Kurtzman hoped it would be a false alarm—every other U.S. agency involved shrugged off Kurtzman’s clues pointing to possible attacks on shipping vessels in the equatorial Pacific.
Kurtzman, morosely, knew he was right, and knew people would die soon because the U.S. failed to react strongly enough to the threat.
When Phoenix Force was on the scene in the Pacific they would need one hundred percent of Kurtzman’s time. The cybernetics team would have to follow the sporadic communications signals step by step, even anticipating their movements, if they wanted to get Phoenix Force on-site when and where the perpetrators made their move.
Bolan would be on his own. There would be little Kurtzman could do to help him out at that point.
“What’s all this got to do with Kuwait?” Price asked finally, noticing one of the windows on his screen with a Kuwait City map.
“Nothing,” Kurtzman said.
“Is Mack there?”
“Yes.”
“Is he in trouble?”
Kurtzman glared at the yellow map image, cubed by a grid, and said, “I think so.”
11
Kuwait City
Mack Bolan’s eyes came open and read the time before he quite realized he was conscious. Five minutes past 4:00 a.m. Motionless, he examined the physical sensations his mind was getting, like a pilot taking readings during preflight engine start. Pain was there, but tamed. Bearable.
He got to his feet, brushing away beetles. The real test was how his body acted when he moved, and in a heightened state of self-awareness he cleaned and dressed the burn on his arm, stretched out his body like a master in a dojo, then moved through the dark restaurant to the motorcycle.
Other than lingering lethargy from the pain pills he felt fit enough. Not quite reinvigorated, and certainly not healthy. His body had been shocked by the wound. It was still demanding recuperation time, but Bolan couldn’t afford that luxury. He had appointments to keep.
He walked the Suzuki outside, stood in the dark alcove and listened to the night. Six long hours ago this part of the city had been swarming with law-enforcement vehicles and aircraft, but now there was silence. Bolan walked to the gate and watched the stillness until he found the anomaly.
It was a movement so slight he couldn’t tell if it was real, but that made it all the more suspicious. He found his field glasses in his pack and probed the shadowy place. There was a concrete office building with just enough stylized trimmings to differentiate it subtly from office buildings anywhere else in the world, and rich fabric banners hung around the entire roof line gave it a softened look, like window draperies. The sign in the front was in Arabic and English, telling Bolan it was an art gallery. He was still in the neighborhood of high-priced retailers—or he had left one and entered another during the chaotic flight from the street of boutiques where he ran into the Kuwaiti police.
The circular drive from the street to the front of the gallery was lined on each side with palm trees in heavy pots, turned so the trees curved inward and their leafy foliage came together eight feet above the drive, forming a leafy carport, a shady place for shoppers to enter and exit their vehicles when they came to their gallery appointments.
Bolan was sure that the car he now made out in the moon shadow amid the palm trees was not a gallery customer. It was a dark Toyota with a tinted windshield. No Toyota driver would be able to afford the merchandise—not to mention the fact that it was seven more hours until the gallery would open for its first appointment.
There was another movement when the invisible occupant of the Toyota shifted in his seat. Bolan imagined a detective or cop inside, fidgeting to keep from nodding off.
So the Kuwaitis had suspected he might still be in the vicinity. Maybe they were too understaffed to go door-to-door. More likely they knew better than to risk the fallout that was inevitable if several dozen retail managers were called out of bed when the cops started opening up every building on the street. These people had pull with the wealthiest and most powerful residents of Kuwait. Better to just stake out the neighborhood and watch for the fugitive to show himself.
Bolan allowed himself the time to move carefully, thinking through the problem as he ate a ration bar and drank water from the fountain nozzle. He was feeling better every minute. The lethargy was receding until the only discomfort or stiffness came from the burning around his arm. One compromised limb he could work around.
He moved a table to the brick wall that surrounded most of the patio and crouched on top, then raised himself until he was peering over the top. The stakeout car looked abandoned in the darkness.
Bolan pulled back to put a section of lattice between himself and the car, judging it would be sufficient to hide the flash of the Beretta, and rested the suppressed barrel across one arm. He aimed, unsure of his drop compensation on such a long shot, and pulled the trigger.
The harsh cough was the loudest sound the street had heard in hours. The round was high—Bolan knew it before his glasses found the puff of dust coming off the side of the gallery where the descending 9 mm round impacted. The stakeout car was motionless. The sound didn’t carry that far. The bullet strike fifteen feet overhead had not been noticed.
Bolan adjusted his aim very slightly, unwilling to risk sending a bullet into the stakeout car, and triggered another shot. He experienced a moment of satisfaction when a window on the gallery’s second story shattered. The tinkling of glass was like music.
Bolan was off the table and heading for the gate with the Suzuki by the time the stakeout car swung in a tight circle to face the building, headlights blazing. A pair of officers stationed themselves in the open doors of the unmarked car and shouted at the gallery. Bolan, in darkness, emerged from the front gate and walked the motorcycle around the restaurant before quickening his pace. The last he heard of them were their fading shouts—apparently they were attempting to place the art gallery under arrest.
