Читать книгу Orange Alert - Don Pendleton - Страница 9

Mack Bolan listened to the rhythmic signal coming through his earpiece. The cadence was strong and steady. As he got closer the beat would get faster and, during his final one hundred yards, the pitch would change if he veered off course. Judging from the spacing between notes, Bolan knew his objective was a ways off, maybe as far as three miles.

When the GPS finally led him to within one yard of the tiny transmitter implanted inside agent Oxford’s molar, Bolan’s earpiece would begin to hum a steady tone.

As he listened to the steady electronic pulse, the soldier was confident that the system would lead him directly to his goal.

In keeping with his practice for night missions, Bolan’s six-foot-three-inch frame was dressed entirely in black, from his jump boots that trod silently across the hard ground of the moors, to the knitted wool hat that covered his closely cut hair. The green-black-and-brown jungle camouflage he had smeared on the high points of his hawkish features absorbed the silvery sheen of moonlight, rendering him invisible against the dark countryside.

On his hip he wore a .44-caliber Desert Eagle and, in the pouches attached to the web belt, he carried, among other items, several clips of ammunition.

A holster on his left shoulder held a 9 mm Beretta 93-R, and a foot-long Fairbairn-Sykes combat knife rested in a weathered black leather sheath strapped to the outside of his right calf.

The man some called the Executioner didn’t know if he would actually need the weapons he carried, but he had been walking the hellfire trail too long to approach any mission unrepared. Despite the tranquil appearance the Irish countryside offered, a CIA agent had lost his life three nights earlier, and, to Bolan, that made the area a combat zone. More than once, Bolan had seen supposedly cold spots turn unexpectedly hot in seconds. He hadn’t survived all these years by being careless. Parking his rental car more than two miles away and coming in on foot was only the first precaution.

The Irish coast near the Ulster border was rugged country, with narrow, winding roads twisting through bowl-shaped contours of land extending from Lake Erne to Donegal Bay. In the daylight, views, at times, were nothing short of spectacular as the trails meandering through barren moors suddenly emerged upon sheep-studded pastures, so intensely green they were almost blinding. Immediately south of the moors, where Bolan had parked his car under the cover of a thin stand of hickory trees, the way became treacherous, perilously clinging to the sides of cliffs rising straight up from the sea where, hundreds of feet below, angry surf pounded the craggy coastline. Small religious shrines were carved at irregular intervals into the side of the rock walls to commemorate locations where fugitive priests had celebrated Mass during the British repression.

The trouble here had started, as so many conflicts in the history of man have, over religion. Protestant against Catholic, both sides killing for Christ, with the escalating violence over a period of more than two generations spawning the Orange Order, the IRA and twenty or thirty splinter groups, each with its own vision of tomorrow’s Ireland. For the most part, the rest of the world had ignored the conflict. A bunch of Irishmen killing each other on their tiny island way up in the North Atlantic didn’t threaten world stability the way an outbreak of war in the oil rich Middle East would.

Under normal circumstances, a man like Mack Bolan wouldn’t have been the one called into Ireland for a CIA find-and-retrieve mission, but the communiqué had been sent straight up the chain of command to the director of Homeland Security, who’d immediately alerted the President of its contents. The chief executive had decided he wanted someone with no traceable ties to a government agency, The call had gone out on a secured line to Hal Brognola at the Justice Department.

“They have to take it seriously,” Brognola had said later that day when he’d met Bolan on the National Mall in the shadow of the Museum of Natural History. They’d been walking west along Madison Drive, the domed Capitol building at their backs gleaming a brilliant white in the light from the afternoon sun.

The big Fed had continued. “This is much more than just an agent getting murdered, Striker. A terrorist group threatening to assassinate cabinet members? Jesus. The President wants someone to help assess how credible these people are.”

Brognola was fully aware of the Bolan’s arm’s-length relationship with the government, but he also knew that the soldier had never refused a request from his old friend. Brognola’s agenda usually was in tune with the Executioner’s. But Bolan would decide on his own whether or not to accept the mission.

Bolan had remained silent, studying the transcript he’d been reading as they’d walked.

“What’s this about another 9/11?” he asked.

“That’s the part that has the President most concerned,” Brognola answered. “The CIA doesn’t need any help dealing with these guys if they’re just a bunch of crackpots trying to make a statement. But, if what we’re up against is an organized terrorist cell with the capability to carry out those threats, we have to know who they are, and we have to know it now. All the President wants you to do is to get the CIA pointed in the right direction.”

It had been the part about another September 11 that had convinced Bolan to take the assignment.

