Читать книгу Critical Intelligence - Don Pendleton - Страница 10

Inside the FARC command bunker Lieutenant Colonel Sin-Bok could hear the men outside screaming as they died. He was out of the way, in a corner, holding tightly to his attaché case and a .45-caliber M-1911 pistol Naranjo had provided him once the attack started.

Outside, bullets struck the bunker and everyone heard them bounce off the concrete. All eyes kept glancing toward the barred and reinforced door at the front of the structure. It was the only way out or in.

If the North Korean was going to make an escape, his only option was out through that door. When the raiders outside came, it would be in through that same door. Sin-Bok’s entire world had shrunk to a four-foot-by-three-foot piece of steel hung on reinforced storm hinges.

Across the room Naranjo cursed loudly and threw his sat phone to the ground. It burst apart on the hard-packed floor, plastic pieces spraying out like shrapnel. The other group of people trapped in the bunker cringed at his outburst.

“I can’t get a signal out!” Naranjo shouted. “They’re fucking blocking communications.”

“Who?” Sin-Bok demanded. It made a very real difference who they were. “Is it your government?”

Realizing immediately what Sin-Bok feared, Naranjo scowled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “All we’ve seen are norteamericanos, maybe Europeans. I do not think these are Colombian Jaguars,” he finished, referencing the Colombian military’s elite unit.

“Then the flash drive has to make it out,” Sin-Bok said.

Naranjo opened his hands and looked around in question.

Salvation didn’t appear to be within reach. Sin-Bok quickly looked around the bunker again. He saw a fourteen-year-old girl in oversize fatigues and holding a ridiculously outsize M-16. Her brown eyes were almost comically big.

FARC, like most Third World insurgencies, recruited heavily from younger members of their impoverished society. Sin-Bok, who had been raised and conditioned since birth to put nation before self, understood this. He also understood how abhorrent the concept of child soldiers were to the Western powers.

“You,” he barked. “Come here!”

The girl started when she realized he was pointing toward her. She cut her gaze to Naranjo, who, confused, nodded. As the girl began crossing the room, a burst of gunfire slammed into the bunker door.

“They’re coming!” Sin-Bok snapped. “Hurry! Now, someone give me a condom.”

Naranjo looked as if he’d been slapped. “This is hardly the time for—”

“Shut up, you fool,” Sin-Bok snarled. “The flash drive must get out. I need a condom.”

Despite being born to a heavily Catholic country, many of the FARC soldiers, heavily influenced by secular Marxist ideals, had a prophylactic on their person. Rubbers were as ubiquitous as cigarettes among soldiers.

Working quickly, Sin-Bok tore open the wrapping and pulled the lubricated sleeve free.

He dropped the flash drive inside the condom and quickly tied a knot in the end. He handed it back to the girl. She held it out in her hand as if it was a snake. She looked back at the North Korean.

Sin-Bok waved his hand at her. “Hurry, hurry.”

Shrugging, the girl leaned her M-16 against a table and began pulling at her belt buckle to loosen her pants.

“No, no, no!” Sin-Bok yelled. “Swallow it, you idiot!”

The girl made a face but quickly slid the material into her mouth and swallowed hard. She gagged once and coughed, then was done. Satisfied, Sin-Bok stepped up close and grabbed her by her thin arms.

Pulling her close, the North Korean locked eyes with the frightened girl. “Listen close,” he instructed. He spoke an address in Bogotá to the girl, made her repeat it. “Now get naked. Go to the corner and do not fight. If the Americans make it through and we lose, pretend you were kidnapped. Then, later, you get that flash drive to the address I just gave you.”

“Seven must prevail,” Naranjo muttered from over the Korean’s shoulder.

“Seven must prevail,” Sin-Bok agreed.

OUTSIDE THE BUNKER DOOR the Phoenix Force entry team prepared for the final assault.

Manning and Encizo formed anchor points on opposite sides of their skirmish line. Up on the hill Able Team provide a second level of security overwatch. The battlefield was spread out below them like a chessboard. Jack Grimaldi, from a standoff position, continued to use his missiles and machine gun to devastating effect along the periphery of the compound.

Calvin James let his main weapon hang loose from its strap as he manipulated an industrial caulking gun. Beside him Hawkins presented timing pencils with preset timers.

McCarter surveyed the iron door as James and Hawkins prepped the demolition charges, a grenade in one hand. “Quarter-inch internal hinges, likely with reinforcement points at the latch and corners,” he said.

James nodded. “I brought a big hammer just in case,” he said.

