He couldn’t identify the sound that had woken him up, but then he realized it was the complete lack of sound that signaled danger. The Badlands might look like a barren wasteland to the untrained eye, but they teemed with life, and where there was life, there were sounds. Whether it was the howling of coyotes or the love song of the —whip-poor-will wooing a potential mate, there were always sounds echoing through the area. The only time the native fauna clammed up was when there was danger present.
Bolan pulled his binoculars from the pouch on his belt and carefully scanned the cliff on the other side of the valley. The sun was getting low in the western sky, to the soldier’s back, leaving the wooded draw in which they hid in shadows, but it shone brightly on the far side of the meadow, and he caught a flash of sunlight reflecting off glass. He focused on the spot where he’d seen the flash and saw a man with a scoped rifle pointed their way. But the man wasn’t looking directly at Bolan’s position; rather, he was focusing on something south of the wooded draw.
The soldier watched the man slowly move his rifle toward Bolan’s position. The sharpshooter was watching his comrades as they made their way toward the encampment. From the angle of his gun, Bolan estimated that whoever was coming at them was at least two hundred yards to their south, and not moving terribly quickly.
People could be coming at them from the north, too, but not likely, since the terrain to the north was virtually impenetrable.
Kemp came out of the tent with her gun and whispered, “What’s up?”
“Someone’s coming at us from the south, and we’ve got a sniper watching us from the east. What’s above us?”
“More of the same. It’s too rugged to pass through. What should we do?”
“I think our best defense might be a good offense, but we can’t just pop out and start shooting because the sniper will get us. And he’s probably not alone.”
“Then what?” she asked.
“Climb as high up the side of the draw as you can get. I’ll climb up the other side. Hold your fire until you hear me shoot. Then open up and shoot as fast as you can aim. You take the ones to the east, I’ll take the ones to the south. We’ll have the advantage of the sun being in their eyes. If we can get them before their eyes adjust to the shadows, we just might survive this.”
Kemp scrambled up the south side of the draw, and Bolan climbed up the north. He’d barely gotten into position when the first man crept around the corner and into the draw, then another man appeared, and then another, until six men stood there. They moved toward the tent with remarkable stealth, but they still made noise, and every twig that snapped under their boots echoed through the stone silence of the draw. When the first mercenary reached the point where the sunlight gave way to shadow, Bolan squeezed the trigger on his Browning. A fist-size hole appeared in the center of the man’s chest.
Bolan didn’t wait to see if the man was dead; he’d already acquired another target and dropped him even before he heard the report from Kemp’s Savage. She was fast with the bolt. Bolan squeezed the trigger on his Browning autoloader as fast as the action could cycle, and he noted that Kemp’s second shot came at almost the same moment as his third. Within the space of a second they had dropped five of the six men, but the sixth had dived for cover behind the ATV. Not that the ATV would stop either of their .30-caliber rifles—their bullets would pass through any part of the machine, even the aluminum engine block. But to hit the man they had to see him, and now he had the advantage of being in the dark shadows of the draw.
While Bolan tried to get a bead on the remaining man, he heard the report of a small caliber rifle from the entrance of the draw. Kemp slammed back against the cliff wall she had scaled, and Bolan saw blood appear on her forehead. Before he could determine if she was seriously injured, a hail of bullets chopped up the juniper trunk he’d climbed to get to his position. Bolan pressed himself as flat as he could against the cliff wall, using the tree trunk as cover. From what he could see, there appeared to be two men who had moved just inside the entrance of the draw, both of whom were throwing a lot of lead at Kemp and Bolan. He couldn’t make out their exact position because they hid among the rocky outcroppings at the entrance to the ravine.
Bolan heard the report from Kemp’s rifle and saw the man who’d taken cover behind the ATV fly from behind the vehicle as if he’d been kicked by a mule. The six-inch exit wound in his back told Bolan that he was out of the fight. It also told him that Kemp was still in it.
