Kitabı oku: «Splinter Cell», sayfa 2
He was about to speak again—simply to buy more time—when he felt a light tapping on his left hip. Slowly glancing down to his side, the Executioner saw a little girl who could have been no more than eight years old. She wore a frilly pink-and-white dress, white anklets rolled down and black buckled shoes. Her sandy-blond hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail.
On the little girl’s face, Bolan saw terror. In her left hand was a Barbie doll with hair that matched her own.
But in her right hand was the barrel of the Glock.
Whoever had come into possession of the pistol after it had been thrown over the seats had determined that Bolan was on their side. The gun had been passed clandestinely to the passenger nearest Bolan, and that had been the little blond girl.
Bolan felt the hard plastic Glock in his fist as the little girl released the barrel.
“You saw what happened to the other men back here in coach,” the Executioner said to the terrorist. “But don’t you wonder about the man you had in first class?”
Bolan wondered, too. But it appeared that Paxton had taken care of the terrorist who had first given himself away to the Executioner. At least there had been no shots fired from the front of the craft. And no explosions.
As soon as the words had left the Executioner’s mouth, the man with the bomb glanced past him toward first class.
Bolan knew it was the best distraction he could pull off.
He brought the Glock out from behind the seat and snapped it up, pointing the barrel as if it were his finger and depressing the trigger at the same time. He saw the red hole appear in the forehead of the terrorist. At almost the same time the back of the man’s head blew out.
The screams, cries and moans returned as Bolan sprinted forward. The attaché case had fallen to the middle of the aisle, and now he dropped to one knee to look inside. His heart fell to his stomach when he saw that what had looked like a simple device from a distance was actually somewhat more complex.
At least a dozen wires—all in different colors—from the Semtex through the detonator to the timer. Most would be dummies that would have no effect at all if cut. But one would be an instant detonator that would override the timer and set off the plastic explosive immediately.
None of which would have been a problem if the timer wasn’t set. Bolan could simply fold the attaché case back up, take it to his seat and turn it over to Dutch authorities when they landed in Amsterdam.
But all hope of such a simple end to the problem flew from the Executioner’s thoughts as he looked at the timer. It had been set.
And the bomb was going to explode in 43 seconds.
THE EXECUTIONER REACHED down and lifted the kitchen timer in his hand, taking a long shot and simply pushing the start-stop button. As he’d suspected, it changed nothing. It had obviously been disconnected somewhere inside because the seconds continued ticking away.
By now, many of the passengers had recovered from shock. Questions assaulted him from all sides. Several of the passengers had unbuckled their seat belts and were starting to rise, curious to see what was inside the attaché case and what the Executioner was doing.
“Sit down! Everybody!” Bolan called out in a loud, authoritative voice that caused the men and women to drop immediately back down into their seats. As he turned back toward the front of the plane, he saw both Paxton and Margie running down the aisle to meet him. Paxton had another SIG-Sauer jammed into his belt, which could only mean that he’d successfully neutralized the first terrorist they’d spotted in first class.
Margie looked puzzled. But Paxton took it all in immediately. “How long have we got?” he asked.
The Executioner glanced back down to the timer. “Thirty-eight seconds,” he said. Turning his eyes quickly to Margie, he said, “Tell the captain to unlock the master lock to the main door in first class.” Margie started to turn.
“And tell him to slow speed to the bare minimum,” the Executioner added.
The woman nodded as she ran back in the direction from which she’d come.
“You’re going to try to throw that thing out the door?” Paxton asked incredulously.
“That’s the plan.”
“You open that door at this speed and altitude and you’ll get sucked out of the plane,” Paxton warned.
“That’s why I told her to have the pilot slow down,” Bolan said.
Paxton and Bolan sprinted back through the coach cabin into first class.
Bolan addressed the six men who were still seated there, their eyes wide in fear. “Quick! I need you to take off your belts and give them to me.”
Immediately, the men unbuckled themselves and began sliding their belts out of their pants. While they were so engaged, the Executioner turned back to Margie. “Get on the phone and tell the captain to drop the oxygen masks. It’ll give the passengers something to do,” he explained.
