Mercy Mission

by Don Pendleton

Hatim felt nervous. Suddenly this meeting was too unsecured, too exposed. “He is one of the worst. He makes people disappear. Many people. Sometimes important people. He is a sadist, a torturer.”

  “That’s Iraqi standard practice.”

  “Yes, to some extent. But I say again, he is one of the worst. He crosses all the boundaries. He does the dirtiest work. When answers are needed from a strong-willed man, and all other persuasions fail, then General Jawdat is the last resort. He always extracts the answers no one else could.”

  “What’s his command?”

  Hatim grinned painfully. “That’s difficult to pin down. He has several former Republican Guard groups of various sizes under his command, but I could not guess at the actual number of them. It is impossible to know how many people secretly support the old regime.”

  Hatim put down his teacup and casually adjusted his steel watchband, twisting the clasp to display a small white tablet adhered inside the hollow of the clasp.

  “Cyanide. Your people provided it as a part of my agreement to do their work. If I fear capture by General Jawdat, I hope to have time to take this first.”

  Bolan nodded. “That’s who he is. Now I need to know where he is.”

  “So you will know best how to avoid him, you mean?” Hatim said, chuckling in his throat. “No, I guess not.”

  “Do you know where?” the American asked evenly, but Hatim knew he was growing impatient.

  “At this moment, no. But in four hours, yes. There is a party tonight at the building site of the World Trade Exposition Hall. Jawdat will be there, along with promoters from throughout the Arab and Asian worlds. There is a dream to transform Baghdad into the hub of commerce for all of Europe, Asia and Africa. So they are building a trade center that doesn’t have any trade. The party tonight is part of the effort to make it happen. Dinner will be alfresco at the construction site, then everyone will retire to the World Trade Hotel.”

  “I think I’d like to attend the late-night entertainment portion of the evening,” Bolan said.

  Hatim nodded, a move too slight to be seen. “There will be many beautiful, cunning women.”

  “There’s only one woman I’m interested in—the woman Jawdat is interested in. Does he usually take the same one?”

  “It is never a woman. It is a young girl. A waif. Look for the starving street urchin with fear in her eyes, and you will have found Jawdat’s partner for the night.”

  “I’ll be there,” Bolan said.

  “This other matter you asked about in the communiqué that preceded you, regarding American prisoners. This I know nothing about. I think if there were prisoners the rumors would be rife in the streets.”

  “Not if they’re Jawdat’s prisoners. Not if it’s a secret only Jawdat knows about.”

  “If they exist, the prisoners would be powerful leverage if their existence is made public at the optimal moment.”

  “You’ll be at the party?” Bolan asked.

  “Certainly.”

  “I’ll need Jawdat’s room number.”

  Hatim blanched. “I will try. How will I communicate this to you?”

  Bolan thought about it, asking a few pointed questions of Hatim, and came up with a strategy.

  “That might work,” Hatim concluded.

  “Do you object to bedding one of the women yourself?” Bolan asked. “You’ll need to keep her with you all night.”

  “I will suffer through it,” Hatim said with a smirk.

  Bolan rose. “See you at the party,” he growled, and strode out.

  Nateq Hatim lingered over his tea for another ten minutes, thinking about Bolan’s parting words. Surely, he thought, the man would not attempt to show himself at the World Trade Hotel.

  That would be suicide.

  15

  “Come with me, please,” he said to the lovely woman with the lustrous skin that contrasted beautifully with the tight, Asian-inspired dress.

  She smiled demurely. “So polite, sir.” She took his arm.

  He grinned drunkenly. “You seem like a well-bred young woman, so you should be treated with respect.”

  By using me for sex? she thought, but still smiled as they entered the elevator. He continued to grin idiotically as he aimed a finger at the buttons and stabbed one, frowning at it. Then he shrugged, sloshing some of his drink on the elevator carpet. On the eighth floor—the highest floor of the twelve-story building in which construction was completed—he marched purposefully down the hall.