The foam shape charge squirted out of the caulking gun like icing from a chef’s pastry applicator. With expert dabs and straight lines the ex-SEAL wasted no time in positioning his charge at the most precise locations. Finished, he stepped back and tossed the caulker aside.

“‘That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do,’” he quoted.

Hawkins snorted as he quickly placed the timers and started the countdown. “Fire in the hole, people,” he warned.

The entrance into the bunker was a short set of steps leading four feet down into the ground with sandbag walls built up on the side. Moving quickly and under covering fire from the support units, they peeled back from the doorway.

The charges went off with a loud, flat bang, and black smoke rolled out. Immediately automatic weapons fire burned out of the opening from inside the bunker.

“Hawk!” McCarter ordered.

The lanky Texan rushed down the steps, slid into a corner of the doorway and produced an awkward-looking assault rifle from a sling carry on his torso.

The CornerShot Assault Pistol Rifle boasted a steel hinge that allowed the weapon to be folded into an L-shape and fired around corners. The version used by Hawkins now had a digital folding heads-up-display screen and handgun at the end of the weapon capable of firing 5.56 mm ammunition.

Coolly, Hawkins swung the weapon around the corner into the teeming confusion inside the bunker. A shape loomed up, filling the screen. Hawkins pulled his trigger three times and the shape went down.

“Do you have eyes on?” McCarter demanded.

“Negative,” Hawkins replied. He snapped the weapon back around in the other direction. “Hold on!” he said. “There! I have eyes on Target Pusan Kim chi. He’s at position fourteen-thirty.”

“Fourteen-thirty,” the team repeated out loud, using the twenty-four-hour indicator for two-thirty on a clock.

McCarter, grenade primed, chucked the little hand bomb in a slap-shot maneuver around the corner as Hawkins folded back out and switched out weapons.

There were curses in Spanish and a cry of terror, then the stun device went off with a brilliant flash and a deafening bang.

“Go! Go! Go!” McCarter barked.

Hawkins charged down the steps into the smoke, weapon up, visor in place. He stepped across the threshold and button-hooked to the left. Two steps behind him Calvin James rushed into the room, twisting to the right. McCarter tapped Rafael Encizo on the shoulder, then charged in after Hawkins and James.

Encizo rushed down the steps into the hellbox.

Behind them Manning held their direct six while the guns of Able Team provided overwatch support fire.

Already pockets of resistance on the compound had begun to fade. Vehicles burned, FARC corpses lay like trash on the ground and Grimaldi’s Blackhawk hovered over the scene, miniguns blazing in sporadic bursts.

Inside the bunker Hawkins rushed forward.

Disorganized and wounded FARC guerrillas stumbled past him. He shot two, skipped over their falling bodies and reached the huddled form of Sin-Bok. The North Korean operative looked up and Hawkins dropped a haymaker on his face two inches up from the point of the man’s chin.

The target dropped, and James rushed forward, spinning around to cover the rest of the room as Hawkins slapped plastic riot cuffs and a dark hood on the Korean. Out of the smoke and dark a screaming FARC officer appeared, a .45 ACP filling his hand.

The pistol roared, the muzzle-flash illuminating the gloomy bunker like lightning. Two heavy slugs slapped into the concrete above the Korean’s head, and James realized the man had been trying to silence the foreign agent. He shot the FARC officer twice, once low in the stomach and once through the face as he folded.

“Let’s go!” Hawkins grunted.

Across the room Encizo and McCarter were clearing the rest of the bunker with ruthless, mechanically murderous proficiency.

James helped haul the groggy Korean to his feet. He turned away from the man, hand on the pistol grip of his weapon. His eyes scanned the room as they began moving forward, looking for any last-second piece of intelligence or overlooked threat.

“Damn, hold on!” he shouted.

Hawkins turned, pushing the Korean down and bringing up his weapon. He jerked around, looking for the threat, but didn’t see anything moving. He looked down and saw what James was looking at.

The girl was in her underwear and huddled against the wall. A dead FARC soldier lay bleeding in front of her. She looked up at the masked and heavily armed commandos with stark fear.

“Hey, boss,” Hawkins called to McCarter.

“Who are you? How did you get here?” James asked the girl in Spanish.

“What?” McCarter demanded. He looked over. “Shit,” he said simply.

“My name is Maria,” the girl said. “I’m from the village of San Sebastian. I want to go home, please.”

“This is mission creep.” McCarter spit.

“We put her on the Blackhawk,” James said, “turn her over to our South American liaison. They contact a relief agency. No fuss, no muss. Just a chopper ride.”

McCarter hesitated, even though everyone there knew there was no way they were leaving a helpless teenage girl behind them.

