Lethal Payload

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan could see what was coming. “And where are Atrache and Sahin now?”

  “Caporals Atrache and Sahin have been listed absent without leave since 0400 hours yesterday.” The brutal smile Bolan remembered returned to Ilyanov’s face. “However, I think I may have an idea of where they have gone.”

  Bolan raised a skeptical eyebrow. “And I’m invited?”

  “Commandant Marmion has ordered me to extend the offer.” Ilyanov clearly wasn’t pleased. “As professional courtesy.”

  “Where are they?”

  “There is a small mosque here in Cayenne. Both men had permission to attend services there when their schedules permitted.” Ilyanov pulled a map of the city from his pocket and spread it on the table. A red circle marked the mosque. “Here. According to informants, a man matching Sahin’s description was seen in the vicinity of the mosque yesterday evening, in civilian clothing. Atrache has not been spotted. But if any of your suspicions have any ground, then this is where they will make contact with their confederates. One way or another.”

  “We stake it out?”

  “We take it out.” Ilyanov’s expression was iron. “Sahin, Atrache and anyone who is helping them.”

  “How soon?”

  “Now.”

  Bolan took a long breath. The legion took care of its own. It did not sound like Ilyanov cared about stopping terrorism. He wanted to avenge the honor of the legion, and he probably didn’t care how that effected Bolan’s probe. The only way Bolan could influence the outcome was to go along.

  The Executioner nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  Cayenne

  “YOU HAVE weapon?”

  The Executioner felt the sudden urge to lie. He had surrendered his 93-R and his knife at the gates to the camp. They had not been returned to him. But at the gate he had not turned out his pockets. He sat in the passenger seat of a civilian Peugeot. A caravan of three such vehicles wound their way through the streets of the capital. Each car was crammed with French foreign legion deep reconnaissance commandos. All of them were in civilian clothing. “No. I figured all I had was observer status.”

  “Use this.” Ilyanov reached into a knapsack between his feet and pulled out a sound-suppressed Beretta 92-G. “You are familiar with it?”

  Bolan took the pistol and checked the loads. “I’m familiar with it.”

  “This pistol is untraceable. If situation goes out of control, dispose of it. You will be on your own.”

  “I understand.”

  “I am in total command.” Ilyanov’s face went stone again. “You are here as a courtesy.”

  Bolan nodded. “I understand.”

  The car behind them peeled off down a side street as they approached the mosque. It was a small building with businesses on either side of it. It was eleven in the evening, and the businesses were all closed. There was no one on the street.

  Ilyanov nodded as he listened to his phone. “Flanking team is in position.” He brought the car to a halt across the street from the mosque. “Let’s go.”

  The four of them went EVA. The four men from the other car got out, and Bolan’s eyes narrowed as he saw Roland Aretos was one of them. The Action Direct agent’s left arm was in a cast, and his face was still swollen. He carried a silenced Beretta low against his leg with his good hand. He seemed surprised to see Bolan, but acknowledged him with a nod.

  It seemed all of France wanted payback on Atrache and Sahin this night.

  The assault team crossed the street and took the steps up to the mosque. Ilyanov tried the double doors and found them locked. They smashed inward as he put his foot into the lock. They fanned out into the mosque. The high-ceilinged building was dimly lit and seemed empty. Other than some low tables, the only furniture was the elevated pulpit where sermons were delivered to the faithful.

  “Lights,” Ilyanov grunted.

  A gigantic black legionnaire found the lights and flicked them on.

  Bolan kept one hand in his pocket and his pistol trained on a door in the back of the mosque.

  The Executioner turned at the sound of the doors being closed and barred behind them.

  The big black legionnaire smiled.

  Ilyanov grinned from ear to ear. His pistol was pointed between Bolan’s eyes.

  Off to the side, a pistol clicked three times in rapid succession. Aretos had his Beretta pointed at Ilyanov’s head. The hammer fell twice more. The action did not cycle. No cough came from the sound suppressor. The hammer just fell, clicking emptily. Bolan didn’t bother pulling the trigger on the weapon he’d been given. Every round within it was a dud.