He had met with Edmund Fontes, the director of CIA activities in Ireland, who’d reluctantly given him Steven Oxford’s final field report. In it, the late agent had described Cypher and the terrorist cell the mysterious man was forming, but there was no mention of any targets other than Catholic organizations in Ireland.

“He was one of my best,” Fontes had said tersely while handing Bolan the report, “and, if it was up to me, we’d go in and get him, ourselves. This is our job, and we don’t like someone else doing it.”

Bolan took no umbrage at the CIA man’s resentment. The way he received missions all but guaranteed that he’d be treading on someone else’s turf from the minute he showed up. He’d go in, get the microchip for Brognola, the one Oxford had in a back molar, and see what developed from there.

Now, twenty-four hours after saying he’d take the assignment, he was on-site, closing in on his objective.

An animal howled in the distance, and Bolan paused to take his bearings. Close by, a freight train rumbled over tracks on its way to the industrialized areas to the north.

The homing signal’s beat suddenly picked up, and Bolan’s senses went on full alert. With the terrain’s undulating dips and swells dotted with sparse patches of tall bushes and wind-blown hickory trees, the area was perfect for an ambush.

Bolan walked quickly, his eyes scanning the darkness, his free ear processing a steady flow of sounds. Noise carried well over the moors. Not as well as over water, where the crack of a gunshot could carry for miles.

He heard them before they were aware of his presence. A metallic click lasting no more than a millisecond rode to his ears on the night’s currents. It might have been the sound of a buckle that hadn’t been taped, or a snap fastening someone’s top collar against the breeze, but to a soldier with Bolan’s honed senses, it just as well could have been a bullhorn announcing their location.

Dropping to one knee, he reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles. As he adjusted the goggles on his face, Bolan turned off his earpiece. He’d deal with the ambush first, then locate Oxford. From the signal he had been getting and the direction he thought the errant sound came from, his greeting party appeared to be positioned close to his objective.

Bolan focused the goggles, bringing the moors into sharp relief. There was a flurry of movement off to his left as a pair of jackrabbits dodged and sprinted their way through the underbrush. He scanned from left to right, pausing at every patch of bushes and trees, watching for unnatural movement. A halo of light flared briefly, the flame of a cigarette lighter magnified tens of thousands of times as its photons passed through the photocathode tube of his goggles.

Amateurs, Bolan thought. Undisciplined, untrained amateurs.

He switched the goggles to infrared mode, and the scene before him shimmered slightly as he painted the landscape with IR. Three men were positioned in a clump of trees about a hundred yards off to his right, their figures clear and distinct against the cooler foliage. A slight spiral extended upward from the man who was smoking, his cigarette heating the air directly above him.

Bolan removed the goggles and returned them to their pouch. The men waiting for him obviously knew that Oxford was wearing a transmitter that would lead someone to his remains. Did they also know that he had been a CIA plant? And, if they did, what were their intentions now for the man who came to retrieve him?

Regardless of what they had been planning, the Executioner thought they were about to get more than they’d bargained for.

He rose into a crouch and set off, as silent as an owl swooping from above to snatch unsuspecting prey. When he finally got to a point about twenty yards behind them and they became visible in the dim light, he lowered himself again to one knee and took note of how the three were set up. He figured they would be facing his objective. He switched the earpiece back on.

The beat was coming in as an almost steady tone, and the note had changed, indicating Bolan was slightly off center. Before turning the signal off, he mentally extrapolated the sound with his position and that of the ambush, arriving at a spot about fifty yards from where he thought Oxford’s body would be buried.

He withdrew a powerful penlight from his front shirt pocket and rotated the lens to produce a beam. Sliding the Desert Eagle from its holster, he stood and took a step forward.

“Everyone freeze!” he shouted in a voice full of authority as he held it out at a full arm’s length to the left of his body.

The three men, suddenly illuminated, simultaneously made the wrong decision. As the two men flanking the third threw themselves to the ground, the man in the middle turned and fired a pistol, the round snapping the air directly beneath Bolan’s penlight, which he switched off while lunging to his right. In midair, he squeezed the Desert Eagle’s trigger once, and the throaty roar of the weapon delivered instant death to his attacker as the heavy round slammed through the man’s chest, exiting through his back in a messy hole the size of a heavyweight’s fist.

Bolan rolled quickly as bullets from the other two gunmen sliced the air where he had been a split second earlier. Using one of the muzzle-flashes for a target, Bolan fired two shots so close together that they echoed across the moors as a single retort. He immediately heard the heavy thump of a body being hammered into hard earth, and all was still.

Continuing his roll to the right, Bolan strained his ears for the sound of his enemy’s breathing. In the sudden silence, he could hear it—raspy and quick. The man was off to his left, about ten yards away, and apparently still standing upright.

