Mercy Mission

by Don Pendleton

  It wasn’t slowing.

  The old cameraman silently swore, something vulgar in Swedish. Was he going to bring the thing on shore at full speed? He’d tear it apart.

  If anything, the big boat seemed to put on an extra burst of speed, then the prow pointed at the shore. A landing ramp was there, but it couldn’t accommodate a boat with half the length of this monster.

  The cameraman tried to keep his mouth shut as the huge ship plowed into the ramp, its front end collapsing and shattering. The immense inertia propelled the entire bulk out of the water, flattening the bottom and spraying fiberglass shards around the open park. The riverside recreational area, once landscaped by the government to give visitors in the hotel district a false impression of its public works commitment, was plowed in two by tons of composite and steel.

  Then there was quiet, except for the whooping of sirens coming through the city.

  “Look!” the reporter whispered in spite of himself.

  A man moved on the deck of the boat. He jogged to the rail and collapsed to the ground, then rose to his feet and fled the scene.

  The camera caught it all on tape, as clear as day. Every light on board the big boat was still on. The engines and generator were probably shot, but the lines from the batteries had to have survived. The cameraman was grinning ear to ear. This was perfect. The man had vanished into blackness, but he was zooming in tight on the remains of the boat, getting wonderful details of the deck and upper levels. Aside from the shattered glass everywhere the top deck looked good as new.

  His lens found a body wedged tight under the front end rail, and he got a tight zoom shot of the man’s face and the Republican Guard designation on his uniform. There was another body in the deckhouse. He couldn’t see the face this time, but he found the same insignia on the corpse’s bloodied chest.

  “Choppers,” the reporter whispered.

  The cameraman reluctantly pulled himself from the window. It wouldn’t do to be seen filming the mess below. As it was, the Iraqis would probably be pounding on the door soon to demand their videotape.

  The cameraman plugged the camera into the global phone modem and began sending data. He paced, cursing the data transfer’s snail pace while the reporter spied through the curtains, watching the crisis-control efforts in the park.

  The sky was lightening when the process was completed. The old cameraman held his breath as he disconnected the camera and made a voice call to Stockholm.

  Gotts answered the line with, “It’s perfect. It’s fucking beautiful.”

  The cameraman grinned. “But is it going on the air?”

  “As we speak. First we run an exclusive. CNN will have it in an hour. We’ll release it to every network on the planet by the time you’re at the hotel lunch buffet.”

  “That’ll give me an appetite.”

  Almost whistling for joy, the cameraman did a fast-erase on the videotape. He finished just seconds before the commotion started in the hall. There was a knock on their door. They opened it to find the dour man who served as the media relations representative for Iraq.

  “What’s up?” the reporter asked.

  “I must confiscate all media.”

  The reporter from the Arabic news network was standing in the open door of the adjoining room, protesting loudly. “We were just on our way to get tape—you can’t hide this!”

  “Tapes and disks, please!” the media relations man insisted.

  The Swedish cameraman, looking puzzled, put his blank tapes in the hands of the Iraqi, who then left in a hurry.

  “These guys are total assholes,” the Saudi reporter grumbled.

  “Hey, what’s all the fuss about, anyway?” the cameraman asked.

  The Saudi looked at him as if he were out of his mind. “You couldn’t have slept through it?”

  “Slept through what?”

  The old Swedish cameraman and the sharp-as-a-tack Saudi reporter had shared a meal or two in their time in Baghdad. It was a sort of competitive, brotherly friendship.

  The Saudi smiled suddenly. “You got tape out?”

  “Now, how could I have done that?” the old cameraman asked, his smile spreading from ear to ear.

  The Saudi nodded with satisfaction. “I cannot wait to see it.”

  “You’ll just have to wait your turn.”

  23

  The Lada was gone, towed off by thieves. It didn’t matter now.

  Dawn was coming fast. Last night’s safe house couldn’t be called safe any longer.

  Bolan went in search of a temporary home, and every step was harder than the last.

  Barbara Price had been right. Bolan was exhausted. He had marshaled his body’s resources, but the bruising impact of the crash, even cushioned in a nest of life vests, had brought the pain of all his recent wounds and burns and bruises to the surface. Suddenly he was drained of energy, distracted by agony and muddled by exhaustion.

  He was vulnerable; he was in danger.

  Fighting to stay focused, he forced his legs to carry him a mile from the crash site, then another mile. The gray dawn was exposing him to passersby. He needed cover, and he needed it now.

  There was a fish-processing shed coming up. The stench was muted and the fish scraps were skeletal. It hadn’t been used in a while.

  He inspected his surroundings. There were a few concrete housing projects a quarter mile away, and some early-morning traffic on the road, but as far as he could tell he was unseen.

  He ducked into the shed. The stench was an attack. The interior was stripped bare except for a single table with one end collapsed. No hiding place here.

  But the floor was raised at least a few feet from the sloping riverbank. Bolan used his combat knife to poke at the pressboard floor planks and jimmied one up. The nails screeched. The second one came up more easily. Bolan stepped inside, pulled in his pack and yanked the boards back into place as best he could.

  Then he was unconscious.