But for how long? Their position had been strategically sound for ambushing the main force coming into the draw, but now they were trapped, sitting ducks for the men at the mouth of the draw.
“Cooper,” one of the men firing at them shouted, “you cannot escape. Give yourself up.”
“Kolodziej?”
“Yes.” Kolodziej was startled to hear the soldier shout his name.
Bolan saw that Kemp had crawled to a ledge that ran toward the mouth of the draw. It appeared that she was out of the line of sight of Kolodziej and the other man. Bolan tried to keep him talking to distract him.
“People like you seldom venture into the field. I think you made a mistake,” Bolan taunted. “I don’t foresee you living much longer.”
“It doesn’t seem to me that you’re in any position to end my life,” Kolodziej stated.
“I’m not,” Bolan said. He looked and saw that Kemp was just about in position to take a shot. “But perhaps I don’t have to be.”
Kemp aimed down at Kolodziej and squeezed off a shot. As his partner swung upward to fire back at her, Bolan leaned out and drilled the man with his BAR.
“We got them!” Kemp shouted.
“Are you all right?” Bolan asked.
“I got a gash across my forehead and I’m bleeding like a stuck pig, but if I can get this cleaned up it won’t leave much of a scar.”
“We can’t start cleaning up just yet,” Bolan said. “We need to deal with that sniper. Maybe with a couple of snipers.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Kemp said.
CHEN’S SAT PHONE rang and he saw that Liang was calling. “What have you to report?” he asked.
“Kolodziej just contacted me. He said he’d found Cooper and Kemp.”
“Where are they?” Chen asked. Liang relayed the GPS coordinates that the Polish man had given him. “What was Kolodziej going to do?”
“He said he was taking eight men to attack them at their campsite. He’d left two men guarding the entrance to the site in case things go wrong.”
“Kolodziej is good,” Chen said, “but I’m afraid Mr. Cooper is better. What do you plan to do to resolve the situation?”
“I’ve ordered both helicopters to the location right away. Each has eight men aboard. They should be at the campsite within half an hour.”
Chen thought about that for a moment, and then said, “Call the helicopters back.”
“Are you certain?” Liang asked. “We are on the verge of capturing Cooper.”
“I’m afraid you may be on the verge of simply losing more men,” Chen replied. “So far all of your efforts to capture Cooper have been worse than ineffectual. We have lost an astounding number of men in an effort to capture two individuals. It is time to cut our losses. I want you to call off the search, fall back and focus your efforts on protecting the facilities.”
“I respectfully disagree,” Liang said. “This man is cagey. We should not underestimate him. As long as he remains out of our grasp, he poses a threat to our enterprise.”
“I agree that he is a wily opponent,” Chen said, “but we need the helicopters to transport the product from the laboratory to the feed-grinding facility in Iowa.”
“What?” Liang asked. “We weren’t going to deploy the product for at least another two weeks. We haven’t completed testing.”
“We no longer have the luxury of completing the tests,” Chen said. “These attacks we’ve been experiencing mean that someone somewhere knows too much about our activitie
s. Even if we defeat Cooper, there will be more where he came from. But if we can deploy the product and get it into the food supply, there will be nothing an army of Coopers can do to stop us.”
“I understand, sir, but please allow us this one last chance to capture Cooper. We are sending the very best men we have after him this time.”
“From what I’ve seen your best might not be good enough,” Chen said.
“Please, sir. Between Kolodziej’s men on the ground and my troops approaching in the helicopters, Cooper faces impossible odds this time.”
“I am willing to compromise,” Chen said. “Recall the helicopters and allow Kolodziej and his men to proceed against Cooper.”
“Sir, I respectfully believe that would be a mistake. I believe we will need my men to attack from the air to deliver the coup de grâce.”
Chen remained silent, pondering Liang’s proposal. “I will allow you to use one helicopter. I need to begin loading the product onto the other helicopter immediately. If I have your assurance that you will send one helicopter to the Killdeer Mountain facility, I will allow you to use the other in your campaign against Cooper.”
