It was days’ worth of rot. Actually, in this dry climate, it was much more than that. The bodies had been there long enough that they’d rotted despite the low humidity. Whoever had killed these people had simply dumped them inside the house, then locked the door.
“Oh, no,” Yenni said. “This cannot be. Not like this. Not six thousand people.”
“The town has been cleared out,” Bolan said. “The residents were sacrificed by whoever controls the weapons. That ‘factory’ was built specifically to hide them. It’s probably pretty flimsy, something they could erect quickly in between what they think are the satellite paths. And inside is another of the missile-launcher trucks, probably with guards and technicians crawling all over it.”
“Six thousand people,” Yenni said again. She pulled her scarf free, as if she could not breathe.
“No, we don’t know it was that many. They might have evacuated most of the town. In fact, it makes sense that they did. But you know how people are. There are always stragglers. And those people, those who wouldn’t obey… they were the ones who were massacred and dumped. Because they couldn’t be controlled. Because they couldn’t be counted on to keep the secret.”
“It is inhuman. We must do something.”
“We will,” he said. “Come with me.” He beckoned and she followed him back to the cargo bed of the Mahindra. There, he opened the tailgate and began removing Semtex charges and detonators.
“What do you mean to do?” Yenni asked.
“This town is one big graveyard,” he said. “We’re going to wire the portion of this neighborhood around the fake factory. Then we’re going to wire that, too. We’ll punch a hole in the middle of this mockery, but first, we’re going to go on a little sightseeing trip. See if there’s anybody left alive. Everywhere you go, I want you to plant a charge.” He handed her one of the cylindrical trigger switches. “This is a dead-man switch. Press down to activate. Release to make it blow. Got that?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Bolan said. “Now go. Take these.” He handed her a duffel bag full of Semtex charges. They’d acquired several such bags from Khasky’s arms store. “I’ll take one, as well. We meet at the center, wire the fake factory, then back our way out. And don’t comment on my plans.”
“This—” she started to say, then stopped. “Very well, Cooper.”
“Get,” Bolan said.
Yenni left. Bolan circled in the opposite direction. He kept his Beretta 93R with its silencer handy, as he didn’t want to alert any guards who might, in fact, be patrolling the ghost city of Sarrin.
Evil. Nothing but pure evil, cleaning out a town and using it as a prop like this. He was going to make them pay for it. He was going to hold them responsible. Whoever they turned out to be, no matter what connections they had, no matter how powerful they thought they were.
And he was going to start by blowing this place to ashes.
Bolan went house to house, lobbing Semtex charges. The little plastic explosive bombs were some of his preferred munitions because they were lightweight, compact and carried one hell of an explosive charge. Semtex was also popular on the world market among terrorists, hostile militaries and other elements not immediately identifiable with the West, so it helped to use Semtex whenever plausible deniability was an issue. Bolan, for his part, had spent enough time around the stuff that he actually sort of liked the smell.
He left charge after charge. He made his circuit around to reconnect with Yenni, and when the walls of the fake factory were directly before him, he strode up to them. This close, it was obvious the entire thing was more or less tacked together. Like the mannequins, it was meant to fool an eye in orbit, not one a few feet away with boots on the ground.
Bolan placed several charges at the base of the factory. Then an idea occurred to him. There was a single doorway in the enclosure, an ill-fitting slab of plywood on rusted hinges. He rapped on this and then stood well aside. Yenni was visible at the edge of his vision, trotting toward him with an empty duffel bag over her shoulder.
Bolan knocked again. Yenni looked at him as if he was insane. Then she cocked her head, crept up to stand against the wall of the fake factory and put her ear to it. “Do you hear that?” she asked.
He pressed his own ear close. “It’s…music,” he said.
“I have never heard this before.”
“I have,” Bolan said. “Sounds like the guards came here to have some fun. We’re going to crash their party.”
“What is it? The music, I mean. It is so…”
“Yeah. ‘Soul Finger,’ I think, by the Bar-Kays.”