  He’d been set up.

  Aretos glared at Ilyanov through the mask of bruises on his face.

  “Drop the pistols,” Ilyanov ordered. He smiled at Bolan infuriatingly. “And you, take your hand out of your pocket. Very slowly.”

  Four silenced Berettas were trained on Bolan. Aretos had three of his own to face. The dummy pistols dropped to the carpet with dull thuds. Bolan very slowly took his hand out of his pocket. He had already pulled the pin from the pineapple grenade once this day. The crimp that held it in place had been pulled straight. It slid out with a flick of his thumb as his hand came out of his jacket. The pin fell to the floor of the mosque with barely a sound as he revealed what he held.

  The legionnaires stared in surprise and horror at the grenade in Bolan’s hand. They were all trained soldiers. The doors were barred. There was no cover, and every man knew he was within the lethal radius of the grenade.

  Aretos grinned with savage triumph at the sight of the grenade in Bolan’s hand.

  Ilyanov looked askance at the ugly, serrated gray lump of steel Bolan held. “You’re bluffing.”

  Bolan’s eyes were icy.

  Ilyanov swallowed.

  “Do it,” Aretos suggested.

  Ilyanov’s gun never wavered. “Killing us here won’t stop it.”

  “Stop what?” Bolan asked.

  Ilyanov was silent.

  “A grenade going off in a downtown mosque, killing seven out-of-uniform legionnaires and an Action Direct agent might cause a big enough stink to start a real investigation. What do you think?”

  “I think it is an excellent idea.” Aretos waggled his eyebrows. Action Direct really did believe in payback. Right to the very end. “Do it,” the French agent repeated.

  Bolan and Ilyanov stood face-to-face, unmoving. The Executioner detected something he didn’t like. Ilyanov was clearly trying to figure an angle.

  But the Russian was also clearly willing to die.

  “Fuck this.” Aretos’s right hand blurred. With a snap of his wrist a switchblade came out of his sleeve. The blade clicked open as it left his fingers and scythed like a quicksilver gleam through the air at Ilyanov.

  The three men covering him all shot the French agent in the chest at the same time.

  The cotter pin pinged away as Bolan dropped his grenade.

  Ilyanov staggered as the knife sank into his neck.

  Two bullets hit Bolan in the chest, and the wind of two more hissed past his face as the giant African and another legionnaire went for head shots. Bolan staggered, but his armor held. He turned and took two bullets between the shoulder blades as he dived for the pulpit.

  Behind him, the locked and barred doors to the mosque splintered as the giant legionnaire applied his bulk to them. Bolan rolled behind the ornate staircase of the pulpit as the grenade detonated with a crack.

  Men screamed as shreds of jagged metal buzz-sawed through the mosque in all directions. The pulpit rattled as it was scored with shrapnel. Bolan was up instantly. Four legionnaires and Aretos were down. The doors to the mosque were flung open. The soldier dived for two of the fallen legionnaires. One was motionless, and one moaned. Both had been torn bloody by the fragmentation grenade. Bolan ripped the silenced Berettas from their hands.

  “Hey…” Aretos groaned weakly.

  Bolan kept both pistols trained on the door as he visually exa
mined the Frenchman. His clothes were torn, but his torso was conspicuously free of blood. His arms and legs were another matter. No soft body armor covered his limbs, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig. His face was badly torn and one of his eyes was pulp in its socket.

  “You…have another grenade?” he asked Bolan.

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it to me…I’ll let go of it when they rush us. You…shoot from cover.”

  “No.” Bolan shook his head. He didn’t like the Frenchman at all, but he had to admit Aretos was as hard-core as they came. “We’re going out the back.”

  Bolan grunted with the agent’s weight as he put him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He put one of the pistols in his hand. “Shoot, if you can.”

