Читать книгу Fire Zone - Don Pendleton - Страница 8

No matter where Mack Bolan looked, fire devoured the land. Trees exploded hundreds of feet below him, sending fiery sap close to the V-22 Osprey’s rotors. Looking out over the Idaho forest convinced him that nothing could survive down there. The fire was too intense and spread like…a wildfire.

“Where you want to land?” The voice in his headphones might have been either the pilot or the copilot. Bolan couldn’t be sure, and it really didn’t matter. It took both men’s skill at the controls to keep the tilt-rotor aircraft from being buffeted to pieces in the fierce superheated air currents caused by the fire.

“Not down there,” Bolan said. His keen eyes studied the raging inferno and found nothing. No landing zone was possible when the very earth itself appeared to be on fire. Besides, Salmon-Challis National Forest was not the spot he was most interested in. It might have been the first place to be torched, but he found the other side of the spiny ridge more interesting. More than his gut feeling, the powers that be back at Stony Man Farm agreed. The real evidence of who set the fires was not here but over near Shepard Peak.

“We’re running low on fuel, sir.”

This time Bolan knew who spoke. The pilot leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his unexpected passenger. Bolan had been high up in the Rockies north of Leadville at the end of a mission when Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman had contacted him. Bolan had been looking forward to a much-needed break, possibly taking time to climb Mount Elbert for the solitude it offered and, for a while, simply not worry about someone shooting him in the back.

The V-22 had been dispatched from the 58^th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to pick him up. The altitude near Leadville made helicopters unstable to operate, and the V-22 afforded a quick method of transport. For all the fly-by-wire technology involved in the vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, Bolan was more interested in speed. It duplicated the helicopter’s vertical capability and added an airplane’s range and ability to move him to his target at more than three hundred miles per hour.

“Head due west,” Bolan said.

“The other fire?”

Bolan nodded and the pilot went back to his controls. The Osprey banked sharply, giving Bolan another look at the devastation below. Kurtzman had sent a video taken by a commercial airline pilot who had happened to be above the forest when it erupted in flame. Careful examination of the low-resolution video by the Stony Man analysts had given a chilling view of the first seconds of the fire. Bolan recognized the sudden wall of flame for what it was: detonation of a long string of explosives, probably dat cord. The second fire had erupted almost exactly ten minutes later, showing coordination and intent.

The charred stench made his nose wrinkle as he leaned out the doorway and peered down. Intense heat like a mile-long blast furnace seared his face, but Bolan saw only the courage of the firefighters below risking their lives to keep the fire from spreading and devouring more untold square miles of the tinder-dry forest.

“Sir, we’re here,” the pilot said. Bolan tapped his earpiece. The static interference almost deafened him. “But we got a problem. We can’t land down there.”

Bolan saw the problem immediately. The fire west of Shepard Peak had devoured too much of the forest for him to get into the spot where he believed the second, more important fire had been set.

“We could get down, but we might never get back into the air. I’m not risking a seventy-million-dollar aircraft, even if the SecDef himself ordered me down.”

Bolan knew the pilot held some resentment toward him personally for being sent on this mission. The orders had come down fast from on high to deliver a single passenger of unknown affiliation to the middle of a forest fire.

“What’s your operational ceiling?”

“Twenty-six thousand.”

“Take me up to fifteen, then you can go home.”

The engines changed pitch as the pilot started an upward spiral. Bolan began getting into his gear. He had to hand it to Kurtzman. The man had anticipated everything. The parachute included with the pack on board when he rendezvoused with the V-22 was exactly what he needed.

“What do you want me to do?”

The pilot’s words spilled from the earpiece dropped onto the deck. Bolan was already out the door and tumbling through the turbulent air above the Boise National Forest. He got a good look at the terrain and how the fire had burned from the obvious line where the blaze had started. It looked as if someone had taken a fiery razor to the ground.

More det cord.

Turning slowly as he fell though the heated air, Bolan arrowed his way toward the seared meadow just to the west of the first ignition point. When he was only five hundred feet from the ground—definitely HALO to avoid the worst of the heated updrafts—he pulled the rip cord. The jerk as the parachute deployed caused his teeth to clack together. Then he hit the ground hard. His knees bent and he rolled in the blackened grass, tangling in the shroud lines as they collapsed rapidly. He finally scraped to a halt and got to his feet. A few minutes later, Bolan had the parachute gathered and weighted down under a rock so it wouldn’t blow around in the hot wind all around him.

