise. Bolan had to do most of the work to get Ryssemus on his feet, but the old man steadied himself and nodded. “But God also helps those who help themselves, and I will walk from this place.” The ghost of a smile passed over Pieter Ryssemus’s mashed lips. “But I do not know if I can run.” He looked down at the submachine gun on the floor. “Swedish.”

  Bolan scooped up the weapon. “Can you shoot?”

  “I was a soldier in the army before I became a soldier of God.” The missionary slung the weapon over his good shoulder and took the grip in his hand. He looked back down the stairs at his torturer. “And we are among men who have fallen from the grace of any God I know. I will pray for their souls.” The smile ghosted back across the old man’s face. “But later.”

  Bolan nodded. Missionary life was hard. They often went where disease, poverty and human suffering were at their absolute worst. The Executioner had only to look in the old man’s eyes to know he was about as tough as they came.

  The soldier clicked on his radio. “This is Striker. I have the package. I am extracting.”

  Ryssemus raised a hopeful eyebrow. “Helicopters are coming?”

  “I have a canoe.”

  The old man blinked.

  Bolan smiled. “Come on. We have a submarine to catch.”

  2

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  “Well, you’re the hero of the hour.” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman said, “That was about as slick a rescue op as has ever been done. One for the textbooks.” Kurtzman made a show of cringing in disgust and waving his hands. “An Adamsite gun, ugh! Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. The Cowboy is a sick man.”

  Bolan stared into the distance, distracted.

  Kurtzman grinned hopefully. “I hear a certain supermodel was suitably grateful.”

  Bolan frowned slightly but not at Kurtzman.

  The computer expert sighed. “What’s bothering you?”

  The soldier glanced at the sketch he had made. “What’d you make of the tattoo and the dog tags?”

  “A little, why?”

  “That guy was in command.”

  Kurtzman cocked his head. “What about Regog and Al-Juwanyi?”

  “It was their show,” Bolan agreed. “But the guy in the cellar was in command, at least tactically, and he wasn’t part of the ceremony. He was wearing a red turban. He was Javanese. He may have been Muslim, and he was definitely more than just another member of the pandekar’s sect.

  “Really?” Kurtzman’s interest was piqued. “How so?”

  “I don’t know.” Bolan shook his head slowly. “His vibe. He didn’t act like s
ome fanatic on guard duty who was missing out on the show of a lifetime. He was way too cool. If he was part of the congregation, he should have come up out of the cellar in berserker mode, foaming at the mouth with two feet of steel in each hand. Instead, he starts making like an FBI negotiator. I don’t think the riflemen he sent out were part of the party, either. I wish I’d had time to check them out.”

  Bolan sat back in his chair. “What’d you get on the sketch I gave you and the dog tags?”

  The Bear held up the tags. “These were simple enough. We’ve got his name, Pak Widjihartani, and his serial number, which implies to me that he at least made sergeant.”

  “You think he’s Indonesian army?”

  Kurtzman put down the tags. “I would, except that at the top of the tags are the letters LE.”

  Bolan raised an eyebrow.

  The computer expert grinned. “Légion Étrangère.”

  Bolan raised his other eyebrow. “You think our boy is French foreign legion?”

  “I’m betting he was. I’m running what I can on his dog tags now, but I don’t think I can get much without actually trying to break into Legion records, and I’d like to try and go the legitimate route first. We do not want to officially piss off the French foreign legion.” Kurtzman let out a long breath. “But I doubt very much your pal was acting in any official Legion capacity when you met him.”

  Bolan was forced to agree, but something about the scenario still bothered him. “How about the tattoo?”

  “I don’t know.” Kurtzman grunted noncommittally. “Some kind of insignia? I couldn’t find anything exactly like it in any open military databases, but soldiers have been giving themselves unofficial unit or specific mission patches and insignia since the French and Indian wars. If this is a legion insignia, I bet it’s an unofficial one, and not tolerated on formal uniform dress. I suspect it’s a custom job. Probably has to do with his company’s special role or a mission.” Kurtzman sighed again. “Assuming of course that he didn’t have it done when he was in the Indonesian army and then joined the legion later. A fair number of legionnaires are veterans of other services. I’m running a check to see if his name or the insignia pops up on any Indonesian or Asian military database we have, but so far we haven’t turned up anything. Of course, people who join the legion are allowed to change their names, and often do, so the one on the tag may not be the one his daddy gave him.”

  “Any other good news?”

  “Yeah.” Kurtzman grinned lopsidedly. “It’s a tattoo. He could have made the damn thing up when he was drunk.”

  “Bear,” Bolan said, sighing wearily, “what would you make of it?”

  “All right. Best guess.” He peered at the sketch again. “The dragon could mean anything, though if I had to bet, it probably has something to do with service in Asia. The owl might mean some kind of night operations. It’s a specialization in the legion. The parachute’s a no-brainer. Your boy was airborne, and in the French foreign legion, the paratroops are the elite.”

  Kurtzman wasn’t telling Bolan much he didn’t already know, but he was confirming his suspicions. The computer wizard stared at the sketch again. “These guys could be mercs. It’s not unknown for guys to get out of the foreign legion and go to work for someone else. ‘Legionnaire’ certainly has some prestige attached to it. Maybe the mullah felt that he needed some extra muscle with the United States and Australia hunting him.”

  Bolan had considered that. “He already had an island full of muscle with the pandekar and his boys. Both men were also very religious. Al-Juwanyi is Taliban and Regog is part of the al Qaeda cell network in Indonesia. Neither organization is known for hiring outsiders. These guys are definitely part of the puzzle.”