  Ahead, the woman spotted the general. She felt a spasm of revulsion, remembering her nights with him. He had a partner, a young newcomer. This had to be her first time with the general. It was going to be a night the young woman would never forget. Maybe she wouldn’t even live through it. In the old days, more than one of Jawdat’s partners had escaped his bed and flung themselves from a palace window.

  The drunken man, to her horror, seemed to be trying to catch up with Jawdat. Was the drunk one of Jawdat’s friends? Staying in Jawdat’s suite? Suddenly she wanted to scream and flee.

  Then the drunk stopped short. He watched Jawdat and the girl enter the room and frowned at them, then nodded.

  “Wrong floor!” he whispered. “I’m on seven!”

  His consort almost fainted with relief.

  She noticed his drink getting the better of him on the way down. He had insisted on taking the stairs. He didn’t want to wait for the elevator to return, but he began reeling on the way down. There was a moment when she thought he was going to fall over and tumble down the carpeted steps. When he fumbled with the key and got the room door open he barged in, forgetting the manners he had used earlier, and spent five minutes in the washroom making retching sounds.

  When he emerged, he was smiling weakly. “Let me help you to bed,” she said with nursemaid kindness. She had been in this situation before—with luck, she would soothe him to sleep before he felt well enough to get aroused, then she would have a night off—she could stay here and relax. Maybe watch some satellite television.

  But her companion seemed to have expelled his sickness and soon had her performing her function. Two things she couldn’t help notice were the mildness of the alcohol taste on his breath and his need for loud music from the bedside radio. It was a French rock station, and it drowned out any other hotel sounds she might have heard.

  BOLAN GOT THE CALL, sent ostensibly to a local office but bounced around the world to Stony Man Farm, where Aaron Kurtzman stripped out the audio performance by CIA agent Hatim, pretending to have accidentally dialed his office as he vomited into the hotel toilet, then drunkenly pressed the keys to get the portable phone to turn off.

  The fumbling was an act, too. The three digits provided Mack Bolan with the room number of the ex-Republican Guard General Saleh Jawdat.

  Bolan had memorized the layout of the World Trade Hotel and guessed the general would be provided one of the rooms on the southeast side of the building, where the best suites were situated to offer a river view.

  Bolan guessed right, and when the numbers came in he left the Lada, entered an older hotel and found his way up to the roof. In his decrepit uniform he gave the hotel employees just the right impression: an underpaid, surly, midlevel police officer with enough seniority to cause problems. Not that they would get in the way of an officer sent to keep an eye on the streets below during the expensive soiree occurring across the street.

  The elevator had an operator. This was an old-fashioned touch but was actually required because the elevator had bare wires where the control panel had once been. The operator used canvas gloves to flip circuit breakers amid the exposed electrical wiring to make the elevator move and stop. The lift probably wouldn’t have earned the required inspection pass certificate that most European and American elevators displayed. When the elevator descended, and the hall was empty, Bolan continued to the roof on foot.

  He set up on the roof edge, keeping his feet on the patches of gravel so they wouldn’t stick to the tar,
which was still hot and gluey from the heat of the day. Finding some scraps of flimsy wallboard he arranged a kneeler for himself.

  Getting to the roof had taken some time, but when he put his field glasses to his eyes Bolan found he had time to kill. Jawdat was freshening a drink in his room unhurriedly.

  Bolan assembled his hardware. The heavy-duty Ruger sniper rifle had come with the heavy load of supplies provided by Kurtzman’s contacts. Bolan’s vehicle was loaded with enough hardware to outfit a small army. If he had come into Iraq on foot he would never have been able to justify the weight of a limited-use weapon like a sniper rifle.

  He was glad he had it. The target was approximately 320 yards from his position, and he was aiming through the dismal Baghdad smog, through a window that canted slightly away from his position. He needed every advantage the Ruger offered.

  Jawdat loomed large in the Leupold scope. The darkening of the night and the brilliant lights in the suite made it look as if he were pouring powder into the drink he was mixing. Concentrating on the magnified image, Bolan did indeed see a small envelope being emptied into the glass. Jawdat stirred the drink with his bony finger.