He had no illusions of safety. It would take them only a few minutes to figure out the ruse, then the hunt would be on again. He started the Suzuki when he was a mile away, finding himself in a low-rent apartment district where the buildings were tall and utilitarian. Keeping to the unlighted alleys and walkways was easy enough now, but the motorcycle was too obvious. He parked it next to a Ford that had been manufactured in a European factory in the distant past. Bolan was inside and driving away in under sixty seconds.
Corroding body panels rattled continuously during the drive, but the old car managed to hold on long enough to get him across town. Bolan parked the junker a half mile from his destination and hiked to President George Bush Boulevard.
The Jasim estate was one of the largest homes in Kuwait City and could be better protected than the Bayan Palace. But Bolan had friends in special places. Aaron Kurtzman had already identified Jasim’s Achilles’ heel, and knew just how to fire an arrow into it.
Bolan pulled out his mobile phone.
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
“AFFIRMATIVE, PHOENIX FIVE,” Barbara Price said into her headset. “Aaron’s isolating the message.”
Kurtzman was working fast, using radio monitoring equipment in the field with the commandos, as well as that aboard a U.S. Navy escort aircraft, to triangulate the source of a low-power radio transmission being sent out over the waters of the equatorial Pacific in Micronesian waters. His efforts were wasted. There was nothing he could learn from that brief tidbit of a voice transmission. It could have come from anywhere.
On the other hand…
“I did what I could with the message,” he reported on the line.
“Get anything from it?” asked a man with a distinctly British accent. It was David McCarter, leader of the commando team known as Phoenix Force, all five of whom were right now bobbing on the surface of the Pacific on personal watercraft and wishing they weren’t.
“Not a thing and I don’t think it matters,” Kurtzman responded. “I suspect the message was transmitted from the closest of the nearb
y islands. If so, we have a destination.”
“Bear!”
Kurtzman and Price were both distracted by the too-loud exclamation. There was a young Japanese man coming at Kurtzman with rapid strides, buzzing stereo headphones pulled down around his neck.
“I’m sending you the coordinates,” Barbara Price radioed distractedly as Kurtzman and Akira Tokaido held a conference in urgent whispers.
“Got them,” came the radio reply that didn’t sound British at all. It sounded slightly cowboy.
Kurtzman was grinning. Relieved about something, obviously. He looked at Price and the grin faded a little.
“Striker’s okay?” she demanded.
They were closer in many ways than a lot of married couples, so Kurtzman wasn’t too surprised that she had figured out that he was worried about Mack Bolan’s safety.
“Yeah, and he needs an assist. Can you spare me for three minutes?”
“Phoenix won’t be on approach to the island for another fifteen,” she said with a sharp nod. “But there’s a price to pay.”
“Huh?”
“You can take five if you agree to bring me in on this thing with Mack as soon as there’s time for a briefing.”
The grin was gone. “That’s not a good idea, Barb.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Striker and I are stirring up trouble. Political trouble. Pentagon political trouble.”
Price’s eyebrows went up. She was intrigued, and at the moment she was on less than good terms with the powers that be that had a hand in the operation of Stony Man Farm. She said darkly, “Sounds like fun.”
Kurtzman shrugged. “Then welcome aboard. But I don’t know about fun.”
With Price in the loop he didn’t need the privacy of the computer lab. He snapped the keys of his workstation and opened the channel on his headset.
“Striker!”
“Morning, Bear.”
Kurtzman felt his joy dwindle. He could count on one hand the times he had heard Mack Bolan sound dog tired.
“What’s going on?” Kurtzman demanded.
“Rough night,” Bolan said.
That’s about as much of an explanation as you could expect from Bolan when he was describing his own condition in the field. “Rough night” could mean he’d hit an annoying number of stoplights en route to the hotel, or it could mean he’d lost a leg to a grenade.
Before Kurtzman could probe further Bolan said, “I’m at the Jasim residence. Want to ring the doorbell for me?”
“Glad to,” Kurtzman said. “Sure you’re up for this?”
“I’m up for it,” Bolan growled.
End of discussion, Kurtzman thought. The Stony Man cybernetics maestro dialed into the proper network with a few keystrokes, shrugged off the security system with the activation of a single preprogrammed macro and sent the signal he needed to send.
“It should be going down now,” he announced.
“It’s going down in a big way, Bear. Thanks.”
Then Bolan was gone.
TENSIONS HAD MOUNTED as the night stretched interminably, and Hamza al-Douri’s temper was stoked by his throbbing pain until it came to a boiling point. Maysaloun Jasim’s practiced composure crumbled as his fear mounted.
Yet when al-Douri tried again to convince the Kuwaiti millionaire that relocation was the best answer, Jasim wouldn’t be budged. He was a stubborn man. He would not be convinced that his fortress could be penetrated.
Al-Douri was in no condition to strike out on his own, and the dangers didn’t end with this man. He was by now a wanted man in Kuwait. He could not let himself fall into the hands of the government. That would mean prison, and that meant death for al-Douri.
Jasim could protect him. Jasim could move about without being searched. Only with Jasim was al-Douri safe from the Kuwaitis.
