Blair waved the dust and leaves away from his visor, flicked bits off his face and neck. He watched his co-pilot run across the granite, and grab the gray yellow branch of a sapling.
Dean fell. Blair watched as his co-pilot struggled to his feet, clutched at his chest, fell again.
Easing back on the engine throttle, Blair let the helicopter rest on the skids. Even as he reached for the engine switch to stop the rotors, agony seized his throat and chest.
His hand groped at the radio switch. Lifting the microphone, he croaked, "Can't breathe . . .."
And he died, convulsions racking his body, his hands thrashing, his feet kicking the control pedals.
The helicopter jumped a few feet into the air and lurched sideways. A rotor tip smashed into the granite mountainside. Inertia pitched the nose of the Huey into the granite as the blades shattered on the rock in a spray of metal and dusty soil. The tail finally fell, the Huey rolling over and over to crash against yellow pines two hundred feet downslope.
Silence returned to the dead mountain. Wind swayed the lifeless branches of the pines. Nothing moved in the next hours, no insects, no animals, no birds.
In the last light of day, another Huey helicopter approached from the south. The second helicopter bore the logo of the United States Army. The troopship touched down on the far side of the ridge.
Soldiers covered in plastic anti-contamination suits and wearing helmets and oxygen tanks moved through the yellowed trees.
3
Kansas
Wednesday
4:30 p.m.
(1130 Greenwich mean time)
BEYOND THE MUDDY STOCK PENS and grain silos of the railroad yard, the Kansas wheat fields continued to the horizon.
Sheriff Milton parked his highway cruiser behind the town's one café and pool hall. The café's blue-and-gold neon Beer sign flashed despite the dawn light that paled the sky. The old, stoop-backed cook stood at the kitchen door, watching the town police and the county deputy sheriffs gather around the dead man. Sheriff Milton gave the cook a wave as he crossed the parking lot.
His new deputy, a boy who had quit the New York Police Department for the Rosemund County Sheriff's Department, took statements from two of the local people. Milton nodded, continued over to Police Chief Desmond and Deputy Sheriff Canfield. They stood over his friend Abe, the night watchman.
"You get the word on Senator Harper?" Deputy Sheriff Canfield asked.
Sheriff Milton nodded. He squatted. Abe was sprawled on the gravel in a clotted puddle of blood. His throat yawned with a neat, surgical slash circling his neck. But a knife had not killed him.
Crossing himself, Milton reached out and closed his friend's eyes. The dead man's face was cold, already stiff. Red beads clung to Abe's face like dew. The stuff came away on the sheriff's fingers. Milton pinched his fingers together, felt them stick. He took a clean piece of white paper from his jacket pocket, wiped the red mist from his fingers, carefully folded the paper and returned it to his pocket. Then he checked Abe's pockets. He found a wallet, warehouse keys, a .38 pistol still in its holster.
The sheriff finally spoke. "Canfield! Get a blanket to cover him. Chief Desmond, anybody know what happened to Abe?"
"Something weird went on out here. What, we don't know. See that?"
The police chief pointed to an aluminium tank standing against a boxcar. An electric pump unit sat on top of the tank. Wires led to a 12-volt battery on the gravel rail bed. A long plastic nozzle extended straight up from the pump. A length of rope lashed to the boxcar secured the tank and pump upright.
"What is it?"
"It put out some kind of red syrup. The stuff's all over town. On cars, inside people's houses, on everything."
"Why would someone kill a man to do that?" the sheriff asked.
"Why would someone do that and then call Senator Harper?" the police chief responded.
A limousine roared off the highway to wheel in a wide turn through the parking lot, gravel rattling off its fenders. It slowed to a smooth stop. A young man in a gray business suit left the driver's seat, then opened the back door.
Wearing the denim pants, jacket and lace-front boots of a farmer, Senator Bradford Harper left the rosewood-and-leather interior of the limo. He strode across the parking lot, his paunch and jowls bouncing with each step. His aide-driver followed him. Police Chief Desmond saluted. Sheriff Milton did not.
The senator saw the corpse. He stopped and stared. Deputy Canfield returned with a blanket and spread it over the old watchman.
