Mercy Mission Read online

  The Executioner had been as good as dead on numerous occasions.

  He had always beat the odds. He couldn’t remember how many times he had cheated fate, but he was going to do it again. This was about saving lives. This was about rescuing the forgotten prisoners of a long-ago war. Failing now meant failing those men.

  The Lada’s special suspension and hardened power train carried her over the mogul-like ridges with teeth-rattling vibration when his speed exceeded 80 mph, and in a quarter hour he had crossed the vast flatness to a long, low ridge of rock that blistered the desert like scar tissue. He was out of sight of the flatbed truck, and there was nobody else within his line of sight. He used another three precious minutes clambering to the top of the rock and scanning in every direction to be sure he was alone and unseen.

  Convinced, he leaped and skidded back down to the Lada and started her transformation. He found one of the tiny steel tabs tucked under the rim of the headlight and gave it a careful, firm pull, which lifted up a film of plastic clinging to the Lada’s body. Pulling steadily toward the rear, he stripped off a two-foot-wide section of the plastic sheeting that ended at the driver’s door. The front quarter panel of the SUV had been transformed from a dirty white, designed to camouflage it in the salt desert, to an aged, sun-faded brown, which would be far less conspicuous on the streets of Iraq. Bolan had intended to wait to perform this process until he was farther away from the insertion point, but if the Iraqis had somebody coming to investigate suspicious activity, he needed every advantage.

  Ten major sections of the plastic coating came off easily enough—a small miracle in the heat, which made the plastic soft and gluey and easily torn. Only the hood section ripped down the middle, and Bolan wasted a few extra seconds clawing off the scraps. When finished, he was left with a mass of sticky film the size of a basketball. He lobbed it up into the rocks, where it disappeared into a crook.

  The vehicle he was left with was not a pretty sight, but she was tough. So Bolan had been told.

  It was a Lada Niva Model 21214 to all appearances. Aside from the frame, there wasn’t much left of the vehicle that had rolled off the factory floor. All the body panels had been stripped off for insertion of armor plating, or simply replaced entirely with armored body panels. One hundred percent of the glass was replaced with the bullet-stopping variety. The 1.7-liter GM power plant had been unceremoniously removed and replaced with a 2.5-liter 6-cylinder block. It was an acceptable set of wheels as long as it proved to be reliable.

  He watched the skies as he raced the brown Lada, coming into difficult terrain when he emerged from the salt desert. Even with his windows open he barely heard the thrum of an aircraft approaching, and he veered the SUV into the nearest cliff side and parked it. He wasn’t kidding himself into thinking he was hidden. The aircraft was going to fly almost directly over him. It wouldn’t spot the Lada on the first pass, maybe, but one backward glance by the crew and he’d be found.

  The plane was a twin-prop aircraft with the Iraqi flag on the small tail. It looked like a personal aircraft, maybe a four-seater, converted for low-flying reconnaissance missions. Just the right tool for finding a one-man invasion force. If he’d still been in the open flatland, he would never have eluded the little prop plane.

  It vanished over the next ridge.

  Bolan waited, watching, but mostly listening. He knew when the aircraft changed its heading by change in the pitch of the twin propellers.

  He thought fast and bought himself time by trying the same trick over again. He yanked the Lada into gear and pulling it into a tight U-turn to bring it up against the wall on the opposite side of the shallow chasm of rock, then examined his surroundings and came up with a plan.

  The plane was skimming the ridge tops when it passed over again, but once again it failed to spot the SUV. It was just a matter of time—they knew he was down there somewhere, and the junkyard of scattered rock piles wasn’t all that large. But once they saw him and broadcast news of their find, the place would be swarming with Iraqis.

  He had to take down the recon plane, and he had to do it with such speed they wouldn’t send out a Mayday first.

  Bolan drove down the narrow chasm and veered around the end of the rocky ridge, then shot straight out into the desert. He found what he wanted—a soft spot where the baked salt surface was weakened by sand from an ancient beach. He’d spun his wheels through several of these desert pockmarks in the past half hour.

