Mercy Mission

by Don Pendleton

  It was time to strike. Bolan sighted the Ruger sniper rifle on the upper body of the Iraqi who was bent under the hood of the transport vehicle. When he pulled the trigger, the Ruger sent the round burrowing in through the side of his rib cage and tearing his upper body organs to pieces.

  The other Iraqis saw their companion lay himself on the big engine block. Only a moment later, when the sound of the sniper rifle reached them, did they see and understand the sudden fountain of blood drenching the greasy engine. They spun, each in a different direction, covering front and rear with AK-74 assault rifles. They were shouting questions to each other when Bolan fired the second round out the window of his shadow-hidden car. The Iraqi facing him saw the flash, but a fraction of a second later felt the terrible shutdown of his body and sensed awful cold from the caved-in place below his collarbone. He stumbled back two steps, crashed into his companion and died on his feet.

  The last man turned the momentum of his unbalanced stumble into a dodge, spinning himself to the ground as Bolan’s third shot streaked from the barrel of the Ruger. The warrior calmly watched the figure slip along the far side of the vehicle and wrench at the door, only to find it locked. He shouted angrily at the general, who was moving sluggishly inside.

  Bolan was out of the Lada and following a planned route along the back of the collapsed building, peering out from behind a corner of masonry into the space behind the armored car. He could see the dim outline of the fidgeting bodyguard, who was watching the place Bolan had been. He did not sense the warrior’s presence elsewhere. The Executioner raised the Ruger, aimed it and triggered a round that took a big bite out of the darkened storefront beyond the guard. The Iraqi panicked and bolted around the front and sped to the open rear door of the vehicle, eyes sparking. But inside the car the general had been spurred to life. His arm snaked out of the car and grabbed at the door. His last bodyguard protested loudly. Bolan fired the Ruger sniper rifle at the crook of the door and the car, and the Magnum round crashed through the guard at hip level and sprawled his front end into the car just in time to serve as a doorstop.

  Jawdat barked orders at the corpse and struggled to shove the body out of the rear door. Wounded and feeble, he didn’t have the strength to do it. He collapsed in his seat, panting, wild-eyed, and then he saw Bolan.

  The Executioner now slung the sniper rifle over his shoulder. The big, Israeli-made .44 Magnum Desert Eagle handgun was more than enough firepower to handle Jawdat.

  “You need me alive,” Jawdat spluttered.

  “I need to know where to find the American special forces soldiers that you’ve held prisoner for more than a decade.”

  “Then we can make a deal.” Jawdat was talking too fast, his eyes slitting from the accusing, wide dead eyes of the guard to the merciless grim gaze of the gunman who held his life in his hands.

  “Who are you?” His voice was shrill.

  “I’m an American.”

  “I know that,” he spit.

  “Where are the prisoners?”

  “You think I’m going to tell you? As soon as I do I am a dead man.”

  “You’ve got it exactly wrong. The only way you might live to see the end of this week is if you tell me—right now—where they are.” Bolan spoke the words with disgust. There was nothing worse than being forced to bargain for justice. He saw no alternative.

  Jawdat sneered. “Next you will try to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “Not all men wallow in cesspools of lies and deception—hard to believe, I know, but the entire world doesn’t operate like the government of Iraq.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. If you’re going to kill me, then get about doing it.”

  Bolan heard a blast of an air horn. Reinforcements were a few streets away. “I’m not going to kill you, you miserable son of a bitch,” Bolan growled fiercely. “But I’m going to make you wish I had.”

  Jawdat was slipping into semiconsciousness, but he showed puzzlement on his craggy, pitted face. When he dragged his eyes up again, the American was gone.

  Bolan trotted across the empty street and slipped into the wreckage of the collapsed building, backing the Lada out of its tight niche and speeding away in the opposite direction of the approaching lights and horns. In minutes he was tucked in his new safe house.