After Liang had assured Chen that he would recall one helicopter, Chen returned to his conversation with Zoeng Wei, the geneticist heading the research team at the laboratory. The man seemed unwilling to alter his program in the face of the new reality.
“We have not finished testing,” Zoeng said. “We will not be ready for several weeks.”
“Will the prions work as needed in their current state?”
“Yes, but the timing is still too unpredictable. Encephalopathy might take anywhere from two weeks to a month to develop. With a little more time, we can make the timing more precise.”
“We do not have the luxury of more time,” Chen said. “A two-week window is more than adequate. Is enough of the product ready?”
“We’ve infected several hundred kilos of finely ground animal protein with vast amounts of prions,” Zoeng said. “At a rate of ten grams of infected protein to one metric ton of feed, we should have enough to infect approximately thirty thousand metric tons of feed.”
“That’s not as much as we had hoped for,” Chen said.
“If we had several more weeks to work on the program, we could have one hundred times that amount available.”
“As I said, we do not have several more weeks. Besides, thirty thousand metric tons is more than enough to poison a large portion of the nation’s beef supply. If we distribute it properly, we should still be able to infect well over a million animals, which should translate into millions of fatalities. It may not kill as many people as we had originally hoped, but it will have the desired effect of bringing the U.S. economy to a halt and throwing its entire system into chaos. How soon can you have the product ready for transport?”
“With adequate manpower, two days,” Zoeng said.
“What is involved?”
“We need to transport the product in sealed casks. It is far too dangerous to transport by any other method. Breathe in one prion particle, and you will soon die a horrible death. We have already lost several people to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It will take at least two days to safely load the existing product into the casks.”
“You have twelve hours,” Chen replied. “Please, do not disappoint me.”
WHILE KEMP’S IDEA was a bit unorthodox, Bolan had to admit that it just might work. The sniper, or snipers, had them pinned down. The rifles that Kolodziej and his men carried were equipped with ATN night-vision scopes, meaning that the snipers in the trees very likely carried the same equipment. He’d had to leave the DPMS with the FLIR back at the vet clinic when he and Kemp had fled in the ATV. That equipment would have more than evened the odds, but Bolan had to make do with the night-scope-equipped QBZ rifles he’d confiscated from the mercenaries for him and Kemp. He’d managed to scavenge ten 30-round magazines for each of them. Kemp traded her Savage bolt gun for the QBZ, but Bolan hung on to the Browning in case he needed more firepower than the compact Chinese rifle could provide.
Even though Bolan and Kemp had upgraded their optics, the snipers still had the advantage of knowing where they were, while Bolan had only a general location for one sniper and no idea if there were more, and if so, how many. Kemp’s plan was low-tech, but it still might work. When the shooting had started, the cattle milling around in the meadow near the entrance of the wooded draw had dispersed, but once it died down, they’d returned to eat the thicker grass that grew along the creek bed. Kemp’s idea was to use the cattle as cover to escape the snipers.
Bolan was studying the situation, plotting a route to the cattle that would give him the most cover from the snipers, when he heard the helicopter approaching. Kemp heard it, too. “What do we do now?” she asked.
“We can’t go out, so we don’t have much choice but to go up.”
They scrambled back up the side of the draw, using branches and exposed juniper roots for footholds and handholds, until they reached an outcropping that jutted away from the cliff, creating a small space in which they could hide from anyone above them using night-vision optics. Bolan didn’t have to tell Kemp to press herself as tightly against the cliff wall as possible—she was already doing it. He hoped the ledge above them jutted far enough to block their heat signatures from the eyes in the sky.
It stuck out far enough to block the helicopter from Bolan’s view, even when he could hear it almost directly above them. The soldier hoped the reverse was also true. They would soon find out, because someone opened up with a heavy-caliber machine gun and tracer rounds lit up the night. Bolan guessed that they had to be using a pintle-mounted gun from inside the door, as he hadn’t seen any fixed weapons on the outside of the helicopters that had taken away Bowman and Grevoy. The shots were too steady to be coming from a handheld weapon.