  He came to a halt with all four wheels in the sandbox and slammed his foot on the accelerator, spinning the wheels up through three gears. The sand spewed and salt dust billowed up and around the Lada like a desert demon released from his bottle and swelling with the rapture of freedom.

  It was better than he could have hoped for. Bolan donned desert goggles and grabbed a face mask from the medical kit, snapping it over his nose and mouth as he heard the small prop plane turn again in his direction. They would spot the dust cloud any second. They would want to see its cause before they reported it to their superiors.

  The props slowed and the plane sounded like it was coming in even lower. Bolan repeated his trick with the Lada, spinning her wheels in the loose sand and creating a white cloud that obliterated the sun like the densest San Francisco coastal fog. He jumped out of the SUV and felt his way around to the front end, satisfied that the vehicle would be invisible underneath it.

  Hidden in plain sight, the Executioner waited.

  “DID THEY BLOW themselves up?” the copilot wondered out loud.

  “That’s dust, not smoke,” the pilot replied, his voice a mixture of scorn and elation. “The fools have got themselves stuck in a sand trap!”

  “You would think they would have a car that could make it out of a patch of sand,” the copilot said doubtfully as they steered at the white billowing mass that hugged the desert floor, sluggish in the stagnant desert air.

  “Let’s take off the mask and see for ourselves!”

  The copilot was about to protest, then thought better of it. The pilot was his immediate superior officer and disliked being second-guessed. The pilot kept the airplane going just above stall speed and brought them over the last ridge, then descended to just forty feet. He headed directly at the dust cloud, buzzing the top of it, the prop draft whirling the cloud away in a sudden maelstrom.

  The copilot craned his neck to see below and gasped.

  “Pull up! Pull up!”

  “What? Why?”

  BOLAN’S M-16 A-2/M-203 combo led the twin-engine prop plane and he clearly saw the momentary look of horror on the face in the window. He triggered the M-203 grenade launcher a fraction of a second later, and watched the 40 mm HE round crack into the body of the aircraft with instant catastrophic results. The fiery detonation chewed a hole in the fuselage and filled the interior with flame. Every window, door and rivet opened to allow fire to stream out. A moment later came the fuel-tank explosion, which jettisoned the burning contents of the interior through the empty windshields. The pilot and the copilot were the largest chunks of burning waste.

  The aluminum frame of the aircraft somehow managed to hold the wings together for another five seconds, carrying the burning hulk out over the desert, her flight amazingly level. Then the heat became too intense. The aluminum cross braces parted, and the wings folded. The aircraft dropped to the desert floor and began to burn in earnest.

  Bolan watched it happen in his rearview mirror as he put the scene behind him. Fast.

  14

  Lada automobiles started as a product of the Soviet Union, which meant they were unimpressive by any measure. During the Communist era it was typical for a new Lada to come off the factory floor with so many mechanical problems it could not be driven.

  After communism was shed like a moldy raccoon coat, Lada found itself competing with automobile companies that designed cars to roll down the street when the driver wanted it to. Significant changes and privatization of its supply chain helped Lada improve quality. B
olan, however, wouldn’t have made the car his first choice.

  But he didn’t have a choice. There was precious little available in the Kuwaiti car pool of hardened vehicles. Kurtzman had a difficult enough time allocating this one, on top of the long list of other equipment he wanted for Bolan, without setting off alarms throughout the Department Of Defense.

  “Trust me, this is ideal,” said the Army captain who handed him the keys. The man had high-level security clearance and was charged with equipping various special ops details, but even he had been told only the basic facts about Bolan’s mission: a one-man penetration into rebel territory in Iraq.

  “Why is it ideal?” Bolan asked suspiciously.

