Pirate Offensive Read online

  “So, how much we pull in selling this crap?” asked Private Synder as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

  Sergeant Waybridge merely smiled. “You’ll be earning about a grand week under the table. That enough?”

  The private almost gagged. “Shit, yes! A grand.... Who do we sell this stuff to, anyway?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “Anybody who can pay. Farmers, fisherman, shepherds, shopkeepers, priests...”

  “Priests! But not, like, the enemies of America, right?”

  “You getting scruples now?”

  “Well...no. Just don’t want to get shot by our own guns.”

  “That’ll never happen with The Scorpion here.” The sergeant affectionately patted the control panel attached to a humming generator. Thick cables snaked across the walls to disappear into the ceiling. On the panel, the glowing green arm of a miniature radar screen swept around and around, showing nothing of importance in the area—land, sea or sky.

  The pulsed energy projectile laser, or PEP, was one of the newest, and least deadly, pieces of field ordnance in the American arsenal. About the size and shape of a common refrigerator, the 500-pound machine was generally attached to an APC, or light tank, and issued a multiphasing laser beam that vaporized the outer layer of anything it hit. The blast was extremely painful but nonlethal. However, sending the searing sting across a crowd easily drove away civilians and soldiers alike. It was difficult for a soldier to shoot back at an enemy when it felt like firecrackers were exploding on his skin.

  “With this baby, we can empty entire villages,” added Sergeant Waybridge with a note of pride in his voice. “Then just pick and choose whatever we want to take.”

  “How did you even get this?” Private Synder asked warily. “I would have thought it’d travel surrounded by a full platoon and air cover.”

  “It did,” Waybridge said. “But they got caught in friendly fire, and I scattered around enough spare parts to convince everybody it had been hit with an IED.”

  “Clever. Ah...you didn’t have anything to do with...”

  “I just sell junk, boot,” Waybridge replied, resting a hand on the Colt .45 on his hip. “I’m no fucking traitor.”

  * * *

  SUDDENLY A LIGHT began flashing out on the water.

  Pulling down a pair of night vision binoculars, Private Synder scanned the outside world. “One ship, big,” he reported. “No flag...and that’s not Morse code they’re flashing.”

  “Because I don’t deal with idiots,” snorted Sergeant Waybridge, sitting upright. “It’s my own code. Each customer gets an ID. If they flash it wrong, no deal.”

  “They’re showing...triple-dash-dot?”

  “Ah, that’s Captain Narmada. Fancies himself a pirate.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit. Wait, did you say one ship? Not six fishing trawlers?”

  “Nope, just one. Huge thing. Kind of looks like an old destroyer...”

  Jumping out of his chair, Waybridge grabbed another pair of binoculars and adjusted the focus. “I don’t like change,” he muttered uneasily. “Perhaps we’d better—”

  With a loud bang, the bunker’s rear door was thrown open wide, and a pair of masked people entered, cutting loose with Heckler & Koch G11 automatic weapons. The two American soldiers desperately clawed for their sidearms, but the hail of 4.73 mm caseless rounds tore them apart, chunks of flesh, bone and uniform splattering across the sandbag walls.

  As they fell, XO Chung stepped closer and administrated an additional two rounds from his old Colt .45 directly into their foreheads. “Don’t like Americans?” Lieutenant Fields asked, removing a spent clip and inserting a fresh one from the brace on top of her weapon.

  “Don’t like traitors,” Chung growled, breathing heavily.

  “Whatever.” She touched her throat mike. “Sir, we have the egg,” she reported, slinging her weapon over a shoulder. “Send in the technicians and LAV-25.”

  “Excellent,” replied Captain Narmada over the radio. “No damage to the controls or generator?”

  “Nothing paper towels can’t clean.”

  “Amusing. Leave everything else. The laser is all I wanted.”

  Sazan Island, Albania

  AFTER REFUELING THE Cessna at a public airport in Sicily and getting some much needed sleep at a private landing field on the tiny island of Corfu, Bolan continued the hunt.

