Kitabı oku: «Path To War», sayfa 5

CHAPTER FOUR

Colonel Yoon Kimsung was livid. Before embarking on Pyongyang’s African venture, he had considered everything that could go wrong. The list was short, but it was so rife with potential grave danger the operation could spiral down into a disastrous misadventure before the first shot was fired in anger.

First, there was the scheme—approved in person by Kim Jong-Il—to ingratiate themselves to Arab fanatics, thus allowing them to land their private jet, complete with suitcase nuke on board, at a remote desert airstrip run by lunatics he would have never sought out on his own. By and large, the Muslim fundamentalists—mindless brutes who blew themselves up on a regular basis and claimed it was for the glory of their religion and God—weren’t to be trusted. Who could, in all rationale and reason, ally themselves with savages who didn’t even place the first scintilla of value on their own lives, believed their own rubbish about some afterlife where they would float away to this Paradise and their god, swarmed by seventy virgin beauties if they murdered scads of innocent people? Oh, but the horror, the stupidity of such creatures, he thought. Killing, though, had never been a problem where he was concerned. Since he was Special Forces, he was often placed in charge of hunting down and eradicating rebels in the North Korean countryside who sought to oust Kim Jong-Il, or outspoken rabble who needed their thinking re-shaped by swift and merciless beatings.

Suicide, however, was for fools.

Then there was this business in Casablanca. He’d been forced to leave two of his commandos in the city at the request of the American, supposedly to pay the fanatics a cash tribute, and he hadn’t heard from his men. They were hours overdue, in fact, for a callback. His commandos never failed to obey orders, no matter what their situation. That alone should have signaled trouble had found them. If they were captured, he knew them well enough—what with their training and fear of retribution—to know they would never talk to the authorities. On the other hand, he couldn’t be sure about the Arab fanatics, say if a legal net had dropped over them, and Moroccan agents or law enforcement went to work in ways on their bodies that left little to the imagination.

In some perverse way he didn’t quite understand himself, he was proud that Kim Jong-Il had placed him solely in charge of carrying out the mission of the ages in Angola. His country, after all—cut off from the world, sanctioned and branded as part of this so-called Axis of Evil—was in desperate need of fuel, food, mineral resources. As far as that went, Angola, swimming in diamonds and oil, could beef up his nation’s military with all the uranium, plutonium, centrifuges, upgraded delivery systems and other component parts necessary to shoot them to the top of the nuclear superpower heap. The battle for Angola hadn’t yet dawned, but when it did, and he was standing, tall and proud on the winning side, there would be enough diamonds and oil for sale to other countries tagged as rogue states by America to buy what was needed to turn North Korea into a warring giant. That they were considered an outlaw nation by America and the West only strengthened Pyongyang’s resolve, he knew, to become the world’s premier military behemoth.

Pygonyang had its eye toward the future, and tomorrow, even years after, conquest of other nations fueled the hopes and dreams of a country feared and snubbed by the rest of the world.

Grim concern number two was the fact that the superiors of the American mercenaries had arranged the delivery and sale of the nuclear suitcase, had found operatives from his own country, stationed in Myanmar, Cambodia and other Southeast Asian nations, who could pull strings with Pyongyang. Yes, the United States was well aware of his country’s nuclear proliferation, but the risk that American operatives were luring them into a trap with, ostensibly, their desire to purchase a suitcase nuke, was always foremost in his thoughts. When too many individuals knew too much about any covert operation, there was always plenty of room for anxiety.

At the moment, as the sound and fury of battle raged around the camp, Kimsung was furious that the plan looked to be in danger of unraveling into the dreams of dead men.

He was on the heels of Baraka, one of his insolent soldiers lugging the eighty-pound suitcase. Their subguns were fanning the chaos as Kimsung spotted the gunships, perhaps five total, scissoring above the camp. For the moment they appeared content to unleash miniguns and rockets on the north edge, but the manner in which the fireballs rose into the black sky, with saffron flashes that hurtled torn stick figures into the air on bright mushroom clouds, warned him the assault would find its way to the motor pool.

“You and your men get to the motor pool, Colonel! We’re bailing!”

Kimsung, flanked by his two top lieutenants, Unsan and Horyin, bared his teeth at Baraka. Armed with nothing but a Browning Hi-Power pistol, delivered to him by the fanatics when he landed at their airstrip, Kimsung found the mercenaries breaking open crates, unzipping large duffel bags. “Give us something more than these pistols we carry!”

Baraka wheeled, his eyes bugged with anger. “The hell you say. I can’t risk you and your guys getting chopped down here!”

