Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine

by Don Pendleton

  In seconds, Bolan had the Cadillac fishtailing through the side streets. Flor sat in the front seat, still clutching a pistol in each hand. She swept her arm across her face to wipe away clots of blood. Blood patterned her white satin blouse like tropical flowers.

  Encizo leaned from the back seat and put his hand on her shoulder. He felt her shaking. He spoke loud to be heard over the wind rush and roaring engine.

  "Hermana, forgive me for my indiscretions tonight. I will never again show you disrespect."

  Bolan looked back at Encizo. His glance showed total agreement.

  Encizo laughed, then said sincerely, "And, if you forgive my earlier indiscretions, perhaps you would consent to accompany us to another investigation tonight?"

  13

  Jamaica

  Friday

  10:30 p.m.

  (0330 Greenwich mean time)

  BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOS, contour maps and building diagrams spilled across the limousine's back seat. Grimaldi looked anxiously at the glass partition that separated him and Able Team from the uniformed driver. Rosario Blancanales and Carl Lyons glanced through their folders. Gadgets Schwarz reassembled his collection of photos and maps.

  "I rented this limo from the hotel," Grimaldi told them, quietly but urgently. "It isn't Team equipment, so we can't talk much. We'll be flying south in about five minutes. The company talked with your friends and got some interesting leads. So here's your next account." He glanced at the partition again. "All I can tell you for now is get ready to take a big step."

  They gazed at maps of Nicaragua, photos of mountains and pine forests. Lyons grinned. "Interesting."

  Gadgets laughed. "The places we go. Wow." Leaving the tourist and commercial center of Kingston, the limousine followed the highway around the eastern end of the harbor, then turned onto the broad modern boulevard along the natural breakwater of the Pallisadoes Peninsula. The lights of the wharves and Kingston high rises shimmered on the black waters of the harbor and broke the early-evening horizon. The festive lights of yachts and pleasure cruisers swayed on the gentle swells of the bay.

  Able Team ignored the scenery. They leafed through the pages in their folders. The top of every page, the corners of the photos and maps bore the stamp CLASSIFIED.

  "They put all this together since last night?" Gadgets asked. He checked his watch. "In only sixteen hours?"

  "You haven't been back to the Farm," Grimaldi told him. "You don't know what's going on. You'll get a complete briefing on the plane. Let's just say that business is hot."

  Speeding past the entrances to the international terminals, the limo continued to the hangars serving the freight flights. The driver braked at a private terminal that catered to corporation executives. The driver jumped out to open the doors for the four "salesmen." Grimaldi checked the seats for forgotten papers, then tipped the driver twenty dollars. In another moment, the limo pulled away.

  Grimaldi stood at the curb while Gadgets, Lyons and Blancanales started into the executive terminal. Grimaldi watched the limo leave the terminal grounds. Then he called out to the others, pointing to a gate in the chain link fencing. "Forget the VIP treatment. Through the fence. Like the rest of the hired , help."

  Hurrying through the employee entrance, they darted through parked trucks and vans. Inside the hangar, technicians serviced Lear jets bearing the logos of multinational companies. Reflexively, the four men stayed in the shadows. They turned their faces when they passed workers or executives. On the runway, they broke into a jog.

  Grimaldi led them to a flat-black executive jet. As the rear door opened, Grimaldi peeled a self-adhesive company insignia from the fuselage.

  "Snappy plane, these," Lyons joked in Los Angeles gang-jargon. "But can't you pay for some paint? Cruisin' in the primer don't make it."

  "Primer?" Grimaldi asked. "Ah, the night black. Talk to the Air Force. Too late for this trip, but maybe the next time we drop you into Indian country, we can fly you there in cherry-red metalflake. Get in the plane, joker."

  Blancanales and Gadgets saw the parachute gear immediately. Lyons followed them, still laughing at the teasing of the ace pilot. Three steps into the cabin, Lyons spotted a weapon. "All right! Konzaki sent us the good stuff."

  He picked up an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon. Made lighter than the standard military model by the use of titanium, it fired belt-fed SS109 5.56 slugs at a cyclic rate of 750 to 950 rounds per minute. Konzaki, the Stony Man weapon smith, had modified the M-249 for long-distance killing by reengineering, the sear mechanism to fire semi-auto and three-shot bursts in addition to full-auto, then mounting a twenty-five-inch precision barrel, and finally adding a Leatherwood ART II variable 3x-9x sniper scope. A lock-on titanium suppressor served to muffle the report and conceal the muzzle-flash.