“Fine,” the ex-SAS trooper said. “But she’s your baby till we hand her over to our Agency contact.”

“No problem,” James answered.

McCarter spoke into his throat mike. “Phoenix, we are leaving.”

THE COMPOUND WAS DOTTED with fires. Corpses, broken weapons, body parts and the cinder hulks of destroyed vehicles specked the ground.

Keeping their security level high, Phoenix Force approached a flat stretch of ground as Jack Grimaldi brought the Blackhawk in for a landing. From the opposite side of the clearing Able Team broke cover and began their approach to the helicopter.

As the teams crammed into the troop transport bay under the watchful minigun, Carl Lyons looked over to where the girl sat quietly. James’s black fatigue shirt was hanging off her.

“What the fuck?” Lyons demanded. “You can’t go anywhere without finding strays?”

James laughed from behind his balaclava. “That’s why I signed up, man, to meet new people and make friends.”

Lyons turned and looked at the carnage the Stony Man teams were leaving behind as the helicopter lifted off.

“Oh, man.” The ex-cop chuckled. “We made plenty of friends today.”

“Yeah,” McCarter agreed. “But we just don’t seem to play well with others.”

Kiev, Ukraine

KLEGG SIPPED HIS DRINK and watched the clubgoers through slitted eyes.

The vodka was expensive and ice-cold so it went down with little more bite than frigid water. The dance beat, a hypno-industrial blend of tribal-styled rhythms, was two years past hip in New York and three in Europe. Despite this the meat-packing plant turned trendy nightclub was crowded with young, inebriated and apparently sexually frenzied young people fueled with chemical cocktails and copious amounts of hard alcohol.

Next to him Svetlana scanned the crowd with the bored indifference of the nouveau riche. She was fashionably anorexic with thighs thinner than her knees and bare buds for breasts. She was draped in a Pierre Cardin silk number with all the ridiculously expensive space-age, unisex, avant-garde styling that implied. She let a hand drift to the flat plane of her stomach, her eyes as large as a character’s in a Japanese manga above the drawn, stark lines of her cheekbones.

Klegg had known her for three days and in that time he’d never seen her eat anything but the olive from her vodka martini. Her energy, both in bed and out, seem entirely fueled by Stolichnaya Gold vodka and cocaine. She performed the most depraved of sexual acrobatics with the same robotic expression and untouchable eyes she used now to survey the club.

Glassy-eyed women in heavy makeup and tight, revealing clothing made their way past them to the concrete dance floor. Stalking them like wolves, strung-out male Russian urbanites, or the occasional steroid monster, followed in close pursuit.

Svetlana nodded to innumerable numbers of the club crowd. Her true value lay not in her penchant for kinky sex but in her vast, tangled social connections.

The youngest daughter of an extremely powerful and corrupt Moscow oligarch, she was more courtesan than prostitute. Klegg had flown halfway around the world and paid her in Colombian emeralds to secure an important introduction.

Upon accepting his request and payment for her services as social purveyor, she seemed to have slept with him out of habitual reflex rather than any sense of obligation.

Klegg himself had gone along with it because while vapid, she was still beautiful and because he had promised himself, upon passing the New York bar exam, that he would sleep with a woman from every continent.

After that challenge he had further redefined his goal to include economic regions and geographical features. It had only cost him one marriage and a stubborn case of herpes to meet his goal.

Klegg always achieved his goals, no matter what the price.

Kiev, he decided, really wanted to be Moscow and Moscow, he knew, really wanted to be Los Angeles.

His eyes scanned the crowd in a slow sweep like a radar dish. The images came back to him in jumbles: two girls in a booth making out while a crowd of onlookers gathered around. Stoned women on the dance floor slinging chem-lights around on strings while their dresses crept up their anorexic thighs. A long, greasy-haired kid in a thousand-dollar jacket dealing Ecstasy in front of the restrooms under the watchful eye of two hired thugs with bodies by Dianabol and eyes like polished steel mirrors.

The place smelled like sweat and cigarettes and liquor and sex. The din of the DJ’s stereo system was enough to qualify as a sonic weapon. Klegg could literally feel the 2-4 backbeat of the bass shake him with tactile force as it pumped out of the massive speakers.

He wasn’t here to have a good time.

He spoke Russian, among four other languages, and he was young enough not to stand out too terribly in the club during the initial surveillance. His cover was simple and straightforward because it was, in fact, his profession. He was a procurement specialist for a private contractor specializing in large-corporation inventory.

He made deals for engines in Peru, he acquired stockpiles of diamonds in South Africa, he secured binary processors in India, he obtained cooling systems for French Mirage jets and sold them to African dictators.

