“Don’t insult me, Striker. I’m already in contact with the President. He’s got aircraft en route and he’ll order them in as soon as he’s convinced we’ve got Americans that need rescuing.”
Bolan considered that. “Hal, I have a message for the President.”
“Yes?”
“Tell him this. I’m recording this personally. I can send the data anywhere from where I’m standing. If he doesn’t save these men, I’ll use it. Make no bones about it—I will blackmail the President. I’ll expose myself if I have to. I’ll create a storm of negative publicity that will shoot down his presidency. I know I can do it, and I will.”
There was a moment of expectant silence hanging in the vast distance between the two men, who had battled for and against each other for years.
“Striker,” Brognola said finally, “if the President doesn’t save those men, I’ll help you do it.”
Washington, D.C.
“YOUR CALL from the Justice Department.”
The President of the United States almost looked startled. “Clear out, please, gentlemen,” he said to the finance and education aides. “We’ll finish later.”
His Homeland Security chief and the head of the Joint Chiefs almost bowled over the aides on their way in. The head of the Joint Chiefs was carrying personnel file printouts, complete with color photographs.
They didn’t sit. The three of them huddled shoulder to shoulder at the video display mounted in one of the Oval Office bookshelves. The test pattern was replaced with a static-blurred video image.
Then they saw what might have been, once, a human being.
“Sergeant Al Long, United States Army, serial number—” The man hacked and drank from a canteen. Finally he managed to rattle off his serial number.
The head of the Joint Chiefs was holding up a photo from a personnel file. It was the same face, allowing for fifteen years and near starvation.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” the President said.
There was another man now. His voice was more clear, but he was just as wasted, as if he had not eaten in months.
“Sergeant George Bolson,” he said, and provided his serial number. He had been a scrawny figure of a soldier before Desert Storm, but he still looked skeletal compared to his old self in the personnel photo.
The third soldier was more difficult to identify. He had no eyes. His sockets were twin sunken scars. A white, pulsing triangle of flesh showed where a patch of his scalp had been ripped off and healed over.
“You are Captain Sandwell Foley,” said a voice behind the video pickup. The eyeless man nodded. “All these men were tortured, but Captain Foley had it worse than the others. His tongue and eyes were cut out.”
“Could be him,” the head of the Joint Chiefs said, looking from the old personnel photo to screen.
“It’s him,” the President declared.
“Who is that behind the camera?” asked the head of the Joint Chiefs. “What’s he doing there, anyway?”
The President didn’t even acknowledge the question. Onscreen the camera moved from the Americans. They saw more men huddled in straw, and then the camera came to another man lying in the far corner of the dark cell. A flashlight came on to illuminate the figure.
The President pursed his lips. The head of Homeland put the back of his hand to his mouth.
“Lieutenant Ricardo Leone,” continued the narrator matter-of-factly, “died fifty-seven days ago. The Iraqis refused to remove the body.”
The video mercilessly stayed on the corpse.
“This good enough, Mr. President?” the narrator asked.
The President had been repulsed by the cadaver, but the sudden bitterness in the speaker’s voice was like a backhand to the face. He walked away from the video a few paces and looked back at it, chagrined.
“More than enough,” he said to the faceless warrior who could not hear him.
27
Juvenal shot to his feet. Before him stood the highest-ranking officer in the United States Army and, alongside him, the Air Force Chief of Staff who currently headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
There were no pretty words; there was no preamble.
“Brigadier General Juvenal,” said the Army Chief of Staff formally, “the President has just ordered an immediate combined-forces operation into central Iraq, the purpose of which is to rescue three American special forces soldiers who were under your command during Desert Storm.”
“What?” Juvenal said. The performance didn’t fool anybody, and he knew it.
“Don’t even think of playing the denial game, Juvenal. I am ordering you to cooperate in every possible way in the extraction effort. If there’s anything you can do to make this happen, I want you to do it. Right now that is our only priority. Understand?”
“I understand, General.”
“The accounting will come later,” the head of the Joint Chiefs added.
Juvenal had no doubts that it would.
He was still standing at attention as they walked out, but Wheatland glared over his shoulder and said, “Juvenal, you’d better hope they come out alive.”
Juvenal walked dismally through the long hallways of the Pentagon to the stateside command center for the operation. It was so impromptu it didn’t even have a name. He was rushed to a debriefing that was just commencing, including brief clips from the video that had been transmitted from the hellhole prison.
Juvenal found himself more interested in the unseen man behind the camera than in his soldiers. It was the same son of a bitch who had harassed him on the phone.
“Who is that?” asked one of the other command coordinators.
“Unknown,” said the Army lieutenant colonel who was conducting the briefing. “We know only that he is the American who tracked down the prisoners.”
“Are you implying he reached the prisoners on his own?”
“That’s need-to-know information,” said the lieutenant colonel. It was evident he had no clue.
He wasn’t military. He wasn’t a spook. The more he thought about it, the more it looked to Juvenal like the guy was some sort of lone wolf mercenary.
The pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Of course. The SOB was ex-special ops or something like that. Somehow he got wind of this and decided to make himself into a freaking hero. Just think of the payoff. He could write a book, sell the film rights. This escapade was going to make that asshole into a millionaire.