  Several of his hidden GPS tracers had gone dead. They’d either been found or had simply run out of power. But he had planned for the worst and stashed them everywhere on the Constitution, even inside the launch tubes of the missiles. He was down to only a handful, but they were still alive and responding.

  According to his maps, the last cluster of GPS tracers seemed to transmitting from the Albanian island of Sazan, an abandoned Soviet submarine base situated in the Mediterranean Sea..

  Staying below the radar, Bolan swept the area until he found a small island a few miles from Sazan. Easy swimming distance, despite the currents. Killing the engine, Bolan coasted the Cessna into the weeds and anchored it securely among the tall grasses. Deciding that wasn’t enough, he buried the vessel under a mound of loose plant life. Bolan waited for the moon to rise completely before proceeding. The light and smoke from a campfire, even a small one, on a deserted island could easily attract all of the wrong kind of attention. Bolan unpacked the Martin, then donned a black Ghillie suit, climbing boots and a 4 mm bulletproof vest. It wasn’t much, but it would stop almost any pistol round from penetrating. He’d, of course, still have massive trauma damage and possibly internal bleeding if he was hit in just the right place. But a slim chance at survival was better than none at all. Bolan added night vision goggles and started buckling on his assorted weapons. The last was an M16 carbine with sound suppressor.

  When he was finally satisfied, Bolan checked over his weapons and supplies. It was rather like preparing to climb up the side of a mountain. Everything had to be secure but easily reached and in precisely the correct spot. If trouble came, he would not have the luxury of searching for a spare magazine or a medical kit. Seconds would count.

  Bolan strapped himself into the Martin, double-checked the emergency release and then at the last moment decided to add an extra can of fuel to his chest. He was now, quite literally, a flying bomb, but that extra fuel might make all the difference.

  Bolan hit the main ignition sequence, and the internal gyroscopes slowly revved to full power, building to a low hum.

  Tightening his hands on the dual controls, Bolan gently squeezed, and the turbofans engaged. The wash from the bottom vents kicked out a swirling cloud of dust and sand as he lifted into the air and soared away.

  Chapter 10

  Sazan Island

  Skimming over the waves, Bolan rose a little higher to keep the spray off his goggles. In the far distance, something large appeared on the horizon, bright lights sweeping the choppy waters and the empty sky.

  Bolan heard the blare of a warning siren and recognized it as a patrol boat of the Italian navy. No problem, then. He was way behind their limits. Bolan maintained a steady course toward Sazan Island. Out in the open like this, he was at the most vulnerable. A single sweep of a lighthouse could reveal the flying man, and then all hell would break loose. Civilians would not believe it. But the pirates used the Martins regularly, and they would be fools to not expect somebody to try it on them.

  Slowly, dark, rectangular shapes formed along the ragged shore—abandoned Soviet bunkers, their cannons long removed. Shells without crabs. If this was Narmada’s main base, it would have plenty of defensives, but nothing as overt as a cannon.

  Spray still misted his goggles and Bolan rose higher, shaking his head to let the wind shear clean his sight. Soon, the lenses were clean again, and a moment later he was streaking over dry l
and. The tight knot in his belly eased some as he began curving around a sharply rising mountain and then swooped down into a tree-filled valley.

  He spotted the ruins of a small town on the northern coast, the streets dark, holes in the roofs of every building, the doors sagging and every window smashed or at least badly cracked. Only a bar seemed oddly intact. Perhaps it was still used as a meeting place for the pirates.

  The wind was cold, the chill biting through his vest and Ghillie suit. Bolan paused on top of a rocky cliff to take off his socks and use them as makeshift gloves.

  Refueling his tank, Bolan checked the mileage against his notes and was less than pleased. Must be fighting a headwind. But there was nothing he could do about that.

  He started up the Martin once more and rose above the trees, the hot wash of the dual turbines shaking the boughs hard enough to knock down nests and pinecones.