  Lyons marvelled at the weapon, at its Fabrique Nationale design, the custom titanium work, the monster scope. At a thousand yards, its 62-grain, hardened steel-cored slugs would punch holes through lightweight body armor and steel helmets. On days of perfect weather at the firing range, Lyons had scored deadly hits on silhouette targets placed at six hundred yards.

  Opening a wardrobe closet, Grimaldi stripped off his sports coat, tie and shirt, and neatly arranged the clothes on a hanger. He pulled on a T-shirt sporting Playboy Club insignia. As he tucked the T-shirt into his slacks, he watched the three men of Able Team.

  They were preparing a high-altitude, low-opening paradrop into the central mountains of Nicaragua. There could be no failure, no surrender. Serious wounds or capture meant death. Yet they had not shown a doubt or hesitation. They were checking through their HALO rigs and weapons with cool professionalism, their hands steady and unhurried.

  Grimaldi thought of the report on the double-ambush the night before on the banana farm. Able Team took one day off to lounge in the sun and rest, now it's off to Stalinist Nicaragua on a do-or-die mission. Where did Bolan get such men?

  "You got an hour, tourists," Grimaldi told Able Team. He went to the pilot's cabin. "Then it's out that door."

  14

  Nicaragua

  Friday

  12:01 a.m.

  (0601 Greenwich mean time)

  MOONLIGHT STREAKED ACROSS the blades of month-high corn. Gadgets lay in the damp field, his head pillowed on his wadded parachute. Rows of corn screened him on both sides. He leaned up and saw the moon low on a horizon of forested ridge crests.

  He found north by the twinkling of the Big Dipper.

  His hand-radio clicked. Lyons. Another code came through. Blancanales. Gadgets plugged in his earphone and keyed his code: three clicks to identify himself, then two more to indicate he was down and ready.

  Silence. A breath of wind moved the corn. Gadgets scanned the farmland around him. He lay on a slope overlooking a small valley. The valley's checkerboard pattern of fields continued uphill almost to the ridge lines; above them, the steep mountain sides became pine forest.

  Perhaps a mile away, he saw a tiny light. A house. What seemed a mile farther were several lights clustered along the pale stripe of a gravel road. Gadgets decided to risk voice radio.

  "The Wiz speaks. I'm in the middle of a cornfield. I came down to the east of the flare. There's a rise to the west of me. I think the flare was on the other side of the rise. Talk to me."

  "Lay cool," Blancanales cautioned. "I'm on the rise. After I came down, I got a good fix on the flare before it went out. I'm moving slow, looking and listening. Ironman, talk. Where are you?"

  "Just missed the trees. I'm way, way up the hill from you."

  "Problems?" Blancanales asked. "You need any help getting downhill?"

  "I like it up here," Lyons answered. "It's beautiful and it's peaceful."

  "Up and moving, tourist," Gadgets told him. "You didn't come here to meditate."

  "Yeah, yeah. I'm on my way. Over."

  "What about you, Wizard?" Blancanales asked. "Thirty seconds."

  Gadgets opened the case protecting their long-distance
radio. The radio incorporated a scrambler and tape unit to produce a "screech" transmission of incomprehensible electronic noise. Without an automatic tape to record and slow the burst of transmission, then a unit to decode the message, the message remained only electronic noise. The first message went to Grimaldi, now on his way back to Miami, confirming Able Team's touchdown and safety. Later messages would travel via NSA retransmission to Stony Man Farm in Virginia.

  Gadgets received a coded response from Grimaldi. Closing up the transmitter, he gathered his wadded parachute, his pack of radio and electronics, and his weapons. He keyed his hand-radio. "Okay, Pol. Let's go meet our friends."

  LYONS LAUGHED. `Teeny Loppers!"

  "Easy, man," Blancanales advised him. "They're qualified."

  Lyons looked incredulously at his fellow warrior. "We're going up against the PLO, radical Muslims, Cubans, and the cadre of the Red Army Faction. And those two—" he pointed at the teenaged boy and girl with autorifles "—they are the backup squad? Get serious!"