While Juvenal went down in flames.
No fucking way.
“General Juvenal, sir, I understand you have some background on this situation. Anything you know that will help the extraction?”
Juvenal stifled a grin, managed to turn it into a stern frown. “Those are my men,” he said, trying to sound bleak. “I inserted them in Iraq in Desert Storm. The man behind the camera was their contact. He reported their deaths to me when the mission ended.”
The briefing room shared a stunned silence.
“He’s a traitor and a murderer,” Juvenal said. “I want him arrested.”
There was an excited buzz as the briefing broke up. Juvenal felt a small swell of confidence. He was still working on the details, but he knew this much—going down would be easier if that son of a bitch went down, too.
Iraq
MOST OF THEM could walk. The others Bolan lifted and carried out of the prison, settling them in the fresher straw in the mud brick dwellings of the former wardens. All of them were thirsty and starving, and made quick work of the boxes of food Bolan had raided from Jawdat’s kitchen. It was too rich for them, even starting with just a spoonful, and they became sick on it. But soon they were ready to try again.
Weak and malnourished, none failed to revive visibly with water and cleaner, cooler air. When he was sure there was nothing more he could do for them, he made another phone call.
This time he wasn’t calling the United States.
Outside Ramstein Air Base, Germany
THE PRETTY BLOND WO
MAN lifted one of the headphone cups and let go. It slapped against her husband’s head. He grabbed his ear, wincing, and dragged off the headset.
“Phone’s for you.” She smiled.
“You could have tapped me on the shoulder. Who is it?” She shrugged and he took the phone. “Hello?”
“Samuels?”
“Yes?”
“You know who this is?”
Master Sergeant John Samuels, USAF, knew the voice. “Yeah. You’re Belasko. We met in Azerbaijan. I’d kinda like to forget that mission.”
“You did me a favor.”
“Yeah.”
“I need another favor.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“I need you to store some video data on your personal PC. It must not be stored on government equipment. It will be routed through a U.S. server, but it must not be physically stored inside the United States.”
Samuels was a producer for Armed Forces broadcasting. His first meeting with this man who called himself Belasko, who implied at the time that he was CIA, had been in a village filled with victims of a chemical attack.
Taping the victims of the attack had been the most gruesome experience of Samuels’s life. All those bodies…
“How much data we talking about.”
“Twenty, thirty MEGs.”
“No problem.”
“Burn me a few DVD copies, then wipe it from your hard drive.”
Samuels’s interest was piqued. “Is this security stuff? Can I look at it?”
“There’s no reason you can’t,” Bolan said. “But I don’t know why you would want to.”
“Oh. You’re still one of the good guys, right?” Samuels said. “There’s nothing illegal here, is there?”
“If you think there is, turn it in,” Bolan replied without hesitation.
Samuels gave him the IP and password for his home server and the video started FTPing in.
It was done surprisingly fast, and then, as promised, Samuels recorded it onto DVDs and trashed the hard drive copy with the best permanent erase software he had.
But not before he took a look at the contents. It wasn’t as shocking as the video from Azerbaijan. But almost.
28
The good news was that the president did sanction a rescue mission. The pickup would come, guaranteed.
The bad news was that the President sanctioned the rescue mission, which meant it had the attention of half the DOD.
“Have they at least formed the committees to determine the best feasible extraction procedure?” Bolan demanded acidly.
“It’s not as bad as that,” Price replied, voice neutral.
“Tell whoever is in charge to come soon or don’t bother. We’re sitting ducks. Jawdat could change his mind or tell all. Then we’re dead.”
Bolan signed off. He couldn’t muster the elation of the prisoners. They were in a party mood, convinced they were about to be airlifted to safety. They were talking excitedly. Americans and Iraqis and Kuwaitis. Bolan learned from their conversations that they had all been here since Desert Storm. In 1993 that one dismal building had become home to sixty-seven men. There were twenty-six left. Today was the first time any of them had been outside the cell since their torture sessions ended.
“Stony Base to Striker.” It was Price again on the headset. He was keeping the line to Stony open. There was something about her voice that told him it was time to stop celebrating.
“Striker here.”
“The Iraqis are on their way.”
“ETA?”
“Looks like helicopters are fifteen minutes out.”
“Stony, these men don’t have the strength to throw rocks, let alone fire weapons. That means they’ve got me. Just me.”
“You’re pretty capable, Striker.”
“I’m not going to be able to defend this bunch against enemy aircraft or a squad of rebel Iraqis!”
Bolan heard someone behind him and found the captain, Foley. His eyeless face was turned to Bolan and he gestured. It wasn’t sign language, but Bolan understood.
“You overheard. Then you know I haven’t done you a hell of a lot of good showing up here. We’re about to be annihilated.”
The captain pointed up in the air. Bolan looked around until his gaze settled on the only thing of interest—a small ledge on a cliff that had served as a watch post a hundred years ago.
“Long,” Bolan shouted. “We’ve got Iraqis on the way. Foley’s trying to tell me something. Is there a defensible cave up on the cliff?”