  JAWDAT TRIED to put the drink down on the table, but it slipped from his fingers and spilled on its side. The air filled with the pungency of vodka.

  Jawdat did not notice. He simply stared at the thing in front of him, seeing nothing else.

  The thing came closer, and smiled.

  Jawdat felt his stomach knot. He couldn’t speak. He was not even sure that what he was seeing was even real or some sort of a vengeful phantom.

  Because it looked like it had come straight out of the grave.

  “I’ve been busy.” It nodded at the television.

  Jawdat glanced at the muted TV. CNN Europe was showing the footage of the boat crash for the thousandth time.

  “You did that?”

  “And the whorehouse. And the biological research lab. And the front gate of your compound.”

  “You couldn’t have done all that alone!”

  “I did,” the Executioner said, his voice like gravel, then added, “It wasn’t easy.”

  Jawdat nodded dumbly, staring at the bruised, scarred, bleeding man that stood in front of him. He looked like he’d been caught in a rock slide.

  But the American didn’t look weakened or beaten by the ordeal. His eyes burned with determination and the submachine gun in his hands was as steady as a steel girder.

  “You should have seen me before I had my beauty sleep,” Mack Bolan said.

  “Why did you do these things?”

  “To send a message to your coconspirators. Seems they haven’t fully appreciated one of their most valuable assets. There’s a certain Iraqi who wants to make it known that he will not be underrated any longer. I left messages to that effect at several of my stops last night.”

  “Who is this man?” Jawdat demanded.

  “You, of course.”

  Jawdat barked. “Preposterous.”

  “I know. But in case you haven’t noticed, the men who sail this screwed-up ship are all paranoid lunatics.”

  “But they won’t believe a stupid scheme like that!” Jawdat roare
d.

  “But they will not discount it. They’re that paranoid. You know it, Jawdat—you’re one of them.”

  Jawdat sat there, wide-eyed and stunned. “I’ll have you killed.”

  “The press releases go out in one hour to every news agency on the planet.”

  Jawdat’s eyes flickered from side to side. “How do we stop it!”

  “I make a phone call. Every hour for the next twenty-four hours. If I make that call, it stops the e-mail from going.”

  “I’ll be dead,” Jawdat stated matter-of-factly.

  “Eventually. First you’ll be questioned. Knowing you and yours, the questioning could take months. But you know how to keep it from happening, Jawdat. Just a little cooperation, a little intelligence, and I make it all go away.”

  Jawdat, a former general of the Republican Guard, murderer of thousands, sobbed once.

  Then he said, “All right.”

  24

  Arlington, Virginia

  Brigadier General Edwin Juvenal, U.S. Army, had waited for days for the shoe to drop.

  When he sent a small, hand-selected group of soldiers to erase the problem of the Iraqi troublemaker Khalid al-Jabir, he never considered the possibility that they would be identified. It seemed impossible that they could be detained. Getting killed in the process was an absurd notion that never crossed his mind.

  After all, these men were the best, and they had been doing dirty work for Juvenal for years.

  Juvenal had always had a knack for getting the system to provide him with a personal staff of hardmen. He always selected soldiers with special skills and a special lack of conscience.

  But now they were dead, and the dead men would be linked to him, and sooner or later somebody would come around asking him about it. The most unnerving thing was that it hadn’t happened yet.

  It finally came at 2:12 a.m., according to the clock radio at his bedside. Agnes Juvenal had long ago become accustomed to middle-of-the-night phone calls for her husband, but that didn’t mean she had to stop complaining about it. He waited out her belligerent sighing and shifting before putting the receiver to his ear.

  “Juvenal.” He turned the name into a command.

  “General Juvenal, I hope I woke you up.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Who doesn’t matter, but where should be of interest. I’m driving south out of Baghdad. I expect to reach Karbala within a couple of hours. From there I’m going out into no-man’sland, a place in the desert about twenty miles southeast of al-Suba.”

  Juvenal was sweating, jaw clenched. It was about to come down on him, the whole house of cards, but somehow he managed to keep the strain out of his voice. “You present a boring travelog, mister, and your choice of vacation destinations leaves a lot to be desired.”

  “I expect to have your men by nightfall, General.”

  “My men?”

  “The Seven Scorpions. At least the four of them who are still alive.”

  “You’ve got really bad taste in jokes, pal,” Juvenal said. “Those were good men. Their memory deserves a little more respect.”

  “The men themselves deserve to come home. It’s up to you to arrange transportation.”

  Juvenal’s anger got the better of him. “Just who the fuck do you think you are, and where do you get off making these kind of accusations? I’m a United States Army brigadier general, and I don’t have to listen to this crap.”

  “Crap is the key word here, General,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “You’re shoveling more manure than I want to chew on, so let’s cut through the bullshit. I’ve got the goods on you, and I’m about to make them public. Why don’t you go check your e-mail and I’ll call you back in ten.”

  The line went dead.

  What did that son of a bitch mean by “goods”?

  Juvenal stomped into his study and booted his PC, downloading his e-mail. How would that SOB have his personal e-mail address? How’d he get his home phone number, for that matter?