“We protect ourselves!” Kimsung shouted above the clamor of explosions, autofire and the general pandemonium of distant shouts and screams.

“This is business, Colonel. You leave the shooting to us!”

“Yes, this is business that you do not seem to be handling all that well at present! Give us weapons! I will not place my safety and the safety of my commandos squarely in your hands! I will stand here and be shot down before that happens, do you understand me?”

Baraka cursed, but gave the order. One of the mercenaries began tossing HK MP-5 subguns their way as the other Americans hauled out bazookas or shoved spare clips for their weapons inside their wastebands. Kimsung demanded and received a few extra magazines. He slapped the magazine home, cocked and locked, his lieutenants likewise armed and prepared in the event the fighting tore into the vicinity. He held his ground, aware his men would protect the suitcases, stuffed with cash, with their lives, watching as the sky strobed with more explosions, tents all but wiped off the face of this desolate earth.

Listening as Baraka barked orders at his men, the gist of it being several of them would be left behind to guard their rear, Kimsung thought he saw a big tall shadow, armed with an assault rifle, there then gone as the weapon blazed, cutting down four or five Arabs. Whoever he was, he appeared to be moving in their direction, from the southeast, using the tents to leapfrog and conceal. A quick but hard search of the area and he didn’t find any other shadows on the move. He wasn’t sure why—perhaps it was the cold way in which the big shadow had mowed the Arabs down with such lightning deadly proficiency—but a warning bell clanged in his head.

“Get the hell out of here, Colonel!”

Flashing Baraka a scowl, Kimsung began navigating a swift course between the tents as he heard autofire erupting too close for his comfort. Looking back, he spotted two of the mercs taking hits, bloody divots gouged in their upper chests, Baraka flailing about, cursing and triggering his subgun at adversaries he couldn’t see. Gathering momentum, he was closing on the motor pool when the first blast ripped through the vehicles.

KHALIFAH HOUDTA SUSPECTED treachery. Supposedly, the Islamic jihad in Morocco was both approved and protected by officers high up in the military. Naturally, they were paid handsomely, a few politicians who leaned more to the radical side of Islam likewise receiving fat envelopes on a biweekly basis. In short, they were granted refuge, allowed even to bring in fighters from neighboring Algeria or farther east from Libya and Somalia, cannon fodder for the jihad, but Muslim recruits, just the same, who could be shipped out to launch suicide missions. And with operations on the drawing board, days away even from being launched, simultaneous attacks in Casablanca and Saudi Arabia…

Why, then, were they being attacked?

The only possible answer, he believed, was that the Americans and their North Korean counterparts had called in a strike. But why? Had he and his brothers outlived their usefulness to the infidels? Had they been used as cover for the deal for the suitcase nuke, the infidels now prepared to flee, perhaps having aimed the authorities here, a smoke screen to seal the backs of a sudden vanishing act? Whichever it was, he would leave the questions hanging for the time being, as he shouted at his warriors to go after their alleged guests, sounding the orders for the big shots to be taken alive, if possible.

As he ran, heading south, navigating his path through the maze of stone dwellings and tents, a large contingent of perhaps twenty-plus warriors surrounding him, he considered that, by all rights, the suitcase nuke should belong to the Islamic jihad. After all, it was their country, and without the arrangements his cousins in holy war had negotiated with both the Americans and the North Koreans there would have been no deal. He passed on the order to find and seize the suitcase nuke, relaying that for the ones who took it back they would receive a cash bonus. Even among the holiest of warriors, he knew money still commanded steely determination.

AK-74 up and ready to blast, twin mags taped together for a quick flip and load, he was running hard past the final row of tents when he heard the massive explosion. The fireball climbed high above the large tent where he knew the Americans were gathered. Another blast rocked the night, and Houdta, recognizing voices bellowing in English, figured they were just around the corner of the stone ruins to his nine o’clock. A check of the sky around him on the fly, and he didn’t find any gunships in the vicinity, no rockets streaking past telling him the motor pool was being decimated by an aerial bombardment. Then what? Or who? With luck he hoped the North Koreans came to the same conclusion that the American dogs of war had duped them.

There was always room ready to be made for new buyers.

Houdta ran on, hopeful he could make the North Koreans see reason.

THE BATTLE GOING STRAIGHT to hell began to live up to Bolan’s grimmest expectations.

Two Hummers and a Ford Bronco were pulped to flying scrap by his opening 40-mm missiles, the soldier dumping another HE round into the M-203’s breech when a second warring faction began unloading weaponsfire on the group he assumed belonged to Baraka. As he grabbed cover behind a mound of rubble from some forgotten dwelling, he glimpsed three North Koreans hurling themselves back between the tents, wreckage winging out for their falling shapes, a sharp cry echoing from their drop site. Hindsight being for losers and the dead, Bolan determined he’d gut it out until they began to board the vehicles.