"So how'd you find out about this, Senator?" Sheriff Milton asked him.
"An anonymous call. Exactly what happened here?"
"What did this anonymous call tell you?"
"That there'd be a demonstration here. Why are you asking me? Am I a suspect, Sheriff Milton?"
"No, Senator. Someone called you. Just asking what they told you. What kind of demonstration did they tell you to expect?"
"That was it. They called on my private line. Only my senior aides and family have the number. I thought it'd be some kind of price protest, whatever."
"Is that why you wore the work clothes, to look like us common folk?"
"What happened here, Sheriff?"
"See that over there? That tank? Someone set that up and sprayed the town with red syrup. Right, Chief Desmond?"
"Covered the whole town. Everything's red and sticky. Don't know what the hell they were trying to prove."
"This some kind of joke?" the senator asked, incredulous.
"I wouldn't say that." The sheriff squatted again and raised the blanket from his dead friend's face and shoulders. "A good old guy. Worked here twenty years. Liked to play cards in the afternoon. His niece married my grandson's best friend. We got drunk together at the wedding, kissed some pretty young girls. And now someone's put a wire around Abe Miller's neck and nearly cut his head off."
The senator flinched at the sight of the open throat. The sheriff turned his friend's head to show the senator that only the spine joined the head to the shoulders.
"A knife didn't do that. It's called a garrotte. That's a commando's way of killing. What kind of joke would that be? A political joke? Wish they'd done their joking in Washington, D.C. 'Cause I don't think this is funny."
4
San Francisco
Wednesday
10:00 a.m.
(1800 Greenwich mean time)
RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC streamed westward on the Bay Bridge linking the San Francisco peninsula to Oakland. The eastbound traffic on the bridge's lower deck travelled at sixty miles an hour. The upper deck, crowded with commuters driving from the East Bay cities and suburbs to their offices in the high rises of metropolitan San Francisco, maintained an even fifty miles an hour.
The cold wind that preceded a late spring Pacific storm whipped up whitecaps on the bay. As they drove, the commuters saw a panorama of the bay beneath a luminous blue sky, the wind sweeping away all mist and pollution. In downtown San Francisco, the Trans-America pyramid and its neighbouring towers of glass, steel and polished stone flashed gold with the light of the morning sun.
Then, at seven thirty-eight, at the center of the Bay Bridge, a car and a semi-truck and trailer suddenly stopped. Horns sounded in one vast cacophony. Drivers swerved from the right-hand lanes to pass the stalled car and truck. Traffic slowed as hundreds of cars braked, some attempting to change lanes.
The truck driver threw open his door and climbed down to the walkway. Later, witnesses could recall few details; he wore a ski mask pulled over his head, a high-collared jacket, and gloves. He hurried to the year-old Cadillac waiting in front of his truck. In seconds, the Cadillac disappeared into the flow of traffic.
Police found the stolen Cadillac burning in the Embarcadero district fifteen minutes later. Fire had gutted the expensive car, leaving only a scorched hulk.
Less than a minute after the driver abandoned the truck with the diesel engine racing, some machinery whining within the
trailer, a high-pressure stream of fluid shot straight upward from the trailer roof. The fluid vaporized, becoming a mist as it continued a hundred feet in the air, feathering with the wind, drifting over the bay.
Mist rained down on the commuters. An odour like ammonia filled their cars. Thousands coughed. Their eyes stung as the irritant touched their faces.
A California highway patrolman stopped in front of the truck. He left his cruiser. He coughed as he walked through the raining droplets. He felt his eyes burning, his mouth filling with saliva. But he continued toward the truck. He tried the door handles, found them locked. The chemical soaked his uniform in the ninety seconds that he struggled with the doors.
Nausea heaved in his stomach. Hurrying back to his cruiser, the officer reported the stalled truck and chemical spray, suggested that the police and highway patrol close the bridge.
Coughing, his eyes swimming with tears, his gut churning, the officer drove on to San Francisco. Paramedics hosed him clean with water, gave him medicated gargle, then oxygen until his symptoms disappeared.