  The general’s broadband connection was quick, but it still spent an endless two minutes downloading the video attachment.

  When Juvenal saw the face of that terrorist Khalid al-Jabir, he just about started overturning furniture.

  On the video the Iraqi was battered and bruised, and spilling his guts about the Seven Scorpions. The video had to have been taken in the hours before al-Jabir died in the melting Ford Excursion in a lonely Pennsylvania field.

  Al-Jabir said to the camera, “They said they were ordered in by an Army officer named Juvenal. They were to meet an Iraqi contact to get a document or agreement or something, I do not remember. They said they thought it was very irregular, but they were sworn to secrecy. They claimed they never knew it was a traitor selling out Iraq they were to meet.”

  Juvenal didn’t hear the rest of it, not really. The use of his name was damning enough. But his attention was riveted again when the Arab started naming the prisoners who still survived. “They are Al Long, Sandwell Foley, George Bolson, Ricardo Leone. Leone is having pneumonia on and off, and who knows if he is still alive.”

  “The U.S. government DOD documents claim that all of them were killed in an exchange of gunfire on the ground in Iraq,” said a voice from offscreen. “How and when did the others actually die?”

  The offscreen voice was the same one Juvenal had just heard on the phone. The same guy was working both sides of the ocean on this one. How many people, and who, were backing him up?

  “There was no gunfight,” the Arab explained. “They strolled right into an ambush of five hundred Republican Guard soldiers. They were surrounded before they knew what hit them. They had no choice but to surrender.”

  “So? How did they die—the other three?”

  “They were questioned.”

  “You mean they were tortured?”

  “Yeah, that is what I mean. Every day for months. All of them. In the beginning they were praying for a rescue, but pretty soon they were begging for death.”

  “Why did they think there would be a rescue attempt?”

  The Arab shrugged on the video. “They talked to Juvenal about it.”

  Juvenal felt like he was going to throw up.

  “When?” asked the offscreen voice.

  “During the standoff at the ambush. Before they surrendered. They were in radio contact with the man himself, and he promised them a quick extraction or a diplomatic solution. But the extraction never happened. After Iraq made its strategic withdrawal from Kuwait and we presented our demands to the interlopers—”

  “You mean after we spoiled your pirate raid and kicked you out like mongrel dogs.”

  “Yes. There was negotiation afterward. The fate of these particular prisoners was never discussed.”

  “The U.S. never brought it up?”

  “No.”

  “And the Hussein regime wasn’t going to offer this information in the interests of humanity. It wasn’t in their nature.”

  “Yes.” Al-Jabir couldn’t look defiant. He was simply beaten and defeated.

  The narrator said, “So many lies and misinformation surround the fall of Hussein’s regime. How do you know that what you have told me is true?”

  Al-Jabir shrugged. “I have interviewed the prisoners myself. I was to know personal information, and I was to undertake blackmail or ransoming if certain other of our plans failed. I can tell you the name of Mr. Foley’s first girlfriend. I know where Mr. Leone buried his dog that died when he was six years old.”

  The video clip ended.

  Juvenal stared at the frozen image of the Arab, then played back the sections of the video where the offscreen interrogator spoke. The voice wasn’t anyone he knew—he had never heard it except for the phone call. Who the hell was he?

  Speak of the devil—Juvenal snatched up the phone midring.

  “How did you like my documentary?” the caller asked.

  “I want your name, rank and serial number,” Juvenal demanded. “
I want to know the name of your CO.”

  “I haven’t had a CO in a lot of years.

  “What branch are you? CIA?”

  “I work independently.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Ready to toe the line, General?”

  “You have nothing on me, son. That video doesn’t prove a thing. It’s just the word of some dead Arab con man.”

  “I’ll have video of the prisoners themselves in a couple of hours.”

  “Show that to me then.”

  “By then it might be too late for you to meet my demands.”

  “Which are?” Juvenal was incredulous.

  “We need an extraction.”

  “No way in hell.”

  “Did I tell you I was taping all this, General? I’ll add your comments to the video when I start the broadcast e-mail program I have set up on my PC in the States.”

  “That’s illegal wiretapping!”

  “Not quite as morally repugnant as your crimes, General.”

  “You don’t have evidence of that!” Juvenal shouted.

  “I think the only fair thing to do is let the public decide your guilt or innocence. These recordings will help.”

  “If I bring those men out of Iraq, I’m just as screwed.”

  “If you bring those men back, I’ll refrain from releasing these tapes to the media. You’ll be able to come up with some sort of a spin that’ll cover your ass. At least enough to save your pension.”

  “Give me time to think about it.”

  “You’ve already had thirteen years to think about it. Give me your answer now or I go over your head.”

  “Fuck you!” General Juvenal slammed down the phone.

  Almost instantly Juvenal regretted it. He should have played ball, at least for a little while so he could come up with a plan of action. It was too late now. He sat morosely in his silk robe with a tumbler of Scotch for almost an hour.

  There had to be a way out of this. But he’d been pondering this for days.

  The phone rang at his elbow. It wasn’t even 4:00 a.m. It had to be his nemesis in Iraq. Now he could try some stall tactics.