The machine-gun fire pulverized the ATV and shredded the tent to bits. Bolan still couldn’t see the helicopter, but he knew he was correct that it was nearly on top of them when he saw the ropes fall down mere yards from their position. As soon as the first person began descending the rope, Bolan raised his QBZ rifle and shot the man. The man lost his grip on his ascender and fell to the ground. By this time several more men had begun to descend the ropes. Bolan managed to tag two more, and Kemp nailed one, but four made it down to the bottom of the draw. The soldier plugged one through the top of his head and Kemp dropped a second, but the remaining two managed to scramble away. Bolan lost sight of them in the dark.
Meanwhile the helicopter was trying to maneuver down into the draw to enable the door gunner to get a fix on Bolan and Kemp’s position, but there wasn’t quite enough room to get the big, refurbished Huey low enough for an accurate shot. The pilot did manage to get low enough for Bolan to put a bead on the windshield right about where the pilot should be sitting in the cockpit. The Executioner had switched to the Browning, and emptied the 4-round magazine into the cockpit. He was glad he’d slung both rifles because the powerful .30-caliber bullet the Browning spit out would do a lot more damage through Plexiglas than the 5.56 mm bullet the QBZ fired. The nose of the helicopter rose up, then tilted back down and the helicopter slammed into the bottom of the draw, its rotors chopping everything within their seventeen-meter diameter to pulp. Bolan hoped that included the two men who had gotten away.
The soldier scanned the area below through the night scope on the QBZ and saw a hot smear beneath one of the broken helicopter rotors and heat signatures from what looked like scattered body parts. That accounted for one of the men on the ground. He scanned the helicopter wreckage and saw heat signatures from two slumped forms in the cockpit. They weren’t moving, and Bolan could tell from their fading heat signatures that their body temperatures were dropping. Both were dead.
Bolan caught movement in the rear area of the cockpit. It was the door gunner. He was trying to get to the gun, which had come to rest on its side, pointing upward out of the helicopter—aimed. The gun was pointed a
lmost directly at him and Kemp. Bolan sighted the ATN scope on the figure and squeezed off a short full-auto burst. He scored a direct hit and the figure stopped moving.
Shots rang out from below, and several bullets ricocheted off the ledge just above them. Before Bolan could get a location on the shooter, Kemp had drawn a bead on him and fired her QBZ. The soldier looked through his scope toward where she’d fired and saw a figure slumped on the ground. She’d nailed him.
When they were certain no one was left alive amid the wreckage, Bolan and Kemp made their way back down to what remained of their campsite. They salvaged a few items, restocked their ammo and prepared to implement Kemp’s escape plan.
LIANG HELD the sat phone in his hand without answering until it stopped vibrating. When he was unable to contact Kolodziej, he began to worry. The B&B mercenaries varied as widely in their abilities as they did in their countries of origin, but the contingent that Kolodziej selected for his squadron were the best of the lot, roughly com parable to the men he’d hand-selected from the most highly trained members of the People’s Liberation Army special forces for this mission. It seemed inconceivable that Cooper would be able to defeat Kolodziej and his crew.
As impossible as it was to believe that a lone man could defeat a squadron of highly trained and experienced soldiers, Liang found the fact that he’d lost contact with the helicopter filled with his own men even more difficult to grasp. The colonel could only assume the worst. He knew that fast thinking and tactical brilliance could hold off overwhelming force to a point, but he had never before encountered an opponent like Cooper.
Chen had been tolerant of the situation up until now, mostly because he was preoccupied with implementing the program on which they had been working these long months, but Liang knew that Chen’s patience was wearing thin. The man was going to be furious about the loss of the helicopter, and there wasn’t time to procure another. Chen had acquiesced and allowed him a final attempt to capture or kill Cooper. He would not allow him another.
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