  He looked like a gnarled dead tree in a suit, with scrawny wrists protruding from the ill-fitting sleeves of the shirt and jacket. His neck, distended and scrawny, looked even longer protruding from the too-low, too-large collar. He made a lipless, hard smile that demonstrated genuine pleasure. He was enjoying himself, whatever he was up to.

  Bolan adjusted the Leupold scope minutely, scanning the suite from side to side, seeing no one, despite a range of vision that extended the depth of the room. Then a door opened to what may have been a washroom. The waif that emerged was smiling drunkenly, her head moving with the unfocused vision of the very intoxicated. She wore what might have been an expensive designer dress that draped her thin limbs without fitting them. Put her and the general on the same scale and they would weigh as much as a normal human being, Bolan thought.

  Hatim had mentioned that Jawdat’s rumored excesses were said to involve the use of various drugs, designed to make his women utterly compliant. But this wasn’t a woman. Even in the up-close view of the scope she didn’t have the spread of hips or the swell of breasts. What was he going to do to this child? Why did it require drugging her in addition to all the booze she had already consumed?

  Whatever it was, Bolan wasn’t going to let it happen. But that was secondary to his true reason for being here.

  Time to make a phone call.

  THE PHONE BUZZED. Jawdat cursed and put the drink on the bedside table. This had better be an emergency.

  “Jawdat,” he announced into the receiver.

  “I have a gun aimed at you, General,” said a no-nonsense voice in American-accented English. “I can get off at least three shots before you reach the door.”

  Jawdat stared into nothingness as he considered the threat, then slowly turned to face the windows, where the drapes and blinds were wide-open. The room lights made them a mirror, but he could see the faint black outline of a building across the street.

  “You are looking right at me, Jawdat.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Bounty hunter. A very good one.”

  “Hired to assassinate me?”

  “Hired to free the American prisoners of war that have been in your clutches since Desert Storm.”

  Jawdat cursed audibly, despite himself. It was impossible that the man could know about the prisoners.

  “I don’t know about any American prisoners,” Jawdat retorted. Bolan hadn’t actually expected him to cave in so easily. Time to start showing the general that the Executioner meant business. Bolan aimed the weapon and squeezed the trigger.

  The Ruger crashed against his shoulder. The .458 Winchester Magnum cartridge went through the hotel-room window, leaving a hole the size of a dinner plate and spraying glass around the interior. He saw the general cowering behind his arm and turning away. When the Iraqi looked up again, he was still holding the phone to his ear, forgotten.

  “Get the message?” Bolan said.

  “You stinking swine!” Jawdat roared. “You will die when we find you! You will die!” The petty threat was all his limited English could come up with at the moment.

  “You are the one with a gun aimed at his head. Tell me where to find the prisoners.”

  “Never.”

  “Think again, Jawdat. Would you like another demonstration?”

  Before Jawdat could respond the glass exploded in on him a second time. The round was closer, crunching into the wall above the desk and tearing into the brushed mauve wallboard. Jawdat made a wordless sound, and even he could hear the fear in it. It was a huge mistake to let the enemy see your fear. But he did not know what to do.

  Then it occurred to him that he was more in control of the situation than he had at first thought. This man was threatening to gun him down to get the information he wanted—but it was information that only Jawdat had. The American needed him alive.

  Jawdat smiled.

  “You’ll never kill me.”

  “Don’t count on that,” replied the man on the phone with confidence that made Jawdat second-guess his deduction.

  He plowed ahead anyway. “You need me. You kill me and you have nothing.”

  “I’ll have the satisfaction of destroying you. I haven’t been simply watching you for the last ten minutes, General. I’ve been taking a little news footage, and it’s already sitting on a computer in the state of Florida in the U.S.A. What will happen if I put it on the news tonight? Think the Iraqi people will appreciate one of their rebuilders getting shown up for all the world to see as a sadistic molester of children?”

  Jawdat’s face and hands became cold. The threat was worse than death. But was it true?

  If it was, he was good as dead. He would have to kill himself or be killed.

