Mercy Mission

by Don Pendleton

  The AUV relayed information back to the tablet PC that could serve as its control board. The PC was in a milspec waterproof diver’s housing, the screen glowing dimly when Bolan booted it and slipped the dangling umbilical over the side. He powered up the submersible and watched the diagnostics scroll past on the PC. When he got the okay, he set the submersible on the water.

  The thing was so heavy he assumed it would float like a brick, but it bobbed alongside the rowboat on its nylon tow line.

  With a single connection he slaved the tablet PC to the heavy global phone that Kurtzman had provided him. It was one of Stony Man Farm’s last-resort communications devices. The hardware specialists working with Kurtzman and Hermann Schwarz at the Farm had thrown everything but the kitchen sink into the unit so that it would be able to make use of just about any commercial and some military mobile phone, radio, and satellite data transfer systems on the planet.

  “It would have been a hell of a lot easier just to take a dozen cell phones and radios and PDAs and wrap ’em all up in electrical tape,” Gadgets Schwarz had said proudly, “but it wouldn’t have fit in your pocket.”

  The unit was surprisingly compact considering its capabilities, but it was still a bulky box of electronics. Gadgets had to have been thinking of clown pockets. Bolan didn’t care as long as it worked.

  “Am I coming through, Striker?” Kurtzman asked in the headset Bolan slipped on.

  “Loud and clear, Bear.”

  “How are you, Striker?” Barbara Price asked.

  Bolan was not too surprised to hear her voice. Kurtzman and Price were very close. He would have trouble keeping regular communication with Bolan a secret from her—and she would not like being out of the loop, even if being included made her complicit in some very politically dangerous activities. “I’m fine,” Bolan said. “ETA in fifteen minutes.”

  “How’s the game planning coming along?” she persisted.

  “Right on schedule.”

  “Striker,” Price said, “you haven’t slept more than a few hours in days. Are you sharp enough for this?”

  Bolan didn’t answer at once. Price knew him. They had their own special relationship.

  But she was also the Stony Man mission controller, responsible for ordering the Able Team and Phoenix Force commandos into dangerous missions on a regular basis. If she was questioning his state of alertness, there was a good reason for it.

  Was he overtired? He didn’t feel like it. Regardless, there was no way this probe could be delayed. It was a now-or-never opportunity.

  “I’m sharp,” Bolan said. “How’s my RC boat? What’s it picking up?”

  “We’re seeing everything she sees. We’ve got a river bottom and fish. A few undiscovered archaeological sites from the dawn of human civilization. A few old tires.”

  “Those are big things. We’re looking for small.”

  “We’ll see whatever the Iraqis have,” Kurtzman assured Bolan. “Sound sensors, motion detectors, mines, nets, you name it. As long as it’s in the water, we’ll see it.”

  “The big unknown is their onboard security system,” Price said.

  “The Iraqis aren’t keeping up with the state-of-the-art,” Bolan responded. “I’ve seen evidence of that.”

  “Pretty insubstantial evidence.”

  “If I’m spotted, I’ll pull out.”

  “That’s when your strategy falls completely apart. You think you’re going to sneak out the same way you sneaked in. I don’t see how this probe can stay soft, Striker.”

  “I don’t intend for it to,” Bolan stated flatly. “Is that our target, Bear?”

  The shape of the large boat emerged from the top of the notepad PC window, highlighted and rendered with fine details by the high-resolution display.

  The rendering was actually a combination of old and dynamic information. The image of the craft had been digitally extracted from the many files of photo and thermal satellite data collected after the nature of the vessel was revealed to the U.S. by their spy, Hatim. Eventually the National Reconnaissance Office developed an RF signature for the boat—all that communications equipment was tough to hide in such an underdeveloped part of the world, especially when it was realized one of the signals came from a Singapore-sourced military tracking device. The Iraqis had to have intended for it to be used to locate the vessel if it was ever seized. The Iraqis didn’t know their proprietary, low-power signal could be picked up by U.S. intelligence. It had been watched every minute—but it had not moved once in months.