“Give us the suitcase nuke and we let you go your way!”

“Up yours!”

“You will die! We have you outnumbered four to one at the very least!”

“Then we take as many of you jackoffs to hell with us as we can!”

In the fire and kerosene light, the Executioner made out the swarthy, bearded faces poking out from the sides of tents and piles of rubble, AK-74s and AKMs now silent as whoever the terrorist in charge again shouted his demand. If nothing else, Bolan knew the suitcase nuke was within his grasp. His problems getting his hands on it, though, were obvious, and damn serious. Forty, maybe fifty shooters, fueled on anger, hate, greed and adrenaline, were hell bent on going the distance.

So be it. He’d been here before. What he could use was a little help from friendlies.

Tachjine and troops, he found, were still blanketing the campsite with heavy gunship fusillades, waves of debris and mangled mannequins that were once human beings now airborne and skydiving closer to this Moroccan standoff at his end. Somewhere he made out the heavy metal thunder of Russian DshK machine guns he’d seen on Tachjine’s aerial photos, big monsters, he knew, that could pound out 12.7 mm armor-piercing rounds in that could chew up a chopper in seconds flat. The warrior was scouting the action in the air when one of Tachjine’s Cobras was suddenly enveloped in a boiling fireball. In that direction he saw dozens of flaming fingers, autofire raking the other gunships, no doubt an RPG or two wielded in the hands of the extremist snakes.

Before striking out on his own, Tachjine had given him a tactical handheld radio, setting the frequency for him that also tied him into his FBI team. Bolan needed some air fire support if he had any hope of beating the house odds here. He reached for his belt—and plucked up a handful of shattered junk, swore and chucked it to the ground. The second group of five he’d dusted had prove themselves quicker on the draw. A line of blood was trickling down his scalp from a near miss, and another round had obviously cut off any communication with Tachjine.

On his own, then.

The Executioner heard a few more seconds of bitter argument, opting to hurl an HE round or two into both enemy sides, when someone on the American team half roared, “Suck on this!”

A massive explosion tore through the heart of the Arabs, then armed figures on both sides came unhinged, charging one another in a suicidal blaze of weaponsfire that defied all reason.

HANK MACNEARY DIDN’T HAVE a problem with drugs. Or, rather, he had no difficulty in consuming vast quantities of whatever controlled substance was available. Indulgence of mood-altering chemicals could well be, he briefly considered, one of the reasons he’d been booted out of the Army. That, and he didn’t much agree with having to salute a Captain or Lieutenant Colonel Wonder Woman, unless it was done with the middle finger and his tongue hanging out. Being a good old Texas boy, women knew their place, and it damn sure wasn’t anywhere near a battlefield, as far as he was concerned.

And the way he saw drug use, any upper—speed, coke, meth—lent a hard-charging, balls-to-the-wall grunt the kind of edge that turned him into Godzilla. No fear, no mercy, no hesitation. Roll on and squash the opposition underfoot like pathetic little bugs. When Commander Baraka had handed him a few viles of the magic potion, meant to turn ordinary grunts into supersoldiers, or so the man’s brief went, he was game, and then some. Voluntary injections?

Forget about it.

A quick plunge of the hypodermic into the rippling blue-purple vein below his massive bicep, as the world around him shattered on with explosions, autofire and the screams of men getting churned up all to hell and gone, and he was already beaming up from Z-Clops. He giggled to himself how the firestorms, touched off around the camp where lanterns and barrels had gushed their incendiary loads, were providing a light show he thought of as the perfect LZ for the mothership.

“Come and take me away, sweet mama!”

Man, but it was sweet, he thought, his whole body—no, his entire being, the man-warrior inside, swelling up with a dirigible of euphoria, his skin tingling, mind telling him he was already on another planet. No, this wasn’t Gulf II, where a buddy of his in Task Force Bull Rhino 101 received a package of Peruvian marching dust from a dealer back in the States once a month—hell, he decided, feeling so light on his feet he believed he was ready to sprout wings and take off, it was better! There was some type of steroid derivative in the juice, he knew, and if it worked as well as the lightning-bolt high electrifying his senses he wished to hell he’d had this stuff when he’d been pumping iron before joining Big Uncle’s Army. Sure, back then he had morphed himself from a scrawny 175 to a strapping 210, with, of course, some assistance from steroids, only this heaven firing him up, his mind laughing and shouting back at him he was an invulnerable killing automaton….

