“We have an unknown number of targets escaping through a tunnel,” Bolan said into his transceiver. “I need sentries in the sewers.”
It was a gamble. The soldier didn’t have much in the way of reserves, and the tunnel could easily lead to another building or alternate escape route; but if you were digging escape tunnels in a major metropolis, the sewers would be your quickest easiest bet.
“Copy that, pulling up the grid, sending units down,” Agent Farkas reported.
Bolan turned at the sound of a scream behind him, and broke into a sprint as it was joined by a second. He skidded back into the office suite. One Black Stork was clutching his hyperextended elbow. The other was rolling around on his back, clutching his damaged knee. The window behind the lab station was smashed out. “She got away!”
The Executioner saved recriminations for later. He tossed away his rifle and vaulted to the desktop and dived out the window. Bolan knew how to take a high fall but, the concrete still hit him with brutal impact. He slapped out of the fall and rolled to his feet, ripping off his gas mask and breaking into a run.
Shushan sprinted down the alley. Despite being gassed and losing an eye, the assassin was very spry. Being a maniac had its advantages. “I got Shushan outside the perimeter! North side! Heading for the boulevard!”
“Copy that!” Keller confirmed. “Intercepting!”
“I want her alive!”
“Copy that!”
Shushan sprinted down the street. A very pregnant woman in an aqua-blue burka stepped into her line of escape. The pregnant woman screamed and raised her hands. Shushan kept running, and Bolan became very aware she was running for a manhole thirty yards ahead. The pregnant woman plastered herself against the wall as Shushan approached.
Agent Keller’s burka was a CIA special.
The azure modesty garment tore away, revealing Agent Keller in sweat-soaked digital camouflage BDUs covered by the breasts and belly of a pregnancy simulation suit. Shushan missed the comical effect as Keller hurled the wad of fabric in a cotton cloud into the assassin’s path. Shushan flailed as the burka enveloped her and broke her stride. Keller threw a round kick that folded the woman in two and sent her sprawling. The NCIS agent stripped the weighted poncho away from her body with both hands.
Keller began beating Shushan’s shrouded, struggling form with thirty pounds of pregnancy armor. The second the assassin’s struggles weakened Keller put a knee in her chest and went to work with her right hand. A palm strike to the mandible left the assassin limp.
“Hook her and book her!” the soldier called.
“What about you?”
Bolan ran past her, heading for the manhole. “I’m going down!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dank and Stank came to mind as Bolan descended into the Islamabad sewer system. It was modern by most standards. The city had been built almost from the ground up, and the sewer system had been designed in the 1950s by Greek consultants. That didn’t keep it from reeking like a goat rotting by the side of the road under the summertime sun. Bolan ignored the stench. He removed the folding foregrip on the Beretta and clicked a tactical light in its place. Keller’s voice came from above.
“Cooper! I’m coming down!”
“Clear.”
Keller descended the iron rungs and her boots hit the filthy water. She unslung her carbine and nodded. “Babar confirms the tunnel leads to the sewers.”
“I thought it was going to take his men an hour to dig through.”
“He says they can tell by the smell,” Keller said.
“Fair enough.”
“He’s mobilizing local and federal police, as well as army units, to drop men down every manhole and cover every storm drain, but it’s going to take time.”
“Time we don’t have.” Bolan took out his phone and tapped an application. The phone began peeping hysterically. He handed the phone to Keller. “Here.”
“Your phone doesn’t like you.”
“It doesn’t like tear gas and by its sensors I’m inundated with it,” Bolan stated.
“Your phone has a sniffer?”
“No, but the built-in flashlight has a photoacoustic infrared spectroscopic application.”
“And every chemical agent has its own infrared pattern.” Keller gave Bolan a smile of supreme approval. “You didn’t just use the gas to subdue the bad guys, you used it to mark them.”
“Yeah, but any CS particulate still clinging to them or their clothes is dispersing by the second.”