All the while he built his networks of shady lawyers, street contacts, intelligence agents, criminal syndicates, ship captains and bush pilots. Today he was going to expand that network into the field of soldiers for hire, and Svetlana was going to help him.

“There,” the woman said.

Across the dance floor near where a phalanx of bouncers guarded the club’s entrance he saw Milosevic. The Russian lawyer came in like a visiting emperor, his entourage part Praetorian guard, part sycophantic toadies and part pleasure slaves.

Klegg reached down to where his attaché case rested against his leg. He took the not unsubstantial weight of the thing in his hand and stepped away from the bar. Across the room Milosevic was shown to a private area at the top of a short flight of stairs leading to a balcony over the dance floor.

A massive, impassive-faced thug with the body of a professional wrestler and an Armani suit stood sentry before the red-velvet rope dividing the stair and viewing lounge from the common dancers and general population.

As they approached, the man’s head turned on a bull neck like a 20 mm cannon on an APC gun turret. His eyes were cold chips of blue. Klegg felt an instant rising of his own hackles as he drew closer. It was an instinctual reaction to so much rival testosterone. The potential for conflict was intense. It wouldn’t pay to lose his head, and this was what Svetlana was earning her percentage for.

He let a small smile play across his face as the bodyguard’s eyes were drawn away from him, a man with a briefcase in a Ukrainian nightclub, to the slinky form of the icy blonde. The guy might be tough, Klegg mused, but he wasn’t a pro.

Behind the guard up the stairs Milosevic was opening a bottle of champagne. He said something and everyone in the group laughed like marionettes. A flamboyantly gay man with purple spiky hair and tight leather pants shrieked his giggles like a siren and dumped a copious amount of white powder down directly on the glass top of the low table set between the party’s couches.

“Dmitri,” Svetlana pouted. Her hand went to the mile-wide expanse of his chest. “You act like you don’t remember me.” Her chin came down, and her eyes looked up as she made coy into a seduction power play.

She was like a big-league power hitter, Klegg realized. Her technique wasn’t subtle; she’d either strike out completely or knock the ball out of the park. And like a high-paid baseball home-run specialist she’d knock more out of the park than she’d lose…until age and the drugs caught up with her.

Dmitri broke into an easy grin, his eyes trailing down her body like the laser guidance system of a jet fighter locking on to target. He replied in guttural, bass Russian, his chest rumbling like the engine of a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

“I remember you, Svetlana. That time in Moscow—” he began.

“We stayed up all night,” she answered, and they laughed together.

Dmitri caught sight of Klegg standing behind her and his smile hardened. Catching the shift in him Svetlana put her hand on his chest again, drawing his attention back to her the way a tiger’s eyes will follow a piece of raw meat in the hands of a circus trainer.

“How is he?” she asked. “Does he ever talk about me?” She sounded so sincere Klegg, who had planned the ruse with her, was almost fooled despite himself. Dmitri grinned knowingly and Klegg could see he had bought into the act completely.

“Of course, baby,” the bodyguard purred. “Like anyone could ever forget you.” He shrugged his shoulders and the effect was like seeing tectonic plates shift. “But you know how he is. Everything, all the time—it’s hard to look back. Hard to keep track.”

“Let me talk to him,” she purred.

He started to shake his head no and she slid two crisp folded American hundred-dollar bills into his hand before he could speak. He made the money disappear and reached for the hook to the red rope strung between the stanchions in front of the short flight of stairs.

“Okay, ’Lana,” he growled. “But just you. I don’t know your boyfriend, and Milosevic doesn’t want to make any new buddies.”

He stared at Klegg as if daring him to argue.

Klegg said nothing. Everything was going according to plan. Svetlana reached up and kissed Dmitri quickly, leaving a lipstick mark so red on his pale skin it looked like a wound. Then she was up the stairs and being greeted like an old friend.

Klegg waited patiently, ignoring Dmitri’s hard stare. He waited while Svetlana passed kisses of greetings all around and hugged Milosevic. She laughed at something he said, then helped herself to a line of the coke and a glass of the expensive champagne. Milosevic seemed generally happy to see her and, having spent time with the lady himself, Klegg could understand why.

After a few moments, once she was comfortably ensconced next to the Russian syndicate lawyer, he saw her lean in close, hand on Milosevic’s thigh, and begin whispering in his ear.

Klegg, long attuned to these things, watched Milosevic’s body language change. The smile, a social mask, stayed in place, but when his eyes cut away from Svetlana and down the stairs to Klegg they glittered like a snake’s, sizing him up.

Klegg smiled slightly back in acknowledgment.

It was time to make his play. He was a six plus one.