It was time for the Executioner to go to work.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

AARON KURTZMAN LOOKED up from his computer console to see the mission controller, Barbara Price, standing in the doorway. The dark circles under her eyes told him she hadn’t slept much in days. She said nothing and didn’t have to. Kurtzman felt the weight of her unspoken question.

“Nothing yet,” Kurtzman said. “Striker has just dropped into the Boise Basin and is doing a quick recon.”

“Have you filled him in?”

“I’m still gathering intel,” Kurtzman said, glancing at his screen. He looked back up. “What more can you tell me?”

“Not much more,” she admitted, heaving a deep sigh. “It seems more and more like an outright attack on the U.S. economy. All the gold was earmarked for delivery to the government to bolster the dollar on world markets. There’s no doubt that the last attack was done by a PMC.”

“Identified?”

Price shook her head and looked even grimmer.

“How many private military companies can there be on the loose within U.S. borders?” Kurtzman asked aloud, but he didn’t expect a response. The question was rhetorical because no one could answer, and they both knew it. The homegrown paramilitary militias had died down over the past few years as government activity against terror cells escalated. This was not the atmosphere a paranoid, super-secret paramilitary group could thrive in. When they were ignored, they flourished in backwoods and the mountains where no one had cared if they blew up old cars with RPGs or shot cutouts of their particular bogeyman. With air travelers having to take off their shoes to check for explosives and everyone jumpy over the slightest thing amiss, the paramilitaries had come under such governmental scrutiny that they could almost be written off.

But not the PMCs. The government used them for security in Iraq and other hot spots around the world. That was fine. What wasn’t fine were the PMCs employed by fat cats as bodyguards and even by dictators as personal armies. Most of the PMCs contained mercenaries honed to a keen edge in a dozen different armies worldwide. The various Special Forces branches of the United States supplied their share, but so did the Russian Spetsnaz, the British SAS and all the other European countries with their super-secret, always denied special ops forces. Kurtzman didn’t even want to think about the disaffected mercenaries operating out of South Africa, Europe and elsewhere. Too many men and women around the world sold themselves to the highest bidder.

“The last two strikes accounted for well over fifty million dollars in gold,” Price said. “That much gold weighs close to two tons. The M.O.s match what’s going down in Idaho. I hope Striker can get on their asses in a hurry. We’ve got to stop them before they bankrupt the country.”

Kurtzman felt a shiver travel up and down his spine. Forest fires were set to divert authorities. The PMC strike team had moved into mines with smelters on-site and killed anyone who had not been evacuated. Then the gold had simply vanished. Tons of it. Gone. Like so much golden smoke.

He touched a screen to get a news ticker scrolling slowly along the bottom and smiled without humor. “Gold just hit nine hundred dollars an ounce today, and it’s still going up. They’re making money even after they steal the bullion. You’ve got to wonder how they transport that much.”

“The question I can’t get a handle on is why they need so much,” Price said.

Kurtzman felt a little colder. Greed was one thing, but this transcended mere avarice. Whoever was responsible for the thefts was amassing enough cold, hard currency to fund a revolution. A big one.

He opened communication with Bolan to get an update.

“Striker, it’s Bear. Report.”

“TWO BODIES,” Bolan told Kurtzman. “Both murdered.” He lightly prodded the man’s head with his feet and saw how the spinal cord had been almost severed with a savage slash. The charred corpse revealed little else. The female with him was harder to evaluate, but Bolan wasted no time figuring it out. She was dead and probably by the same hand. He thought she had been knifed in the belly and then the point driven upward into her heart. Bowels, lungs and heart were cinders, but her head remained firmly affixed to her spine. A murder-suicide was out of the question, since there wasn’t a knife anywhere to be seen.

Kill the man, then the woman. That was how the solitary killer had moved. Professional. Very professional.

“What do you see at the edge of the forest?”

Bolan’s stride lengthened as he went to the worst of the burned area along the meadow. The fire had ravaged the terrain and had moved a mile farther east, where it still roared uphill with voracious intensity. It took only a couple minutes for him to find what remained of one detonator cap and the radio unit that had set off the explosive. He rubbed his fingers over the ground but came up with only soot. Any of the grainy PETN likely used would be completely oxidized.