And here he was, at long last, a god among mere mortals, armed with his weapon of choice, an Israeli Galil with a 50-round detachable box, and ready to slay Islamic demons.

Invincible!

And looking for fanatic insects to squelch.

At least five of his teammates, he knew, were likewise flying along, men of steel, their weapons now chattering out long streams of autofire, hosing the fanatic rabble that had the unmitigated gall to believe they had the stones to break the back of their shooting rush across the stretch of no-man’s turf.

No chance.

Bye-bye.

A slab of one of their vehicles came pounding down to MacNeary’s one o’clock as the extremists screamed, spun, dropped, sliced and diced to ribbons so bad he figured there wouldn’t be enough goo left to scrape up with a spatula. He was taking hits—damn straight, as expected—but they were little more than bee stings, as he tasted the salty wetness on his lips, a few more insignificant needles jabbing him, up and down. Cover!? Screw that, he heard his mind laugh, blowing two more terror mongers off their feet, riddling their fallen corpses with a stream of 5.56 mm rounds until they were eviscerated sacks of dung. He didn’t need any cover! Cover was for female grunts and candyass officers of both sexes!

“Didn’t anybody warn you fools?” he shouted, the air lashed with sharp grunts and howls of pain as he fired on. “Godzilla has come to Morocco! Bring it on, you insects!”

BARAKA FROZE in backpedal, his HK MP-5 falling silent. Whatever Z-Clops had done to at least a squad worth of his commandos, it was a fearsome sight, and one he didn’t enjoy beholding. They were wading into a wall of full-metal jackets, their bodies absorbing hits, clean strikes all, but they were in the ozone, no puppets on the string these robotic behemoths. A dozen or so Arabs who had come thinking they would gladly trade their lives in exchange for the suitcase nuke were swept off their feet by the opening barrage of autofire from his drug-crazed Terminators. But where ten or more dropped like flies under his commandos’ blistering sledgehammers of lead, another squad of fanatics charged out of the fiery halo to the north, firing long bursts of autofire on the run, screaming the familiar Islamic war cry. Whether they were hit in the chest, legs, arms, jerking this way and that, the Z-Clops force kept on going, changing clips, then back to unleashing wild sweeps of autofire in less time than it took to blink. It shot through his mind that if he could field a controlled army under the influence…

The world was his.

Not this night. He’d be damn grateful just to make it out of here, board the choppers and scoot for the border.

The motor pool and those gunships were his gravest concern at the moment. With evac looking as dicey as the mental states of his slaughtering robots, the good news was that there appeared to be enough Arab shooters left around the camp to keep the Cobras and Hueys occupied. Another Cobra erupted in a fire cloud, this time over the heart of the camp. He had to give the Islamic fighters due credit for manning the big Russian guns, others clearly holding bloody real estate, jetting off RPG warheads.

Going the distance.

And a Huey was shot down in flames to his two o’clock, a flaming comet leaping from the hull, all shrieks and windmilling arms before he slammed to his final resting place.

“Fall back!” Baraka bellowed at his commandos to the rear of the automatons, fearful of losing any more warriors as one of the robots finally toppled, blood and brain matter spurting from his burst skull. Even as he fell—Gadsen from Alabama, he recognized—roaring something that was whipped away by the hellish din of battle, his HK-33 flamed on until the clip burned out.

Baraka felt a smidge of relief as they fell in, a ring of ten shooters garnered around his march.

And still another two vehicles were blasted off the face of the desert plateau, Baraka squinting as the blinding light pierced his eyes, the North Koreans shrieking curses as debris rocketed through the tents flanking them.

“One man!”

Baraka found Kimsung and his commandos hanging back, crouched at the edge of the tents. “What?”

Pointing east, Kimsung shouted, “There is only one man out there! Do you think you can take care of one commando who is keeping us from leaving this fiasco?”

One guy? Baraka thought.

What manner of warrior would be stupid or insane or reckless enough to attempt to take on twenty—or a few less now—of the best shooters on earth? Baraka heard the thunder of a Gatling gun, flinched as the canvas beside him was shredded. He was hitting the deck when he heard one of his commandos bellow. A quick eyeful of the Gustav anti-armor, shoulder-mounted rocket launcher belching its 84 mm projectile, and Baraka tracked the warhead as it slammed into the nose of a Huey. He was on his feet as the flaming shell floated to earth on tendrils of black smoke and gushing fire.

“Just one asshole, huh?” he heard Engels snarl, as the big man shouldered a bull path through him, then elbowed Kimsung out of the way. “I’ll take care of this nonsense!”

