"Off your duffs, mates!"
Five minutes later, the men of Phoenix Force left Houston behind, flying west on a search for a DC-5 somewhere in the flatlands of Texas.
20
Miami
Saturday
9:00 a.m.
(1400 Greenwich mean time)
SKIDDING TO A STOP on the airfield, the DEA unmarked Plymouth rocked on its springs. Flor threw open the door. She ran back and unlocked the truck. Bolan and Encizo lifted out their heavy suitcases. They shook hands with the exotic young woman agent who had guided them through Miami and the Everglades.
"Flor, if you ever get bored chasing dopers," Bolan shouted over the screaming engines of two waiting Lear jets, "send a résumé to Stony Man Farm. You can give Colonel John Phoenix as a reference."
"Thank you, sir."
"Mack to my friends—"
"Senorita," Encizo urged. "Please consider the offer. We need fighters like you."
"With your charm and intelligence," Bolan continued, "I'm sure we could send you anywhere in the world. You could be very valuable to us."
"And very dangerous to las comunistas!" Encizo laughed.
"I will think about it," Flor said, turning away from the engine noise. "But I don't know if I would be effective in counter subversion. My politics; my ideas—you would consider them very socialist. My father, his brothers, my mother's family, all were very well-known in the Socialist parties of Bolivia, before the fascists and the Communists drove us out, murdered—no, that is history. This is my country now. Now, I'm fighting a war here. A war against dope."
Bolan looked at her long and hard. "Many battles. One war. Give us a call sometime. Stony Man pays better than your Agency. Adios."
"Hasta la vista, guerrera," Encizo told her.
The Stony Man warriors strode to the two waiting jets. Encizo passed his suitcase to Bolan and jogged to the plane that would take him to Texas to join Phoenix Force's search for a DC-5 carrying binary chemicals. A case of weapons in each hand, Bolan marched up the aluminium steps to his jet's cabin.
Bolan turned, waved even as he saw the Plymouth speeding away, the brave woman already returning to a war no less dangerous than his own.
As a joke, he had offered her more pay than the Drug Enforcement Agency. But what value could he put on an American like Flor Trujillo?
Did a civil-service salary pay her to face death every minute of her career? Perhaps a hideous, drawn-out death at the hands of sadistic drug traffickers? He had seen her fight with fear shaking her body. For a government pay check, did she risk the terrible wounds and disfigurement of modern weapons?
In an era when popular philosophies preached self-enrichment and the pleasures of wealth, she gave her intelligence and spirit to her adopted country for a few hundred dollars a week.
Even as he posed the questions, he knew the answers. Flor Trujillo loved America, loved the idea of America. She felt her responsibility to freedom, and her character, her spirit, her soul—whatever word described the mysterious element that made a person different from all the other people of the world—gave her no choice but to serve that country, that idea, with everything such selfless service entailed.
Bolan had met a kindred spirit. Another warrior like himself.
21
Nicaragua
Saturday
11:00 a.m.
(1700 Greenwich mean time)
HEADING STRAIGHT NORTH, toward the Honduran border, they littered their trail with bloody bandages and ration packets. The three men of Able Team took shifts carrying Maria's stretcher.
After the attack on the camp, they had delayed only to hack down two saplings and fashion a stretcher. Now, Gadgets and Lyons raced along woodcutters' paths, plodding uphill under the weight of the semi-conscious Maria and their own packs, trotting when the trails went downhill.
Ranging far ahead of them, David surveyed the trails for ambushes or signs of Nicaraguan army re-act squads. He knew the mountains and the people.
As Gadgets and Lyons rounded one bend, they saw a peasant woman waiting with the teenaged boy.
"Water," David told them, pointing to the plastic jug the woman offered them.
The woman leaned over Maria, kissing her cheeks, making the sign of the cross over her. She washed Maria's face as Gadgets and Lyons gulped the cold spring water.
"No bueno, kiddo," Lyons told David, nodding toward the woman. "Maybe she tell comunistas."
"She no talk. She sister of friend of mother of Maria."