In the bay, fishermen passing through the drifting mist coughed. Workers and residents along the Bay-shore closed their windows to the ammonia stink. Police closed the Bay Bridge as the stream of chemical continued into the clear morning sky.
Before the highway patrol's hazardous-chemical unit could arrive with respirators and protective suits, the tanks inside the trailer went dry. In ten minutes, the truck's pump had shot thousands of gallons of the stinking, irritating chemical into the air of San Francisco.
5
Northern Lebanon
Thursday
5:45 a.m.
(0345 Greenwich mean time)
THE SUN ROSE LIKE FLAMES out of Syria. Mack Bolan squinted at the ragged shadow of the Qurnat as Sawda. The red disk of the sun appeared over the ridges and peaks of the mountains in the northeast of Lebanon. Bolan looked to the east. Lights marked farms around Sir ad Dinniyah, a small town ten miles away. He saw nothing on the rutted, weaving road. The graying hills and ridges obscured Tripoli, fifteen miles farther away. Despite the rising sun, night still held the wine-dark Mediterranean.
On a barren mountainside east of Tripoli, Bolan and a squad of Phalange commandos were waiting in cold shadows. They had para-dropped on the far side of the ridge and crossed over during the night. Now they waited for a plane to land on an airstrip gouged from the rocks and sand.
Only minutes to go, Bolan thought, and a PLO gang dies.
In the years since the Palestine Liberation Organization seized control of Southern Lebanon, holding the population hostage, the gang had earned billions of American dollars for their organization's campaigns of terror and atrocity by channelling heroin into the United States. With the complicity of the Soviet Union, Syria, Iraq and Iran, the gang gathered opium from thousands of poppy farmers as far away as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Transporting the raw opium paste to regional laboratories, the gang's Palestinian and ComBloc chemists refined the opium to pure crystalline heroin.
Then the White Death went to the cities of the United States. The drug became an attack-by-proxy on American society: every day of the year, armies of addicts robbed and murdered to pay for the heroin. The millions of crimes—the billions of dollars spent battling the crimes, the maimed victims, the shattered lives, the dead—all counted as victories for the Palestinian warlords who masterminded the drug flow and banked the American dollars. The Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon had not stopped the gang's operation, only denied them the use of Beirut International Airport. Although the Palestinians in Southern Lebanon had been politically abandoned by their "brothers" in the Arab world, for fear of Israeli reprisals, the PLO in the north were entrenched and still active.
Glancing again at the graying countryside, Mack Bolan still saw no headlights on the road. Nabih, the Phalangist teenager assigned to be his spotter, swept the distant vista with his binoculars. A motorized Nikon with a telephoto lens hung by a strap around his neck. The photos would go into the files of Stony Man, the CIA, and the Mossad.
Bolan searched the shadows and darkness of the rocky mountainside around the PLO airfield below him. Nothing moved on the half-mile-long airstrip scraped from the rolling hillsides. He saw none of the soldiers who had accompanied him to this cold, windswept mountain.
The Phalange militiamen waited in the rocks, concealed beneath gray-and-black-patterned camouflage cloth. Bolan stroked the cocking lever of the 7.62mm x 54R Dragunov sniper rifle. Like Bolan, the Phalangists all had Soviet autorifles and rocket launchers. Without NATO weapons or cartridges to link this operation to the free world, the PLO would first suspect rivals within their own murderous regime. Even the American hand-radios they carried had been stripped of manufacturer's and country-of-origin identification.
Lights flashed from the shadowed valley. Bolan's hand-radio buzzed. "Colonel Phoenix!" a French-accented voice blared through Bolan's earphone. He recognized the voice of Jean-Barakat, a French-educated architect who had returned home to lead a combat squad in the Phalange. "They come."
Nabih focused his binoculars on the yellow lights. He turned to Bolan. "Trucks. . . "
They watched the convoy approach. Headlights appeared, bobbed, disappeared as four Soviet transports drove through the folds and curves of the narrow valley. In the minutes that he watched and waited, Bolan calculated the numbers and considered what he saw.
Four troop trucks for a load of heroin? Why? And why did one of the transports tow a forklift?
