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Bolan and Sawyer moved down the tunnel. Bolan ran a hand along the wall. It was rough and appeared to have been recently widened. It was wide enough to drive a jeep through. Bolan knelt and found tire tracks in dirt among the many footprints. “Bravo Leader, this is Striker. Be advised there has been vehicle traffic in the complex. At least jeep size.”
“Copy that, Striker,” Dirk replied. “We’re coming in.”
Dirk left a team outside watching their six, and the rest entered. Bolan and Sawyer crept down the tunnel. Both men held up their fists for “Halt” and crouched at the entrance to a large chamber. There were about fifty men in the cave, and several fires burned. Many were asleep. Others crouched in small circles drinking tea and talking or running rags over their rifles.
Sawyer shoved up his goggles. “Well, I count fifty, and the map says there are four more caves.”
“Most of them are sleeping.”
“Well, how you wanna wake ’em up?”
Bolan reached into his gear bag, pulled out four grenades and handed a pair of them to Sawyer.
Sawyer stared at them. “Frags?”
“Stingballs. Each one holds several dozen hard rubber buckshot pellets.”
Sawyer scowled. “Okay, that will probably wake them up, but then—”
Bolan pulled out a couple of Claymores.
Sawyer frowned. “Claymores? I thought you said you wanted prisoners.”
“Stingmores. These contain hundreds of rubber buckshot pellets.”
Sawyer grinned. “I think I saw this in a movie.”
The lieutenant came up, and Bolan related the plan to him. “Then we hit them with flash-bangs and stomp them,” Bolan finished.
Dirk was grinning as he turned to the two commandos behind him. “You heard the man. They beat ’em, and then we light ’em up!”
Bolan pulled the pins on his grenade. “On your signal, Lieutenant.”
“By all means, please.”
Bolan and Dirk hurled the grenades strategically throughout the cavern.
“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey!” Sawyer called out happily.
The men around the campfires jerked and rose, grabbing for weapons. Bolan and Sawyer crouched low and lowered their helmets, and the stingball grenades detonated. Men howled out in Arabic and Pashto as the blunt 20 mm rubber spheres traveling at five hundred feet per second struck them. Everyone else was leaping out of their blankets and rising while others fell around them.
Bolan and Sawyer stuck the stingmore mines into the dirt and pumped the detonator switches. “Gooooood morning, Afghanistan!” Sawyer sang out.
More than one thousand rubber buckshot pellets blasted across the cavern in two intersecting arcs, and men blinking from sleep were scythed down before they knew what hit them. Bolan and Sawyer stayed crouched, plugging their ears with their thumbs and shutting and covering their eyes with their fingers. Orange light still pulsed through Bolan’s eyelids, and thunder rolled through the cavern. The second salvo of flash-bangs detonated moments later, and then Bolan was up and in the cavern with Bravo troop swarming in behind him.
The devastation was almost total. Fifty men lay on the ground, beaten, blinded, deafened and disoriented.
Lieutenant Dirk roared, “A and B Teams! Secure the side tunnels! Everyone else secure prisoners!”
The two teams charged to the side tunnels and aimed overwhelming firepower down them. In the cavern, plastic zip restraints appeared like party favors and moaning, suspected Taliban where swiftly hog-tied.
Gunfire broke out in the right side tunnel. Sawyer bawled back into the cavern. “We got resistance here on the right, LT!”
Dirk shouted orders. “C Team! Reinforce B! D Team, you’re with me! Pincer movement!”
Bolan took point with Sawyer. Both of them had M-203 grenade launchers mounted beneath their rifles. The Executioner nodded at him, and they both fired the weapons down the tunnel and leaned back as the grenades detonated in the chamber beyond. They charged down the corridor, followed by Dirk with A and D teams. The chamber was dimly lit and filled with open metal racks. Two men lay dead on the floor, while another man clutched his face and fired a pistol in the general direction of the entrance. Bolan’s and Sawyer’s bursts peppered the would-be pistolero. He fell into one of the metal racks, and a row of six of them fell like dominoes.
Sawyer stared at the rows of racks. There were scores of them. Possibly a hundred or more. “What? Are they building a treehouse?”
Bolan stared at them. The racks were actually frames consisting of eight hollow aluminum rectangles bolted together. Each was about eight feet long and contained a series of metal hoops within them. Bolan estimated the diameter of the hoops to be approximately 132 mm. “No, those are rocket racks. The hoops inside are the launch rails.” Bolan peered at the dark entrance to the next tunnel and turned to Dirk. “I strongly suggest we don’t throw anything explosive into the next room.”