  “Check it out,” the captain said, blowing his nose on a red grease rag and tucking it into his back pocket. “It changes color like a chameleon.” He went on to show Bolan how the thermally applied plastic film could be removed within minutes to remove the light desert camouflage. “Underneath that it’s brown and ugly, just like every other piece-of-crap La-dee-da you’re gonna see driving around in the place where you’re going. You’re not going to stand out.”

  “Are the improvements strictly cosmetic?” Bolan asked.

  “No way,” the captain protested. “The block is bigger and better, and most of the components have been replaced with milspec desert-grade parts. The transmission is upgraded, too. Everything is greased up so that somebody looking under the hood won’t see anything that’s out of line—not unless they know their mechanics really good, know what I mean?”

  “Suspension? Brakes? Tires?”

  “All upgraded. Good tough parts,” the captain said defensively. “Not so’s you could tell by looking.”

  “Mileage?” Bolan asked.

  “I dunno, why don’t you check the sticker on the window?” the captain blurted sarcastically, wiping his hands rapidly on his soiled coveralls. He had done much of the work on the Lada himself and didn’t like the big guy’s attitude.

  Then he noticed the big guy wasn’t talking. He was just staring.

  The captain saw something in those eyes that he recognized from some of the SEALs, the Rangers, even the fields grunts. The ones who went into the field again and again, who saw horrors that no one should witness, who survived battles where the odds for survival were minimal. And they went back every time their CO asked, without question, because they were America’s warriors.

  And along comes this guy, who’s going into the worst possible field and going alone, and some smart-ass grease monkey Army captain is giving him shit. Well, when you looked at it that way…The captain’s attitude altered abruptly.

  “Sorry, sir,” the captain said. “Didn’t mean to get cocky on you.”

  “Mileage?” Bolan repeated.

  “You’ll get five to seven hundred miles with the reserve tanks we’ve got tucked up in the body panels, but a lot less if you do some stop-and-go desert driving.”

  “Captain, I think you know you probably won’t get this vehicle back,” Bolan said.

  “Yeah, but that’s out of my hands.”

  “You wouldn’t try to get rid of one of your problem vehicles, would you? The one everybody around here knows about? The one that probably wouldn’t make it round trip to the off-base convenience store?”

  “No, sir! We don’t even keep them around here—we transfer the troublemakers over to the regular car pool for local use.”

  “Good. Anything more I should know?”

  “Well, we did install a bank of 20 mm heat-seeking missiles that launch from under the headlights.” The captain chuckled briefly.

  The joke hung in the air like a heavy, wet blanket, but then Bolan grimaced.

  “Q you ain’t, Captain,” Bolan said.

  The captain smiled, relieved, thinking, And you’re not James Bond, either, buddy, ’cause nobody would want to watch a movie with a grim bastard like you running around for two hours.

  THE LADA SUV took him swiftly into one of the remote villages, then on the road to Balad, where he lost himself in the heavy auto and pedestrian traffic by noon. He struggled through the city to the Tigris highway, which ran alongside the river on its northwest to southeast path from the three-corners intersection of Iraq, Turkey and Syria, into Baghdad, then continued all the way to the Persian Gulf. Bolan stayed on the main road despite the possibility of roadblocks. He was counting on the confusion of the Iraqis over the meaning of the intruder to delay a measure that drastic.

  Soon the Iraqis would know their missing recon plane was shot down. But who was trespassing and why?

  The sun was blazing and the interior of the SUV became like an oven. By late afternoon he was muscling through the dense throngs that crowded the streets of Baghdad.

  Bolan wasn’t formally educated in ancient history, but he knew enough to feel a sort of reverence for this place. Baghdad, the great city that dominated the Fertile Crescent, had been one of the birthplaces of civilization. In this place, where the beneficence of the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, made agriculture highly productive, human beings for the first time found themselves freed from the struggle for survival long enough to expand their interests into art, science and written language. Tiny slivers of advancing knowledge were diffused by merchants into that other infant civilization in the Nile Valley. Bolan knew that scholars argued over which of the two was really the first true civilization, but that was just intellectual minutia.