  IT WAS an unused military staging garage, probably forgotten, unneeded by a military that no longer existed. Hatim said it was once one of the hiding places for equipment, which Saddam Hussein dispersed as widely as possible to avoid the frustratingly effective U.S. strikes. The equipment was probably nothing more than scrap now, rusting in some forgotten corner of the desert, but the official designation on the door kept this building free from squatters.

  It amused Bolan to find haven here, although he wouldn’t exactly be letting his guard down. No place in Baghdad could remotely be considered safe.

  His senses were alert as he checked his new home, finding nothing but years of accumulated litter. He ate a military Meals Ready to Eat, and for a moment allowed himself the luxury of stray thoughts—his old friend Gadgets had been complaining about MREs a few months ago, going on and on about them in the way that only Gadgets could.

  Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz was a commando with Stony Man Farm’s Able Team and his nickname suited him. He could tinker with just about any piece of electronics or mechanics you put in front of him and usually improved it. But what he really wanted to improve upon were the MREs he was forced to eat in the field.

  He had been complaining to Cowboy Kissinger when Bolan found them. “You gotta help me out here, Cowboy,” Gadgets pleaded.

  Kissinger was the Stony Man Farm armorer. There wasn’t a weapon he couldn’t build or customize, from throwing knife to small arms to the sophisticated homing and computer-targeted missile defense systems deployed around the Farm. He gave Gadgets a look of disbelief. “Let me get this straight—you want me to drop what I’m doing to tinker with your ham steak?”

  Bolan, sitting in the lonely blackness of the trash-strewed concrete box, felt a grin on his face. He realized he had just eaten a ham steak MRE himself. He’d stopped paying attention to his field rations years ago.

  He wondered where Gadgets and the others in Able Team were now. Kurtzman had hinted that Able Team and Phoenix Force were both in the field but hadn’t said where. He wished them safely home again.

  They were all the family he had. Able. Phoenix. Stony. The men and women who devoted their lives to toiling in the shadows for a nation that was ignorant of their existence. Those who did know—the very few in the federal government—weren’t always appreciative of their efforts. Or their sacrifices.

  Stony Man Farm had lost some of its own. Yakov Katzenelenbogen, Stony Man’s tactical adviser and onetime commander of Phoenix Force, was the most recent loss. He had been a warrior, with a list of impressive credentials and unmatched field experience. He was a friend. There had been others before him…

  Bolan got to his feet in a single fluid movement, cutting off that distracting chain of thought. Right now he couldn’t afford to wallow in the past. There was the present to deal with. But, before he could force his reminiscences back into their mental box, the memory of a face flashed in his brain, beautiful, young, smiling at him. He almost heard himself say the name “April.”

  17

  Bolan increased his speed and veered around the turn in the barrier gate. He was using information and a list of targets provided by Kurtzman and Hatim. In the predawn darkness he spotted the lonely outpost of the outer-ring security guard. The pair of guards wasted no time when they saw the speeding, unlit vehicle coming straight at them. One of them raced for the tiny guard shack while the other took his stance and aimed his automatic rifle into Bolan’s windshield.

  The soldier flipped on the headlights and added the spotlights, mounted in the headlights but several times more brilliant than conventional high beams. The blinding light was like a physical blow, making the gunner shield his eyes with his arm and d
rop the weapon to his side. The man in the guard booth flung away the radio.

  Bolan stood on the brakes at the last possible moment. The tires screamed and the Lada fishtailed at the guard booth. The blinded gunner ran for the safety of the entrance gate, plowing into it at crotch-level and flying heels over head and thumping on the pavement.

  The radioman found the spotlights weren’t on him and snatched at his rifle, but Bolan was way ahead of him. The Heckler & Koch submachine gun perforated the radioman with 9 mm shockers. Bolan jumped out and took out the second guard before the man got to his feet. Then there was silence.