  When the Iraqis used the craft, they came to it. It was some sort of a Ba’ath secret meeting place, possibly designed to serve as a mobile government seat if the various bunkers and safe houses were unsafe.

  Hatim had heard rumors about its true purpose: it was supposed to have been an escape vehicle for the Glorious Leader if the people of Iraq rose up against him. If the mobs closed in, the U.S. would likely shut down air traffic and the only quick way out of Iraq would be a lightning-fast flight down the Tigris. The boat that had never left anchor under the vigilance of the United States was said to be capable of reaching speeds of 50 mph or more.

  Secret and expensive. Undoubtedly it had taken an enormous chunk from of Iraq’s strained military budget to procure it and equip it and, undoubtedly, arm it. Taking away this toy would make some higher-ups very angry—and more vulnerable.

  Bolan couldn’t see the craft, but this stretch of the Tigris was outside Baghdad far enough to be isolated. The river was all black. The brightest things to see were the glow of the PC and the feeble stars shimmering above the haze.

  “Close enough,” Kurtzman said.

  Bolan dropped anchor close to shore with the bottom just three feet under his hull. He entered the tepid Tigris River and strapped on a full-face scuba mask, powering up the waterproofed microphone mounted at his chin and the lipstick video pickup on top of the mask.

  Bolan was thankful that Kurtzman had dredged up the CIA reports on Hatim prior to sending Bolan in. He had found mention of the secret Iraqi escape yacht and added the extensive selection of underwater gear to the shopping list he gave to Kurtzman. As long as Bolan had a car to transport it all, why not go in heavy?

  The equipment package included the MK 25, the standard closed-circuit oxygen underwater breathing apparatus, or UBA, used by U.S. Navy combat swimmers. The MK 25 MOD 0 variant was for warm-water use, offering no thermal protection while enabling the most user mobility. Bolan had carefully gone through the predive checklist twice, checking the oxygen bottle pressure and inspecting the soda lime canister packing.

  The rebreather directed the diver’s exhalations through the material in the soda lime canister, which absorbed the carbon dioxide and sent the air back into the breathing channel. Because the air circulation was completely contained, no bubbles rose from the unit to advertise the diver’s presence.

  The full-face mask was not standard, but required. Bolan would need constant communication to get past the type of security he assumed would surround the former president’s escape boat.

  Bolan’s underwater weapon was a Heckler & Koch P-11, firing a fin-stabilized tungsten dart. The cartridge allowed for five shots before reloading, and at the relatively shallow depths Bolan expected work in, less than three meters below the surface, the darts had an effective range of more than fifteen meters. It was usable out of the water as well.

  “Here I go. I’m setting my escort free,” Bolan radioed. He detached the cable from the nose of the tiny submersible and the AUV sped away, like an excited dog the moment he was released from the leash. Bolan moved below the surface and swam after it at a leisurely pace.

  This part he didn’t like—letting a piece of hardware make his security decisions for him. It didn’t help that the thing was smaller than some of the catfish it was startling out of the bottom muck. On the other hand, he considered, this was an action that would have been unthinkable without the AUV—his human eyes never could have found tiny sensors or
monofilament trip wires staged in the murky black water.

  “Hold up, Striker,” Kurtzman radioed. “We’ve got one.”

  Bolan stopped dead in the water.

  AARON KURTZMAN watched the display windows scroll data from the various submersible sensors as it closed in warily on the object that floated ominously in the darkness, tethered to the river floor so that it hovered just beneath the surface of the water. A pair of secondary tension lines tied to the main line stretched out upriver to keep the floating object from moving too much with the whims of the current.

  Kurtzman signaled the submersible to move closer to the intersection of the three lines, finding them to be galvanized steel cables looped through a single steel plate. The primary cable passed through the steel plate, then through a sort of vise that tied off a long section of loose cable.

  “What’s it for?” Price asked, making out the digitally rendered shape on Kurtzman’s screen.