When the Executioner had gathered all six of the belts, he tossed three of them to Paxton. The Ranger had figured out what he had planned and he buckled one strip of leather through his own belt, then began linking the others together. Bolan did the same with the three belts in his hands, hoping the buckles and any other weak spots in the leather would hold.
The Executioner linked his last belt to that of Paxton’s, then turned to the cabin door. He had just enough length in the makeshift retention straps to reach the handle. Swiftly twisting it, he heard the whir of a million bees’ wings as he slid the door open. At the same time, he felt himself suddenly pulled forward. His own belt, attached to the leather chain, threatened to cut him in two the waist. He swallowed hard, trying to equalize the pressure in his ears as the atmosphere suddenly changed. Glancing downward, he saw that he had eight seconds left on the timer. He swallowed hard again. Even if the bomb didn’t explode, it felt as if his eardrums would.
Taking a final look down at the timer, the Executioner saw only the number 4. Before it could turn to 3, he leaned forward, assisted by the vacuum, and pushed the attaché case through the opening.
A second later, a barely audible popping sound issued forth through the galelike wind outside the doorway. The sound was so small—so seemingly insignificant in the distance—that it was almost an anticlimax to the near destruction and deaths it had almost caused. Bolan closed the door.
The threat was over. For now, at least.
But as the Executioner walked back and dropped into his seat, he knew that while his actions had saved the lives of the several hundred people on the plane, he had been unsuccessful in at least one way.
He and Paxton had flown commercial to keep a low profile upon entering the Netherlands. There was no chance of that now. By the time they touched down in Amsterdam the pilot would have radioed all that had happened aboard the 747 to the tower. There would be long interviews with police, which took time away from the mission. But worse than that, the airport would be a carnival of newsmen and-women shouting questions and popping flash in their faces.
Bolan and Brick Paxton would not go unnoticed, they’d be celebrities. Their pictures would be on the front page of every newspaper in Europe and quite possibly the rest of the world.
The Executioner leaned back against his seat, shut his eyes and frowned. Then, slowly, the corners of his mouth began to turn upward as a plan took shape in his mind.
A LIGHT SNOW HAD BEGUN falling over the city of Marken by the time Abdul Hassan slid his heavy overcoat over his navy blue blazer, placed the woven tweed fedora on his head and wrapped his muffler around his neck. He descended the back stairs of his hotel to avoid having to speak to the desk clerk but, as luck would have it, the hotel manager was sweeping the stairwell near the rear door when he reached the ground floor.
The manager looked up in surprise when he heard Hassan’s footsteps coming down the last flight of stairs. But he smiled. “It is not that cold outside,” he said in Dutch as he dumped the contents of his dustpan into the large rubber trash can he had rolled into the stairwell along with the broom. “You will soon be sweating.”
Hassan forced a laugh. He didn’t like surprises like this, didn’t like being noticed at all when he was in Marken. Which was why, while he lived only a few short miles away in Amsterdam, he always came to town the night before he was to meet his contact. And why he never stayed at the same hotel. But such coincidences were sometimes unavoidable, and he had his cover story ready, as always.
“You seem to forget,” Hassan replied in Dutch, “that I come from a country where 120-degree temperatures are not unusual. To me, it is freezing out there.”
The two exchanged another short, polite round of laughter. As Hassan reached for the door, the manager’s eyebrows lowered in either concern or curiosity—Hassan wasn’t sure which. But he expressed concern.
“You should use the front door,” the man said. “Marken is not a violent town like Amsterdam. Still, there is crime, and the alleys are not safe.”
Hassan shrugged. “I suppose you are right,” he said. “But I am only out for a short walk. And it is only a few steps down the alley from the door to the street. I will be all right.”
Now it was the manager’s turn to shrug. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But I will watch you from the door until you reach the sidewalk.”
“Thank you,” Hassan said and opened the door.
