Wednesday’s Wrath

by Don Pendleton

  Bolan replied, “Looked that way, yeah.”

  “Well, what do you think the mission was?”

  “Some sort of diversion, maybe,” Bolan mused. “Or a fail-safe of some kind. This thing has been planned to the final detail, Jack.”

  “Obviously,” the pilot agreed. “So why were they preparing to withdraw from Camp Strong?”

  “They’ve accelerated the schedule,” Bolan explained. “So it could mean anything. Maybe the acceleration negated the Camp Strong mission. Or maybe they were just moving to a different camp. Maybe a fail-safe, to protect the air getaway. I don’t know, Jack. I’m playing the ear, guy, just like forever.”

  The pilot grunted deep in his throat and turned his attention to the radio. He was getting a hit from Holloman Control.

  Bolan relaxed in his seat and listened to the approach instructions with only a portion of his mind. There were many things yet to be considered and evaluated in this crazy caper concocted by a madman.

  A very dangerous madman, yes.

  And an insanely dangerous concoction.

  Bolan walked into the Holloman operations office and took the place over. He served the red envelope on a rosy-cheeked captain, gave the guy a moment to gape at the contents, then ordered him, “Get your security honcho up here on the double.”

  The security chief took several minutes to get there. While they waited, Bolan paced at the big convex windows overlooking the field and picked the mind of the young duty officer, identified by his badge as “T. Solomon.”

  “Are those C-One-forty-ones that are parked back there on the cargo apron?” he asked him.

  “Yes, sir. Air Transport Command is gathering a squadron here, sir, for some special exercises.”

  Bolan asked him, “Do you have those orders?”

  “No, sir. The operations officer could fill you in on that, sir. I understand there was some sort of glitch with the orders. They didn’t come in until some of the aircraft had already arrived. Teletype circuits at ATC were down, or something like that.”

  An anomaly, perhaps.

  Bolan asked, “How long have they been here?”

  “They started coming in just after thirteen hundred hours, sir. I can get the log if—”

  “Not necessary,” Bolan grunted. “Any more large transports come in today?”

  “Just the One-forty-ones, sir, but two of the super-troopers are en route from Dobbins. They just now revised their ETA to sixteen hundred hours.”

  Bolan checked his watch. It was now twenty minutes away from sixteen hundred hours—four o’clock by civilian count.

  “I’m not familiar with your terminology, Solomon,” Bolan said with a friendly smile. “What is a super-trooper?”

  The guy smiled back and explained, “The C-five-A, sir, the Galaxy. Largest thing flying.”

  Bolan nodded and said, “Uh huh. Dobbins is the air base near Atlanta?”

  “Yes, sir, at Marietta.”

  “Do you routinely verify these flight orders from other commands?”

  “I don’t, Colonel. I guess it’s possible that someone in operations would check them.”

  Bolan produced a folded paper from his pocket and consulted a list of names inscribed there. “Do you know a Captain Howard Carstairs?”

  “Yes, sir. Captain Carstairs will be relieving me, sir, at sixteen hundred hours.”

  Bolan raised his eyebrows and asked, “Duty officer?”

  “Operations duty officer, yes sir.”

  “How well do you know Carstairs?”

  “Not well, sir. He hasn’t been here long.”

  Yeah, Bolan already knew that.

  A mean-looking bird colonel came stomping in at about that point. He looked Bolan up and down and asked him, “Are you the dude with the presidential orders?”

  Bolan was not pleased with this guy’s attitude. He handed him the envelope without a word and turned his back on him, casting eyes but not the mind onto the field.

  Behind him, a moment later, the security boss asked, “Exactly what does this mean, Colonel?”

  Bolan replied, without turning around, “I presumed that you could read, Colonel. Or don’t they teach you that basic skill in the Air Force?”

  The guy laughed then, and it was a good sound. Bolan turned to him with a grin, shook hands, and asked, “You ready for a bit of excitement?”