“So let’s go see who else stinks down here.”
“You’re going to have to take point or I’ll be lighting up that sensor like a sun.”
Keller took point. “Not a problem.”
Bolan drew his Desert Eagle and took rear guard position. The NCIS agent swept the sewer section ahead of them with the invisible infrared beam. The graph lines on the screen rose and fell slightly. “If I’m reading this right we are getting minor traces of CS in this sewer section, parts per million are— Jesus!”
The graph lines on the phone spiked into the red.
Bolan and Keller advanced to a sewer junction. A body lay on the lip of the raised walkway. The soldier dropped to a knee beside the corpse and recognized the man. “It’s Afdar, the intelligence operative our prisoner, Jamshed, gave up.”
“Looks like someone gave Afdar a hard time. One of his buddies cut his throat.”
Bolan shone his tactical light on the victim. Afdar’s head had just about been removed from his body. “This was done with a sword.”
Keller’s eyes narrowed. This was a part of the narrative she was still having problems with. “Great. So, we have a ninja down in the sewer with us?”
“Looks that way.”
The woman looked both ways. “So, you like, brought a sword with you, right?”
“No.”
“So why hasn’t he shot us already?” Keller asked.
“I think he’s waiting for us to walk into him. We hit the warehouse hard and fast. We achieved genuine surprise. I don’t think he has his rifle. If I had to bet, he has a silenced pistol of some kind. Probably a .22. We’re armored, and there are two of us. He’ll want to do it close.”
“Good to know,” Keller stated.
“Then again, if he’s feeling his roots, he might pull the old ninja, ‘toss the smoke bomb, come in slashing through the smog’ routine.”
“Do you have some kind of countermeasure for that?”
Bolan frowned. “You don’t have a gas mask.”
“Unfortunately no. I was holding the perimeter up top with Ous, remember?”
“You might want to stay back a bit.”
Bolan holstered his Desert Eagle and pulled a gas grenade from his belt.
“You know, I can take a little tear gas. Bet you a ninja can take more.”
The soldier removed the pin. “It’s not tear gas.” He pulled down his gas mask and glanced around the junction. “Which way does the CS trace start again?”
Keller pointed the phone down the three paths one by one and stopped on the northern section. “That one.”
“Go ahead, but slow.”
Keller slowly advanced down the sewer section. “It’s getting stronger…” One by one the graph lines began crawling up into the red. “Stronger…”
The smoke bomb came hurtling out of the darkness.
Bolan threw himself in front of Keller. “Back! Back! Back!”
A frag grenade would have served the assassin far better. But in a concrete tube where the roof nearly scraped your head it was hard to throw a grenade far enough to keep yourself out of the lethal radius; and smoke bombs were much lighter than frag grenades or concussion weapons.
Black smoke enveloped Bolan and expanded to fill the section. The nice thing about the dark smoke in a dark sewer was that it obscured his response, which out in the daylight would have been a pleasing canary yellow. The cotter pin pinged away, and the soldier moved rapidly backward as his own c
loud expanded. He fired bursts from his Beretta into the bank of gas and smoke because the ninja would be expecting him to.
He doubted the ninja would be holding his breath. He would be creeping in slowly, depending on the fabric over his mouth and a good squint to protect him from the sting of his own smoke long enough for two swift beheadings.
The ninja was wrong on both counts.
Bolan knew he was right when he caught the sound of someone sneezing in rapid fire. The sound was suddenly eclipsed by a noise like a wolverine being killed in the snow. Keller spoke across the radio. “What the hell?”
“Stay back,” Bolan cautioned. “Well back.”
Keller didn’t need to be told twice. Bolan kept slowly backing up. The sound of coughing, choking, sneezing and yawning followed him. The stagger and scrape of footsteps was more like a man dying on his feet than the catlike step of a ninja. The soldier stepped back and found himself out of the gas and smoke cloud. The horrific noises followed. Keller was right. Tear gas wouldn’t stop a ninja. Diphenylaminechlorarsine would. Technically it was called DM, or sometimes Adamsite, after the chemist Roger Adams.
