Nuclear Reaction

by Don Pendleton

  To hell with it, he thought.

  He’d take what he could get, and would be glad to put this lot behind him, now that he knew his sister was still alive and subject to Kurush Gazsi’s brutal attentions.

  Lining up another target in the field, Pahlavi dared not let himself imagine what Gazsi had done to her. That would lead to madness, and he needed every ounce of mental clarity he possessed to make it through the next few minutes.

  Pahlavi’s friends were firing all at once, while soldiers on the skirmish line returned their fire, some dropping out of sight to finish the advance on hands and knees, while others fell to rise no more. The enemy’s advantages were numbers, training and the possibility of calling reinforcements to the scene. That thought worried Pahlavi, and he knew it had to have been on the American’s mind, as well.

  The sooner they could kill these strangers and be done with it, the better his chances of escaping from the farm to save Darice.

  Pahlavi fired another shot and saw his target flinch, stagger, but then keep coming. It was difficult to tell, but it appeared the hit had simply been a graze, painful but not debilitating. As the man in olive drab ducked lower, trying to conceal himself as much as possible and still keep moving forward, firing from the hip, Pahlavi tried again and this time hit him squarely in the chest.

  The soldier dropped back out of sight, but someone else had glimpsed Pahlavi, and a storm of bullets rattled overhead, some passing close enough to clip the weeds around him. Death was close at hand, as it had been for days, but his fear was swallowed by determination to retrieve his sister from the hands of his enemies.

  Pahlavi rolled away from where the steadily advancing soldiers would have seen him, where they’d be expecting him to rise again. He popped up ten feet to the left and caught one of them by surprise, still firing at the spot Pahlavi had vacated. There was a split second when the young soldier appeared to realize his mistake, and then Pahlavi shot him through the neck, a puff of crimson hanging briefly in the air after he dropped from sight.

  Pahlavi ducked another storm of fire, gasping this time as a slug plucked his sleeve, scorching the flesh beneath. He nearly cried out, then caught sight of Cooper kneeling in the weeds, returning hostile fire, apparently without a thought for his own safety, and Pahlavi rallied. Bending his arm to make sure it still functioned, he shook off the pain and returned to the fight.

  How many soldiers still remained? Enough to win the fight, despite their losses, if his own people did not stand fast and hold the line. The house in itself meant nothing, but if they could not defeat these soldiers, then Darice was truly lost.

  Pahlavi ducked as another grenade explosion rocked the firing line. Cooper had not thrown that one, and the screams that followed it were not from soldiers. Pahlavi thought he recognized them, but in the confusion of the moment he could not sort out the names, could not be sure.

  Enraged, he rose above the weeds and raked the line of his advancing enemies with automatic fire. Someone was shouting curses with his voice, daring the soldiers to destroy him if they could, while gunfire rang and echoed in his ears.

  THERE CAME A MOMENT in each battle when the victory was up for grabs, could still go either way, and all it took was one small shove to make the difference. When Bolan heard the second frag grenade go off and knew it wasn’t one of his, he feared that point had come and might be slipping through his fingers even then, impossible to clutch and hold.

  If all of the advancing soldiers started tossing frag grenades, he thought those of Pahlavi’s friends who managed to survive would surely break and run. It was too much to ask of them, and if they lost heart, or if enough of them went down, it spelled the end of everything—not only Bolan’s mission to prevent the ultimate success of Project X, but everything, including his life, whatever hope of final victory he harbored in his heart. The whole damned shooting match.

  But after one grenade, the others never came.

  He never knew what stopped them using more, whether grenades had not been properly deployed among the troops, or whether most were simply too caught up in ducking bullets and returning fire as best they could. In any case, the soldiers on the skirmish line missed their best chance to win the fight and forge ahead while dueling individually with their enemies.

  It was a critical mistake.

  Pahlavi’s people fought from cover, four guns barking from the farmhouse, while the rest spit death through screens of grass and weeds. The vegetation couldn’t shield them from incoming fire, but it obscured the soldiers’ vision, spoiled their aim, while bullets flew out of the field to cut them down.

