One of the four showed himself. He had to have noticed something out of place in the shadows, because he pulled back through the drapery divider before Bolan got off a shot. The newcomer shouted and fired through the divider, pockmarking the wall with a trail of holes that homed in on Bolan with lightning speed. Bolan dropped into a crouch, targeted the unseen source of the rounds by their trajectory, and triggered a long burst from his submachine gun. He heard a grunt and the fall of a body.
Bolan bolted for the office and faced the pair coming to join the gun battle. He triggered a quick burst into the nearest gunner, whose companion leaped for cover and squeezed out a long burst from behind a utilitarian room divider of steel.
Bolan answered by rolling a fragmentation grenade across the room. It arced behind the divider and the panicking gunner jumped into the open, firing wildly but desperate to escape the grenade blast. Bolan cut him across the middle and the gunner slammed down.
His eyes were open long enough to see Bolan retrieve the grenade and reattach it to his combat webbing.
Bolan had not bothered to pull the pin. He had to conserve when possible.
The outsmarted Iraqi’s last words were probably not polite, but Bolan couldn’t understand them anyway.
Back in the hall the scrape of feet on the other side of the draped archway alerted him to approaching danger. A hissed whisper, a grunt of agreement, then two of them barreled through the opening aiming high and low. They should have concentrated on left and right. Bolan’s foot tripped one from the side, propelling him into his companion, and they both spent the last seconds of their lives struggling to regain their balance. A 9 mm burst chopped into the pair and they were still.
The guards were neutralized, if Hatim’s estimate was correct. But Hatim hadn’t been confident.
Bolan stayed where he was, instinct or intuition holding him there. Maybe he saw or heard something that was too faint to identify but nevertheless activated his warning sense. He was too good a soldier to ignore the impulse.
A moment later there was a an electric crackle from the floor. One of the corpses had a radio and was being asked to check in.
The request became more insistent and Bolan heard the voice in stereo—the caller was talking outside the draped door, maybe ten paces off and coming fast. Bolan listened to the near-silent slap of bare feet and determined it was just one man.
An automatic rifle prodded through the drapes tentatively. Bolan let a head wriggle through the opening, too, then the warrior’s hand snaked through the darkness and latched on to the newcomer’s collar, hauling him through the drapes, sweeping him in a fast circle, and propelling him bodily into the wall. The Kalashnikov was picked out of the man’s hands, and before he could get his wits about him he found himself on the floor, trussed liked a goat about to be bled.
Bolan yanked off the drapes, tearing off a wide strip and twisting it into an improvised rope that he threaded through the series of slots constructed into the concrete bricks above the door to allow air circulation between the rooms. He hauled on the rope and winched the guard off the ground. The shell-shocked guard became agitated.
“Speak English or shut up,” Bolan said.
“Who are you?” The guard was so surprised he’d stopped sounding angry.
“Just the hired help,” Bolan said. “This place is all screwed up. Lots of unfit men running things in Baghdad. I’m here to send a message to those dogs.”
“What are you talking about? You Americans have already taken over ruling Iraq.”
“I’m not here for the U.S., dog, I’m here for my friend. My friend is a powerful man here, but he is not being appreciated.”
“You are a mercenary?” the guard asked incredulously. “Hired by an Iraqi?”
“Now you’ve got it.”
“Who? Tell me who hired you!”
“Not quite yet, dog.”
The insult was just enough to goad the guard, who thrashed impotently, which pulled his plastic handcuffs painfully tight on his wrists and ankles and he swung into the doorjamb. Bolan watched the performance while waiting for the woman behind him to make her play. He had glimpsed her in the chaos, ready to come in with her snub-nosed handgun. He just didn’t know whose side she was on.
“Keep moving and you’ll cut the circulation to your hands,” Bolan told the guard, giving the woman the opportunity to close in under the cover of his voice. She came to within a foot of his back.
“Drop your wea—”
Bolan spun and lifted the weapon from her hands so fast she didn’t believe her eyes.
“Give me that!” she blurted foolishly.
“I don’t think so.”
She lashed out at his shin with a downward step, but telegraphed the move with a long lifting of her leg. The blow never landed. Bolan snap-kicked her other foot from under her, and suddenly the young woman found herself doing the splits. She sprawled to the ground.
“Are you the bitch that sired this whelp?” Bolan asked as he tied up the woman with strips of drapery—he had used up the last of the plastic handcuffs on the dangling man.
The woman tried to spit on him, which was impossible while helpless and facedown on the floor. She followed it up with a venomous string of invective.
“Whatever. You’re old and ugly enough.”
She screeched and tried to twist on her back, gnashing at him with her teeth. Bolan actually thought she had a pretty face, and she couldn’t be more than twenty. But he wanted her mad. In fact, he wanted them both seething and humiliated. His goal was to offend them so severely they wouldn’t even think about keeping it to themselves. This probe was a waste of time if it was covered up.
“You will be a dead man very soon!” she shouted.
“Listen to her if you know what is good for you, American!”