Colloquially it was called nausea gas.
It was said every person had his or her breaking point.
The ninja staggered out of the smoke and gas. He was wearing civvies. Only the sword drooping in his hand like a reed and the sand-colored hood covering everything except his eyes and the bridge of his nose identified him as a Japanese assassin from ancient lineage. Adamsite hit a victim in a rolling wave. First it acted like tear gas, affecting the eyes and esophagus, producing tears and coughing. Then on top of that, it triggered uncontrollable sneezing. The ninja tore away his crusted cowl as another wave of vomiting threatened to drown him. The tip of his sword struck sparks as he stabbed it down to keep himself from falling.
Bolan advanced.
The ninja’s sword swing was weak and wild. Bolan dodged it. He stepped in and pistol-whipped the man with the slide of his Beretta forehand and back. The ninja rubbernecked and dropped to his knees, slumping as his bowels released. Severe irritation of the bowels and bladder was a secondary symptom of Adamsite poisoning. Another symptom was occasional death. The ninja had taken a massive concentration of DM in an enclosed space. He needed fresh air, his nasal and throat passages flushed, and immediate medical attention.
Bolan threw the filth-encrusted ninja over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and was glad he was still wearing his mask. “Keller, go ahead. Fast, I need an ambulance and a HAZMAT unit if Babar can scare it up.”
“On it!”
The Executioner trudged through the muck. The aesthetics had gotten a little ugly, but the fact was he’d caught two ninjas in one week.
Not bad.
Secure Communications Room, CIA Station, Islamabad
“TWO NINJAS in one week?” Kurtzman whistled. “Incredible.”
Bolan nodded. “It’s got to be some kind of record.”
“Yeah, well, if there was an old record you were the one holding it anyway.”
Bolan shrugged modestly.
Kurtzman got back to business. “So, you lost your giant.”
“The infrared chemical indexing spectrometer in the phone was fantastic, but it has its limitations. The smoke and Adamsite concentrations overwhelmed it. It’s going to have to be recalibrated before I use it again. Unless Babar’s subterranean sweep picks him up, he’s long gone.”
“So what do you intend to do?”
“We have Shushan back in custody,” Bolan said.
Kurtzman considered everything he knew about the rogue Israeli assassin. “Good luck with that.”
“She’s been turned once. I hear it gets easier every time.”
“Well, that would be a genuine tiger by the tail.”
“More like the devil on a leash,” Bolan mused. “I just need to figure out the appropriate carrot and stick.”
“Well, let’s see, she’s a sociopathic assassin who likes sleeping with her targets before killing them,” Kurtzman offered.
“That narrows it down a bit. Don’t forget that I have two ninjas.”
“Thought they were supposed to be inscrutable—” Kurtzmann frowned “—and would rather die than betray their mission.”
“They don’t make ninjas like they used to.”
“What are you going to do, make them an offer they can’t refuse?”
“Something like that.”
Kurtzman leaned into the camera. “Can I watch?”
“We’ll set up a camera for you.”
BOLAN ROLLED ninja number two across the well-guarded med ward. The man had survived his experience with Adamsite gas. There was an aura of weariness around his eyes that even the stone-faced inscrutability of a ninja couldn’t quite hide. He was handcuffed hand and foot to the wheelchair. Bolan had taken the extra precaution of bundling him into a heavy canvas motor-pool coverall backward and epoxy resining him into the chair from the middle of his back to the hems of his sleeves and pant legs. The soldier had been hoping to watch the assassin try to ninja himself and his tender orifices out of the chair. So far the assassin hadn’t summoned the strength.
