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“You heard the man!” Dirk bawled. “Now I would like you all to turn your kind attention to our friend and leader, Captain Fairfax!”
The commandos whooped for their commanding officer. Fairfax had been in Somalia and earned his officer’s stripes and the jagged scar along his jaw the hard way.
Lieutenant Dirk edged up to Bolan as the briefing began. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“By all means, Lieutenant.”
“No offense meant, but, uh, just who in the blue hell are you, anyway? Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice that the Man has taken an interest in our little situation, but why exactly are they sending me a Fed?”
“None taken, and I’m not a Fed.”
Dirk cocked his head suspiciously. “Well, you work for the Justice Department, don’t you?”
“No.”
Lieutenant Dirk blinked. “No?”
“No.”
“I was told you did.”
“That was a misinterpretation.”
“Well, we’re going out tonight, me and you.” The lieutenant’s eyes went hard. “So why don’t you illuminate my ignorant black ass?”
Bolan sighed. He had been a soldier, and there was nothing worse than strange, murky individuals suddenly popping up from stateside during an operation. It implied mission creep and goat screws of epic proportions. “I don’t work for the Justice Department. I have a working relationship with the United States government, and when I choose to take action, I liaise with the President through the DOJ.”
“A…working relationship, and when you choose to take action you talk with the Man?” That gave even Dirk pause.
“Yeah.”
“Directly?”
“Sometimes,” Bolan admitted.
“So…you’re a spook?”
“No, though I’ve been spooky.”
“Paramilitary?” Dirk tried.
The man was getting warmer. “I guess you could call me an operator of a sort.”
“You’re—” Dirk’s nose wrinkled in suspicion “—a merc?”
“Naw.” Bolan shook his head. “I don’t get paid.”
“You don’t get paid?” Lieutenant Dirk regarded Bolan like a primatologist who has just encountered a gorilla with wings. “So you’re a…volunteer, spookerator, with a direct line to the President who does this out of love?”
“Close,” Bolan conceded. “And payback. I’m pretty big on payback.”
Dirk suddenly grinned. “Well, hell, that’s all you had to say! Count me in!”
Bolan looked at Lieutenant Dirk long and hard. “You want in all the way?”
The lieutenant cocked his head. “You mean join the all-volunteer spookerator love and payback club? Sorry, man, I appreciate the offer, but I’m Delta all the way.”
“What if I said I might need you on a one-shot deal, and it involves the dead Rangers.”
“I’d ask you to clarify that a little.”
“I think it was an inside job.”
“Inside job?” Dirk’s face became a mask of stone. “That’s some real messed-up shit you’re implying there, Spooky.”
“Problem is, I don’t have any proof. To get it, and get payback, I’m going to have to go inside. I’m going to need someone like you to piggyback my way in, and frankly I don’t mind admitting I’d like to have someone like you on my six.”
“This is getting really goddamn deep and dark.”
“Listen, if we come back from this op tonight alive, and you trust me after, I’d like to buy you a beer and talk about it more.”
“Ooh!” Dirk grinned. “Beer.”
Pandit Valley
“WHERE THE HELL IS Coop?” Dirk hissed. “I told him to keep his civilian ass on my—”
Bolan spoke quietly. “I’m right here.”
“Jesus!” Dirk turned around. “I thought you were arranging satellite feed.”
“I was.”
“Well, don’t sneak up on a brother like that!”
“I didn’t. I’ve been here for five minutes.”
“Man…So what have we got?”
“It’s a series of caves. The local villagers say two years ago there were some earthmoving machines up in the hills. There’s no known mining in the area, and satellite recon shows no new construction. Most likely, what we have is a tunnel complex, probably using the preexisting caves as a template. Thermal-imaging satellites show low-level heat signatures venting from several sources around the cave area, probably cook fires.”
“Great.” Lieutenant Dirk wasn’t pleased. In his experience the only thing worse than urban warfare was tunnel fighting. “We’re going to have to dig them out hole by hole.”
“I’ll have a map of the complex ready in another couple of minutes.”
Dirk brightened. “Someone gave you a map of the place? Why didn’t you say so?”
“No one gave me a map. Someone’s making me one.”
Dirk paused. “Someone’s making you one?”
“Yeah, hold on.” Bolan pressed the mike on his secure line. “How we doing, Strike Eagle?”
Jack Grimaldi, Stony Man Farm’s premier pilot, came back across the line. “Striker, I am over the target area.”
Gadgets Schwarz came across the radio. He was Able Team’s technical whiz, and Bolan had asked him to come up with something that would give them the edge on the dug-in Taliban. Schwarz loved a challenge and as usual had come up aces. “Striker, we are ready to deploy.”
“Deploy when ready, Strike Eagle.”
Dirk cleared his throat. “So, uh, who is deploying?”
Bolan looked upward. “I have a couple of friends of mine up at about twenty thousand feet in an F-15E Strike Eagle.”
“Oh?” Dirk contemplated that. “What are they deploying?”
“UAVs.”
Dirk nodded. U.S. Special Forces were ever increasingly discovering the joys of working with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. “So what are they going to do for us? Fly in the cave and blow everything up?”
“No, we want prisoners and we also want any papers, computer files, cell phones or intelligence we can get our hands on. So it would be best if we went in and took care of business ourselves, by hand.”