“Keep barking like that and you’ll wake the neighborhood,” Bolan said, as he stuffed wads of drapery into their mouths and lashed the gags in place with more strips of material. Finally he lashed their bits together with a short length of more rolled fabric. The woman’s struggles jerked the suspended guard and slammed him into the doorjamb. He jerked back and wrenched her head off the floor on a backward-bent neck.
Bolan liked what he saw. These two wouldn’t get free without help and would spend the night fighting each other. By morning they would be in severe pain and as mad as hell.
He went back the way he had come, finding the barracks crowded with worried-looking young women and girls.
He wanted to tell them to leave. To go home. But they had no homes to return to. Their fate was sealed. They huddled in a large frightened mass, eyes wide with fear.
Bolan knew what he had to do. He had to protect them from even the implication of blame in the humiliation he was perpetrating inside. He pulled the gate shut that locked them out of the rest of the residence. They were prisoners in their barracks. There was nothing these girls could do to help those inside.
He peered into the crowd, looking for the standouts—the older women, like the one he had just tied up in the next room. Shouldn’t there be more experienced whores supervising the younger ones? The mothers of the girls who had been born and raised in this place?
Then it occurred to him that they were attending the party at the World Trade Hotel. Just the one house mother with the bad attitude had remained here tonight.
It didn’t matter. The message he left was clear enough.
But there were many messages to send this night.
19
When Nateq Hatim drew up a quick list of possible targets, Bolan and Kurtzman had been able to choose the best targets. Best, in this case, meant high profile.
Bolan had a few predawn hours in which to work, and every probe had to be a slap in the face to the Ba’ath Party and to the still-powerful underground rulers. The slavers of Baghdad were going to be eating unforgivable insults for breakfast.
Which didn’t mean they couldn’t be effective antiterrorist countermeasures at
the same time.
“You are a dead man,” said the research doctor charged with monitoring the laboratory on the midnight-to-noon shift. “You will be killed!”
“You said that.” Bolan yanked the rolled sleeves of the doctor’s cleanroom coat into a hard knot. The doctor’s arms were still inside them.
“What are you doing?” the doctor demanded, raising his voice. He said even louder, “You are not supposed to be here!”
Bolan had the submachine gun in his hands and when the pair of Iraqi soldiers rushed into the work area he squeezed the trigger, cutting them down in a harsh blur of 9 mm rounds. They were dead before the door had swung itself shut behind them.
The doctor’s blustering was gone for the moment, and he began to whimper like a worried mutt when Bolan came at him with the submachine gun.
Bolan did not aim at the doctor but at the wall next to the man.
When the MP-5 SD-3 spewed 9 mm rounds into the electronic panels, it chopped up the controls and eviscerated the stand-alone cryogenics monitoring computer. The cryogenics CPU sensed multiple simultaneous failures throughout its systems and issued several alarm protocols, all within the few hundredths of a second before the redundant power and alarm systems were themselves transformed to scrap and the microchips themselves shattered. There was nothing left to control the cold box.
The doctor was silent in the aftermath, numbed by the tiny pocket of damage and its vast implications.
Bolan walked to the mess, found the last-resort emergency override circuit breakers and yanked out their electrical cables.
“You are very thorough.”
Bolan’s mouth was a hard line. “I’m not done yet.”
“I know what you think this is,” the doctor said in broken but rapid English. “You are wrong. It is just research. That is all we have ever done here is research!”
Bolan nodded. “Of course.”
“Now what are you doing?”
Bolan did not bother to explain. He knew the doctor knew exactly what he was doing. He inserted his wire cutters handle into the steel latches on the wall-mounted containers and popped them off, one after another. The containers were as tall and wide as shoe boxes. Cold vapor breathed out of them when he flipped off the lids in quick succession.
Inside were brushed aluminum canisters, about the size of coffee cans. Bolan knew that if he placed his hand inside one of them it would have instantly frozen his flesh to crystal and preserved it just as perfectly as the tissue samples frozen inside. Each of the canisters was labeled with a name printed out laboriously in Roman and Arabic and each label had the word Belinga or Booue. At the bottom of each was the legend EHF.
It took him a moment to come up with the meaning of the words, but when he did he understood the entire enterprise. He glared at the doctor and said, “Just who is interested in researching a vaccine for Ebola hemorrhagic fever?”
The doctor stammered but couldn’t come up with a reply.
“If I didn’t want to risk infecting every person in this city, I’d make you eat one of your tissue samples and you could get a real firsthand understanding of what EHF does to you. I’ve been there. It’s not pretty. It’s inhuman to contemplate unleashing that on anybody, anywhere, for any reason.”
The doctor was torn between denial and debate and didn’t manage to say much of anything.
Bolan found printed stationery from the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville inside one box. “This is where you got the tissue samples. Let me guess—you paid some poor Gabonese to break into the medical research center and carve hunks of flesh out of EHF victims before the Ministry of Health could have the cadavers cremated. Am I right?”
Bolan could see that he was. “Did you even think twice about the fate of your burglar? If he was in there hacking out flesh in a big hurry, he wouldn’t have avoided contact with infected blood. How many people did he infect? How many innocent men, women and children died of EHF so you could get these samples?”
The doctor spluttered, “We fight your oppression using whatever means necessary!”