The manager had been correct—it was not cold enough outside for the way Abdul Hassan had dressed. He guessed the temperature to be only slightly below freezing, and the wind was light. Still, it chilled his face and hands as he stepped outside. His footsteps echoed hollowly along the bricks of the narrow alleyway, and he could see the light from the open door to the hotel reflecting off the walls to both his sides. It illuminated his path, and for that he was grateful.
He glanced behind him and saw that, as promised, the hotel manager was still watching him.
He walked casually along the pavement. He would take a roundabout route through the downtown area of Marken, doing his best to appear to be nothing more than his cover story claimed he was—an exporter of Holland’s wooden shoes to the Middle East. He was in town on business and bored in his hotel room.
The real reason for his walk, however, was to look for a tail. He had begun his relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency nearly three years before, which was a long time for such a relationship. He was only human, and he knew he had made many mistakes in the past that could have given him away to the more fundamentalist Muslims who had infiltrated Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. What was even more frightening was the fact that he knew he had to have made countless other mistakes of which he was not even aware.
Perhaps it was time to get out. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he could do that. He felt a tremendous responsibility to stop the terrorism his misguided fellow Arabs perpetrated. It gave everyone with the sharp features and dark skin of the Middle East a bad name, and made men and women suspicious of everyone who fit the profile.
Hassan didn’t even glance into the shoe-shop window as he passed. If someone was following him, he didn’t want the man remembering him as having any interest in the shoe shop at all. Tomorrow, he would leave through the same door to the alley by which he’d exited the hotel tonight, then follow a labyrinth of other alleys to another back door into the shoe shop.
There, he knew, he was to meet two new men.
The snow began to lighten as Abdul Hassan walked on, stopping occasionally to window-shop at businesses that had nothing to do with his work, and glancing casually behind him. He did the same at street corners as he waited for traffic lights to change, and turned randomly right and left whenever the mood struck him, or when he thought he’d seen a familiar figure behind him more than once. Each time, the men or women who had caught his attention eventually disappeared. Which meant that he was left wondering if he had simply imagined them following him, or if they might have turned the surveillance over to another agent.
Yes, Abdul Hassan nodded to himself as he finally turned back toward his hotel. Paranoia was definitely beginning to get the better of him.
But by the time he was within two blocks of his hotel, his mistrust had all but evaporated. He had seen no one on the way back that he had seen before, and he felt a sudden relaxation come over him. Either no one was interested in him, or they were so good at what they did that he would never spot them. If the latter was the case, there was nothing he could do about it. They would eventually kill him, and that would be that. Strangely, this realization brought on a certain calmness. He had done everything he could do.
Hassan slowed his pace, actually enjoying the walk now that he had given up his own counter-surveillance and warmed up. He stuffed his hands deeper into his coat pockets and felt the hilt of the pesh kabz dagger. The T-shaped blade was always reassuring to him. Even though it was of Persian and Northern India origin and he was not, he had chosen it because its original role had been to penetrate chain mail.
He assumed it would work just as well in penetrating the thick clothing worn against the Netherlands cold. He always carried the dagger unsheathed, letting the heavy wool of his coat and the other layers of clothing beneath the garment protect him from both the point and edges.
Hassan wrapped his fingers around the grip of the dagger as he walked on. There were two reasons he had left Syria for the Netherlands. The first was to escape the influence of the fundamentalist Muslims who insisted on restricting behavior to that more befitting the twelfth century than the twenty-first. The second reason was the heat. What he sometimes questioned, however, was why he had allowed himself to be recruited by Jim Campbell, who had been the CIA chief of station in Amsterdam when he’d first arrived. What was even more puzzling was why he’d stayed on after Campbell had been transferred and he’d been turned over to the ambitious man’s lackluster replacement, Felix Young.
Hassan thought of the man who had taken Campbell’s place. He rarely left his office, wherever that was—Hassan had to assume it was at the American Embassy after the fashion of all intelligence services the world over. The bottom line was that Hassan had done more work, accomplished far more, during the six months he’d worked for Campbell than in the two and a half years since his recruiter had been replaced.