Dirk frowned beneath his night-vision goggles. “Okay, so…”
“So the UAVs are carrying ground-penetrating radar units. GPR scans work best in solid rock formations that will resonate to the radar pulses. The good news is that those caves are mostly solid granite. We’re deploying three UAVs. With any luck, within a few minutes we’ll have a three-dimensional map of the complex.”
Dirk stared up at the stars. “Aren’t our little friends going to hear the buzz bombs as they come in?”
“The UAVs are gliders. Once they’re near the target, they fold their wings, deploy steerable chutes and extend padded all-aspect legs. GPR works better in direct contact with the ground, so the legs act as the antennas.”
“You know, I thought I had access to all the cool toys, but this is shit I ain’t even heard of.”
Bolan shrugged. “I happen to know the director of the Future Warrior Project in Massachusetts. I gave her a call, and my friends brought over a few working prototypes.”
Dirk considered that and how quickly it had come about. “Jesus, you really can make the magic happen.”
“I’m a helper,” Bolan agreed. “I’m here to help.”
Dirk snorted in bemusement, and then Bolan and Bravo troop waited long minutes. The commando spoke quietly. “The Man wants blood for blood, doesn’t he?”
“From what I understand, favors are being called in. More than favors—the U.S. is giving markers to people we’d normally never get in bed with,” Bolan said.
“Except that no one gets to ice eighteen Rangers and walk away,” Dirk stated.
“No, the Rangers get payback. No one is walking away. The President wrote a blank check to get a line on these caves, and he wants to see people in bags for his money.”
Schwarz’s voice came across the link. “Striker, this is Strike Eagle. The Eaglets have landed. We have solid returns from One and Two. Eaglet Three must have landed wrong. We are mapping. You should be able to pull it up.”
“Copy that, Strike Eagle.” Bolan pulled out a small handheld device and watched as the screen filled with radar patterns. Bolan examined the screen. “We’ve got one main entrance that leads in and up about fifteen yards and opens up into a large chamber. By shape it’s a natural cave, about thirty yards by forty. Two tunnels branch off, one straight back and another off to the left, each about ten yards. They’re straight and level, cut by machines, and each leads to another chamber. The chambers are symmetrical, and again, man-made. One appears to be filled with a number of large, symmetrical objects. The two chambers both have a tunnel coming out of them and meet in a fifth chamber. Basically, the complex is a rough hexagon, each chamber connected by a tunnel.”
Dirk stared at what appeared on the screen to be little more than blobs and streaks. “If you say so.”
Bolan pulled out a stylus, traced the diagram and killed the flashes of the radar pulses behind it, leaving five circles each connected by a line. “That’s your map. I’m sending it to the PDA of each man in the troop.” Bolan pressed Send and a few seconds later each man in Bravo troop signaled he had the map.
“God…damn,” Dirk opined.
“I told you the President was writing a blank check on this one.”
“Then by all means, let’s give the man his money’s worth.” Dirk spoke into his tactical radio. “All units. Start moving in.”
Bolan and Bravo troop began moving through the rocks. Delta Force always had access to the best toys, and Bolan had been given the keys to the candy store. Each man in the reinforced squad was equipped with a SCAR rifle chambered for the Russian 7.62 mm round. It was ballistically comparable to the old Winchester .30-30, but Bolan had no complaints about that. Some people thought the U.S. .223 was too light and didn’t have enough stopping power. Others thought the other major U.S. military small-arms round, the .308, was too heavy and had too much recoil. The 7.62 mm was the porridge the Russian Bear had chosen, and her soldiers had collectively wept when they’d abandoned it to try to emulate the Americans.
These rifles were firing heavy subsonic bullets and had suppressor tubes fitted over their muzzles.
Bravo troop was as silent as wolves running through fog.
Corporal Sawyer’s voice came across the link. “I got two sentries by the entrance to the cave beneath camouflaged shelters.”
“You got a line of fire?”
“Affirmative.”
“Take ’em,” Dirk ordered.
Bolan was close enough to Sawyer to hear the action of his automatic rifle click twice and two spent pieces of brass tinkle to the ground. At the cave mouth, nothing seemed to happen save that an arm flopped out from what appeared to be solid rock.
“Sentries down,” Sawyer said.
“Move in,” Dirk ordered. “By the numbers.”
“Mind if I take point?”
“Oh, by all means, please.” Dirk waved Bolan forward expansively. “I’m sure Sawyer would love the company.”
Dirk spoke into his radio. “Sawyer, wait on Striker.”
“Copy that.”
Bolan moved forward to Sawyer’s position. “Corporal.”
“Nice to see you up front, Coop. In my experience, civilians tend to lead from the back.”
Bolan scanned the entrance. From Sawyer’s angle, the Executioner could see that the rocks overhanging the cave mouth were really awnings, blankets stiffened with clay and dirt and stretched across stick frames so that they looked like rock formations. It was an old trick and a good one.
“You ready to step into the funhouse, Sunshine?”
“After you.”
They moved to the mouth of the cave. Beneath the camouflaged awning, two men in local dress lay facedown with a single bullet hole through their heads. “We’re in, Bravo. Come ahead.”
