Mercy Mission

by Don Pendleton

  But the call wasn’t from Iraq. He heard, “Please hold for General Wheatland.”

  Wheatland? Wheatland was the top man, the Army Chief of Staff. Then Juvenal knew his nemesis in Iraq hadn’t been bluffing. He had gone up the Army chain of command.

  “Edwin?” asked the voice of the highest-ranking man in the Army.

  “Yes, General,” Juvenal answered smartly. But he wasn’t feeling too smart.

  “I want you in my office. Five minutes ago. I think you know why.”

  “Yes, General.”

  Juvenal stared at the floor. His career was over, and he couldn’t think of any damned way of weaseling his way out of this. If it wasn’t for that stupid fuck in Iraq, this never would have come back to haunt him. He’d worried briefly when the U.S. went into Iraq in 2003, but in all the chaos his secret remained buried. Now it was a different story.

  Yeah, he’d go to Wheatland. He’d take what was coming to him. But first he was going to do what he could about putting a name on that fuck in Iraq.

  Juvenal had friends. At NRO, at Justice, at Homeland. Quickly he made a few calls and gave his NRO contact access to his home PC and his phone line.

  “Trace the calls and that e-mail and find out where they came from,” he told them. “I want to know who he works for. He’s not working alone, I know that. I want to know who’s signing his fucking paychecks.”

  His friends in high places promised to get right on it.

  While that was happening, Juvenal dressed and was out the door by 4:30 a.m. He felt like a prisoner on his way to the gallows.

  25

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  Nobody knew the aircraft was en route until the vast network of security systems began buzzing the alarm. Buck Greene, the chief of security grew even more concerned when he identified the approaching aircraft by its transponder code. That particular small jet was a frequent visitor to the Farm. Why was it coming in now without radioing ahead? This was not standard procedure.

  He took the radio from the operator and raised the jet himself. After an exchange of identifying code words, the security chief ended up speaking to the big Fed himself.

  “Is everything all right, sir?”

  “No, in fact, nothing is all right! Get me on the damn ground! And get me Aaron and Barbara. I want them waiting when I get there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Greene had never witnessed Hal Brognola on a rampage, but he had heard rumors. More like legends, actually. The tales always seemed to end with a moral, like an Aesop’s Fable: When Hal Brognola is really, really angry, a body needed to be somewhere else.

  It was advice Greene intended to take to heart.

  THE JET HIT the ground abruptly and stopped short of the regular passenger debarking point. A powerful-looking figure stormed out and stomped down the roll-away steps. Hal Brognola climbed into the waiting jeep and rode the short distance to the farmhouse in silence.

  “You want to explain this to me?” he demanded as he stormed into the War Room and dropped a brief printed report on the table. Kurtzman slid the page across the wide conference table and nodded. “It looks like our intercepts protocols worked perfectly.”

  “Huh?”

  “The safeguards we’ve put in place to alert us if there are inquiries being made about Farm activities. Inquiries made within the Justice Department are designed to channel to you.”

  “I know that—”

  “They worked. An inquiry was made and you got it, within seconds, too, according to the time codes. So we were protected and the probe was stalled.”

  “I’m not asking about the safeguards, I’m asking about the nature of the investigation. Why do I know nothing about this?”

  “You didn’t ask?” Kurtzman suggested.

  “I shouldn’t have to ask when you start meddling with the effing Pentagon!” Brognola snapped. “I’m supposed to be the Farm’s liaison. How am I supposed to deal with a situation like this when I have no clue it’s even going on?”

  “It’s not sanctioned,” Price said. “It’s Mack.”

  “Oh, shit. Of course it is. I had this pegged as cleanup somehow from the mess Phoenix was dealing with in India. I guess I didn’t think it through.” He sighed, long and heavy. “So what’s our connection?”

  Before Price could get a word out Kurtzman said, “I’m the one who uncovered it in the first place and requested Striker insert himself in it.”

  “Which means what, exactly? What is it?”