  But they kept coming.

  Bolan had to give them credit for determination, slogging forward as their skirmish line was pummeled, one man out of three or four already down and out. Pahlavi’s team had taken hits, as well, and Bolan couldn’t even start to guess their present number, but he saw that nineteen of the thirty-two soldiers he’d counted were still in the fight.

  And they were getting close.

  He shot another in the chest, then pivoted to catch a second as he fumbled to reload his weapon. That left seventeen that he was sure of, fit to fight—and then, they charged.

  He wasn’t sure if there had been an order given. There was too much shouting up and down the line in languages he didn’t understand, but suddenly the rush was on, survivors rushing toward the farmhouse and the shooters who were standing in their way.

  Bolan shot one more on the run, from twenty feet, then braced himself as two more closed with rifles raised like clubs. He ducked the first swing, slashed the muzzle of his AKMS into his opponent’s unprotected groin, and finished with a hard knee to the face that may have snapped his neck.

  The second soldier hit him on the shoulder with his rifle butt, sending a bolt of pain through Bolan’s arm and chest. The warrior came close to dropping his Kalashnikov but held it with an effort, swinging in his left hand, while the tingling fingers of his right drew his Ka-bar fighting knife.

  His adversary ducked, retreated, then rushed forward once again. He had his CETME rifle raised to shatter Bolan’s skull, and doubtless would’ve done so if the Executioner had waited for the blow to fall. Instead, he lunged inside the swing and drove his blade deep into the soldier’s gut, then drew it upward to his solar plexus, feeling blood and offal splash across his wrist.

  The Pakistani soldier screamed and wriggled, thrashing as the blade bit deep and found his liver. Black blood followed red, and when the man fell away from Bolan, he was far past any help.

  The soldier he had dropped before the last one struggled weakly on the ground, moaning, until Bolan knelt at his side and dragged the blood-slick blade across his throat. His life departed in a final shiver, leaving Bolan to confront the next soldier in line.

  But there was none.

  While he’d been grappling with his last two adversaries, Bolan realized, the gunfire in the darkling field had sputtered out, gave way to sobs and grunts of fierce exertion as the last few stragglers were dispatched by hand. He scanned the field, saw no remaining enemies to slay and had a sudden flash of inspiration.

  “Get their uniforms,” he told Pahlavi. “Try for those that fit.”

  “You have a plan,” Pahlavi answered with a cautious smile.

  “I have a plan,” Bolan replied, already staring toward the highway and its distant vehicles. “Can anybody drive those trucks?”

  18

  Bolan supposed his group would pass a casual inspection in the dark. Their borrowed uniforms were hardly perfect fits, but he had noticed that the soldiers he’d met so far were not exactly fashion plates. Three of the women hid long hair beneath their forage caps, while their OD fatigues concealed most other traces of their femininity. If they were smaller than the men, on average, it shouldn’t matter in the vehicles, when they were sitting down.

  In other circumstances, Bolan would’ve liked to wash the uniforms, at least remove some of the bloodstains, but again, he guessed it would
n’t matter in a truck or jeep, at night. Whichever of their enemies got close enough to notice would be killed, in any case.

  The vehicles had not been damaged, which was critical, and Bolan had no shortage of capable drivers, but his team had come up short from losses in the skirmish—three dead on the firing line—so they’d been forced to leave one of the army jeeps behind. They hid it in the trees, behind the farmhouse, with Bolan’s rental and Shankara’s car.

  Bolan had puzzled over how the troops had tracked Shankara, set Pahlavi’s people to a hasty search, and thus had found the locator affixed with magnets to the undercarriage of his car. Bolan removed it and carried it with him as their paramilitary convoy rolled toward Project X, pausing when they were thirty miles east of the farmhouse, where he dropped it in a roadside ditch.

  His enemies still might invade the farm and find his rental car, but that was low on Bolan’s list of worries at the moment. He could always find another vehicle. The more important question, at the moment, was would anyone would be alive to drive it when the time came for him to depart?