Long limped to him and strained to look at the cliff.
“No. There’s nothing there. Just a rock wall. They used it to defend this valley in some old-time fighting.”
Foley was shaking his head vigorously. He pointed into the air, spun his finger, then brought it directly down like a fluttering leaf. Then he pointed at the floor beneath the ledge.
“What you trying to tell us, Captain?”
The mute blinded man repeated the gesture. Bolan looked at the ground below the ledge, trying to figure out what was special about it. It was just a flat acre of land.
The only flat acre of land in the valley.
“That’s where the helicopters will land,” he stated. Foley took the warrior’s shoulder and nodded vigorously, then he stabbed his finger at the cliff wall.
Now Bolan understood. “And that’s the perfect place to get the drop on them,” he said.
The twisted scar of Foley’s mouth became a wide smile.
BOLAN HUSTLED the prisoners into the mud-brick hovels, then drove back the way he came, finding a steep incline that took him ten feet up to a more gradual rise in the cliff side wall. When he hit the brakes he was on top of the cliff, looking down. A steep, narrow pass took the jeep onto the ledge, no bigger than a VIP box in a Broadway theater. He covered the jeep from front to back with big, flat stones from the low rock wall on the ledge. The wall had been built more than 150 years ago to shield the ledge.
The jeep, the rocks and the cliff wall all seemed to meld together. Even the black tires were so dust-covered they matched the desert. Bolan heard the thrum of helicopter rotors and he crawled partway under the jeep.
Two bulbous Russian-made transport choppers rumbled overhead and descended one after another into the valley. Bolan peered through the gaps in the low rock wall, wondering if the choppers would even land. Maybe they would just deposit their troops anywhere and take off.
They headed for the only level surface in the rugged terrain of the valley, just below Bolan.
He could have spit on them.
As it was, he might have to resort to spitting. He was running low on ammo. But he had tactics in mind to conserve what ammunition remained.
The troop transports settled and opened, disgorging some twenty soldiers each. They fanned out, forming a line like a riot-control police unit marching on the silent, deserted-looking buildings.
Pigs to the slaughter.
Bolan struck. Slaughter it would be, and he didn’t have to think twice. From the guard wall he hoisted a flat slab of dense shale rock that weighed more than fifty pounds. He lifted it overhead and jettisoned the rock into open space.
One of the soldiers saw him and shouted. All the men turned. They raised their guns to fire, and then the rock inserted itself in the rotation of the nearest set of spinning rotors.
The effect was catastrophic. Rotor blades shattered, flying in all directions. Eight of the Iraqis flopped to the ground, killed instantly by the flying metal, one of the bodies halved with meat-slicer precision. Another guard found himself staring at an empty arm socket. It happened so fast he couldn’t come to terms with it and ended up walking in circles for several seconds before the blood loss dropped him.
He was one of the lucky ones. The unlucky victims were contending with massive deep-tissue wounds, some mute with shock and some screaming.
Bolan had expected the first rotor destruction to result almost immediately in the second rotor’s destruction,
but somehow that hadn’t happened. There was a series of shouts and shots that dropped Bolan behind the cover of his wall. He heard the whine of the second chopper increase even as the first chopper’s motor spun out of control. Bolan grabbed another rock, stood, but took cover again as a series of shots smacked into the wall inches below him.
He heard the helicopter take to the air, and the cover shots stopped to avoid hitting the helicopter. Bolan rose and pushed the next stone away from the cliff and saw the panicking helicopter rise up to meet it.
Bolan dived to the earth as his projectile met the rotors just below the level of his ledge. The stone wall imploded as if a cannonball had hit it, and rained down on him.
He felt fresh pain explode from several parts of his body, then heard the thump of the old Soviet helicopter returning to the valley floor.
He wriggled wormlike through the rock debris. A stab of pain below his left arm advertised a cracked or broken rib, but the rest of the injuries were simply bruises. He already had more bruises than he could count. He crawled on all fours onto the wrecked pile of rock and peered over the ledge, finding the Iraqi troops in disarray.
Half were dead or severely injured. Both aircraft were scrap heaps.
A shout. An Iraqi was pointing at the mud-brick buildings. One of the damn fool prisoners was standing there, watching the goings-on.
The Iraqi soldiers, those who still lived, now had somewhere to direct their anger.
Bolan cursed savagely. He hadn’t gone through all this just to watch the prisoners get wiped out in front of his eyes. He yanked the M-16 A-2/M-203 from the jeep, chose autofire and triggered it into the knot of men marching on the prisoners. Three dropped before the burst ended.
The retaliation was instantaneous, and Bolan crouched on top of the rock pile to ride out the onslaught of rounds from below, then crept forward enough to pick off two more Iraqis as they were running for cover. The others got the message—the safest place was directly beneath the madman sniper.
At least, that was what Bolan had intended them to think.
He was out of 40 mm HE grenades, but he still had a few of the five-gallon incendiary variety. From the rear of the jeep he dragged out the plastic gasoline cans and lit the rags stuffed in their caps. He scooted the first can to the ledge and gave it a nudge, sending it spiraling earthward with bullets flying around it.
Mercy Mission Page 20