The light turned and Abdul Hassan walked on. He could see the sign above his hotel ahead. Soon he would be inside and warm. He would get a good night’s rest, then meet with two new men from some other agency to which the CIA was turning him over. He hoped they would be more ambitious than Young, and that he would actually do some good in changing the way the world looked at Islam and Arabs at this point in history. As his heels clicked against the concrete, he thought of his own feelings of religion. He was hardly a man without sin, and he had always been especially susceptible to one sin in particular. His was a major sin for which he not only felt guilty but for which he might fall victim to death just as fast as he would if the terrorist faction in the Netherlands ever found out he was an informant for the Americans.
This thought not only sent guilt coursing through Hassan’s veins, but also it brought fear. And it was right in the middle of this fear that an arm suddenly reached out from a darkened doorway fifty feet from his hotel and jerked him off the sidewalk into the darkness.
Hassan smelled the strong odor of curry on his assailant’s breath. “Die, you bastard!” he heard a gruff voice say in Arabic.
A split second after that, something pushed hard against the side of his coat. Then it felt as if a pin or needle had pricked the bare skin beneath his garments.
Instinctively, Hassan drew the dagger from his coat pocket in a reverse grip. He could feel something still tangled in his overcoat as he reached up and wrapped his left arm around the back of his attacker’s neck. The Persian dagger rose high over his head, then came down with all of the force he could muster from his arm and shoulder, penetrating the other man’s clothing, skin, and burying itself deep within his heart.
Fear, anger and adrenaline now mixed in Abdul Hassan’s soul as he withdrew the dagger. He brought it up into the air once more, then thrust it down again as close to the same spot as he could. The man who had tried to kill him went limp in his arms, then slumped to the ground inside the doorway.
Hassan knelt, grabbed a sleeve of the man’s coat and used it to wipe the splattered blood from his face. His heart still beating like a kettle drum inside his chest, Hassan stood back up. He knew his coat would be soaked in blood so he would use the same side entrance to the hotel, secure in the fact that since the manager had already swept there it would be vacant now. He peered out from the doorway, looking quickly up and down the sidewalk.
There was no one else in sight.
Pulling a small penlight from the inside breast pocket of his overcoat, Hassan shone the tiny beam onto the dead features of the man he had just killed. The man’s eyes were open, staring lifelessly back at him.
But Hassan didn’t recognize the face. So he had no idea whether the attempted murder had come from his association with the CIA or from his private sin.
Using the penlight now to check himself, in addition to the blood Hassan saw that the hilt of a broad-bladed dagger still extended from his coat just beyond where he had felt the pinprick. He pulled out the knife and saw only the tiniest drop of blood on the tip. The wide, leaf-shaped blade had been a poor choice for assassination through heavy clothing.
It was not the kind of weapon a professional killer would choose on a cold night when men wore heavy layers of clothing. Which led him to believe the would-be assassin was an amateur, and that, in turn, answered his earlier question.
His relationship with the Americans was still secure. This attack was directly related to his personal sin rather than his work for them.
The man lying dead in the doorway had come to kill him for reasons personal rather than political.
2
“They told me you speak Dutch and Arabic,” Bolan said to Paxton as he grabbed the man’s elbow and pointed him toward the passenger terminal’s freight reception area in the distance. They had excited the plane through a hatch that led to the cargo hold, where they donned the overalls that baggage handlers wore.
“More Dutch than Arabic,” the Army Ranger said. “I’m not exactly what you’d call fluent in either. But I can hear enough Dutch right now to know that everybody—cops, reporters and airport officials—are all looking for us. The passengers are keeping their word and covering for us, saying we’re getting off last.”
“That should give us some time, then,” the Executioner said. “Come on.”
They quickly reached the freight area, where they passed several other men dressed in similar coveralls. The men didn’t give them a second look. Ducking into a stairwell to the side of the large room, Bolan led Paxton up the steps to the next landing and peered through a window in the door. What he saw looked more like a freight expedition area than what he wanted, so he said, “Let’s try one more level.”
The two men jogged up the next flight of steps, taking them two at a time.
This time, the Executioner looked through the window and saw what appeared to be a boarding room. Quickly stripping off their coveralls, he and Paxton dropped them in the stairwell and stepped out onto the carpet.