"When the Communists come," Lyons explained to the boy, "they will see our tracks. They will know she saw us. If she does not tell the Communists about us, she dies."
"No problema," David replied. "She help us, she help the comunistas. She already send boy to comunistas, tell them of many, many Somocistas in mountains—"
"What? She's informed on us? What the—"
"Boy walk to army camp. Walk six hours. Army comes tonight. We gone. Comunistas give her money. Todo es bueno, yes?"
Gadgets tore open a foil packet of hikers' trail mix. He ate the mixed nuts and fruits in a few swallows, and tossed the wadded packet on the trail. If their pursuers missed Able Team's boot prints, they could follow the trash.
"I do not like this," Lyons told his partner, looking down at the woman who comforted the wounded girl. Lyons squatted, grabbed the handles of the stretcher. "Time to move. Make distance."
They continued north. The cool mountain air warmed to tropical temperature as the morning became midday. Sometimes they came to stretches of overlogged and eroded mountainside. Leaving the shadows of the pines and oaks, they immediately felt the heat of the direct sun. Red orange dust swirled from the denuded, gullied slopes; walls of gritty, desert-hot wind enveloped them.
In other places, the trail took them through deep folds in the mountain. Lush tangles of ferns and mosses enclosed the footpath. Bromeliad—orchid like parasitic flowers in red and pink and soft purple—hung in pine boughs.
Where the trail crossed a ridge crest, they stopped. Blancanales jogged up to where the others waited with the stretcher. In addition to his pack, Blancanales carried the M-249 machine gun and two hundred rounds of ammunition. Though they had used all the Viper rockets and most of the ammunition during the attack, the weight of his pack and the M-249 made every step an effort. His camouflage fatigues were sopped with sweat under his straps and back.
"This is it," Blancanales told them. He took a plastic-protected map from his chest pocket. Sweat from his face dropped on the map and beaded away as he scanned the topography. "Now we cut west. Give the kid whatever trash you got left."
David bent over Maria and talked quietly with her. Gadgets and Lyons dug through their packs. They found a few foil envelopes of presto-food. Lyons gnawed at a granola bar. Blancanales took a syrette and another dressing from his medical kit.
Making quiet conversation in Spanish with Maria, Blancanales changed the blood-soaked bandage on her leg and gave her an injection of painkiller. The boy took the bloody dressing and empty syrette, and gathered the empty food packets and wrappers. He ran ahead on the path to create a false trail for their pursuers.
"I think we should bury this monster," Blancanales told Lyons, patting the M-249. "We don't need it. And we could move faster without it."
Lyons bugged his eyes. "No! Never! I'll carry it. That thing is a precision instrument—"
"Twenty-five miles."
"I'll carry it. We get jammed by a re-act unit, that monster's our ticket out and away."
"Here you go. Twenty-five miles." Blancanales and Lyons exchanged weapons, Blancanales reclaiming his M-16 / M-203 rifle/grenade launcher, Lyons the M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon.
Blancanales slung the hybrid auto rifle over his back, then gripped the stretcher.
As Blancanales and Gadgets marched west with the girl, Lyons cut a long leafy branch, then followed them. Behind him he carefully whisked away the boot prints that betrayed their new direction.
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22
Texas
Saturday
12:00 p.m.
(0700 Greenwich mean time)
CUT BY THE BLACK LINES of the highways and the red tracks of dirt roads, the Texas range extended to the horizon. Water holes flashed like coins.
In the distance, a few miles from the helicopter, a swirl of wind created by the heat of the morning's sun swept across the land, gathering strength, becoming a column of whirling dust and debris. Yakov followed the dust devil with his binoculars. His mind drifted from the search for the DC-5 cargo liner, and he thought of the suffat chol created by the heat and winds of the Sinai and Negev deserts.
The ancient Hebrews had seen God in those columns of wind: the unseen form of God, walking the Land of Israel clothed in wind and swirling desert sand.
Yakov blinked hard against the fatigue stinging his eyes. He turned his thoughts away from his home and his God.
Scanning the range with the binoculars, he saw clusters of isolated ranch buildings, sometimes a town, sometimes light reflecting in flashes off a speeding car's windshield. But no DC-5.