  What was important was the soul of this city. Baghdad was one of the ancient hearts of the world, now reduced by decades of despotism and the devastation of war to nothing more than a sprawling slum. The struggle for democratic rule still faced pockets of resistance.

  Someday maybe Baghdad, standing on her ancient but rock-solid foundation, could become a great center of civilization again.

  Bolan shook off such thoughts as he found the safe house Kurtzman had located for him—stressing that there was nothing “safe” about it. Just a hole in the wall set up by an Iraqi spy who was more or less on the CIA payroll and thought to be more or less dependable. Bolan drove by the alley entrance to the dank-looking bottom-level flat three times before deciding there was no one watching it from the street.

  Then he went to find the CIA agent.

  NATEQ HATIM HAD WATCHED as his grandmother was beaten to death by high-ranking Republican Guardsmen when they caught her stealing fruit from a street cart. Hatim was already a rising star in Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party when he brought official charges against the Guardsmen—only to realize too late that embarrassing the upper-echelon Guard was an insult to the prime minister himself.

  With the help of a family contact the bureaucracy gave Hatim what amounted to a free pass: the complaint was essentially wiped off the record books. It had never officially happened.

  The men who made up the Ba’ath Party remembered the event, and questions about Hatim’s naiveté slowed his advancement up the party ranks for a few years, but his otherwise stellar record made him a favorite once again. There were talks of him eventually moving out of the vast middle-management pool and into the select, top-level Party elite.

  But Hatim was not what he seemed. He had changed his allegiance. The beating death had opened his eyes and made him realize that a regime that ignored brutality against its own people could not be good for the people. Hatim realized he had operated on a principle of self-empowerment. The Ba’ath Party was guided without a philosophy of its own and served only as a pool of men who also sought to empower themselves. Neither the party, nor the government, operated under a higher ideal, despite the slew of slogans that the government drilled into the people.

  When this chilling, brutal truth became evident, Hatim understood other truths. Iraq was an aggressor that proclaimed itself a victim. Iraq slaughtered her own people and proclaimed it a necessity in the name of national stability. Iraq was ruled by a tyrant who called himself a freedom fighter.

  Then the war changed everything.

  New
leadership was the only way Iraq could hope to escape the ways of the tyrant—and the succeeding tyrant who would inevitably emerge from the Ba’ath breeding pool if no external force prevented it. That external force was America, which Hatim had been educated to hate from the day he was born. It was difficult now to know who to trust.

  The man who emerged from the crowds outside the café didn’t even attract Hatim’s notice until he had entered, passing a bill to the proprietor to be permitted entrance, and strode to the table adjoining Hatim’s.

  It was him. The man was walking around Iraq like he owned the place, but he gave the name Cooper in a low mutter, and repeated a series of numbers that were the total of an equation that was the agreed-upon password.

  The man ordered lunch in Arabic, putting a Syrian-border accent on the words to hide his lack of fluency. When the proprietor left them the man called Cooper said, “I came in from Balad and your people know it.”

  “Have you been spotted yet in Baghdad?” Hatim asked as he sipped tea.

  “I don’t think so. They’re looking for a white car and mine’s not white anymore.”

  Hatim glared at a man on the street, who brought the stench of his clothes far too close to the café. The man understood the message and gave the café a wide berth. The café was for the social elite—as defined by their cash roll.

  “Is the safe house secure?”

  “I can’t make guarantees. As far as I know, it is undiscovered. I pay a local boy to keep out squatters.”

  The American seemed satisfied with that, and he launched into his lunch hungrily. After a moment he said, just before taking a mouthful, “Former Republican Guard General Saleh Jawdat.”

  Hatim stiffened and forced himself not to react visibly. “What of him?”

  “Who is he and where is he?”

  “Who he is,” Hatim replied evenly, “is very bad news. If he’s part of your plans, then it’s time to change them, my friend.”

  “Tell me why.”