  “Lord, yes,” the guy said, grinning. “Did you bring me some?”

  Bolan pointed to the C-141s and said, “You are to very quietly round up the flight crews from those planes and put them in chains.”

  The smile faded away as the security boss replied to that. “Are you serious?”

  “I was born serious,” Bolan told him, “and I keep finding fewer and fewer things to laugh about all the time. You also have two C-five aircraft inbound from Dobbins. I want your APs to meet those planes and take those crews in custody, also. And then there’s an oncoming duty officer, a guy calling himself Carstairs. Due any minute. He’s one of them, too. Arrest him. I want all those guys placed in the darkest pit you have around here and I don’t want them to see daylight until I tell you different. You are to keep this entire thing under the very tightest security your command is capable of. Put your APs in ordinary uniforms and keep down the ripple effect—I want no leaks, I want utter secrecy, and I want no failure.”

  The guy backed onto a desk and perched his weight there, eyes hard and bright on Bolan’s. After a moment, he said, “What the hell is going on?”

  “You’ll be given full details at the earliest possible moment. Right now I just want you to move it.”

  “It has something to do with the NATO event, doesn’t it?”

  Bolan said, “It sure has.”

  “Good Lord! I was just telling my boys this morning … this would be the perfect time for some embarrassing—damn!” He lunged across the desk and snared a telephone.

  This was the man for Bolan, all right—a guy with some imagination and a willingness to act.

  Another man for Bolan walked in the door at that very moment, also. Not Carstairs, though Bolan knew this was the one moment he saw him—not because of any special way the guy looked or carried himself, but solely because of the other man who accompanied him.

  Bolan had his forty-five in hand and was across the room before anyone else in there could twitch—and he had the muzzle of that pistol shoved between the guy’s teeth before a word could come out of there.

  A man for Bolan, right—a prize man, the “captain’s” chief of staff—none other than Lieutenant Thompson of Tularosa Peak and thereabouts.

  Grimaldi hustled the fast-wilting Thompson away and stowed him quietly in the Cobra, there to await the pleasure of “Colonel Phoenix.”

  Up in the operations shack, a greatly impressed security honcho was in a huddle with that other bird colonel, firming up the Air Force interface.

  Bolan gave him a card containing telephone numbers and tactical radio channels as he instructed him, “You’re closing your sky. Nothing flies until it has been cleared with Alice.”

  “That’s Alice like, uh, in Wonderland?”

  Bolan said, “That’s the one. She’s a he, though, so don’t get confused about it. Not a chopper, not a trainer, not even a Piper cub hits your sky until Alice clears it. I’ll give you an authentication coder to pass to your C.O. He can clear all this with Washington if it makes him feel better. Meanwhile you have a damn small sky up there, Colonel, and I’m depending on you to keep it that way.”

  “I should alert Air—”

  Bolan growled, “Hell no, you haven’t been listening to me, you alert nobody. We’ve been infiltrated, and nobody yet knows how high or how wide that infiltration stretches. Tell me you understand that.”

  “I understand that, sure,” said the colonel in a hushed voice.

  Bolan was making ready to break away. He paused at the door to say, “Small sky?”

  “Small you haven’t seen before, Army,” replied the securit
y boss. “You better hurry and get that Cobra off the ground before I seal you in.”

  Bolan smiled, showed the guy a clenched fist, and went away from there … back to the smallest sky over America.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SCENARIO DOWN

  It was not what you could call an ideological war between two homelands with the stouthearts defending the faith—nor was it, either, a matter of brotherhood and loyalty to a bloodline. Harrelson’s troops were simple mercenaries dedicated entirely to their own enrichment—and they were not even “bound” to the omerta oath of their employers.

  So Mack Bolan was not at all surprised to find trooper Thompson willing to come over to the other side. Especially since Bolan had phrased the proposition in such persuasive terms.