  Not for long. This was just the outer ring of a security system with many layers, and in the middle was the heavily secured compound of what remained of the old guard. It was here that attacks on coalition forces were organized. Here that resistance to democracy lived. It was disguised as a social club for what remained of Iraq’s elite class. It was a transparent ploy. Still, the trickery and wrangling of the ruling class every step of the way had kept U.S. forces out far more than it had allowed them in.

  Now the entire area would be on high alert in minutes.

  Bolan jogged to the security booth and tucked his visiting gift up under the small shelf that held the communications equipment. It was out of sight. It needed to stay unnoticed for just ten minutes.

  The soldier drove away.

  FAEIZ FOUND twenty guards on the scene when he arrived. There was a general dispersal of the knotted groups when they saw it was the security chief in charge of the night command arriving.

  “What happened?” he demanded. The head of the outer perimeter guard duty stood over a body. The dead guard was on his back, chest bloodied, rifle still gripped tight in his right hand.

  “Somebody gunned down both of them.” The captain nodded at the figure slumped inside the cramped guard shack. “He managed to get out a radio call.”

  “Did the attackers get inside?”

  “My men saw an SUV pulling away. I have already started a full-scale search of the area, inside and outside the first perimeter. We will know if they are here but I think we would have spotted an intruder already.”

  Faeiz frowned and grabbed the radio from his belt, calling for another status report. No one had any trouble to report.

  “Keep the status reports coming. Once each minute until I say otherwise.”

  He looked out over the buffer zone between this outermost guard station and the next, more formidable fence. The security lights were all on. It looked like noon. The grounds were barren and devoid of life.

  “I do not understand this,” Faeiz muttered. “Why execute these men? What purpose did it serve?”

  “As a distraction?” the captain suggested. “Maybe they think we will lower our guard at some other entrance point if we focus on this gate.”

  Faeiz shook his head slowly, walking to the booth to stare down at the remains of the guard inside. “They would have to be head-in-the-sand fools to think that. But I have no better explanation.” He said into the radio, “Have the city patrols gone out?”

  “Yes, of course, as soon as the alarm was sounded,” replied the mobile squads chief. “We’re looking for an SUV or four-wheel-drive vehicle of some kind. We would find a better description useful.”

  “I’ll let you know.” Faeiz said. He bent at the waist, leaning inside the booth, and looked at the odd lump under the radio shelf brackets. He leaned in so far his head was on the dead guard’s lap.

  “What is this?” he called out, sounding like he had his head in a barrel, reaching for it.

  Ten minutes were up. The odd lump detonated.

  18

  It was a house of prostitutes. Hatim had claimed he knew of at least thirty of them working the place, and probably more he had never seen. The place was funded by Ba’ath Party directors, who made certain that midlevel Ba’ath up-and-comers knew all about it. Nothing spurred success like sex.

  “You know you are somebody when you get pleasure house privileges,” Hatim had said with a taut grimace.

  “You’ve been there?” Bolan had asked.

  “Of course. I am a ‘somebody,’ aren’t I?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Hatim told him everything he knew, which included some of the layout and most of the security measures, which were limited to armed guards and some well-hidden video surveillance pickups.

  “Audio too?”

  “Sure. The audio’s most important. The resistance wants to know who’s spilling secrets.”

  “What are the women like?”

  Hatim began telling him and Bolan interrupted, restating the question.

  “Oh. Which of them are dangerous, do you mean? I would say any of them who are over the age of fifteen or sixteen. If they are there that long, then somebody thinks their will is broken and they will stay loyal enough. Any woman older than that was surely an employee of the palace. The palace was where the very fetching girls went, and many came back to the pleasure house to run the place and of course continue entertaining the men of the Party.”

  Bolan thought about that, thought about a fifteen-year-old girl who had been in the place long enough to have her will broken. He said finally, “Hatim, how old are they when they first go in there?”

  “If they’re recruited or purchased, maybe eight, maybe ten. Some are there from birth—the daughters of palace women.”