  The soldier took his second grenade and pulled the pin. He moved to the back of the mosque, keeping himself out of line of sight with the front doors. As Bolan approached the back, he could hear people moving in the back room. Bolan kicked the door and rolled the grenade into the room. Shouts of alarm sounded in several languages, but Bolan had already stepped behind the jamb. The grenade detonated, and Bolan staggered in, bearing Aretos like a sack of potatoes. A legionnaire howled, clutching his face. Another lay still with hardly any face left to clutch. Both men were riddled with metal fragments. The room had a wall for hanging jackets and a small kitchen. The back door flung open, and a legionnaire hurtled inside demanding to know what was happening. He only had time to widen his eyes as Bolan shot him twice in the chest. Concealable soft body armor was not legion issue.

  Bolan stepped outside. He grunted under Aretos as a bullet hit him in the stomach. The soldier took another hit as he brought his pistol to bear on the legionnaire by the idling car. His first shot spiderwebbed the windshield. Aretos wheezed as he took a bullet in his side meant for Bolan’s head. The Executioner awkwardly adjusted his aim. Bolan’s first shot shattered the man’s clavicle. His second tore out the legionnaire’s throat.

  Bolan tottered down the tiny flight of steps to the street and piled Aretos into the back of the car. He slid behind the wheel. Three men came around the corner. Ilyanov stood with the knife still in his neck. The African and a smaller man stood with him. All three began emptying their pistols at the car.

  The Executioner rammed the car into gear and aimed straight for Ilyanov. The huge African yanked the Russian to one side even as he kept shooting. The windshield pocked and cracked with bullet strikes. Bolan jerked his head below the dash, and the headrest tore with bullet strikes as glass rained down. He swerved the car but was not rewarded with the thump of a body. Bolan swung the car back as bullets began hitting the rear windshield. He rose up and yanked the wheel. His rear tire spit off its hubcap as it turned the corner with a scream.

  “Did we get him?” Aretos asked.

  Bolan took the car back out onto the street. He drove past the two parked cars and put a bullet into each tire facing the street. “You got a piece of him.”

  “I must…check in.”

  “You need to check into a hospital.”

  “Unnh.” Aretos wheezed noncommittally. “And you?”

  Bolan grimaced at his pulverized rib cage. No one in the legion could be trusted. Someone had been willing to sacrifice Aretos. His car was shot up, and he could not afford to be stopped by the police.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll lay low. Go get laid.”

  The Frenchman’s laugh was a bubbling wheeze. “Good…good for you.”

  BABAR TOOK the knife in his hand and put his other massive mitt on the Commander’s shoulder. Ilyanov didn’t flinch as Babar pulled the blade free. It had just missed his carotid artery. Cigarette reloaded his Beretta and went into the mosque. They had minutes before the city police began arriving.

  Babar wiped the bloody knife on his pant leg and closed it. The Commander already had his handkerchief pressed against the wound.

  “What do we do, Commander?”

  “Contingencies were planned for. Now we must do damage control. His access to the Jungle Warfare camp must be cut off. All of his intelligence assets in French Guiana must be cut off.”

  “And?”

  Ilyanov looked into the future. “And he only has seventy-two hours left.”

  15

  Sinnamary

  Jolie Erulin’s voice was tightly controlled over the phone. “Where are you?”

  Bolan stood at the edge of the water as the morning tide rolled in. “Someplace safe, for the moment. How is Roland?”

  “He is stable.” Her voice relented somewhat. “I must thank you. He says you saved his life…after you blew him up.”

  “He told me to go ahead and do it.” Bolan considered the brutal Frenchman. “He’s tough, I’ll give him that.”

  “I do not love him, personally, but he is our best in South America, or was. He will be relegated to a desk now, if he does not retire.” Her voice hardened again. “Where are you? You should not have gone to the mosque without telling me. That was foolish.”

  “I went to rescue you from Ki without telling the foreign legion. That was probably for the best.”

  She accepted that with silence.

  “Sorry, but even if I’d wanted to, I wasn’t given the opportunity.” Bolan’s voice hardened to match the French agent’s silence. “Where’s Ilyanov, and who is he?”

  Agent Erulin paused for a long moment. Bolan almost thought she had hung up before she finally spoke.

  “Due to recent activity, Action Direct has broken into the foreign legion database. If this gets back to French Military Intelligence, there will be—”

  “Lady, I don’t have time for political considerations, and neither do you. Spill it.”