“This means nothing to me,” Yenni said. “Why do you smile?”
“No reason. Sounds like a hell of a party in there.”
“You are insane,” she said.
“Just watch.” He rapped on the door again, louder this time. A voice answered from the other side.
“He says ‘Who it is?’”
“Candygram,” Bolan said. Again, Yenni looked at him as if he’d grown a third eye.
The door opened. Bolan struck like a cobra, grabbing the man and wrenching him outside. Yenni, who was fast on the uptake, slammed the door shut as Bolan smashed a heavy fist into the side of the man’s head. It took two more punches to knock him cold, but Bolan had little difficulty applying the necessary force.
“He wears that same uniform,” Yenni said. “The one we could not identify.”
“He does. And we’re taking him with us.”
Inside the enclosure, the music continued to thump along, all horns and bass. Bolan couldn’t get it out of his head, which still hurt badly, as they dragged the unconscious man through the streets of the ghost town and back to their truck. Once there, Bolan bound him with zip-tie cuffs from his war bag, gagged him with duct tape and pushed him into the cab of the Mahindra.
A siren began to spool up inside the fake factory.
“Uh-oh,” Yenni said.
“Damn it.” Bolan started the truck, then thought better of driving. “Switch with me,” he told her.
Yenni threw open her door, ran around to his side and climbed in, while he took up the shotgun position. The unconscious man in the mysterious camouflage uniform started to snore.
“At least someone is comfortable,” Yenni said. She slammed the accelerator to the floor and sent the Mahindra tearing out of there, headed for the perimeter of what had once been Sarrin.
The gunfire started.
“Where is it coming from? I cannot see anything,” she muttered.
“Probably because we have no working mirrors left,” Bolan said. The rearview mirror in the cab was useless because the truck bed was full of munitions. Once more Bolan was reminded of the old grenades they carried.
The soldier risked his skull and stuck his head out the window, looking back the way they’d come. They passed the perimeter of Sarrin. “There are more of those Hummer-like vehicles,” he said. “Probably a lot of them in the Syrian regular military before pieces started getting passed around in the wake of Hahmir’s rise to power. Either that or we’re simply dealing with loyalists in disguise.”
“Should you not be shooting at them?”
“I thought about it,” Bolan said, “but we’ve got enough of a head start that I don’t think we’ll need to.”
“You mean…”
“Yes. Pull over and step out quick.” He checked the prisoner, who was still out cold and snoring like a man in his own bed. Then Bolan jumped out of the truck and walked toward the rear. Sarrin was before them.
“Do it, Yenni,” he said. “Take the honors. Before the pursuing trucks get out of range.”
“Yes.” Yenni held up the metal cylinder and popped the protective cap. “For the people of Syria,” she said. Then she pressed the button.
Nothing happened.
“Let go,” Bolan reminded her.
“Oh,” Yenni said. “Of course.” She raised her thumb.
The chain reaction of Semte
x charges rolled over them like thunder. It was followed by a sandstorm that caused them to cover their faces. Yenni wrapped her scarf once more around her face, while Bolan simply ducked his head.
A burning truck rolled slowly out of the town limits and came to a stop on the road. Nothing else followed.
“We should check the weapons emplacement,” Yenni said.
“Wait for it.”
The secondary explosion happened then, emanating from the center of town. “Ah,” she said. “The launching vehicle.”
Bolan, looking through his monocular, nodded. “The launching vehicle. Now we can go back in, survey the damage from the truck and make a quick escape.”
“Escape to where?”
“Just down the road a piece,” he answered. “I want a nice, quiet place for us to talk.”
“Us?” Yenni’s tone had changed.
“Uh, I was thinking more along the lines of me and Sleepy here.”
“Oh,” she said. “So afterward. You and I will finish the conversation we tried to start. About the battles we fight.”
Bolan wondered, then, if this mission hadn’t gotten him into even more trouble than he’d anticipated.
