Minotti burped and said, “Oh hell, that’s it, that’s why I couldn’t stomach the guy.”
Thompson was not backing off, but he had a new look in his eye as he argued, “It was the same man who was here earlier, who verified the Rickert analysis, who stood and talked with Mr. Minotti and me.”
“Then it was Bolan all the way,” Harrelson quietly insisted.
That did it for Thompson. He said, “On the double, aye,” and sent the jeep plunging back into the chaos.
“So now what?” Minotti inquired despairingly.
“So now the impossible merely becomes a bit more difficult,” Harrelson replied casually. “Don’t worry about it, Banker. You ain’t lost nothing yet, hoss.”
Brave words, sure.
But what the hell … the guy had already done the impossible, hadn’t he?
“You’ll just work a little harder,” Minotti quietly suggested.
“And a little faster,” Harrelson said.
“But especially a little harder,” said the Capo Mafioso. “I want that guy’s head, Harrelson. I want to take it home with me.”
“You will,” said the trooper, “have to take it away from me, first, mister.”
Which was a lot of shit. But at least they both had the same idea in mind.
The Huey Bell Cobra was on station high above the strike zone, hovering at almost the limit of her service ceiling. Both occupants were observing the activities below through powerful binoculars.
Grimaldi muttered, “Well, I’ll be damned. You were right. They’re moving it west, into the restricted area.”
“Only way to go,” Bolan replied quietly. “That’s where their pay dirt is, Jack.”
“Do I keep them in sight?”
“That’s the only reason we’re here,” Bolan told him.
“They’ll pull us right into the security zone.”
So be it, then.
Bolan suggested, “Turn on your IFF transponder. I’ll bet you the whole arsenal that it’s set to the proper response.”
“I’ll bet you’re right,” Grimaldi said with a sober smile.
Bolan was right, all right. And that was easily the scariest damn part of it all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE VARIABLE
They got it together in a motel near Alamogordo—and it was quite a gathering. Brognola’s rolling command ships and Bolan’s cruiser took up much of the truck parking at the rear; the federal force occupied half of the ground-level rooms.
“Don’t worry about the visibility,” Brognola quietly told Bolan. “The management thinks we’re a news crew, out here to cover some exercises.” He grinned. “They even gave us a special rate.”
April Rose had given Bolan a bit of low-keyed hell during the early moments of reunion—including some well-phrased thoughts on “abandoned brides” and “damn short honeymoons”—though of course there had been neither marriage nor honeymoon, except in the broadest possible sense, and she had obviously intended a half-humorous expose of her anxieties.
But she had not taken her eyes off him since that moment—hell, she was fairly drinking him down through the eyes—and he was finding the warm attention just a bit uncomfortable.
He told her, “Cut that out.”
She smiled knowingly, but replied, “Cut what out?”
“You know what,” he growled. “And with your boss looking on, at that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I intend to be entirely professional while the occasion demands it. But I also want you to know what’s in store for you, soldier, when that occasion goes away.”
He told her, “I already got the message. So—”
“Let it sink in, then, and let it bring you through the day in one piece. Don’t go flinging yourself around like there’s no tomorrow.”
Brognola stepped back into the room and asked, “What’s that about tomorrow?”
April lightly replied, “I was just telling him to save some for tomorrow.”
Brognola sniffed at that. “Tell it to the wind, April.” He unrolled a detail map of the White Sands Missile Range and spread it on the table in front of Bolan. “This the one?”
“That’s the one,” Bolan said. He spent a few seconds marking the chart with a red pencil, then explained: “These are the known hot spots. There could be more … or they could change rapidly. I don’t have a good feel at all for the size or full intent of this force.” He drew an X through the Tularosa Peak encampment. “This was Mission Central, I’m sure of that. As of about an hour ago,” he drew a dotted line to another encirclement, “they moved it to here. And it didn’t take them long to do it.”
“Why did they move it?”
Bolan smiled. “We sort of encouraged them to.”
“Uh huh.” Brognola pulled up a chair and sat down. “Who is we?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t get into that.”
“Maybe we should. Maybe I need to know who’s in the damn game.”
Bolan stared at his hands for a moment, then took a scrap of paper and wrote a name on it. He handed the information to Brognola and said, “I guess it’s time to get this guy on your list, at that. He’s been with me since Glass Bay, on and off.” Brognola was staring at the scrap of paper. “This is the guy who …?” He cleared his throat, placed the paper in an ash tray, and put a match to it. “Nashville?”
Bolan nodded his head. “And many others.” He winked. “Seattle. Texas. And he’s been a steady source of intelligence. I wouldn’t have come this far without him. Put him on your endangered species list, huh?”
“I’ll do that,” the head fed replied drily. “Where is he now?”
Bolan smiled. “He’s babysitting a captured gunship.”
Brognola’s eyes flared. “What?”
Bolan nodded affirmation and explained, “A Huey. Full armament. The latest and greatest configuration available. All the newest communications gear, black boxes, firepower enough to raze a small city like Alamogordo … all of it.”
“Where the hell did you get it?” Brognola asked quietly.