  “I don’t give a damn whether you live or die, Thompson. I have no respect for your life, because you have no respect for anything whatever. I’d as soon route a bullet through your tonsils and kick your melting carcass the hell out of my ship, here and now, except for one thing. I need your help.

  “I think you can help. And I think you will. That’s the only reason you’re alive at this moment. You’re the first prisoner I’ve taken all day—and I’ve taken you because I believe you are close enough to the top to have information of some value to me.

  “But I don’t have the time and certainly not the patience to dick around with you. I get no jollies from shredding living flesh, so I’d much rather just put it to a guy in terms of life or death.

  “Now you’ve got this decision to make, see. It’s yours entirely. Are you going to live, or are you going to die? That’s the decision. But I’m not going to mislead you in this. You need to know—hell, you have a right to know, since it’s your life that’s at stake—you need to know that your decision is actually pitched between certain death and only a thin chance for life. But I’m offering you that chance. You decide.

  “Here’s the situation, flat and simple. You are sticking to me, bub, like one of my arms, until this thing is finished. If Harrelson wins, you die. Got that? He wins, you die. If I win, you live—or, at least, you don’t die at my hands.

  “That’s simple enough, isn’t it? It boils down to this: if you want to live, then you’ve got to stop Harrelson. Since you can’t do that for yourself, your only chance is for me to stop Harrelson. And you better hope to God I can, if you want to live.

  “I’m not going to interrogate you, guy. I’m not going to play dumb games of the flesh with you. I’m just going to take this gun out of your mouth for about thirty seconds. You start talking sense to me right away—then, okay, I leave it out and we go beat Harrelson. You don’t talk quick sense, then I put the gun back in and pull the trigger.

  “I can see it in your eyes. You understand. So, okay. You’ve got thirty seconds to decide.”

  It did not take the guy even ten seconds to decide, nor half that long. He’d made the decision long before that Colt forty-five came out of his tonsils.

  It did, though, require a couple of seconds to get the saliva under control and to make his speech intelligible. Beyond that, there was not the slightest hesitancy in his response.

  “What time is it now?”

  “It’s ten past four. You have a date with somebody?”

  “There will be a diversion shot at five o’clock. You’ll need to stop that, first.”

  “What kind of shot?”

  “Nerve gas. Just enough to create a range emergency. Meteorologist says it should drift northeasterly across the flats at about ten miles per hour with a kill zone of maybe three hundred yards across.”

  “How does this happen?”

  “We quietly took control of Complex Three at nine o’clock this morning. The gas was canistered in the inert mode, for display only, so the brass could see what it looked like. We added the catalyst and loaded it aboard a Lance SRBM, one of the latest configurations. The Lance is scheduled for a demo shot Friday morning. It will be accidentally launched at five o’clock today.”

  “About a seventy mile on that baby,” Grimaldi said worriedly.

  “The target is not that far,” Thompson quickly informed them. “The bird will go in a bit north of Tularosa, about twenty miles inside the range. We calculated a possible risk factor of less than one percent for contamination reaching the civilian sector.”

  “How would you like that factor,” Grimaldi inquired angrily, “if your wife and kids lived in Tularosa?”

  “The forecast winds—”

  The pilot snorted that response away. “Forecast …”

  Bolan said, “Okay so we have a diversion scheduled for five o’clock. Then what?”

  But Thompson had not left the “diversion” behind, yet. “That gas should get bottled into the mountains,” he said, speaking really to Grimaldi and maybe trying to establish the idea that he was not that much a monster. “It can be neutralized long before there’s any danger to the populace. We merely wanted the range emergency confusion factor.”

  “Then what?” Bolan persisted.

  “We’ve been working a shell game for about a week. Ninety percent of the weapons slated for the NATO event have been completely disassembled and crated for trans-shipment.”

  “To where?”

  “We start ferrying it over to Holloman at five o’clock, under cover of the range emergency. There are a number of large air transports, fully crewed with our own people, waiting and ready for a legitimate training flight to Puerto Rico. We will refuel there and go on across the Atlantic to an as-yet-undisclosed destination somewhere in North Africa. I don’t know the plan from that point.”