“Yeah, I hear you.” Dirk spoke into his radio, “Obie, what’ve you got?”
Obradors came back from the other side of the complex. “Two hostiles down. The chamber appears to be some kind of machine shop. Multiple generators and lots of welding equipment. Looks like they’ve been making frames and mounts for something, as well as a bunch of threaded collars, and I mean a lot of them.”
Bolan spoke across the link. “You got a diameter on those collars, Obie?”
“Yeah, uh, about five inches?”
Bolan frowned as his suspicions were confirmed. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, your map?” Obradors said.
“What about it?”
“It’s shit. There ain’t no fifth chamber.”
“What do you mean?” Bolan probed.
“I mean there ain’t no tunnel. The wall is blank.”
Dirk looked at Bolan. “And?”
“And ground-penetrating radar doesn’t lie. Tell B and C teams to hold position and don’t touch anything. Especially the walls.”
Dirk gave orders. Bolan jerked his head at the far tunnel. “Let’s see what’s behind door number three.” Bolan moved down the tunnel with Sawyer right behind him. There was no one in the next chamber, but it wasn’t empty.
“Shit,” Sawyer pronounced. “Missiles.”
Bolan stared at the pallets of weapons stacked in pyramids. “No, unguided artillery rockets, 132 mm. The Russians call them Katyushas, or ‘Little Katys.’”
“Jesus, they must have a hundred of them in here.”
Dirk had one of his men videotaping their find. “A lot of them seem to be missing their warheads.”
“Yeah,” Bolan agreed, “and Obie has a machine shop on the other side of the complex making 132 mm threaded collars.”
“Shit,” Sawyer said.
“Shit is right,” Bolan said. “You notice anything else.”
Sawyer looked around the room and stopped. “There’s no tunnel. No fifth chamber. Just like Obie said.”
Bolan clicked on his private link. “Strike Eagle, this is Striker. Give me another GPR pulse, and triangulate the position of the tunnel to chamber five from my position.”
“Copy that, Striker,” Schwarz responded. “Coming up.”
Bolan took out his little computer and watched as the GPR pulses flashed across his screen. Up in the stratosphere, Schwarz was scribbling with his stylus. The pulses faded, and the map of the complex appeared. A dot appeared in the chamber where Bolan was standing.
“That dot is you, Striker.” A straight line appeared on the little map that went from Bolan’s position through the tunnel to the fifth chamber. “The tunnel entrance is exactly ten degrees east from your position.”
“Copy that.” Bolan walked up to what appeared to be a roughly dressed but blank stone wall.
Dirk played the tactical light on his weapon across the rock face. “So, there’s like a secret knob or something?”
“No. The tunnel’s been sealed off from the outside. There probably isn’t even a door, just brick or concrete with a layer of clay and rock molded over it for camouflage.”
Dirk scowled. “You said sealed from the outside?”
“Think about it. If we hadn’t used GPR, what would have happened? We’d have come in, kicked ass, destroyed the rockets and then dropped the caverns with explosives and walked away happy, mission accomplished. We never would have known to look for a fifth chamber.”
“Yeah—” Dirk nodded as he saw it “—and the Taliban could come back later when the coast was clear and dig it up.”
“Right. You got some shaped charges?”
“I believe we do.” Dirk turned to one of his men. “Penner! Coop here would like you to make him a door!”
The demolition man came forward and stared at the wall. “Okay, assuming concrete, assuming the same diameter as the other tunnels…” Penner mumbled to himself in demo-speak as he put together a breaching charge and then packed the plastique brick against the section of wall. He took a few steps back from his work and pressed his detonator box. “Fire in the hole!”
The detonation was anticlimactic. There was a thump and a pulse of fire around the edges of the charge, but the explosive had been shaped to blow inward against the wall. A two-foot section of the rock wall was gone to reveal that Bolan was right. The tunnel had been bricked up and then covered with a layer of clay and rock. Penner and another commando went at the sagging brick with entrenching tools. They cleared a four-foot entrance and stepped back.
Bolan shone his tactical light down the tunnel. It was exactly the same as the other, and the entrance to the fifth chamber opened into darkness at the end of it. “You better let me go first. This part may be booby-trapped.”
Dirk nodded. “Be my guest.”