  Bolan had never given voice to the next question: How old were they when they began to be used? He knew that it was at once.

  That was rape, pure and simple. Even when marriages were arranged at birth, cultures did not allow for their prepubescent children to consummate it. Even fifteen seemed young to Bolan—Bolan, who had been horrified by the desperate choice his seventeen-year-old sister had once been forced to make.

  This was not his reason for being in Iraq, but the Executioner was glad it had presented itself as a target.

  HE WENT IN THE BACK of the pleasure house, scaling the concrete walls and snipping the nonelectrified barbed-wire mounted on top. He lowered himself inside the grounds, where meager attempts at beautification included a few gaunt, thirsty trees and some benches made from cast-off concrete block. Bolan had seen penitentiary recreation yards that were beautiful compared to this stark garden.

  He stalked the armed guard stationed in the back, creeping through blackness unrelieved by lights.

  The guard was there to keep the women in and to keep the would be rescuers of unwilling recruits out. He didn’t come across as a skilled soldier. His flashlight was his way of finding his path, but he had to have walked it a thousand times and only used it when he reached the gate of steel bars. He tested the lock by giving it a hard rattle, and when he turned he found himself face-to-face with his killer.

  The Iraqi knew the look. Battle cosmetics to darken the light complexion. A vest or straps on which were clipped the instruments of killing. All the signs of a western commando—probably American, maybe a Brit. Definitely the enemy.

  The Iraqi reacted with a flash of movement, spearing the enemy hard in the gut with the bayonet on his AK-74. The only problem was his enemy moved faster.

  Mack Bolan sidestepped the bayonet and yanked the weapon out of the guard’s hands, then slammed the time-worn wooden stock of the AK into the Iraqi’s chin, shattering the complex weave of skeletal components that had fused together to form his jawbone. The Iraqi gagged on a choking deluge of blood and felt the world explode when the same sort of blow broke his skull case to pieces.

  Bolan left the body and entered the unlocked rear door. He found himself in a low, cramped room that stretched into the blackness as far as he could see. There had to be fifty narrow cots crammed together along the two walls and on every cot there was a sleeping form.

  Not all sleeping. Three beds away there was a stirring under the thin sheet and the bed’s occupant rose on her elbows. Her face was dappled with perspiration from the heat and stagnant air. She looked at Bolan, then lay down again. Sh
e had to have assumed he was just another of the guards.

  How could she know better? She was a child. Hatim was wrong—that girl was younger than eight. Yet she was resigned to her life. He had witnessed it in the dullness of her eyes.

  Mack Bolan was not a man who knew much about children, but nothing was so offensive to his sense of right and wrong as the destruction of a child’s soul. How much humiliation and suffering it had to have taken to tarnish the sparkle of natural buoyancy was inestimable, and yet he had just witnessed it in the flesh.

  Someone had to pay for the lack of luster in the eyes of that little girl. With grim purpose, the Executioner left the barracks and went searching for the warden.

  SOMEBODY SPOKE in the long, shadow-filled hallway and came to catch up, talking urgently. It was another of the guards, whose rapid flow of words caught in his throat when he came alongside Bolan.

  The warrior struck fast then, burying the stiletto in the surprised guard, withdrawing it, burying it again, then steering the dying man through a set of doors that turned out to be a kitchen. The filthy stench almost gagged Bolan. He heaved the guard into a bin filled with soggy vegetables and the man collapsed, hands dangling limply over the sides.

  There was excitement at the end of the corridor, where a man slipped through a curtained divider and into a well-lit security office without noticing the warrior clinging to the wall. Bolan knew the cause of the apprehensive conversation: news of the attack on the compound was spreading among the city’s security infrastructure. A higher alert state was being ordered citywide. Two voices in the office, two guards already out of commission, that left four or more guards patrolling the complex, according to Hatim’s intelligence.