  But if it was a bluff, what did he have to lose by calling it?

  “I am going to walk out of this room, American,” Jawdat stated with a carefully controlled voice. “You will not kill me.”

  “You got me, Jawdat. I won’t kill you. But let me give you something to remember me by.”

  There was another explosion of glass and the heavy-duty window disintegrated entirely. Jawdat screeched as the phone bounced on the carpet. He snatched at his elbow, where he found a mass of soggy flesh.

  Jawdat staggered from the dropped phone to the young girl, slumped on her face on the bed—he had not even noticed that she had passed out. He used his good arm to grab the collar of her dress and hoist her to her feet. She was a sack of bones and skin, and Jawdat was a powerful man. She dangled as if from a noose in front of his body. Would the American risk shooting again with the girl in the way? He was an American. He would refrain.

  Jawdat felt his body weakening, and he could only maintain his shield for a minute or two, then he saw the clouds of darkness creeping into his vision and the encroaching numbness of shock settling on him. He tried to walk with the dangling prostitute puppet, but his strength was gone. He dropped her in a heap on the carpet, where she moaned. Jawdat careened to the door, expecting another shattering sniper round to tear into him at any second. If he heard the sound of more glass, it would already be too late.

  But the sound never came. Jawdat fumbled with the doorknob, somehow opened it and fell into the hall. He heard a scream from someone, then he was in blackness.

  16

  Bolan knew with Jawdat unconscious it wouldn’t take the others long to understand what had happened and where the shots came from. It was time to get out.

  He descended unseen and exited a rear door of the second-rate hotel, the Ruger now disassembled in an old canvas sack held over one shoulder as he strolled through the unlit streets to the garaged Lada. The man whom Hatim had arranged to rent the space showed up, demanding an additional stipend to the already exorbitant fees paid by Hatim. The garage owner grew enraged when Bolan ignored his demands, putting himself between Bo
lan and the SUV.

  Bolan didn’t have to understand the rapid-fire language to know he was being shaken down. So he nodded and reached under his loose-fitting shirt. The garage owner’s reaction showed that he had been expecting cash to be removed from Bolan’s shirt, not the big Beretta 93-R.

  The hands went up and the angry diatribe died on the lips that were the target of the suppressed handgun.

  Bolan checked the Lada’s contents without allowing the garage owner to slip from his sights. The specialty locks and hardened door mechanicals had foiled a break-in attempt that was evidenced by the scratches around the various locks. The garage owner saw Bolan notice the scratches, and the man looked like he would melt from fear. He began stammering. Bolan gestured for him to take off, and the man slithered out of the garage without turning his back or lowering his hands.

  Bolan left the place and sought new cover.

  It was time to hurry up and wait.

  THE PLACE WHERE he waited was a shadowy alcove in the rubble of structure that had collapsed amid all the fighting over the years. The odd angles of the tight space inside the rubble somehow managed to accommodate the Lada, although there was paint from the SUV left on a skewed support pillar. Bolan had scoped the spot earlier. Inside he was invisible in the blackness but had a clear view of the VIP parking area. He observed General Jawdat’s vehicle with impunity.

  Jawdat would come. The wound was bad but not life-threatening. He would never allow himself to be taken to hospital, not knowing he was being hunted. He would trust only his own personal security. If there was one thing a corrupt bureaucracy fostered, it was a sense of healthy paranoia.

  As expected, the guard posted at the car had abandoned it during the crisis at the World Trade Hotel to assist in the search for the culprit. As expected, Jawdat and his entire retinue came back to the squat, armored steel box that looked tough enough to withstand the crush of an avalanche, and powerful enough to drive out from under the mountain of snow afterward.

  But it wouldn’t stand up to the gift Bolan left under the front end. The engine grumbled to life, and Bolan keyed the remote that snapped a relay inside the device, causing its erect, flexible metal probes to discharge a flash of static electricity. The engine died without a sputter, and the car disgorged a trio of cursing bodyguards who made for the front and popped the hood. The rear doors were wide open, revealing the general sprawled on the rear-most bench seat.