Actually, he did not expect to see the aircraft itself. In his years with the Israel Defense Forces, Yakov had often patrolled the Sinai. He remembered incidents of Israeli planes lost or terrorist planes intercepted, the many other incidents when radar had indicated the incursion of a low-flying aircraft. In those searches, he and the other patrolling soldiers had looked for the tracks of the landing gear. An aircraft may be a hundred feet long, yet still be cleverly hidden. A crash could scatter metal over a large area, yet the debris might go unnoticed in a rocky, sand-blown area.
But the tires always left scars. Sometimes even windstorms could not erase the marks. Yakov had seen truck tracks remaining from Turkish pursuits of Lawrence and his Bedouins during World War I. The face of the desert healed very slowly.
A DC-5 required a long landing strip. Yakov looked for parallel lines a kilometre in length.
Yet in the vast heartland of Texas, a kilometre diminished to insignificance, merely a fleck on a horizon-to-horizon plain of green brush and dusty earth.
Yakov pressed the helicopter's intercom buzzer and shouted over the roar of the rotors.
"Billions of dollars for your high technology and we do this with binoculars?"
The co-pilot answered. "We'll get a report from the eyes in the sky soon. We grab these grass smugglers all the time—"
"We'd better get this one!" Yakov did not correct the co-pilot’s misinformation about grass smugglers; in their briefings, the Air Force personnel had received no information on the binary gases. Their officers spoke only of the intruding aircraft, not of the crew or cargo.
Keying his electronically encoded hand-radio, Yakov heard a static, blurred voice answer. He looked to the south and saw the speck of another Huey. Even with direct line-of-sight transmission, the distance taxed the small radio's power. He spoke slowly, distinctly.
"Phoenix One. Calling all Phoenix soldiers. Have you sighted anything? Anything?"
Bursts of static answered.
A faint voice he could not recognize said, "No." McCarter's voice came through clear. "Bloody zilch."
Yakov turned. Behind him, McCarter faced out the helicopter's opposite side door. With the safety strap looped around his waist, he held binoculars to his eyes with one hand and the radio to mouth with his other.
Yakov tapped the Englishman on the shoulder, shouted, "You need not use the radio, young man!"
McCarter shouted back, "Bloody zilch! This is a waste of time!"
The co-pilot’s voice spoke through the intercom headsets. "Message from the airport. Changing channels. . ."
A click brought the voice of Rafael Encizo. "This is Phoenix Two. I wait at the airport. They have no helicopter for me."
"Phoenix One speaking. Do not, repeat, do not join us. This search is not productive. Contact the local law-enforcement liaison, coordinate our search with the police in the countryside and the highway police—"
"The highway patrol."
"Correct. We will continue in helicopters until they return to refuel. What news from the Farm?"
"Stony Man One on his way back. There was fire in Miami. I cannot say more."
"A success there?"
"Two. But a big fish got away. I go now to speak with the police. Over."
Yakov returned his binoculars to the heartland of Texas.
23
Over Virginia
Saturday
1:00 p.m.
(1800 Greenwich mean time)
BOLAN FOUND A CHESS SET in one of the Lear's Compartments. He spread a map of the Western Hemisphere over the conference table and used the white pawns to plot the positions of his men. Three pawns marked Able Team's mission in Nicaragua. He placed four pawns in Texas to represent the search by Yakov, Ohara, Manning and McCarter for the DC-5 cargo liner. The last pawn marked Encizo's arrival at Houston.
A rook represented Stony Man Farm. He took a knight for himself, glanced out of the port to confirm the Virginia countryside below, and placed the knight south of Washington, D.C. The other knight went to Honduras, where Grimaldi waited for Able Team's extraction signal.
Nine men and himself. Against how many? He did not even know who he was fighting.
Grabbing a handful of black pieces, he placed a rook and a pawn in Nicaragua. The black king in Florida represented the Japanese terrorist leader who escaped. He put two more black pawns in Texas.