  The wind was still against him, and he had no more additional fuel. He had a siphon coiled in his belt pouch, along with a sewage filter. But that was for emergencies only. A recent invention, the filter could be used by a soldier to actually drink raw sewage. Incredible, but true. It yielded only clean water. Not much, and not for long, of course. But Bolan felt assured that it would clean out any impurities from any local gasoline he found and maybe operate the Martin. If not...well, that was what boots were for.

  Bolan checked the GPS dots on his cell phone then the EM scanner. Smaller than a pinhead, the brand-new GPS “dust” squares were incredibly powerful and almost impossible to locate with the naked eye. A solid win-win for Bolan, in this case. To be safe, he’d also scattered some old, half-inch CIA-issue GPS dots for the pirates to find and destroy.

  One of the Russian trawlers had peeled away from the others and seemed to be heading toward the Shënkoll River. That was probably just the pirates stashing the weapons away for their own use.

  Following the main cluster of “dust,” Bolan spotted five of the trawlers moving steadily along the irregular coastline. There was no sign of the Constitution. Suddenly, the trawlers simply vanished from the screen.

  Bolan tapped the scanner to make sure it was still working, then checked the battery level. The device was fine. The trawlers were simply gone. Which made no sense. The pirates might have discovered the CIA dots but not the Hitachi dust, and there was no way they could have neutralized all of them at the exact same moment. Unless....

  Descending dangerously close to the ground, Bolan moved slowly along the old Soviet highway. Switching his goggles to infrared, he easily found the contrail of the hot diesel engines. The damn wind was dispersing it fast, so he revved the Martin to full speed and raced through the darkness. If he hit an unseen branch, or a bird, it was going to be very messy. But the trails were disappearing fast.

  The fuel gauge was rapidly dropping toward zero...but then there was nowhere else to go. The highway ended abruptly at a huge cliff face with a fortified tunnel entrance built into the bottom. The edge was lined with steel and still faintly bore the emblem of the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Empire. The tunnel hadn’t been on any of Bolan’s NASA or NATO maps.

  A hidden missile base. Bolan could not have been more pleased. If this wasn’t the pirates’ main base, it had to be a hardsite, a fortified waystation. The mountains, the woods, the river. The Soviets had their faults, but they were top-notch engineers. They really knew how to hide things. Sometimes entire cities.

  Thanks to Hal Brognola, Bolan had read all the reports, both classified and declassified, about the hundreds of Soviet missile bases that had been abandoned around the world when the Union’s economy collapsed.

  Scanning the cliff, Bolan spotted a waterfall and easily located the exhaust vent hidden among the mossy green boulders. The rising hot air would trigger almost any thermal scan...unless it was mixed with the cooling mist of the waterfall.

  Hoping the Martin’s fuel would hold out, Bolan shot up to the vent, landing amid wet, slimy rocks. The area around the vent appeared to have been undisturbed for years, maybe longer, but he double-checked, then triple-checked, for anti-personnel devices, land mines, tripwire, proximity sensors and everything else he could think of. He found some nearly antique video cameras tucked inside Plexiglas boxes inside hollowed out trees, but they were blocked solid with bird droppings and dead insects. Stalin would not have approved.

  Stashing the Martin inside a copse of young birches, Bolan draped the machine with a spare camouflage poncho, then added a couple of tripwires attached to BZ gas canisters. The U.S. Army had stopped making the knock-out gas a decade ago, but he’d managed to pick some up from the dealer in Kingston.

  Drawing a knife, he dug out the thick carpet of soft moss from around the vent and got to work on the bolts. A few minutes later, the heavy grill cracked loudly, and a red snowstorm of rust sprinkled down onto the slippery boulders.

  Waving away the dust cloud, Bolan held his breath and listened hard. If there was any response to the breach, he couldn’t hear it. Measuring the opening, Bolan found the fit tight but serviceable. However, the M16 would have to be left behind. The carbine was simply too big and would constantly clang against the sides of the rusty steel shaft.

  Switching to the ultraviolet setting on his goggles, Bolan used his UV headlamp to illuminate the snaking tunnel.