  “Intervene in the al-Jabir prison break. From there I asked him to continue following the trail. I heard from him less than an hour ago, and he thinks he’s got the real goods this time.”

  Brognola’s bushy eyebrows raised, like a face-only shrug.

  “He’s almost found the prisoners,” Kurtzman elucidated.

  “The prisoners from the federal pen? Al-Jabir?”

  Kurtzman and Price looked at each other. “The American prisoners of war,” Price said. “In Iraq.”

  Something profound happened to Brognola, as if he had just learned someone close to him had died. He lost his bluster, and every taut muscle in his face slackened.

  “Are you telling me,” he said, “that there are American prisoners of war inside Iraq right now?”

  “Yes,” Kurtzman replied.

  “Were they just captured?”

  “No. They’re from Desert Storm.”

  Brognola looked and felt ten years older. But mostly he looked and felt immensely—sad.

  Price had come into the meeting thinking she was going to butt heads with the big Fed in a huge way. Now she wanted to reach across the table and take his hand. Neither she nor Kurtzman could remember seeing him affected like this by a mission—and this little family had seen the worst humanity had to offer.

  “Okay,” Brognola said finally. “Okay, then, tell me this. Who’s this Brigadier General Juvenal? What’s his involvement?”

  Kurtzman had thought Brognola would have all the details, but now realized the man from Justice knew very little. “Juvenal’s the one who left them there.”

  “Left them there?”

  “As in abandoned. Sent them in on unofficial business and wrote them off as dead when they were captured.”

  “He knew they were alive and in Iraqi custody?”

  “Yes. He knew about the planned jailbreak, too. He sent in his hit squad to take out al-Jabir so the thing would stay under wraps.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Brognola shook his head slowly. “That son of a bitch.”

  He reached across the table and his hand was shaking. His face was animated again, but it was the clenched tension of rage.

  Brognola wasn’t one of the great moralists, or one of the great ideologues. He didn’t have the dogma of justice that he knew drove Mack Bolan on and on. He was a politician, he played the games of compromise and bureaucratic manipulation. But he was a man with an ideal.

  It was an American ideal that transcended America. It was a moral code that he could never have put into words. It was a knowledge of right and wrong and loyalty and patriotism.

  According to Hal Brognola’s code of justice, this thing was wrong in every possible way.

  A man who was selfish enough to condemn the soldiers that trusted him to a living hell just to keep his own reputation untarnished—that was selfishness to an unthinkable degree.

  But as he sat there, silent, the big Fed came to the conclusion that there was a subtle aspect of this thing that made it even more despicable: Juvenal was a United States Army brigadier general. He was the United States of America in his capacity as a trusted leader.

  By perpetrating this horrific deed he made the U.S. itself guilty of it.

  “If this is true, then he’s a traitor.” Brognola had wadded up the printout without knowing it. “I want to know it all. Every detail. I want the evidence on Juvenal.”

  “We’ve got it,” Price replied. “Phone conversations. Solid links between the men and materiel
used to assassinate al-Jabir.”

  “And in a few hours, Striker will have the testimony of the men themselves,” Kurtzman added.

  “Good,” Brognola said fiercely. “Then we can fry the bastard.”

  26

  East of al-Suba, Iraq

  Bolan found the path in the arid hills, a faint stretch of side-by-side tire tracks. Jawdat said it was one of two ways to get through the hills to the old forgotten prison, but the easier, southerly route was patrolled by coalition forces and would take at best a half day to get to.

  The trail kept disappearing on expanses of flat rock. Bolan always found it again by virtue of oil stains, and eventually found he could not possibly get lost since the path followed the only vehicle-accessible trail through the hills.

  It had been chosen just for this reason—although when the tiny prison was founded, in the nineteenth century, the prisoners had come in on carts pulled by horse or camel. The jail was meant to hold enemies of the Ottoman sultan, at a time when he still wielded nominal control in Iraq. The sultan wanted the British and the French interlopers out of Iraq, but the trade potential kept the British and French coming.