  “To adjust the mine’s depth as the river depth changes with the seasons,” Kurtzman explained. “They must do it manually.”

  “That sounds like fun work.” Price imagined divers going in every month for the painstaking and dangerous process of adjusting the level of the lethal floating balls. Talk about job stress.

  The mines themselves were small, spiked devices. They were near enough to the surface that even a small craft could have actuated one of those spikes. The submersible was ordered to deviate enough to find the next mine, which materialized almost immediately out of the murk, only ten feet from the first. The next was a few feet closer to the ship and just five feet away. The mines were placed without pattern, making a surface water approach a dangerous undertaking.

  But it was easy enough for Bolan to swim between the gap in the cables when Kurtzman gave him the go-ahead. The extremely low visibility would have made finding the gap a hit-or-miss proposition if not for the submersible, which was mounted in the rear with an infrared beacon that showed up in the infrared pickup that flipped down over his scuba mask. Bolan simply swam close behind his underwater guide dog.

  Then Kurtzman ordered him to halt once more.

  “We’ve got monofilament netting now, Striker,” Kurtzman said.

  “Just find me a way under it,” Bolan replied.

  “Looking now. Here we go. Follow the submersible in.”

  Bolan approached more cautiously, creeping into the river grass that grew no more than six inches high. The monofilament could be immensely dangerous—virtually invisible, possibly razor-sharp and barbed. A strong, careful diver could get tangled up in the stuff in just a few seconds—and never get free.

  The Iraqis used floating fence poles to hold the netting. One end of each pole was secured to an anchor to keep the fence upright, and the level nature of the river bottom in this place made it easy to get bottom-to-top coverage. Bolan wondered if the submersible had truly located a way in.

  When he had almost reached the infrared light, he stopped and flipped on his dive light, keeping the setting dim, and the fence appeared an arm’s length ahead of him in the blackness. It seemed flimsy, rippling softly with the flow of water, but the dozens of tangled and snagged fish corpses attested to its capability to snatch and hold prey. Bolan had no intention of being caught in this spiderweb.

  The gap beneath the reinforced bottom hem of the netting and the riverbed was a foot and a half high, just slightly wider than his shoulders. With the rebreather apparatus he didn’t think he would make it through.

  “Stony, my gear and I are going to have to go through one at a time.”

  “Hold on, Striker,” Kurtzman said. “I’ve got an idea.”

  The submersible’s tiny rear-mounted props spun to life, tilting slightly to maneuver the submersible until it hung in the gap just inches below the netting. Two flat metal fingers popped out of the top of the toylike hull. Bolan had not even known they were there. The submersible rose at a rate of just an inch a second, maneuvering slightly until the bottom hem of the net touched between the two steel fingers, which clamped the netting. Now with a firm grasp on it, the submersible rose with the monofilament barrier and left a gap wide enough for Bolan to slither through easily. He played it safe and hugged the slimy riverbed until he was well clear of the netting.

  Behind him, the submersible lowered the net, retracted its mechanical claws and swam away unscathed.

  The river was much more shallow, but now the seafloor rose rapidly. He went two paces uphill.

  “Striker, don’t move!” Kurtzman froze Bolan in his tracks. The soldier’s eyes scanned the darkness, seeing no sign of the danger.

  The submersible was just inches from where he crouched, and it rose to the height of his head and drifted forward, the gentle turning of its screws so soft he could only hear it when it was nearly grazing him. With the flashlight off again he saw only its glimmering infrared signal easing away into the murk. But it didn’t go far. It was just sitting there, looking at—something.

  “WHAT IS THAT THING?” Price asked.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kurtzman admitted. “The housing looks like a piece of ceramic piping.” He tapped the vague image on his screen. “This is some sort of electronics gizmo, but I’ll be damned if I know what it does.”

  “Talk to me,” Bolan demanded on the radio feed.

  “We’ve got something up there, but we don’t know what it is,” Kurtzman admitted. “The database isn’t pulling up anything that matches the configuration we see.”