TO GAPE AND WONDER about what he viewed on the killing fields wasn’t something Bolan normally did under combat stress. Still, the soldier stole a few seconds in an attempt to determine if Baraka’s cutthroats were insane, suicidal or…

Drugs, he concluded. Figure speed, maybe meth or some synthetic derivative had them so clearly whacked out, the way they charged the enemy guns and certain death, it stood to reason they may even be psychotic. Even at fifty years or so, he could see the wild light of animal fury in their bulging eyes, their faces running in sweat, bellows of rage and war cries so loud he imagined they could reach and shimmy the heavens above. Whatever kept them pumped, they weren’t going down easy, even when they were cored by autofire with enough holes to turn them into human Swiss cheese. And Bolan could see bloody exit holes punched out their lower backs, between the shoulder blades, all but dispelling any notion they were donning body armor.

Quick reassessment number two was the 20 mm Vulcan Gatling guns in the beds of three oversize military jeep 4x4s of undetermined make and origin, complete with what appeared outfitted housings of either TOWs or Stingers. Those Baraka Specials, as he thought of the souped-up wheels with their maneating loads, weren’t quite aligned at the moment for a 40 mm scrap heap touch. That, and two berserkers whirled around the corner of the tent, HK subguns flaming, and on-line, snaring the warrior’s full and undivided grim attention. Their converging streams of fire were near laser-beam perfect, stone shrapnel exploding on either side of Bolan. They either had already pinned down his position, he thought, or whatever the fire in their veins had blessed them with extrasensory perception, but of the chemical variety.

And with the enemy damn near sprinting for his hiding hole, Bolan knew he had but a few seconds to counterattack.

Hunched, the Executioner bolted away from the subguns, detonating chunks of stone, needles and spikes of the bitter hard earth slashing off his neck and the back of his skull.

And not moment too soon. As the blast crunched off in the Executioner’s wake, the zombie killers hurled grenades. Whether Lady Luck was smiling on him from her gilded throne or not, the soldier tumbled down into a crevice, shrapnel blazing over his head. The narrow strip, carved out by the wrath of Mother Nature long ago, was just deep enough for Bolan to lurch up and draw a bead on Zombie One.

Head shots were the obvious and only response.

Flicking his selector switch to single-shot mode, the Executioner squeezed the M-16’s trigger and drilled a 5.56 mm round through the side of Zombie One’s skull. Incredibly, though, the man-thing only twitched, his subgun hosing the ground, but winging out a line of bullets zipping up divots in Bolan’s direction. Beyond the chaos of his engagement, as Zombie Two wheeled and cut loose with his HK MP-5, the soldier heard engines revving to life, men shouting and shooting in the distance somehow a surreal sideshow to the freak parade he was up against.

Finally—what felt like thirty minutes but was only more like four or five seconds in real time—Zombie One folded up like an accordion, hit the earth and spent a few more moments convulsing out the final nerve spasms. Then Bolan braved the dust and rock tempest hurled in his face, bringing his assault rifle on-line as he felt another burst of adrenaline race through his blood, and smashed a big ragged hole between Zombie Two’s eyes. Another two quick caresses of the trigger for good measure, and Bolan took off half his skull before he toppled.

That left one zombie, or so he hoped.

The return firestorm was searching him out, the soldier feeling hot slipstreams tugging at his earlobes as Zombie Three rushed and roared obscenities. Dropping down, Bolan armed a frag grenade.

Enough.

Already he had glimpsed two or three enemy vehicles beating a hard flight across the desert, but survival became his gravest concern. And if Baraka had thrown him a few sacrificial lambs to cover his fast exit…

Why not oblige the man?

Bolan shuffled away from the swarm of bullets chewing up the lip of the crevice, and popped up, hoping his mental gauge of his target was on the money. He whipped the steel egg in a sideways motion, sent it nearly skimming across the ground. It bounced up, maybe three feet but on a perfect intercept course with the superhardman. Bolan turned away, dropped his head beneath the lip as the lethal baseball blew, then looked back at the roiling cloud and—

Zombie Three, or what was left of him, shuddered to his feet!

How the hardman could survive getting shoved through a shrapnel grinder, and rise, minus an arm and half his face and skull sheared to the bone…

Bolan didn’t waste another second wondering about the impossible. He shot him three times in the head.

WHEN IT CAME to America’s War on Terror, Special Agent Andy Dawkins always figured himself one-for-all, all-for-one. In short, he was a team player, a veteran agent with scores of arrests, with a few commendations and citations stapled to his sterling track record. But it seemed as if his task was never finished to any emotion resembling satisfaction or gratitude, and he often wondered if the battle against international terrorism could ever be won. The world had become a far more dangerous, sinister and darker place since 911, he knew, but at least the rules of engagement had changed.