The cargo liner had popped onto the Air Force radar screens somewhere west of Cuba. Had it taken off from a Communist airfield? The Ilyushin in Lebanon bore the company logo of Air Cuba. He placed a rook on Havana.
Where did the other terrorist forces hide? The death list to the President had named five cities: New York, Washington, D.C., Dallas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Had the terrorists pre-positioned murder squads in all the cities? Were millions and millions of people held hostage in a waiting game that would soon explode into bloodletting? He placed a pawn on each city.
But how many other squads waited in the United States to do mass murder?
There could be no answer. Not until they revealed themselves. And now, with the breakdown in the discipline of the terrorist leadership, he could not expect the assaults to come in any order or logic.
How could he tactically respond to chaos?
A buzz came from the intercom.
"Are we over Dulles?" Bolan asked the pilot.
"No, sir. You have a communication on your secure line. Three more minutes to landing."
Bolan flicked on his monitor. April spoke urgently.
"Mack, there's a tanker off the Carolina coast. A Coast Guard cutter attempted to stop it for a search. It opened fire on the cutter with machine guns and automatic weapons."
"I'm on my way. Call ahead and arrange for a helicopter to take me out to the Coast Guard ship."
"I will. We just got a call from the chemical-warfare squad decontaminating the Tarala."
"They confirm the nerve gas?"
"Confirmed. But it wasn't just nerve gas. The freighter had that super pump and tanks of chemicals, but in the containers on deck they had rockets. Short-range rockets loaded with binary agent. Mack, that tanker's only a hundred miles from the White House."
"Warn the Coast Guard. Tell them to hold the attack until I get there. Over."
He took a last look at the map of the Western Hemisphere, at the positions of the chess pieces. Now he knew where another Hydra pawn moved. But what of the others? The hidden terrorist squads, the DC-5 somewhere in Texas, the hidden Cuban base?
His fist opened over the map, scattering black pieces everywhere.
If the terrorists hid, the Stony Men would wait. If they appeared, the Stony Men would attack. He and his nine warriors would hack away the many heads of Hydra.
Mack Bolan stripped off his sports coat and prepared for the next battle.
24
Texas
Satur
day
4:00 p.m.
(2300 Greenwich mean time)
"I DON'T KNOW WHY THOSE GENTLEMEN in the Air Force didn't call us hours ago," Sergeant Bragonier of the Texas Highway Patrol told Rafael Encizo.
Passing the dispatchers' room, the sergeant waved. The young woman at the consoles returned the wave. Though balding and scarred by a career in law enforcement in the extremes of Texas weather, Sergeant Bragonier presented a formidable image in his motorcycle officer's uniform: high boots, jodhpurs, black leather jacket, Ruger .44 Magnum. Commendation and marksman medals marked a shirt stretched tightly across his chest by powerful muscles.
"Maybe they think we're still men who ride around on wheels," the Texan continued. "Can't make it in the space age. I mean, what's so top secret about dope? Got those marijuana smugglers coming out of sky most every night. Maybe we could get a Federal Aviation ordinance enacted. All aircraft flying below one hundred feet are highway patrol responsibility. . . "
Encizo laughed. Where was that DC-5 and its cargo of nerve gas?
They pushed through double fire doors. The clatter and whir of computers filled the corridor. Sergeant Bragonier motioned the Cuban through a doorway.
A lanky young man in faded jeans and a red rayon cowboy shirt, his lizard-skin boots propped on a printer, watched phosphorescent green numbers flash across video screens. Perforated paper spilled out of a high-speed chain printer, thousands of names and files descending into a chromed paper stacker. The cowboy-operator wore his hair in the short crew-cut brush of an English reggae-rock pop star.
"Well, say, Sting," the sergeant joked. "This is a Mr. Torres from some federal agency. That's what he told me. What do we have in the way of aircraft reports?"
"De-bop-bop. . . " "Sting" replied, scooting his rolling chair across to a keyboard terminal. He typed in codes. Columns of one-line crime-report summaries—each line identifying the town, county, time, date, then numbers indicating the crime or accident—rolled through the video screen. A flashing line appeared.
Super Bolan - 001 - Stony Man Doctrine Page 16