  Some of the key figures in the trade invasion had ended up in this remote valley. The bones of hundreds of French and British corpses were still scattered in a pit at one end of the valley where the dead were dumped.

  But it was too isolated and was ultimately abandoned. Only a small clique of men connected to General Jawdat were even aware of it.

  Jawdat’s driving directions were based entirely on natural landmarks, and Bolan stopped when he found the outcropping that meant he was a quarter mile from the valley.

  Jawdat had tossed the jeep in as a part of the bargain. Bolan managed to tuck it behind a spill of boulders, then he scaled the nearest high peak to have a look.

  He had made better time than expected, and he was not surprised to see guards still packing up. This was not a temporary move. They were clearing out for good on Jawdat’s orders. The guard detail was told that the prisoners would be collected in a day or two for relocation. The security of this facility, he told them, had been compromised, according to fresh intelligence. Any guards who remained behind would be taken into custody by coalition forces if they weren’t killed in the battle for the territory.

  That had to have motivated them. They were moving fast, literally running in and out of the mud brick huts with armfuls of clothing, boxes of food and collapsible plastic jugs of water.

  Bolan saw the place cleaned out, and soon all that remained of the guards was the dust of their receding vehicles, which headed south, on Jawdat’s orders.

  It appeared that the coercion of Jawdat had been effective, but the Iraqi was desperate and unpredictable. He might have put an ambush in place for Bolan.

  The Executioner waited and watched.

  JAWDAT BLINKED his eyes open. They felt like they had gum in them. His head swam, and he knew he was still very drunk. Was there somebody in the room?

  “Stand up, General.”

  “Who is it?” he asked irritably.

  “Tereq.”

  “Radhi? What are you doing here?”

  “I am arresting you, General.”

  Jawdat struggled to his feet. General Radhi Tereq was an acquaintance, sometimes even an ally. He had been a chief of al-Hadi, Iraq’s Project 858, an intelligence agency that monitored communications within the country and, when possible, outside it.

  “I do not understand this. Arresting me for what?” Jawdat demanded.

  “Conspiracy. You are a traitor, General.”

  “Nonsense!” Jawdat found himself surrounded by the soldiers who filed in behind Tereq. They cuffed his wrists in front of him. Jawdat stared at the bracelets. “I am not a traitor, Tereq.”

  “I did not want to believe it myself, General,” Tereq said. “But we have surveillance on you. We watched you conversing with an unknown American. The man matches the description of the man who perpetrated major crimes against Iraq in the past twenty-four hours.” Tereq leaned close. “You even gave the man one of your cars and let him drive away from this house. I think it is obvious he was working for you.”

  Jawdat grimaced. “No, he was blackmailing me.”

  Tereq bleated a short, harsh laugh. “I do not believe it, of course. But if it is true, I cannot wait to find out what this American has on you that made blackmail possible in the first place.”

  “I will tell you everything.”

  “You certainly will.”

  Jawdat had a mental image of his immediate future. He would be tortured. He had conducted these tortures and even participated in them, many, many times. Eventually he would die, but that would be a long time coming.

  His intoxicated mind struggled for clarity as they led him through his house. He fought the need to vomit.

  Then he had an idea.

  He stopped resisting the nausea and gagged noisily. In the front hall he stumbled and spit bile down the front of his shirt. He collapsed on his knees and willed himself to bring up the contents of his stomach.

  The soldiers fell back from him. Tereq was clearly disgusted.

  Jawdat sat up, spit out the last of the rancid stuff that now soaked his shirtfront and grabbed underneath the spindly table that stood inside the front door. Even with his hands cuffed he was still able to yank out the .25-caliber revolver hidden there, and he targeted Tereq.

  He fired a shot, but the slime on his hands made his finger slip from the trigger and spoil his aim.

  It didn’t matter. The consequences were just what he wanted.