The excitement created by the attempted hijacking hadn’t seemed to reach this level of the terminal yet, and Bolan led the way past a duty-free shop and several ticket desks to a sign that read Passport Control in a variety of languages. He waited as an elderly couple got their passports stamped, then stepped up to the desk and pulled his own small blue book from inside his coat.
The uniformed man behind the counter glanced at the picture in the American passport, then Bolan’s face, and asked in English, “Business or pleasure, Mr. Cooper?”
“Primarily business,” Bolan answered. Then he smiled. “But I’ve never been to Amsterdam without having a good time, either.”
The uniformed official chuckled under his breath, stamped the passport and handed it back. “Have fun,” he said.
Bolan waited to the side as Brick Paxton handed the same man the passport Stony Man Farm had come up with for him. He was traveling under the name John Henry McBride, who was a general building contractor. The Executioner had learned that Paxton had worked construction during the summers when he’d been in high school, and had more than a passing knowledge of the business. So that was to be both men’s cover from now on. If anyone asked, they were in the Netherlands to check into both commercial and residential construction for the Brown Realty Holdings Company, out of Chicago, Illinois.
As soon as “McBride’s” passport had been stamped they were waved quickly through customs. They didn’t look like drug smugglers, but it wouldn’t have mattered much if they had in a country where most drugs were legal. The nonchalance shown by the Dutch customs officers reminded the Executioner of an old saying among drug abusers: “Taking your own dope to Amsterdam is like taking your wife to Paris.”
An elevator took them back down to the ground level, and they stepped out through the revolving doors of the terminal. Two minutes later Bolan had flagged down a cab. The cabbie took one look at the two men and immediately sized them up as Americans. “No luggage?” he asked in a thick Dutch accent.
Bolan shook his head. “We shipped it ahead of us.”
The cabbie wore a plaid driving cap with a short bill as he got back inside behind the wheel. “Where to?” he asked.
“The American Embassy,” the Executioner said.
The driver glanced up into the rearview mirror, the fact that he was impressed evident in his eyes. Without another word, he threw the cab into Drive and took off at breakneck speed, dodging in, out and around other vehicles with the daring for which certain cabdrivers are known the world over.
Forty-five minutes later they came to a screeching halt beneath an American flag mounted atop a pole sticking up out of a thick concrete wall. It waved in the breeze as if welcoming them as they got out.
Two U.S. Marine Corpsmen stood guard at the gate. Bolan and Paxton showed the men their passports. One of the Marines checked the list on the clipboard in the guard cubicle just inside the walls, then opened the gate and waved them in. The other Marine escorted them up a set of steps and into the building. He knocked loudly on a first-floor door at the rear of the embassy and waited for it to be opened.
When the door was answered, a short, overweight man chewing on one of the earpieces of a pair of reading glasses stood just inside the office.
“Mr. Cooper and Mr. McBride,” the Marine said. Then, with a stiff salute, he pivoted away from them and marched back down the hall.
“Come in. My name is Felix Young,” the short man said with one of the least enthusiastic tones of voice Bolan had ever heard. He was dressed in brown slacks below a pale blue sweater vest, with white shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The knot of his necktie had been pulled down almost to the end of the V in the vest, and his general appearance was one of slovenliness. The office was in a similar state, with stacks of paper cluttering his desk, several tables and the tops of a half-dozen filing cabinets. Ashtrays scattered throughout the room overflowed with cigarette butts, and the stale smell of smoke hung in the air like the fog of a London morning.
Bolan’s eyes fell to a stack of luggage in the corner of the office. The suitcases and other bags were the only items in the office not covered in a thin coat of gray ash—which meant they couldn’t have been in the room very long. They likely contained Bolan’s and Paxton’s clothing and other gear, including their weapons, all of which had been flown over from America in diplomatic pouches.
Felix Young dropped into his seat behind the desk. Bolan and Paxton both looked around, but the chairs in front of the desk were as cluttered with paperwork as the rest of the furniture so they remained standing.