  As expected, several pressure plates had been built into the ventilation tube. Air flowed harmlessly over the plates, but anything over a hundred pounds, such as a soldier, would set off explosive charges or alarms. Sometimes both. Trained in counterinsurgence, Bolan easily spotted the telltale marks of the traps.

  At one point, Bolan smelled cigarette smoke and froze until the odor passed. Guards on patrol, feeling safe inside their Soviet fortress. Fools.

  Eventually, he found an inspection panel that looked serviceable, but Bolan heard snoring from the other side and guessed this was the barracks. If the hatch squeaked upon opening, or if any of the pirates were awake, he could end up in a fight that would ruin the whole mission. Bolan moved onward, searching for a better access point into the heart of the pirate base. Suddenly, the sound of a woman crying caught his attention. The noise was coming from a side tunnel that angled deeper into the mountains.

  Without hesitation, Bolan started that way.

  Chapter 11

  Mediterranean Sea, Italian Territory

  The sleek Italian patrol boat, Orincia, was skimming along the rough waters toward Sazan Island.

  The newest edition to the growing national defense fleet, the 175-meter long vessel was fully equipped with SOTA radar, sonar, EM scanners, satellite links, an onboard battle computer and a deadly accurate 76 mm rapid-fire cannon. Fully prepared for battle, the thirty sailors were wearing lightweight body armor and brandishing a wide variety of weaponry—Beretta 9 mm submachine guns, Zastava .50 sniper rifles, DP-64 45 mm grenade launchers and Neostead shotguns.

  The crew stood impatiently along the gunwale, straining to see the tiny enemy island in the distance.

  “Bloody pirates,” a boson snarled. “I wish we could just bomb the dirty sons of bitches off the face of the sea!”

  “Illegal, immoral, and unethical,” snapped the first officer, checking his watch. “Sadly, we have no real evidence that Narmada and his people are actual pirates.”

  “But, Sir!”

  “Hints and clues, boson. Vague indications, hearsay and rumors. That’s all we have,” the First Officer continued with a grim expression. “That’s why we’re just going to rattle their cage, eh?”

  “To see how the monkeys react?” asked a sailor, a bright orange life jacket tied tightly around his chest.

  The first officer flashed a wide grin. “Exactly! If they are foolish monkeys and fire at us, well, then, under international law we have the right to protect ourselves.”

  “But if they are smart and do nothing, Sir
?” the young sailor persisted.

  The Italian officer worked the arming bolt on his weapon. “Then it is our job to make them respond.”

  A chief petty officer glanced at the wheelhouse bristling with radio antennas and satellite dishes. Nobody could be seen behind the tinted windows. “The captain will throw us all into the brig for this.”

  “True. But I’ll accept that price,” growled the first officer. “You need to beat the grass to find the snakes! Then when they attack—”

  “We send ’em to hell!”

  “Pirates...” a young boson said, the single word filled with hatred and revulsion.

  Slowly, the land disappeared behind the Orincia, and only the shimmering blue expanse of the Mediterranean Sea stretched out before the speeding vessel.

  “Check your magazines. Rubber bullets only, gentlemen,” declared the first officer, touching his throat microphone. “We’re just harassing the bastards.”

  “And if they send back lead, sir?” a sailor asked, a hand touching the magazines sticking out of the equipment belt around his waist. One magazine was marked with a touch of blue paint, and the rest were marked with red.

  “Lord, I hope so,” the first officer said eagerly, glancing across the deck toward the Oto Melara 76 mm rapid-fire cannon at the front of the vessel.

  “Emerging from the cobalt-blue water, the dark cliffs that dominated Sazan Island rose high before them. There were no clouds or mist surrounding the rocky peaks, just clear open air. Pure line of sight.

  Out of nowhere, the crew on the deck of the Orincia began yelling and running about, slapping themselves all over as if they were being attacked by a massive swarm of invisible hornets. Several of the sailors accidentally triggered their weapons; the barrage of rubber bullets bouncing off the decks and lifeboats wildly.