  A tiny fire of corncobs and sticks sputtered, throwing intermittent light on their faces and swirling smoke into the sooty ax-hewn rafters of the hut. The five of them crowded within its earthen walls, Able Team's packs and weapons competing with dried corn, chilies and farm tools for space.

  Maria and David talked back and forth with Blancanales, their voices low but angry, Blancanales's voice soothing. Maria threw back her knife-cut black hair and glared at Lyons. A hateful sneer twisted the angelic beauty of the teenaged girl's face. Then she turned again to Blancanales and hissed in quiet, rapid Spanish.

  Gadgets grinned to Lyons. "Shouldn't have said that. She knows English."

  "So what?" Dropping down the bipod legs of the M-249, Lyons pointed the weapon at the hut's plank door. He checked the fiberglass-and-foam case protecting the scope. He pulled out his silenced Colt Government Model, wiped mountainside mud from it, and returned it to his web-belt's holster. Then he adjusted the straps of the shoulder holster carrying his Python.

  "No dig in, mister," David told Lyons in broken English. "We go, inmediamente. One minute."

  "Not with you, kid," Lyons answered. "I don't take teenagers to the cemetery."

  Blancanales spoke. "There's no one else. If they—"

  Holstering his Magnum, Lyons leaned past Blancanales. He put his hand on the girl's shoulder. "Maria, how old are you? Thirteen? Maybe fourteen? And your brother, how old—"

  She twisted away from Lyons's touch. "My brother dead. My father dead. My mother dead. This my country, my war. You come here, tell me no. Who are you? Here, you foreigner. Here, you work for me."

  "Their unit got ambushed a day ago," Blancanales explained. "Her father and brother and the older men did not come back."

  "How'd you two get rifles?" Lyons asked the teenagers.

  "This my rifle!" Maria snapped back. She shook her M-1 carbine. "I carry it one year."

  "I kill Cubano," David declared, holding an AK-47. The scuffed stock still bore a stencilled spray paint armory0 number.

  "They're qualified to lead us there," Blancanales told his partners. "They're qualified because there's no one else to guide us."

  "We have maps," Lyons countered.

  "Is our war," Maria stated simply.

  "Four to one," Gadgets concluded the argument. "Looks like you're outvoted, Carl."

  Once the moon had set, Maria and David led them from the valley.

  They followed a rutted dirt lane past farms and family compounds. Dogs barked from dark houses.

  As they passed one house, a voice called out in Spanish. Maria answered. A man came out carrying a long-barrelled shotgun. David ran through corn to talk with the man for a moment. The man slung his shotgun over his shoulder, then scrambled across the cornfield to join them.

  Lyons's right hand went for his silenced Colt. Maria spoke quickly in her schoolchild English. "No, mister. He brother of my father. No problema."

  Her uncle looked at the three combat-clad men of Able Team. He pointed to the sky and mimed a parachutist pulling on his shroud lines as he descended.

  "I don't like this," Lyons told Blancanales and Gadgets. "Everyone in town's going to know—"

  "The brother of my father saw you come," Maria interrupted. "David tell him we go kill comunistas . He say he help us."

  "Why did we have to come here?" Lyons groaned. "Everybody wants to kill the Sandinistas."

  "Mister!" Maria hissed. "We are Sandinistas. True Sandinistas. The others are comunistas . They steal our revolution."

  "Can we get moving?" Lyons asked, impatient, staring around at the dark fields. "Let's talk politics when the crazies are cold."

  Blancanales laughed softly. "You would've loved Vietnam, Ironman. Politics in five languages, all night long."

  Maria spoke with Blancanales quickly in Spanish. Blancanales turned to Gadgets and Lyons. "Give the uncle some of your weight to carry. He'll go with us to the top of the mountains. It'll be downhill past there."

  The newcomer shouldered 800-rounds ammunition for the M-249, a pack of six Viper rockets and two pouches containing claymores. He trudged behind them as they climbed the hillsides. They left the fields and the occasional houses behind, and hiked on through pine forest. Beyond the pale smear of the starlit path, the forested mountainsides became depthless voids of pitch-black.