  “Okay, but making them fit isn’t going to be fun.”

  Bolan was all too aware of that. He trusted his instincts, but there were no facts to back them up or leads to take them anywhere. “What about the cell phone and the documents I collected on the island?”

  Kurtzman clicked a few keys on his keyboard. The monitor showed Carmen Delahunt rapidly pounding the keyboard at her workstation. She looked up and blew a lock of red hair away from her eyes. “What’s up, Aaron?”

  “Striker is here, and he’s hoping for some answers. Got any?”

  She punched up information. “The cell phone’s memory had some numbers in it. Several were to Jakarta, and not surprisingly, they were to phones that were stolen. One led to Bali, and again, dead-ended to a stolen phone. One anomaly was a number that led to French Guiana, which, as you can guess, dead-ended.”

  “The French foreign legion has its Jungle Warfare School in French Guiana,” Bolan said. “Bear, I want a country study, now.”

  Kurtzman began tapping keys, and a map of South America popped up on his screen. Information began scrolling. They read an encyclopedia-like description of the French colony.

  Bolan stared hard at the map inset on the screen. “What kind of transnational issues are we looking at?”

  “Very few. They’re always asking for increasing autonomy from France, but in public votes only a small percentage of the population supports seceding from France, and they’re not a violent faction. Their neighbor, Suriname, claims a strip of their territory between the River Litani and the River Marouini, but it’s never come to a military struggle. There is limited illicit marijuana growing along the coast, but that’s mostly for local consumption. Interpol considers them to be a minor drug transshipment point to Europe at best. Unemployment is a problem, but not monumental.”

  “What’s the Muslim population?”

  Kurtzman could see where Bolan was going. “Miniscule, not enough to register in official population charts. French Guiana is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. The Muslim community are immigrants, and most likely to be businessmen or university-educated professionals working for French companies.” The computer expert’s brow furrowed in thought, and he hit more keys. His map tracked westward and information scrolled. “Suriname, however, does have a significant Muslim population.”

  “From Java,” Bolan concluded.

  Kurtzman hit a key triumphantly. “Bingo. Suriname was a former Dutch colony, just like Indonesia, and the Dutch imported a lot of Javanese for labor.” He lost some of his exuberance. “But that still doesn’t get us anywhere. The Javanese are in Suriname, and there are almost none to speak of in French Guiana. It’s a nonissue.”

  “But our boy had a contact there.”

  “He called a phone number there. They’re two tiny countries on the northern tip of South America, and it’s a small world.”

  “Our boy was al Qaeda.” Bolan shook his head. “They don’t do anything small. He was on a mission, a high profile kidnapping and murder, and he had presets in his cell phone. Those would all be important contact numbers. One of them was in French Guiana.”

  “Well, it is intriguing, I’ll grant you.” Kurtzman leaned back in his wheelchair and laced his fingers behind his head. “But how you’re going to string this all together into anything significant is beyond me.”

  “I’m not.” Bolan leaned back and matched his comrade’s posture. “You are.”

  “You know, I knew you were going to say that.” Kurtzman sat straight up. “How do you want to play it?”

  “Suriname has a significant Muslim population, predominantly Javanese, and Regog was a Jokuk stylist, heavy into religion and mysticism, and now it looks like at least some splinter sect of it has gone militant. Do whatever you have to to find any practice of Jokuk-style pentjak-silat in Suriname. Find a connection, no matter how tenuous, and then make it lead to French Guiana.”

  “All right.” Kurtzman chewed his lower lip in thought. “But this is getting thin, sniper. I trust you, and I trust your instincts, but we are officially grasping at straws.”

  “I know,” Bolan said. “But I trust you, Bear. I trust your instincts, and you’ve worked with a lot less.”

  Kurtzman laughed. “You keep talking like that,
and you’re gonna have a date for the prom.”

  Bolan smiled. “Here’s the part where you lose that lovin’ feeling.”

  Kurtzman read Bolan’s mind. “You want Akira and me to hack the French foreign legion’s military records.”

  Bolan nodded once. “Yeah.”

  “Striker, if you’re accepted into the legion and want to change your identity and get away from your past, they do everything in their power to help you. This is the kind of info they’re going to keep protected. You know what kind of a stink it’s going to raise if we get detected breaking into their military databases?”

  “So don’t get detected,” Bolan replied.

  “Jeez, Striker, hacking France is—”

  “Keep it real mission specific. Find Pak Widjihartani if you can, and any other aliases he may have. Find out where’s he’s from and where he’s been. If he was a legionnaire, find out what regiment he served in and where. Other than that specific info, no sight-seeing. Don’t download anything else France or the legion would find sensitive, but I have got to have Pak.”

  “All right.” Kurtzman considered the enormity of the task before him. “I’ll lay out a battle plan for Akira and pull up our French translator programs. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of operating systems and safeguards the French foreign legion is using, but I’ll start on the assumption it’s using the same protection of information protocols as the regular French military. I’ll have Carmen download and collate every useful piece of information on the legion that she can find and get a copy made for us. The legion is one of the most colorful military units in the history of mankind, and it should make interesting reading on the plane.”

  Kurtzman’s eyebrow rose once more. “I’m assuming you’re getting on a plane.”

  “Yeah.” Bolan yawned and nodded. “But I need a nap. I’m gonna take twenty-four hours’ downtime. Then I want to meet with you again to see what we have. Assuming it’s anything, I’ll need Barbara to arrange a flight to Suriname. I’ll need an updated passport and a French visa, and get me a full warload delivered to the U.S. Embassy down there.”