  They had been lucky with the opposition, so far, but he knew that they were pushing it. His team could fight, they’d definitely proved that much, and while the seventeen survivors—nineteen, with Pahlavi and himself—were groaning from the weight of surplus ammunition and grenades, the fact remained that they would be outnumbered at their target, faced not only with superior numbers and firepower, but also with various fortifications and security devices specifically designed to keep out intruders. If they couldn’t breach the plant and do it with sufficient personnel to put the whole place out of action for all time, the exercise would be a bloody waste.

  On top of all the obstacles that lay before them for a simple hit-and-git, Pahlavi was obsessed now with finding his sister, bringing her out alive from the viper’s den. He wouldn’t listen to the possibility that his informant, dying and delirious, had been mistaken—or that someone at the plant might have executed Darice after Shankara made his break.

  “She is alive,” he kept repeating. “I must help her. This time, she needs me.”

  There was no argument with that, no logic that could batter down the walls of such familial devotion. Bolan only hoped that brotherly love would not lead to Pahlavi’s death—or more importantly, the failure of their mission to dismantle Project X.

  Still, they were on their way and there could be no turning back. Whatever happened in the next few hours, Bolan knew that he could stand for judgment with a plea that he had done his best, unstinting in the face of killer odds. Fate might determine the result, but Bolan wasn’t resting on his laurels, waiting for a signal from the Universe.

  He would carry the fight to his enemies, as always, and if it should happen that he lost this time, the other side would still be candidates for massive posttraumatic stress.

  Those who survived, at least.

  At this instant, he was satisfied to occupy the staff car’s shotgun seat and watch the dark highway unroll before their headlights. If they met another military troop in passing, Bolan was prepared to bluff. And if that failed, he was prepared to kill. More guns, grenades and ammunition for their cache, perhaps.

  And they would need it all where they were going. Sight unseen, the Executioner took that on faith.

  Nobody built a secret nuclear facility and left it unprotected, much less in a quasi-military state that was preparing for the war to end all wars.

  Bolan couldn’t aspire to that in his lifetime, but with a little skill and luck he might prevent this war from happening.

  And that, he thought, would be enough.

  DR. MEHRAN WAS WORRIED, and he didn’t care who knew it. Sitting in his office with Simrin Amira and Kurush Gazsi, he felt the perspiration beading on his head, resisting the impulse to wipe it off until a salty droplet stung his eye.

  “I don’t see,” Mehran told his chief of plant security, “how Manoj managed to escape, much less evade arrest when you had placed a beacon on his car.”

  “As I’ve attempted to explain, Doctor,” Gazsi replied, “he bluffed his way into Administration with a dummy file, claiming he was ordered to carry it by hand, then overpowered one of my men and escaped.”

  “That’s what I can’t imagine,” Amira said. “Manoj couldn’t overpower me, much less a trained enforcer.”

  “Perhaps he’s managed to fool us all,” Gazsi said. “Anyone can land a lucky blow or two, of course, when striking by surprise. The officers who failed to stop him will receive my personal attention, I assure you. At the same time, I believe we must consider that Manoj Shankara may be more than simply what he seems.”

  “Explain that,” Mehran ordered.

  “I’m suggesting, Doctor, that you may have had two spies within your plant, instead of one. Darice Pahlavi was the first to run with information from the lab. We apprehended her before she could deliver it. Now, such a short time later, comes this meek, mild-mannered nothing of a man, beating my officers unconscious, crashing through the gates and fleeing in a hail of gunfire—all for what? Simply because he had a stomachache?”

  “As I’ve explained,” Mehran said, “he requested leave for illness, and I told him to consult our staff physician for a remedy. He seemed a bit disgruntled at the time, but did not argue. I had no reason to think that he would go berserk and flee the plant. He’s not that kind of man.”

  “As far as you know,” Gazsi answered. “Yet, he obviously did precisely that. I would suggest to you that he was never ill, but merely used that as a ruse to get away. When you refused him…Well, we’ve seen what happened next.”