Bolan considered taking him alive in order to gain some intel about the communiqué. Before he could initiate his next move, however, panic apparently got the better of his adversary, who abruptly let loose with a barrage of automatic pistol fire aimed a full four feet above Bolan. With the shooter illuminated by his series of quick muzzle-blasts, Bolan zeroed in from his prone position and fired once, drilling a hole through the man’s gut. The force of the Eagle’s .44-caliber punch threw the hardman four feet and he crumpled into a lifeless heap, oozing intestines that shimmered and shone black in the intermittent moonlight.

Like most firefights, this one had been quick and violent.

The acrid smell of cordite hung heavy in the air, mingling with the fresh stink of death that filled Bolan’s nostrils. He remained in his prone position, listening intently for any sound of life. After a good thirty seconds, he rose to his full height. Holding the penlight out to his left again, he switched it on.

All three men were dead.

Bolan quickly scanned the area, anxious to complete his mission. There was no vehicle, which meant that these men had either left their means of transportation somewhere and walked to the site as Bolan had, or they had been dropped off by other team members who were still very much alive.

In the beam of his penlight, tire tracks were visible in the dirt, confirming Bolan’s worst-case hunch. He rushed forward to check the bodies, intent on removing any identification they might be carrying. As he patted down the first corpse, he noticed the gleam of a silver chain around the man’s neck. With the same motion he had used more often than he wanted to remember when pulling the dog tags from a fallen comrade, Bolan snapped the chain free and stuffed it into his pants pocket. He continued checking the body for identification, and, finding none, moved on to the other two with the same results. None carried ID of any kind, but all three had worn a medal around their necks.

Turning his back to the bodies, Bolan switched his earpiece receiver back on. The signal was strong and steady, and as he sprinted to the spot he had selected before the firefight broke out, the tone became solid. In the moonlight, Bolan could see the dim outline that had the correct dimensions for a shallow grave. When he stood over it, the earpiece told him he had found his mark.

He pulled the foot-long combat knife from its sheath and plunged it into the soft earth. Just as the hilt touched ground, the tip of the blade made contact. In the distance, Bolan could hear a new sound—the steady drone of a vehicle that sounded big. He didn’t know for sure how distant it was, but the way sound traveled over the moors, he thought he had at least five minutes before it would reach him. He began to claw at the grave, moving the loose soil to both sides. In less than a minute, he reached the body. Holding the penlight with his teeth, he saw that luck was with him—the end he had chosen to clear exposed Oxford’s head, the upper portion above the agent’s eyebrows mangled and singed around the edges by the point-blank shot that had taken his life. The bottom half of his face was smeared with dirt and, after three days in the grave, swollen beyond recognition.

Leaning forward, Bolan grabbed the corpse’s head and brushed the dirt away from its mouth. Placing the point of his combat knife at a spot directly beneath Oxford’s earlobe, he opened the agent’s cheek with a quick forward slice, revealing teeth that shone like pearls in the penlight’s beam. In the back of the dead man’s throat, insects scurried to escape the sudden illumination.

Bolan pushed the flap of bloodless skin away so he could insert the tip of his blade under the last molar. In the back of his mind, he was aware that the vehicle was drawing closer, coming slowly due to the winding roads, but approaching, nevertheless, at a steady pace. As he twisted the knife’s handle and the dead agent’s tooth popped free, Bolan wondered what had prompted its approach. Whether it was responding to the sound of gunfire traveling a great distance through the clear still night, or a missed call-in from the men waiting in ambush, the result was the same—there was no time to retrieve Oxford’s remains. But Bolan had the most important thing he had come for and he could mark the body’s location for a future pickup by placing his earpiece with the corpse.

He dropped the extracted molar into the same pocket containing the chains he had taken from his would-be ambushers, shoved his earpiece down the front of Oxford’s blood-enrusted sweater and hurriedly pushed the dirt back over the body. Just as he was finishing, he caught the glimpse of approaching headlights winding their way down the side of the shallow bowl-shaped valley less than a quarter of a mile away.

After smoothing the earth back over the shallow grave, he ran at full speed for a stand of trees and thick bushes about a hundred yards away. He had progressed less than ten feet into the woods when an SUV burst out of the adjacent hillside pasture onto the flat land of the moors, and the night was suddenly filled with the eardrum-splitting sounds of AK-47s chattering in full-automatic mode.

The air surrounding Bolan became a deadly beehive of activity as bullets whizzed by with the distinctive snaps of 7.62 mm bullets. He dived to the ground, scrambling for cover.