Bolan tapped the X on the White Sands chart. “They had two of them, plus several small scout-ships. We borrowed one Huey and disabled the other. Couldn’t bring myself to destroy it. Which worked out okay because they left it behind when they withdrew. I suggest you get some people up there damn quick, though, to take custody of that stuff. Also there’s a small chopper belongs to a flying service in El Paso. Jack is worried about it.” He grinned. “It’s checked out to him and I think he’s a bit concerned about the insurance coverage.”
“I’ll take care of it, sure,” Brognola growled. “How many other gunships would you guess they have?”
Bolan said, “I believe you could determine that better than I could. Just find out how many have been sent to this area through official channels over the past few weeks. Look to Fort Bliss, especially.”
“You think the guy is working the Pentagon faucets again, eh?”
“I’m sure he is,” Bolan replied. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. This Huey, Hal, is a legitimate U.S. Army gunship. It’s a Cobra and it’s fully equipped with all the secret gear. You can’t just go out and buy those things.”
Brognola went to the door to pass some instructions to the brain trust in the next room, then he returned to perch on the desk facing Bolan. That good face was pulled into worried lines as he inquired, “Where does Jordan fit into all this?”
“They call him Architect,” Bolan explained. “That’s a code name. I believe the whole thing was his brain child. With his contacts and knowledge of DOD routine—well, it would take someone like that to pull this thing.”
Brognola muttered, “I guess I better make it a full alert. But God I hate to …”
Bolan quietly told him, “Don’t let me second-guess you, Hal. It’s your responsibility … and I’m sure you’re better equipped than I am to … uh, well …”
“Out with it,” the fed growled. “Don’t pussy
foot me, dammit.”
Bolan grinned soberly and continued, “I believe there’s a force at work here, sure … but I’m not so sure it’s a force in the way we usually think of it. I, uh, I’d sure as hell like to see a computer study on recent personnel changes in this area. I, uh …”
Brognola said, “You think they’ve stacked the deck.”
“Something like that, yes. I can’t get this Jordan guy out of my thinking. I know that type of mind and I know how it operates. Devious … devious as hell. Nothing so blatant and chancy as a paramilitary force running around out here in the desert under the noses of the legitimate military establishment. Yet, they seem to be doing exactly that. One chance meeting, Hal—hell, one wrong twitch of the eyes and … these military people around here are not idiots. The whole thing could blow sky high over a small breach of military courtesy. And that would be the smallest of worries.”
“So what are you saying?”
Bolan relaxed into his chair and lit a cigarette. April was giving him the warm-worried look. Brognola was waiting for a bomb. Bolan felt like he was throwing one as he said, “There are a lot of disgruntled people in the military today, Hal.” Brognola grumpily said, “So?”
“High people. And not just in the military, but throughout government service.”
“You’re talking about treason, you know.”
“Call it what you like,” Bolan said. “I’m talking about human nature and the imperfectibility of man. I’m talking about people who grow cynical and corrupted because of the way power is routinely abused without penalty in this country—hell, in every country—and I’m talking about a plot to steal some of the most sophisticated weapons ever devised by the military mind. So don’t try to tell me that a guy with Harrelson’s brains and background would barge in here with some harebrained scheme to do battle with the United States Army—on their own ground, yet.”
“You’re still pussyfooting me,” Brognola complained.
“I’m trying to elaborate the problem, Hal. And I am simply telling you that Jordan, Harrelson and Company have been given some sort of assurances that they will not encounter any significant resistance out there.”
Brognola’s eyes fluttered as he said, “Okay. Say it’s true, then. So we need to know how high and how wide goes the treason, before I go pushing any alert buttons. I guess that’s what you’re saying.”
Bolan growled, “That’s about it, yeah.”
“And what if we cannot make such a determination?”
“I don’t believe we can,” Bolan replied. “Not in time. They’re talking about an acceleration. I guess that means a deviation of sorts from the original plan, whatever that was. I do know that they are worried about the implications of the California hit, yesterday. The problem with every great plan is that you cannot always cover every variable. And, yes, I believe they’re worried. They went to a great deal of time and trouble to grab Charlie Rickert and sweat his bones for intelligence. And now …”
“And now?”
“Well, now they know that I’m onto them. I believe they will be making their move very quickly. I mean like right away, today.”
“You’re saying they know that Mack Bolan has joined the game.”
Bolan nodded. “That’s right. I wanted them to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I hope to make them play my game instead of their own.”
“What will that accomplish? In real terms, I mean.”
“In real terms,” Bolan replied, “they could defeat themselves. They’ll move at my pace, not theirs. They’ll make mistakes.”
“You hope.”
“Nobody’s that perfect, Hal. Something like this calls for precision drill. Like a football team. Any quarterback can complete ten of ten passes if all he has to do is stand back there and throw. Put a couple of linebackers blitzing his butt on every throw, though, and he’ll gratefully settle for five of ten.”
Brognola sighed and splayed his fingers across the White Sands detail. “What you’re saying, I take it, is that you want to do all the linebacking yourself?”