“He knew what he was doing,” Bolan said.

“Latest intel says there is an African PMC on the prowl. We’re pinging the CIA and FBI for info on them now to get a better identification.”

“That’s a mighty big continent.”

Kurtzman did not respond, and Bolan hadn’t expected him to. He ended the call and pulled out his map and oriented himself, then set off running downhill in the direction of the Lucky Nugget Mine, reaching the tall cyclone fence around the property in under a half hour. He took slow, deep breaths and calmed his pounding heart. Having been at altitude in the Rockies for the prior week helped, but the thin Idaho air still took its toll on him.

As he rested, hands on knees, he looked around the mine site. From the dozen signs painted with huge red letters, this property was owned by Lassiter Industries, a multinational conglomerate owning not only gold mines but copper, silver, manganese and every other metal known to man. Rested, he tossed a broken branch against the fence to see if he might get a shock or trigger an alarm. Seeing no response, and hearing only the miles-distant crackle of a forest being destroyed by fire, he scaled the fence, deftly avoiding the barbed wire strands on top, then dropped lightly to the ground inside.

He reached a well-traveled road and saw a couple abandoned trucks. Of the large crew required to work a mine this size, he saw nothing.

Some equipment had been properly shut down, but most had been hastily abandoned. He knew what had happened. Sirens warned of the forest fire. The miners had to evacuate the mine or risk being trapped a half mile underground if the fire swept this way. Those aboveground would work frantically to get the miners to the surface, then they would all jump into trucks and evacuate. The sheriff’s department would be sending constant warnings the entire while. The scream of sirens as the firefighters came in would goad the miners into leaving.

Some might even be volunteer firefighters and join the effort. However it happened, they were all absent from the mine.

But the security staff would remain. Not of their own choosing, but orders would keep them here until the flames came close enough to singe their eyebrows. Bolan jogged to the main gate, which gaped wide. He peered into the glass-windowed guard booth and saw a man slumped on the floor. There was no reason to check his vital signs. The huge hole in the back of the man’s head showed where a single shot had taken him out.

Bolan turned from the guard booth and went immediately to the main office building. The double doors were closed. He tugged at one and it came open easily. The panic bar had not properly locked when the last employee had evacuated.

Halfway down the corridor was the sprawled body of a uniformed woman. She had been shot in the back of the head just like the other guard. Bolan moved from room to room. He found three more murdered security guards. Only one had tried to get his weapon free before six shots had punctured his chest. Examining the entry angles of the wounds convinced Bolan that at least three shooters had sighted in on the poor son of a bitch. From what he could tell, the same caliber weapons had ended the man’s life. The killers probably used identical model pistols. That would go with the military precision shown in this attack.

Bolan searched the building from top to bottom. Whoever had killed the guards had not looted the offices. Computers remained on desks. No drawers had been pulled out and searched. Obviously valuable display ingots remained in glass cases in the hallways. Since he found no one alive in the rest of the building to give him eyewitness information, he exited to search other parts of the sprawling mine complex.

Like a compass needle finding magnetic north, he was drawn to a large shed nearby. Heavy steel doors that had once been held closed by intricate locks stood open. Reaching down, he drew his Desert Eagle and let the muzzle precede him into the well-lit interior. Vaults along the walls were open and empty. The guards positioned at all four upper corners of the building on catwalks had been shot. From the look of it, they had put up a fierce fight but had been overwhelmed by superior firepower.

Walking into the empty expanse in the middle of the building, Bolan saw where a truck had stood next to a loading dock. It took no effort for him to imagine a half-dozen men swarming into the vaults, removing the gold and loading it into the truck before driving away with their valuable cargo.

He had only one more bit of intel to gather. It was surprisingly easy to find the manifests for each of the looted vaults. He kept a running inventory in his head as he read the numbers.

When he finished the tally he stood and stared out the doors where the truck had left.

Three-quarters of a ton of gold stolen. Fifteen thousand pounds. Well over ten million dollars.

His strides long and determined, Bolan left the building, found a car that could be hot-wired easily and roared off in pursuit of the thieves. They couldn’t be more than a few hours ahead of him. With that much of a load on the narrow, winding road leading down into Boise, they wouldn’t be able to match his breakneck pace.