11
“That is a minefield,” Yenni said. “There are many like it out here in the wastes, their purpose forgotten, their explosives remaining to maim and to kill. We are fortunate this one is clearly labeled. Many are not. It is children, most often, who find the mines, when they go out and play.”
Bolan nodded. He massaged the bridge of his nose. “We’ll stay clear of it,” he said. “I just want to run parallel to it, up and down this dirt road, while I chat with our friend Azhul.”
Their captive had given his name as Anren Azhul. They knew little else about him except that he was Syrian. Bolan intended to correct that.
He would have to walk a fine line here. Bolan hated torture and those who engaged in it. He had seen too many good people reduced to quivering carved turkeys by those he fought. But he needed the prisoner to believe he would do anything, commit any atrocity, to make him talk. A prisoner who truly feared his captor would give up what he knew in hopes of saving himself. And Bolan would be able to tell if that man were lying, because there was no better lie detector than bald-faced terror.
So how to induce this state in a man without actually torturing him? Bolan knew that one of the principles of physical coercion was this: you never threatened to break a man’s arm. You broke the arm and threatened to break the other one. But Bolan would no more break a captive’s arm than he would remove his fingernails. It just wasn’t what he did. He was a soldier, first, foremost and always.
“Get me the chains from the truck,” Bolan told Yenni. “The ones for the tires.”
She clearly did not understand how this was helpful, but she didn’t argue. Since Azhul had awakened, she’d been careful to say little. She understood that Bolan had to appear to be in complete control. Undermining him through banter would not help their cause in making the prisoner fear the big American.
Bolan thought Azhul would be a reasonably easy nut to crack. The man was terrified. There was no way to know what sort of function he might have played at the weapons emplacement, but at the very least he knew which of the various Syrian factions claimed his loyalty. That alone would go a long way toward telling Bolan what he had to do here to fulfill the parameters of his mission.
“Time to pay the piper, Sleepy,” Bolan said. He brought the chains over, hooked them tightly around Azhul’s arms and dragged him to the rear of the Mahindra. There he connected the chains to the truck’s back bumper.
“What is this?” the man demanded. “What are you doing?”
“Oh,” Bolan said. “You speak English. Maybe you should start by telling me what you do for a living. Who do you work for?”
“I will tell you nothing,” Azhul said defiantly.
“I was hoping you would say that.” Bolan opened the driver’s door of the truck, reached in and started the engine. Behind the vehicle, Azhul began to caterwaul.
“What are you doing?” the prisoner demanded. “This is against the Geneva Convention!”
“You don’t even know what I’m doing,” Bolan said. “And honestly. Geneva Convention? What, did you see that in a movie or something?”
“I have rights!”
“You have nothing,” Bolan said. “Now, Azhul, I’m going to drive up and down this dirt road. It’s going to take longer than it might if it was asphalt—”
“‘Asphalt?’” he said. “What is this ‘asphalt’?”
“Pavement,” Bolan said. “Don’t interrupt. It’s going to take longer on a dirt road, but eventually, I’m going to flay all the skin from your body. And the best part is, it won’t kill you. You’ll still be alive to answer questions.”
“No!” Yenni stomped over, her hands on her Krinkov. “Strikeforce, you are mad!”
Bolan opened his mouth to correct her, then realized what she was doing. She had deliberately used the wrong code name. “You stay out of this,” he told her, faking anger.
“I will not!” she said. “I stood idly by the last time you tortured our prisoners. I cannot see you abuse another human being again! It is wrong. You are wrong. I cannot let you.”
“You’re going to.”
“Wait,” Azhul said.
“Leave him his eyes, for pity’s sake,” she said. Bolan was amazed. She actually sounded as if she was on the verge of tears. “How can you carve out a man’s eyes like that? He will live the rest of his life as a freak—”
“Please stop!” Azhul screamed. “Please, not my eyes! I will do whatever you ask! Anything you say! Please!”
Bolan turned on the prisoner, grabbed him by the collar and drew his combat knife. He put the blade near Azhul’s face. “Who are you and what do you do?”