  Every sound—the cry of a night bird, a dislodged rock bouncing down the hillside—made the three men of Able Team freeze for an instant. Maria and David ranged far ahead of them, always returning to point out the correct fork in a path, but usually stayed in the darkness.

  "How do we know these people aren't leading us into a trap?" Lyons whispered to Blancanales.

  "We don't."

  After another hour of steep, switch backing trails, the pines thinned out as the mountainsides became sheets of black volcanic rock.

  They went over the crest. As a wind whipped at their sweat-soaked clothing, Able Team paused for Maria's uncle to return to them the ordnance he carried. He shook hands with Lyons, Blancanales, and Gadgets Schwarz, then slipped away.

  "Adios, yanquis y nitios."

  They paralleled the ridge line for miles. Above them, the vast dome of the night swirled with stars.

  They rounded a fold in the mountain and saw the distant lights of the terrorist training camp, Blancanales glanced at his watch. He called the teenagers back. They spoke in Spanish.

  "It's eleven now," said Blancanales. "By our maps, we're six miles from the camp. How fast can we cover that distance?"

  "For first part, very quickly," Maria told him. Her voice was mature beyond her years. "But near camp, becomes dangerous. They have patrols. Land mines."

  Gadgets and Lyons waited as the teenagers briefed Blancanales in rapid Spanish. Then Blancanales turned to his partners.

  "The terrorists train up here. They set booby traps, ambush each other with noisemakers and blanks. If we contact one of those squads and can slip away, great. But if they identify us, they can get their helicopters up here in ten minutes."

  "How many helicopters do they have?" Gadgets asked. "What kind and how many soldiers do they carry?"

  "The kids say they're Alouettes. Six men in each. Seems the socialist governments of Nicaragua and France exchanged gifts, and the terrorists got troop-ships."

  Lyons interrupted. "What about the patrols?"

  "We shouldn't encounter any serious patrols until we're almost at the perimeter. They've got cleared fields of fire and mine fields out for a hundred meters. Maria and David can take us to the wire. Their job with the local militia is to steal the mines. They go in there twice or three times a month."

  Lyons stared at the two teenagers. "Someone sends these kids to steal land mines? That's sickening. And you guys call me cold."

  "Mister," Maria told him, "we volunteer." Blancanales looked at Lyons. "Don't let it bother you. This is the last night. Let's go."

  Hiking again through the darkness, they followed networks of tiny
trails downhill. Gravity accelerated every step, helping them move quickly despite their heavy packs and weapons. At a switchback, Gadgets stood side by side with Lyons for an instant. A little breathless, Gadgets spoke quietly to his ex-cop partner. "Sometimes I forget you weren't in Nam. There, you would have learned the meaning of the word 'sickening.' "

  Then Gadgets hurried on, trying to keep up with the quick-footed girl and boy.

  CANS AND BOTTLES AND CARTRIDGE CASINGS littered the hilltop. On this side of the mountain, the winds carried moisture from the distant Pacific and the jungles of Honduras.

  Lyons crawled through ferns and vines.

  Trash scraped at his night suit. Beneath a pine, piled trash smouldered, a gray wisp of smoke drifting up from time to time. Lyons stood up beside the tree and looked downslope four hundred yards to the training base.

  Gadgets and Blancanales came up. Blancanales lifted a can to the starlight. He strained to read the label, but could not. It was printed in Arabic.

  He squinted at the label on a beer bottle. People's Republic of Cuba.

  "I got a good line on the parade ground," Lyons told them. He scanned the compound with a telescope. "I got all the guard towers. A few of the streets in between the barracks. All of one road going into the base. Most of the other road. Yup. I'm going to make them hurt."

  "If we don't get them," said Blancanales, "you will."

  "Don't talk that way," Lyons told him. "When they get a fix on where I am up here, everything in the camp—recoilless rifles, RPGs, pistols—everything's coming this way. It's up to you guys to keep the heat off me,"

  Blancanales laughed quietly. "Come on, Wizard. We got another half mile to go. Adios, dead-eye. I'll send one of the kids back to stand sentry for you."

  Gadgets gave Lyons a quick salute as they went.

  A COIN FLIP DECIDED which of the teenagers stayed with Lyons. In the darkness, Blancanales ran his fingers over the peseta. He offered it to Maria to touch. She felt a profile.