  “We ignored the Interpol background checks and used our own files. Then we called in favors with British and U.S. Intelligence.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Ilyanov changed his name when he joined the legion. This is not unusual, over half the legion is from Russia and the former Eastern Bloc, and apply simply as Slavs. They—”

  “Short version,” Bolan said impatiently.

  “His real name is Valentjin Islamov. He was a rebel in Muslim Chechnya. When his activities began to include bombings in Moscow, he was forced to flee. He spent time in the Middle East before joining the legion.”

  “There was an African with him at the mosque, huge. What’s his story?”

  “Babacar ‘Babar’ N’Dour, Senegalese. Former heroin dealer until his conversion to Islam. He is Islamov’s adjutant in the Jungle Warfare School.”

  Bolan saw an ugly trend. “And both men are involved in security at the launch facility.”

  “Yes, as is Truong Nguyen Ngoc, ‘Knock-Knock’ as he is called. A Vietnamese Muslim. Engaged in terrorist activity in Indonesia and wanted by the Australians for the murder of UN peacekeepers in Timor. Sretko “Cigarette” Tadic claimed to be a Serb when he joined the legion, but he is a Bosnian Muslim. Atrache and Sahin you already knew about. The rest of the men you killed in the mosque are unimportant, for the moment, but have similar backgrounds. What is more important, is that all the men I have mentioned are now AWOL from the Jungle Warfare camp.”

  Bolan’s world got uglier by the second. “What about Marmion? He’s their commanding officer. Have you investigated him?”

  “Commandant Marmion is dead.”

  Bolan was shocked. “How?”

  “He was found in his office last night. About an hour after the battle at the mosque. He was bleeding from the ears and the tear ducts.” Erulin paused. “Closer examination reveled a .32-caliber exploding bullet was introduced into his brain through the back of his head.”

  Bolan grimaced. Another good man had gone down. “What did you find out at the space port?”

  “Is Dr. Mohammedkhani with you?”

  Bolan turned back to his little camp. He had come back to Sinnamary half expecting to find her kidnapped or dead. He had put her on the back of his bike with a sleeping bag, and they had driv
en up to the coast to an abandoned bit of beach. Bolan had grabbed a few desperately needed hours of sleep. The scientist lay in the bag, her head veiled by the masses of her dark hair. “Yeah, she’s with me.”

  “You are at her house?”

  “No, but she’s out of earshot at the moment.”

  “Good.”

  Bolan heard the urgency in Erulin’s voice. “What is it?”

  “I spoke with Dr. Seth last night. Babu Seth. You met him in the space center lounge.”

  “I remember him. The payload engineer.”

  “Yes. You kept thinking that somehow the launch was going to be involved in some sort of terrorist atrocity. I spent a number of hours last night consulting with him, to see if we could find any kind of discrepancy, and—”

  “And you found one.”

  “Dr. Seth is thorough. He checked everything, and then he checked his own records. He found that industrial quality powdered cobalt had been purchased and shipped to the space center satellite division, under his name, and using his security codes.”

  Bolan’s blood went cold. “I gather Dr. Seth does not recall buying any cobalt?”

  “No, much less two thousand kilograms of it.”

  “Where is the cobalt now?”

  “That is just it. It is not in the warehouse where it is supposed to be. We tracked the transaction to a South African firm. The South African distributor assures us that the metal was paid for, shipped and sent. All perfectly legal. Action Direct is checking all stages of the transaction, but so far it seems like the distributor is telling the truth. We are acting on the assumption that the cobalt disappeared on the South American end of the deal.”

  “You believe Feresteh bought the cobalt using Dr. Seth’s clearance and identification codes.”

  “Cobalt is a metal used extensively in modern manufacturing. There is nothing suspicious about it, alone. The space center manufacturing division here in French Guiana goes through tons of it every year. The only discrepancy is that two thousand kilograms were bought under false pretenses. If Dr. Seth had not stayed up until four in the morning personally checking inventories, it could have gone unnoticed for the rest of the year.”