  “Do not fire!” Tereq ordered his men, but the fusillade was already plowing into the prisoner.

  Saleh Jawdat did not feel the pain, only the pressure of the bullets and the weakness that was pulling him into blackness.

  He was a disgrace. He was humiliated. He was dying without ever having achieved what he had wished to achieve. It had been a waste of a life. But ending it now was better than the alternative.

  RADHI TEREQ STORMED into the Project 858 intelligence center, shouting for his secretary and record keeper. “Where is the transcription from the videotape?”

  “We have a first draft, but the quality was poor and we are still trying to clean it up,” his secretary explained.

  “Well, for now it is all we have to work with. Give me the draft and find out why we have not tracked down that jeep!”

  A languages assistant hurried forward with a few sheets of printed paper and took flight as soon as Tereq snatched the pages. He flopped into the nearest desk chair without even heading for his office, then leaped up again not a minute later. His assistant rushed up without being summoned.

  “This page gets top priority. I want to know exactly what is said here, and I want it in five minutes.”

  The assistant fled and Tereq grabbed a phone, glancing at the wall clock. Time was running out.

  BOLAN WOULD HAVE preferred to wait until dusk, when he could scope the place out with night vision, but he didn’t have the luxury of time. It was beginning to look like the transport wasn’t going to be forthcoming until he could transmit video of the actual, living prisoners.

  That would do the trick. The bureaucrats would bow to that kind of pressure. Bolan stopped long enough to detach the retransmitting module for the phone and position it on the peak, where it he hoped it would keep his communications uninterrupted even from within the rock walls of the valley.

  When he drove into the valley there was no reaction except for the sudden flight of scraggly birds feeding on the trash pile.

  He circled the collection of buildings, which were mostly made of mud-mortared rock. One structure, the long, low building that housed the prisoners, was concrete. That’s where the prisoners would be.

  If they were really here at all.

  He scanned the walls of the valley and saw no sign of hiding places. He was alone.

  He searched the mud-and-rock structures first, finding nothing but tras
h and a mind-numbing stench.

  The smell from the prison was worse.

  Three .44 Magnum rounds finally cracked the lock on the iron door, and when he pulled it open he was assaulted with a wall of heat and stench that he had to swim through. Inside was darkness.

  Bolan circled the building and shot out the second door lock, then wedged it open, too. The breeze in the valley was a mere trickle, but it instantly began drawing out the torpid air inside, and it illuminated most of the interior. Bolan stepped inside.

  He was in a narrow aisle between two rows of iron bars set in a waist-high concrete barrier. Behind each set of bars was a single large cell filled with huddled human beings.

  All Bolan could see were bones. Spines sticking out like the ridges on the backs of lizards. Rib cages and skulls. These men had no flesh, only pasty, flaccid epidermis draped over crooked skeletons.

  But they were alive. There had to be twenty, thirty people here, and yet he felt alone, like the only man in a room of coma patients.

  Somebody spoke in Arabic.

  “Who speaks English?” he asked.

  All the prisoners were blinking in the sunlight but one man nearby tried to look at him, then squeezed his eyes shut again and buried them in his arm. “Are you an American?” he asked in disbelief. His accent was right out of the Bronx.

  “Yes. I’m arranging for transport out of here. I’m looking for the Seven Scorpions.”

  “I’m one of them. Christ, have we finally beat the Iraqis?”

  “We can catch up later. Right now I’ve got to get a message back home. I need evidence that I’ve found you guys.”

  The man tried to look at him again. “Doesn’t sound to me as if you’ve got a ride waiting outside.”

  “No. Not exactly.” Bolan had already activated the lipstick video pickup on his headpiece. He had tied it into the Stony Man communications unit and said into the mike, “You getting this, Bear?”

  “We’re getting every damn second of it, Striker.”

  But that was not Aaron Kurtzman. It was the man from Justice himself. Bear’s secret project had blown its cover.

  “Hal,” Bolan said testily, “tell me you’re behind us on this.”