  “It’s not like the Iraqis to be innovative,” Bolan observed. “Describe it to me.”

  Kurtzman described the unusual conglomeration of components, all bolted and wired together and mounted on a steel post about three feet off the bottom of the river, with just a foot of water above it.

  “What do you think?” Kurtzman asked.

  “I think we need Cowboy,” Bolan said. “And I’m running out of time, so we need him fast.”

  COWBOY KISSINGER’S forehead rolled over his eyes in intense concentration.

  “Am I seeing a sewer pipe?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Covered with a screen,” Kurtzman said. “Then there’s this weird cutout at the elbow in the pipe. Looks like it’s positioned so the natural river flow sends water in the front end, passes over whatever the gizmo is that’s attached at the elbow, turns another right angle and exits the pipe.”

  “Visual sensors? Thermal sensors? Anything like that in the area?”

  “Not that we’ve found,” Price said.

  “Time’s not a luxury we have here, Cowboy,” Mack Bolan growled from the bottom of a river on the opposite side of the planet.

  “Understood, Striker,” Cowboy said. “Bear, let’s swing up behind this thing and take a closer look at the electronics.”

  Kurtzman gave the submersible orders to circle the odd device then come up behind it. He paused the AUV with its nose just inches from the cutout and flipped on a miniature headlight. Kissinger’s face moved closer, until he almost touched the screen with his nose. “I see words printed on the electronics, in English, I think. Change the angle a little so I can see down more.”

  Kissinger watched the incremental shifting of the image as the back end of the submersible rose, aiming the video pickup and the light source down into the opening at the elbow of the ceramic pipe.

  There were serial numbers, upside down from his perspective. They told him nothing.

  The imprinted logo that came into view was from a multinational electric parts supplier that made everything from home thermostats to space shuttle control components. The next word that crept into view was sensor. The final words appeared halfway and then were covered in shadow again.

  “I need a sharper angle,” Kissinger said quickly, feeling the urgency build.

  “I don’t know if I can do much better,” Kurtzman answered as he tapped in a command. The angle of the video image seemed to increase a half degree, but no more.

  “Now down, just a hair,” K
issinger said.

  “Yeah,” Kurtzman said, and told the submersible to descend a half inch, which brought the bottom half off the next word into view.

  “That’s as good as it gets,” Kurtzman said before more complaints came his way.

  “At least flip it right side up.”

  The image of the backward, upside-down partial letters turned 180 degrees.

  “I still can’t make it out,” Price said as if to herself. “I, U, K, B, I, I, I, I, Y. It can’t be a word.”

  “That’s an R, not a K,” Kissinger said.

  “Any of those Is could be Ts,” Kissinger added.

  “Makes no more sense.”

  “Must be a serial number,” Kurtzman said.

  A low grumble of a voice said from the speakers, “I’m waiting.”

  Kissinger knew it wasn’t a serial number. It was something. A word with meaning. If he couldn’t come up with an answer, Bolan just might decide to risk going through anyway. He had to come up with an answer. And the answer was lurking at the edge of his thoughts—he could feel it.

  “How many freaking kinds of sensors are there anyway?” he demanded, angry with himself.

  “Thermal, pressure, acoustical?” Kurtzman suggested, shaking his head as he realized none of those made sense.

  “EMI, RFI,” Price added. “Speed, electric conductivity—”

  “Turbidity!” Kissinger exploded. “Striker, don’t move!”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Bolan said.

  “Striker, listen to me,” Kissinger said distinctly. “Do not move.”

  21

  Mack Bolan, crouched alone on the floor of the Tigris River, said into his mask mike, “Okay, Cowboy, I read you loud and clear. I’m a statue.”

  And he was. Stock-still. Muscles relaxed, but his body as motionless as the sunken granite carving of a long-forgotten Babylonian despot.

  The submersible wasn’t moving either. Her penlight-sized headlamp faded and her tiny motors spun just enough to compensate for the light current and keep her right where she was.