  “But why?” Mehran demanded.

  “As I’ve said, it’s my opinion that Manoj Shankara is an agent of the group called Ohm. Perhaps he was Darice Pahlavi’s handler. We may never know the full details, but I’m convinced that you have harbored traitors in the very bosom of the project all along.”

  Mehran saw where Gazsi was headed, but before he could respond, Amira cut through the security controller’s monologue. “That won’t reflect well on yourself, Kurush,” she said. “Have you considered that? You’ve overlooked two traitors, working underneath your very nose for months on end until they start in beating up your goons. I daresay there’ll be questions when you tell that story to your masters. It should be something to see.”

  Gazsi glared back at her while he considered his reply. “Of course,” he said at last, “I’m not ascribing blame to anyone. We share the fault for failing to identify subversives whom we’ve seen—or, in your own case, worked with—every day. Apparently, they managed to deceive us all.”

  “There is another possibility,” Amira said.

  Mehran leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “What is it, Simrin?”

  “For some time now,” she replied, “I have suspected that Shankara was infatuated with Darice. He’s had that look about him, when they were together, and I’ve seen him watching her at work, around the lab. I doubt she was aware of it. He’s far too meek for that.”

  “Too meek?” Gazsi snorted. “Tell that to my man with the broken nose and the swollen—”

  “Meek, I say, around the woman he’s infatuated with,” Amira interrupted. “Quiet with his coworkers. The kind of man who wouldn’t harm an insect. But if he believed Darice had suffered harm or was in danger, well, who knows what he might do?”

  “You don’t believe he bought the cover story, then?” Mehran inquired.

  “The tale about her marriage?” Amira shrugged. “He may have swallowed it at first, but something happened to dissuade him. Please remember that he snapped today, not when she disappeared, or in the intervening days. Today, I think, he heard or learned something that made him desperate.”

  She turned to Gazsi, saying, “Possibly, one of your men let it slip that she is still inside the compound? Or that she had been arrested. Is that possible?”

  “It’s possible,” Gazsi said, rising. “I’ll look into it at once and let you know what I find ou
t.”

  “I believe you struck a nerve, Simrin,” Mehran said.

  She frowned. “Not that it does us any good. We still don’t have a clue how to complete our work on deadline. Do we, Jamsheed?”

  “No,” he answered sorrowfully. “We don’t.”

  WITH BETTER THAN a hundred miles to go, Bolan could feel the mounting urgency inside, a need to meet the enemy once more and settle all that lay between them finally, once and for all. He couldn’t rush it, though. They’d reach the target when they got to it, and not a moment sooner. Speeding down the rural road at unsafe speeds would only draw attention to their convoy and risk accidents that would spoil everything.

  Two hours, at their present rate of travel, meant that they would reach the lab complex before midnight. He didn’t know what kind of activity they should expect, but Bolan took it for granted that security would be out in force, and they should expect a challenge on the gate.

  What happened after that would depend almost equally on skill and luck, with the surprise advantage hopefully on Bolan’s side. They had a heavy machine gun on the jeep, manned by one of Ohm’s military veterans who had trained on the weapon a few years before, which could help swing the balance. Beyond that, they would simply have to do their best and keep their fingers crossed.

  A pair of distant headlights, moving toward them from the east, caught Bolan’s eye and raised his hackles. Vehicles were not uncommon in the Pakistani hinterlands, but traveling by night was hazardous and therefore limited in most cases to military or police vehicles, bandits, or civilians caught up in emergencies. Bolan had no idea what to expect from the oncoming traffic, but he was relieved to note a single pair of headlights only, rather than another caravan.

  In fact, it proved to be an old, ramshackle pickup truck with three men in the cab and half a dozen crowded in the bed behind. They might have been a labor crew returning to humble homes from a job, but from the looks they shot at Bolan’s convoy, he suspected they were prowling for an easy mark, someone to rob and terrorize, mixing business and pleasure.