“Nobody buys it, Doctor. Even you know that’s a load of crap. Every tyrant who rules a wasting economy tries to cast the blame somewhere else. Kuwait or the U.S. or wherever. But a dictatorship is just a dictatorship, nothing more—a bunch of power-hungry wheeler-dealers without much ethical backbone. In this case, no ethics at all.”
The highly insulative properties of the canisters made them extremely resilient in case of unexpected temperature alternations. Even if their outer refrigerated chamber failed catastrophically and reached room temperature, the canisters should keep their contents sustained at minus one hundred degrees Celsius for almost six hours. In fact, the only thing they could not stand up to was fire, which was why they were in a concrete-and-steel fireproof lab.
Bolan took a collapsible plastic canteen out of his backpack. The contents were not water. He flipped up the nozzle and squirted the liquid from one end of the refrigerated case to the other, and the smell of gasoline filled the lab. In seconds all six canisters were dripping with it.
By then the doctor was pleading with Bolan to stop. He was struggling in the twisted-and-tied lab coat. It got him two full inches closer to the action by the time Bolan lit a match and ignited the fuel in each container.
The doctor screamed. The surface of each canister shimmered under liquid flame.
The canisters each had a stainless-steel internal temperature gauges. Bolan watched one.
“What? What does it say?” the doctor pleaded.
“Seven degrees Celsius and rising fast. I guess the experiment is about over.”
The bioterrorism researcher said nothing for a moment.
“I’m dead anyway,” he finally allowed.
Bolan was pleased as the digits on the displays topped one hundred degrees Celsius. The pestilence stored in the cryogenic cells was being cooked. When the temperature in all the canisters was over 150, he knew they were more than sterilized.
More important, the chambers were ruined. Bolan knew they had been expensive and difficult to come by—one of the former regime’s prized possessions. The chambers would be almost impossible to replace. Getting more tissues with which to breed bioweapons in Iraq just got harder.
This was turning out to be a productive evening.
Now, time for the pièce de résistance.
20
Bolan thought this would be a nice night for a pleasure cruise. He returned to the hotel district fronting the Tigris River, then drove upriver to the commercial riverfront. With the Lada tucked against a dock house he took his pack and strolled onto the abandoned wharf. This was the biggest shipping and fishing port in the city of Baghdad, but in the black night it was silent and still, and the heat that never seemed to fully dissipate even in the deep of night brought out the full flavor of the dead fish and fish parts that were splattered everywhere.
They made the great old waterway smell bad, too. It looked as if the wharf were the scene of a bizarre, supernatural shower of fish parts. Stiff, waxy heads from creatures that found their way into Iraqi nets just twelve hours ago, and mummified dollops of rot that had been decaying for days in the hot sun.
Bolan found his transport waiting where it was supposed to be. The purchase had been arranged by Hatim, who paid more to purchase the dingy craft and its coughing old engine than both were worth when new on the black market. There was a half inch of water on the bottom where a deteriorating tar patch covered a gash in the aluminum hull. Bolan wondered if the thing would be up to the task of floating him downriver.
Just one more factor in this exercise that was unpredictable.
This was by far the riskiest phase in his strategy of harassment, with far too many elements out of Bolan’s control. He knew he was taking a gamble. The possible payoff made it worth the risk.
But he was putting his trust in Kurtzman’s skills and Hatim’s loyalty to the American cause. Bear wouldn’t let him do
wn. Hatim—he just didn’t know for sure. He was also depending too much on technology he could not directly control. That deepened his misgivings.
And there was his own physical state. He was worn down.
But there was no choice but to proceed at full speed.
He rowed into the deep water of the half-mile-wide Tigris, then allowed the current to carry him while he prepped the electronics Kurtzman had appropriated for him just for this probe.
What looked like a toy submarine was, in fact, a toy-size underwater reconnaissance robot, crammed with enough electronics and sensors to drive its price tag into the six figures. Kurtzman had been clear to distinguish the unit as a micro AUV, or autonomous underwater vehicle, not the same as the unmanned underwater vehicle, which in military applications was usually a larger probe and typically controlled remotely.
The decades-old development of small underwater devices for reconnaissance was given a boost by twenty-first century miniaturization technology, some of it coming out of MAV, or micro air vehicle, development. But designing effective spy flies was challenged considerably by the need to make the devices lightweight and powerful enough to deliver themselves through the air to their target and stay there long enough to get good intelligence. AUVs had years of small underwater maneuverability systems development to build upon.
Bolan’s sonar-sensing micro AUV was about eighteen-inches long, tapered at the front, not quite eight inches in circumference at its widest point. Two small rear props were enclosed in tapered, screened canopies. Combined with the lines of the hull, the canopies made the AUV’s profile completely smooth. It was capable of slithering through thick weeds without snagging.
The batteries and the motor made it quick when it needed to be, but capable of operating independently for several hours on a single charge at normal scanning speeds. The computer system made it autonomous for most operations. When provided with a task it would map its own route, adjust the route dynamically to accommodate terrain and obstacles, even adjust its depth or make repeated passes when it decided it needed to get clearer scans.
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