  The guy was beginning to sound like a press release. Bolan inquired, “Who does know?”

  Thompson shrugged and showed the palms of his hands. “I suppose the captain knows. Or the banker. I just know that the training mission is supposed to terminate at Puerto Rico. We kluged it for an extension to an air base in Spain. But it will divert at the last minute to somewhere in North Africa.”

  “By what method do you ferry the stuff to Holloman?”

  “We have four Chinooks loaded with the hot stuff—you know, warheads. The nuts and bolts systems will go by truck convoy. They will move out through Rancho Jacundo and down Highway Fifty-four through Alamogordo en route to Holloman.”

  Grimaldi said, “These guys don’t miss a trick, do they? Ask him about Camp Strong.”

  Thompson did not need an interpreter. He told Grimaldi, “We accelerated beyond Camp Strong.” His eyes flashed to Bolan. “A tribute to your influence, sir. The captain chose not to risk—well, we went to the acceleration contingency. The original plan was to accidentally shoot down the observation planes, which would be carrying the NATO visitors, as they toured the range prior to the demonstrations. That was on tap for tomorrow.”

  The pilot commented, sourly, “No worry about risk factors for that one, eh?”

  Thompson smiled solemnly and replied, “If you mean would the captain weep over a general’s spilled blood, no, there was no worry. He’s still quite bitter about Vietnam. So are many of us. Aren’t you? They sent us into a war they never intended to win. It wasn’t really a war, was it? It was a political caucus.”

  Bolan sighed and punched in the Tac channel. “Alice,” he called.

  “Go.”

  “Have you been contacted by Holloman?”

  “Yeah. Just finished an interesting conversation with the commanding general. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Here’s something better to think about. A range emergency is scheduled for five o’clock. That’s today—in, uh, forty-five minutes from now. You’d better get a hot-hot team over to Complex Three. A Lance missile has been salted for CBW. It will be accidentally launched at five. Unless someone gets there first.”

  “Someone will,” Brognola promised, and he quit that connection immediately.

  “At six o’clock,” Thompson went on, unprodded, “the air transports should be on their way. Once they are airborne, the
national communications link at El Paso will blink out.” He smiled, but without much humor. “Another confusion event. All the national telecommunications between east and west will be disrupted. So a few million homes will miss part of the evening news. And telephone calls. But just briefly. When they make the switchover to ComSat, everyone will settle back happily. But another hand will be rattling the microwaves.”

  Bolan nodded his head and commented, “That’s why the anxiety over the California link.”

  “Some of it, yes. A confusion event of your own, Colonel. We bridged that without too much inconvenience, however. There are other points between here and California to fill the gap.” Bolan said, “You’ll be telling someone else about that, all of that, later. Right now I want to know what your contingency is for a sealed sky over Holloman.”

  “For what?”

  “Your flight crews are in chains and your planes are grounded. There you sit with tons of stolen weapons. What do you do now?”

  Thompson replied, “I don’t believe that eventuality is covered, sir.”

  “Then,” Bolan told him, “you’ve got a hell of a glitch in your scenario.”

  “Sir?”

  “This is no drill, soldier. You do have a sealed sky over Holloman.”

  The guy smiled with genuine good nature this time. “Then I’d have to say you’ve won the game, Colonel Phoenix. Or is it Colonel Bolan?”

  That title, used with that name, sounded strange indeed to the ex-career sergeant from ’Nam—even from those lips and in this context.

  “It’s Sergeant Bolan, Lieutenant,” he told the guy.

  “Well, I used to be Major Thompson, sir,” the guy told him with a sober smile. “And I’d feel privileged to serve under you anytime, anywhere … Colonel.”

  Flattery was not going to get the guy anywhere … but Bolan did feel a pain for military excellence gone awry.

  And he had not won the game, yet.