“My name is Anren Azhul,” he blubbered. “I am a computer technician. I was assigned to deploy the American weapons system.”
“And did you?” Bolan asked.
“No. We do not have the arming and launching codes. These can be reconstructed, but it will take time. We did not achieve this goal.”
“How close are the other teams?” Bolan demanded. “How many emplacements are there?”
“I do not know,” Azhul said. “I know nothing about the other weapons sites or the progress of their teams.”
That made perfect sense. Bolan didn’t bother to tell Azhul that he believed him. Fear would keep the man talking. Silently, he congratulated Yenni on her intuitive grasp of the whole good-cop, bad-cop routine. He would have to thank her later.
“Give me the locations of any other weapons sites you are aware of,” Bolan said.
“I do not know any! I swear! Please, American, do not take my eyes.”
“Oh, relax,” Bolan said. He unchained Azhul from the bumper, but left his hands bound. “Now comes the easy question. I want to know who you’re working for. That uniform was chosen to hide your affiliation. Why?”
“I can say only—” Azhul began. Then he bolted.
“Cooper!” Yenni called out.
The Syrian technician was quick. He took off like a jackrabbit…and ran straight into the minefield.
“Damn, damn, damn,” Bolan swore. “Yenni, get me my rifle from the truck.” He followed Azhul to the perimeter of the field and began calling after him. “Azhul! Azhul, stop! You’re running through a minefield!”
The Syrian either did not hear or did not care. Yenni returned with the rifle. Bolan ripped the plunger back, ejecting a live round over his shoulder. Then he put the weapon against his body and peered through its sights.
“Do you mean to shoot him?”
“Just the opposite,” Bolan said. “If he blows himself up we’ll lose our chance to know who’s behind this. I don’t intend to let him do that.”
“But what is it you mean to do with that rifle?”
“Blaze a trail.” Bolan started shooting.
The rounds impacted
well before Azhul, who was too afraid to stop despite the sound of gunfire from behind him. Bolan did his best to sweep the terrain in front of the fleeing man, spacing his shots as close together as he dared. The minefield was a ribbon barrier delineated by signs on both sides. He could see the opposite side from here, distant though it was. He just had to see Azhul safely there before giving chase.
The Syrian reached the far side. He did not seem to consider why Bolan might have fired before him. None of the rounds had caused a mine to detonate, but then, neither had any of Azhul’s footfalls.
“I’m going after him,” Bolan said. He handed Yenni the rifle. “Hold this for me. I’ll be back.”
“Cooper!” she shouted. “This is a bad plan!”
“I know,” he said as he ran into the deadly minefield.
In the arid soil, Azhul’s boots had left clear footprints. The man’s stride was not as long as Bolan’s, which the soldier found awkward to negotiate, but he managed, stepping only where Azhul had stepped. Soon he, too, was on the opposite side of the barrier. He looked back and threw Yenni a thumbs-up. He wasn’t sure she could see it, but it couldn’t hurt. Then he ran harder. Azhul was already a fairly distant speck.
Bolan had spent a lot of days and a lot of miles on the march. He knew how to beat a fleeing man. Many people did not realize it, but the human being was actually the best distance runner on the planet. Some cultures practiced “persistence hunting,” in which they simply ran after an animal until the exhausted prey, capable of much faster short-distance sprints than the human, gave up in exhaustion.
It didn’t take long for Bolan to catch up. When he did, he tackled Azhul, dogging him to the ground. The Syrian fought back, but it was no contest. Even if the man’s arms hadn’t been chained, he would have been no match for Bolan. The two tussled for a few moments before Bolan got the man on his back, straddling his chest. He slapped Azhul a few times to leave him dazed, then stood and dragged the prisoner to his feet.
“Time to carve out those eyes,” Bolan lied.
“Please…no,” the man said, breathing hard. “Fafniyal. I am a member of Fafniyal’s Wolf Brigade.”
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