“I don’t know exactly who you are,” Young said in a tone that had only slightly more character and inflection in it than had his self-introduction. “And I don’t know exactly why you’re here.” He opened the top middle drawer of his desk, retrieved a crumpled package of unfiltered cigarettes. When he’d lit a cigarette, he went on. “And I’m not sure I want to know.” He drew in a lungful of smoke and looked up at the ceiling with complete uninterest.
Bolan was quickly tiring of the listless bureaucrat. The man was CIA—that much he knew because Hal Brognola had told him. As to any further information about Felix Young, the Executioner could only guess that he was nearing retirement, had lost all enthusiasm for his work and would be happy as long as the two men standing in front of his desk didn’t create any extra work for him.
Young more or less voiced those thoughts himself by saying, “Keep in mind that whatever you do here, we’re going to get blamed for it.” He looked down from the ceiling but met Bolan’s eyes for only a second before turning his gaze to a wall. “CIA, CIA, CIA,” he breathed out with another chestful of smoke. “The whole world blames everything that happens on the CIA.”
Paxton was losing patience with the man, too. “I don’t see how they could blame too much on you,” he said.
Young merely pointed toward the luggage. “All of your stuff is in the corner there,” he said. “So just take it.”
Paxton moved toward the bags but Bolan stayed in place. “I believe you have something else for us,” he said.
Young frowned. It was obvious his mind had already moved from Bolan and Paxton to something else. “Oh,” he finally said. “Yeah.” Opening the same drawer where he’d found the cigarettes, he pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper and spread it out on the desk. Pushing it down with both hands in an attempt to flatten it, he finally lifted the paper again and handed it across the desk to Bolan. “Here. Try not to burn the guy, okay?”
Bolan stuffed the rumpled page into his pocket. He couldn’t see how burning the informant Young was turning over to him would have much effect on the listless CIA man one way or another. It could get the snitch killed, of course. But it didn’t appear that the man behind the desk planned on using him any more than he had to. Or doing anything else that required any effort, either.
Without further words, Bolan joined Paxton and the two men lifted the various bags from the corner of the office and left. The Executioner felt both disgust and relief as they walked back down the hall. The disgust came from seeing a man like Young who had lost all enthusiasm for his work and now did nothing but punch the time clock while he waited for retirement. But the fact that the CIA officer didn’t appear to have any plans of interfering with what he and Paxton were about to do was a relief.
THERE HAD BEEN no euphoria left in him by the time Phil Paxton awakened.
Only terror.
Phil looked around the semilit room as he came to his senses and wondered if he might not still be asleep. Was this a dream? He closed his eyes once more, hoping it was. But the reality of the situation, and the memory of what had happened, came flooding back to his mind and forced his eyelids open again.
The undisputed realization that the room he was in was a cell hit him between the eyes like a two-by-four. The walls were made of jagged stone, and overhead he saw rough-hewn wooden beams. It looked like something out of a horror movie, a place where Frankenstein’s monster might live, or where Dracula might keep his coffin to sleep in during the daylight. Maybe where the Wolfman would chain himself up during full moons in the hope that the chains might prevent him from ripping people apart with his long teeth and fangs.
The thought of chains led Phil Paxton to look down at the steel handcuffs encircling his wrists. The chain between the two cuffs was attached to another chain that ran around his waist. That restraint, in turn, was secured by a large sturdy padlock.
Phil Paxton’s back and legs felt as if they were in ice packs. Looking down, he saw that he was seated on the smoother stone of the floor. A painful twist of his cold and stiff neck told him his back rested against the wall, and condensation glistening off the stones had soaked through his shirt. For some reason, that sudden knowledge—that his shirt was wet and likely to remain that way—caused him to shiver more than any other of the morbid details that were just now registering with him.
As Phil continued to shake with both cold and fear, his mind began to race. Where the hell was he? He had been kidnapped, he remembered, as the events that had taken place before he lost consciousness suddenly flooded back into his memory. The taxi. The alley. The lights from outside and suddenly being jerked out of the vehicle. The hood coming down over his head and then the needle in his arm, which brought on elation and then oblivion.