Engine drone came from the east. A flurry of voices spoke Arabic and French in Bolan's earphone as Lieutenant Barakat checked his squad. Even as the lieutenant reported the men ready, Bolan's eyes spotted the distant speck. The speck became a four engined turboprop aircraft; soon Bolan recognized an Ilyushin with the markings of Air Cuba.
The Air Cuba turboprop did not surprise him. The decline of the Russian economy had forced the Soviet overlords to limit their subsidies of the world's socialist slave states. The Cuban Communists now earned cash for the repression of internal dissent and external enemies by trafficking in drugs. Before leaving Stony Man for Lebanon, Bolan had dispatched Able Team to break an operation run by Cubans to transport marijuana and cocaine from South America to Florida.
As the Ilyushin banked in a wide circle, the convoy of trucks low-geared the final hundred yards, then screeched to a stop beneath Bolan's position.
Palestinians in keffiyehs and mismatched uniforms dropped from the trucks' tailgates to take sentry positions around the airfield, their AKM rifles still slung over their shoulders. Other Palestinians disconnected the forklift. One started the engine.
A fair-haired European-looking male left the cab of one truck.
"Get photos of that man," Bolan said to Nabih. He took the binoculars as Nabih steadied the long lens on a rock and snapped photos. Through the five power lenses, Bolan watched the blonde direct the forklift operator. Then the man returned to the truck.
The Air Cuba Ilyushin made a flawless landing, bounced over the airstrip's gravel, the plane's props whipping up storms of dust. At the truck, the fair-haired man took off his shoes and pants and slipped into green plastic coveralls. He pulled on rubber boots and gloves. Slinging a pouch over his shoulder, the man returned to the forklift.
In the backs of the transports, Palestinians muscled fifty-gallon drums onto the forklift. The European pointed to the airliner. The operator bumped over the airstrip to the center door of the airplane.
Focusing on the door, Bolan saw into the interior. Despite the passenger ports lining the sides of the airliner, he saw no seats inside, only an empty cabin. The Cubans had evidently converted the Ilyushin to a cargo carrier, while maintaining its appearance as a passenger aircraft.
Lieutenant Barakat's voice came through the big American's earphone again. "When, Colonel?"
Snapping his hand-radio to his mouth, Bolan answered quickly, "Wait. Repeat, wait."
Bolan focused the binoculars on a fift
y-gallon drum, read the stencilled numbers of a product code. Why the man in the anti-contamination suit? Why the oil drums with the different product markings?
"Nabih, take a photo of those numbers on the oil drums." Bolan keyed his hand-radio. "Lieutenant Barakat. That European. Tell your men not to hit him. We need to take him alive."
"He appears to be a Russian, I think. I will instruct my fighters."
"Wait for my command to fire."
Bolan set the radio beside him and readied his Soviet rifle. Pulling off the soft plastic lens cap, he flipped the reticle switch to power the illumination of the cross hairs. He put his eye to the rubber eye shield, found the airliner's side door with the scope's four-power optics. He set the cross hairs on the chest of a Palestinian struggling with an oil drum.
Estimating the distance to the trucks at two hundred fifty yards, Bolan adjusted the elevation knob and raised the cross hairs to the Ilyushin. A difference of fifty yards meant a point of impact approximately five inches lower. With a Leatherwood sniper scope, he could have made exact range corrections as he fired; but the inferior Soviet scope would force him to adjust by eye.
Keying his radio again, Bolan called his first shot. "I'm going to put a bullet through the European's leg. Open fire when he drops. Understand?"
Lieutenant Barakat instructed his men in Arabic. "They understand. And they are ready." Bolan looked to Nabih. The young man touched the Nikon and nodded. Bolan checked the row of ten-shot magazines ready at his left hand, then put his eye to the scope.
Sighting the cross hairs on the ankle of the European, Bolan flicked off the Dragunov's safety.
In the instant after Bolan squeezed off the shot and before the slug hit, the protective-clothed European moved. The bullet almost missed the man's leg. But the grazing hit spun him, slammed him into the gravel.
Auto fire raked the trucks, shattering windshields, killing the drivers. Other riflemen put bursts into the scattered sentries. The PLO gunmen died before they could raise their weapons.
Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine Page 2