Bolan quietly replied, “That’s it, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t know who are the friends and who are the foes. They’re all wearing the same colors. And I keep thinking of this guy Jordan. You say he was a think-tanker. I say okay, he’s had a lot of time to brain-trust this one. You send for help, okay, but I’m saying you’ll never know which side of the street that help will be coming from. And that help, when and if it gets here, will simply add to the confusion.”
“That’s your finding?”
“Yeah.”
“You are absolutely sure.
“I’m sorry, yes, I am absolutely sure.”
“Well, relax,” Brognola said, sighing, “so am I.”
Bolan smiled grimly and said, “You’re a couple of steps in front of me, aren’t you?”
Brognola took a deep breath and said, “Yeah. I wanted your inputs before they could be tainted by …” He opened a leather case and produced a thin stack of computer print-outs. “Here’s the DOD file on Jordan. I told you he was psych-war specialist and tank thinker. Well, he was more than that. At times, a hell of a lot more. As he got older, though, he was used almost exclusively as a thinker. He was what they call in the tanks a scenarist. The guy wrote fiction. But fiction with a particular edge. The point is to dream up every conceivable threat to the national security. The scenario is a step-by-step detail of how a particular threat could unfold. The challenge, then, is to beat the scenario with another—how to reduce the risk of the threat-scenario, how to respond in case the threat-scenario should become a reality.”
“I’ve heard of the routine,” Bolan murmured.
“It’s standard Pentagon routine, sure. There are people doing that all the time. Must be a bunch of paranoid guys haunting that place. I suppose that right this minute, in some scenario being developed and played in a Pentagon think tank, eighty or ninety million Americans are lying dead in the streets as a result of a sneak nuclear attack. Washington is probably in flames, maybe the whole White House staff has been assassinated. But the attack did not come from Russia or China—as you might expect—but from India or South Africa, maybe even England or France. These are nightmares, see—nightmares—deliberately induced so that our planners can systemize some methodical reaction to anything that could conceivably develop. Another scenario could be playing right next door, which has the entire eastern seaboard writhing under nerve gas … from Cuba.”
April wrinkled her nose and commented, “I’ll take the first case, thanks.”
Brognola went on, “I’m just trying to show you where Philip Jordan is coming from. All scenarios do not, of course, deal with overt military actions. Or they don’t even have to have a military context. There are political scenarios, religious scenarios, visitors from outer space scenarios. Hell, Hollywood never came up with anything better.”
April said, “I had some small exposure to that during computer training. We worked with some of the models and antimodels.”
“What’s an antimodel?” Brognola growled. She explained, “The scenario emerges from the think tank as a computer model. Then they have to play those models off against possible solutions, which in turn produces contingency models, statistical evalutions, and various other planning devices. The antimodel is the solution to the model.”
Brognola said, “That’s computer talk for plot and counterplot.”
“Okay, I’m with you,” Bolan said quietly.
Brognola sighed heavily and replied, “No, I’d guess that you’re a bit ahead of me. That printout—which is top secret, by the way—that printout includes a brief summary of Jordan’s scenarios, which were developed during his last few months at DOD. You will find one in there, near the end, which is titled Infiltration and Capture of White Sands Missile Test Center, et al, by Small Terrorist Group: The Seizure of Sophisticated American Arms for Indiscriminate Ap
plication in Political Causes.”
Bolan said, “That’s a mouthful. How’d it play?”
“It played too damned well, I guess,” Brognola replied soberly. “It became an obsession for the guy. Nobody could beat the model. Jordan kept playing with it, long after he’d been repeatedly ordered to drop it and go on to other problems. I guess his superior figured the scenario was just too far out to warrant that much attention. Anyway, like I said, Jordan apparently became obsessed with the damned thing. The obsession finally lost him his job. He had CIA connections. Talked a section chief into taking him on covertly to continue work on the White Sands problem. That’s a bit kinky, of course. CIA has no legitimate interrest in domestic problems. I guess there was question enough regarding overseas inputs to at least make it an iffy project for covert concern. Nobody at CIA will admit to knowing anything about what the guy was doing, although he was certainly on the payroll for nearly two years. He was not fired, incidentally. He resigned. Less than a month ago.”
Bolan sighed and said, “With his model intact.”
“You got it, pal. And now we are looking at the reality, not the model.”
April inquired, “Why couldn’t anyone beat the model?”
Bolan suggested, “Because Jordan had devised an insoluble problem. The way he laid it out, there’s no way to beat it.”
“Which is precisely,” Brognola pointed out, “what Striker has been telling us.”
April said, “Then what …?”
Brognola said, a bit wryly, “Well … Jordan did overlook one small variable. He left something out.”
“What did he leave out?” she asked.
Brognola coughed delicately and flicked his eyes at Mack Bolan as he replied, “He left out Striker.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE MODEL
There was little room for doubt that the Jordan scenario had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It mattered little, now, what had motivated the guy. But it was impossible to not wonder about it.
April tended to feel a bit sorry for Jordan. She seemed to believe that his original motive had been only to prove that his scenario was a valid worry, that perhaps he became a bit unhinged and lost himself somewhere during the development of that proof.
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