Soldiers in the ward nodded at Bolan and gazed at the prisoner with a mixture of hatred and interest. Rumors had spread, and it wasn’t every day you got to see a real live ninja. Unlike Syed, this man was clearly Japanese in appearance. His mission had been clandestine rather than covert. He and Ninja number two had been used as lurkers and assassins and, in a sugarcoated bit of misuse of precious assets, whoever was employing the ninjas had decided to deploy them as shock troops against Bilal’s village. The ninja hadn’t spoken a word since Bolan had dragged him up out of the Islamabad sewer system.
Bolan rolled Ninja number two into Ninja number one’s private room.
One was in bed. He was awake and slightly elevated with all four limbs in casts. Two went rigid in the chair. An expert in reading body language would have read all sorts of conflicting emotions passing across the supine ninja’s face. Bolan had left instructions to keep One well under the influence of morphine to loosen him up.
The Executioner tossed the opening ball. “So, you two know each other. Good to know.”
The ninjas simultaneously became as blank-faced as a stone Buddha.
“Listen, you two aren’t Iga or Koga clan. If you were, I never would have taken you alive. I suspect you’re from one of the splinter groups that were hastily trained and developed during World War II and after. It explains your sloppy technique and lack of discipline.”
One visibly bridled from his bed. Bolan chalked it up to the morphine. The soldier wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Two grew even more rigid in the wheelchair. Bolan rolled him over by the bedside and pushed a rolling table between the two men so they could both see. He flipped open the file on the table.
“This man passed himself off as an ethnic Hazara. His cover name was Syed.” Bolan flipped to a picture of the Israeli assassin. “This is Na’ama Shushan.” He flipped another page to a sketch of the giant. “We believe this man is in control of the operation, at least locally.”
Two gave Bolan a very hard look. “We are enemy combatants. Captured in uniform. We submit ourselves to the United States Military justice and demand all rights and protections under the Geneva Convention and Protocols.”
Two had made the first cardinal mistake during an interrogation. He’d opened his mouth.
Bolan returned his stare for long moments. “Now your buddy, Syed, as he was calling himself, was chosen and trained to be an operative in Central Asia because of his general appearance. Probably had too much Mongol ancestry in him than was good for him.” Bolan stroked his chin in meditation. “But like I was telling a friend of mine recently, despite everything you see in the movies, ninety-nine percent of the time a ninja’s job is to pass himself off as someone he isn’t, rather than doing gymnastics in pajamas.”
The ninjas stared at Bolan as if he were a snake in their mids
t.
“Now, these days, it’s just so much easier to buy yourself a local asset than insert your own people. Then again, sometimes, particularly if the job is important enough, you just have to go in and do it hands-on.”
The two Japanese waited silently for the rub.
“During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services determined that approximately ten percent of Japanese could pass for Chinese and vice versa.” Bolan pointed his finger at the ninja in the chair. “You’re one of those ten percent.” The man in the chair was taller than the average Japanese, and despite being green around the gills from Adamsite exposure, with the right accent he could pass for someone from Manchuria. “I suspect you’ve operated more than once in Mainland China.”
The ninja stopped short of flinching.
“I’ll make you a deal. I won’t ask you to betray your organization or any connections you may have with Japanese Intelligence. What I demand is that you tell me everything you know about the operation that you’re currently engaged in.”
The ninja on the bed spoke for the first time. “And if we don’t? What is it you think you are threatening us with? As you surmise, we are not Koga or Iga clan. Failure in our…association is not punished with death. What is it that you think the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service will do to us? Turn us over to the Justice Department?”
The ninja stopped just short of smiling at Bolan. They both knew that the day he got off his crutches it would only be a matter of time before he escaped from the authorities and be sipping drinks topped with tiny umbrellas on the Caribbean beach of his choice. There was only one problem with that theory.
“Your problem is that you aren’t a prisoner of NCIS or any other United States government entity.”
“And whose prisoners are we?”
“Mine.” The look that passed between the ninjas was priceless. Bolan continued. “I can do anything I want to you. I can put rock salt in your catheter or take you back to the village like I did Saboor and let the women geld you.”
Assassin's Code Page 18