In another hour, when the sun rose, they would go to the boat with an escort of Jasim’s remaining security staff and a few hired cars. A police bomb squad was already aboard the yacht, responding to Jasim’s claim that he’d received a phoned-in threat.
“We move when it is light. We’ll be safe when the sun is up,”
Jasim declared. “Until then, we stay here where we’re protected.”
Then the lights died.
“You fool,” al-Douri said. “Now I think you will see how wrong you are.”
Jasim knew it, but he could never let the wretch al-Douri see it. As the emergency lights blazed to life, he got to his feet and grabbed the radio from his pocket.
“What is happening?” he demanded.
“The security system went down,” his security chief shot back.
“That cannot happen!”
“It just did—somebody got in from the outside.”
“That cannot happen!” Jasim sounded foolish even to himself, then he heard the distorted response from the security man. Something about “police override.”
“What about the police?” al-Douri demanded.
“They hacked into the security system through an override reserved for the police,” Jasim said in a stunned monotone. “It is supposed to be accessible to the antiterrorist units of the National Police Force and nobody else. Just in case I am held hostage in my home.”
“Now it is being used against you.”
“What is our security status?” Jasim radioed.
This time the security team did not reply.
Behind him, choking on the agony of every step, al-Douri chuckled.
BOLAN JOGGED to the grounds of the Jasim mansion as it seemed to suddenly wither and die, the system of lights that illuminated every square yard of the grounds powering down. A moment later banks of harsh emergency lights streaked the grounds behind the twelve-foot iron fence.
So far so good. Kurtzman had made him a promise: he would disable the security system on the grounds of the Jasim family home, sneaking in through a security override system supposedly accessible only to the Kuwaiti antiterrorist units. Then he would cut the power to the grounds. And that was about all he could do. If he was able—if he wasn’t actively needed in the current field operations of the other Stony Man Farm teams—he would monitor the Jasim situation and lend an assist if and when he could.
Bolan wasn’t counting on it.
He crossed the dry, open ground around the outside of the gate in a steady trot, unnoticed by the video surveillance systems, and unceremoniously jammed a finger of putty into the massive steel box of a lock on the gate. He added a tiny detonator and jogged away, taking a position behind one of the mortared stone columns that anchored the gate every five yards. He heard shouting from across the grounds and waited it out.
Bolan’s Arabic language skills, picked up piecemeal during more Middle Eastern missions than he could count, wasn’t up to the task of deciphering the rapid-fire exchange between the pair of security men and their unseen radio contact, but the tone of their voices indicated they had not spotted him. They were mildly alarmed by the power loss, and they were on the alert for signs of an intrusion that had to be imminent.
It was time to meet their expectations.
Bolan scuffed the hard-packed earth with his foot as he stepped away from the column. The guards turned toward him, trying to sight him through the bars, but he put the column between them again. Their voices told him precisely when they reached the gate, and he pressed the detonator.
The gate burst open, making a metallic clang, and with the hum of vibrating metal still hanging in the air Bolan raced for the opening. The gate swung wide, the lock box reduced to singed strands of steel.
One of the flattened guards staggered to his feet. He was deafened by the blast and one eye was destroyed, charred along with half his face. He screamed, and blinked frantically to clear the blood from the good eye while spraying the air with 5.45 mm rounds. Bolan triggered the Desert Eagle into his chest.
The one-eyed guard collapsed, but the second fallen guard rolled onto all fours—never making it to his feet before Bo
lan’s second .44 Magnum round crashed like a sledgehammer into the top of his head and liquefied the skull contents. The electrical activity in his brain shut down so fast the man received none of the benefits of his brief flash of postmortem consciousness. For him there was only blackness.
Bolan snatched at a fallen radio, then bolted across the lawn as fast as he could move, heading for the sprawling Jasim mansion.
The building was built on high ground, a hill engineered by the Jasim family to create a majestic view over the other oceanfront homes and the huge bay that was an extension of the Persian Gulf. The backside windows were infrequent—it was the front windows of the stepped building that were designed to offer the magnificent views, but Bolan kept his eyes on the fragments of light coming from them. He reached the wall and found the utility alcove, where the underground electric and other utility maintenance equipment was housed. A decorative gate—no lock here—hid the unsightly equipment. Bolan grimaced as the gate clicked shut behind him at the moment the generator in front of him rumbled to life.
The emergency CPU and operating system for the building was here somewhere. Kurtzman had learned the generator was on a two-minute delay. Kuwait had a reliable utility infrastructure, and power outages were infrequent and usually momentary, so there was little need for the generator to kick in every time the power went out. Still, Jasim should have thought through his need for emergency power.
Bolan explored the equipment and wiring, then planted a series of tiny charges. Each one was a receiver with a tiny detonator for a thin finger of plasticized RDX. The little packages were the size and shape of cigarettes, and white paper coverings and a bit of tobacco packed in the end completed the disguise—not that they would survive a close examination.
This was off-the-shelf military componentry, but Cowboy Kissinger, Stony Man’s armorer, was proud of them. “Smoking kills,” Kissinger joked about his little explosive creations. He placed them using waterproof strips that stuck them in place like vicious little bandages. Each unit would do devastating damage in a controlled area.
Mercy Mission Page 9