Bolan crawled through the hole and slowly went down the tunnel. Dust filled the air from the blast. He went into the chamber and played his light across several pallets laden with crates. The crates had Cyrillic writing on them. Bolan didn’t read Russian, but he didn’t need to. Nor did he need to open any of the crates. He recognized the green circle with the three-lobed, red warning sign for chemical hazard, and he recognized the colored bar code and the serial numbers and letters beneath it.
Dirk came across the radio. “What do we have, Coop?”
“We’ve got cyclosarin nerve gas.” Bolan ran his light across the piled pallets. “A lot of it.”
2
Tent City, Kabul
Aaron Kurtzman was well pleased, and his face showed it across the video link. “Everyone is singing your praises, Striker. Delta Force is oozing goodwill, and Hal said the President wants to clone a hundred of you in assorted colors.”
“Yeah.” It hadn’t been a bad op. Some very unpleasant adversaries had gone down, and something very ugly had been averted.
“You don’t seem pleased. You don’t think you got the right boys?”
“Oh, we got the right Taliban boys, but we didn’t get the thugs who backed their play against the Rangers.”
“You still believe someone betrayed the Rangers’ location?”
“It was more than just a tip-off. The Taliban had intel on composition and numbers, and they had serious backup. Light-support weapons, at least, being used by people who knew what they were doing. Even in the most desperate of circumstances, Army Rangers should have been able to fight their way out of a Taliban ambush. Instead, they were cut to pieces. Even in the face of overwhelming numbers, a few should have been able to escape and evade. We have hundred percent casualties. That’s unheard-of, Bear, but since they were mutilated, beheaded, burned and their bodies stacked like cordwood, it’s a little difficult to determine exactly what happened. So everyone is screaming Taliban.”
“Yeah, well, it’s Afghanistan, Striker—people scream Taliban with good reason.”
“Bear, someone sold that gas to the Taliban. You want to take out a reinforced squad of U.S. Army Rangers with hundred percent casualties? How about starting a firefight in a narrow canyon and then ending it with nerve gas.”
Kurtzman was no longer smiling. “Yeah, nerve agents are nonpersistent. So when help finally arrived, they found spent shell casings and RPG hits and suspected nothing.”
“And the bodies were burned to prevent any telltales of nerve-agent exposure to be found.”
Kurtzman let out a long breath. “Well, that means you’re right. Someone set up the Rangers, someone gave the Taliban nerve agents and someone with the expertise had to be present to deploy the gas correctly.”
“That’s right, and it happened on German army turf.”
“Striker, the Germans haven’t produced chemical weapons since World War II.”
“The East Germans did.”
“Those stockpiles were destroyed—” Kurtzman sighed unhappily “—supposedly. You’re going to have a hard time penetrating the German army.”
“I can’t, and winding a black turban around my head and pretending to be Taliban isn’t going to work, either.” Bolan flipped through his file again. “You said the Shield protection agency has contractors working in the area?”
“For God’s sake, what are you trying to say?”
“Nothing I can prove, and nothing anybody will want to hear. Hell, I’m probably wrong, and frankly I hope I am. But we won’t know unless I go in and tear things open. What I am saying is eighteen Army Rangers are dead. And if the United States Army Rangers are after you, you’d better have a weapon of mass destruction, because that’s the only way you’re going to stop them. I think that’s exactly what happened, and far as I can see there are three possible players. I can’t join the Taliban, and I don’t speak German.”
Kurtzman’s craggy brow furrowed. “So you’re going to join Shield.”
“They’re independent contractors,” Bolan said. “It’s probably the only cover I can use to poke around.”
“They’ve got a waiting list a mile long,” Kurtzman argued. “They’ve got Special Forces guys from all over the world taking early retirement just to join up.”
Bolan nodded. “I know, so I’m going to need a guy they would kill to have join them and then piggyback my way in.”
Kurtzman perked an eyebrow. “You have someone in mind.”
Bolan grinned. “Indeed I do.”
BRIGADIER EUGENE TOLER PEERED at Lieutenant Dirk’s fist somewhat apprehensively. He sighed, rolled his eyes and then shook his head at Bolan. “Mr. Cooper, are we sure this is absolutely necessary?”
Bolan didn’t blame the English officer one bit. The lieutenant’s fists, like a lot of things about him, were oversized for his frame. “I’m afraid so, sir.”
Captain Fairfax stood to one side shaking his head. He had been in Special Forces for decades, and nothing had ever prepared him for the utter surrealty of this situation, much less the fact that he was about to lose his best officer.
