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  “The Man is grateful to his new friend, but he isn’t stupid. The Farm was told to track that weaponry shipment through to its destination. Thermal imagery shows us multiple locations in remote areas of Syria where we believe the weaponry has been cached. It’s only a matter of time before the loyalists, without the benefit of US technical advisors, figure out how to deploy the missile systems. When they do they’re going to set that region on fire. We’re looking at all-out war.”

  “So I go in, find the weapons and destroy them, with Sabeen Yenni to show me all the local highlights.”

  “That’s the upshot, yes,” Brognola said. “But it’s more complicated than that.”

  “It always is.”

  “No matter what you do there, Striker,” the big Fed said, “it could touch off a war for control of Syria at the very least. The United States cannot be seen as interfering on the ground, or the resulting backlash could cause us problems almost as bad as losing a sympathetic government. Your presence in Syria isn’t sanctioned by Hahmir’s government, and we couldn’t allow them to know about it for fear of compromising you. That’s the official word. Unofficially, they know damned well we’re sending someone to track the weapons, even though everyone involved is going to play dumb. The Man has even shared some intelligence with them, as a good-faith gesture.”

  “That leaves me plenty vulnerable,” Bolan said.

  “There’s no other way to put a team, or even a single man, on the ground,” Brognola said. “Hahmir’s government claims it will play ball, at least off the books. But if they’re pressed, they, too, will claim they have no knowledge of your mission. They’ll treat you accordingly.”

  “You drop me into the nicest meat grinders, Hal.”

  “We need you to ferret out who has done what, if you can, but under the cloak of plausible deniability,” Brognola went on. “That means we’re giving you an internationally available electronic tablet that you can use for mission data and so on. There can be no way of tracing you back to us should you end up in enemy hands. And there’s no shortage of potential enemies who might want to put you down.”

  “Understood,” Bolan said. He understood, all right. It was a familiar story…as familiar as the thin ice on which he now stood.

  “Striker, there’s one more thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you do find evidence of perfidy on the part of Hahmir or elements within his government, you do have one more option.”

  “And that is?” Bolan asked.

  “Option Zeta,” Brognola said. “It’s a file in your dossier. Read it thoroughly and memorize the codes. You might need them.”

  “Got it,” Bolan had said. “Striker, out.”

  And now he was here, in Syria, with his boots—and his back—on the actual ground. He would either return the weapons systems to Hahmir’s government or he would destroy them. And along the way he would determine, if at all possible, whether the President could trust the Hahmir regime. But right now, there was the matter of the dead men who had been lying in wait under the ground.

  “This is a problem,” Bolan said, indicating the bodies. He took Yenni’s hand when she offered it, and allowed her to help him to his feet. The freedom fighter draped her desert scarf around her neck, pocketed her lighter and crouched next to him.

  “They are dead,” she said. “And we are alive. This is not a problem.”

  “Not in the immediate sense,” he replied. “But the drop coordinates were known only to your network. These men were waiting for me. Right here.” He knelt and played the beam of his tactical flashlight over the nearest body.

  “Black scarves,” Yenni said. “These are the Wolf’s men.”

  “You’re supposed to be working as an operative for Fafniyal, right?”

  “Yes,” Yenni replied, nodding, “but it would not matter. There is very little trust between the Wolf’s people and all others. If they find us they will kill us immediately.”

  “So somebody knew about the meet,” Bolan said. “Which means our operation may be compromised before it begins.”

  “Someone in the network, or with access to it, intercepted coordinates,” Yenni said. “These men were left to conceal themselves beneath the dirt. They did not know what was coming. Do you think they would have worn oxygen masks and let the sand fleas bite them for just one American?” She held up the mask the nearest corpse had worn on a rubber cord around his neck.

  Bolan had to admit that she had a point, but he was still worried about the implications. There was no telling where the leak came from. The entire process was potentially porous, from Hahmir’s government—which knew that a force of some kind was to be inserted by the United States to track the missing weapons—all the way down to boots on the soil.

  “Your move, then,” he told her. “I’m counting on you.”

  “And I am counting on the Americans. I’ll help you to free Syria. Whether that happens now or twenty years from now does not matter. What matters is that the work is done.”

  “We’ll need to bury these men,” Bolan said.

  “No,” Yenni replied. “There is no time. There are frequent patrols. The gunfire will have attracted one of these.”

  “Fafniyal’s people?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Leave them. I will take their magazines.” She went from soldier to soldier, stripping the bodies of ammunition, adding it to her gear. She also reloaded the little Krinkov.

  “Are we on foot?” Bolan asked.

  “I have a truck half a kilometer east, under a camouflage net.”

  Bolan patted down his web gear. The little ruggedized tablet was right where it should be. He used it to access a real-time topographical overlay of their position against a satellite map of the area. The encrypted tablet also contained the coordinates of the weapons caches. He noted the position of several icons on the screen and read through the captions.

  “We should get moving to the closest target site,” he told Yenni. “Before…” He let his words trail off. He could hear something on the night wind.

  “Cooper,” Yenni said. “Do you hear that?”

  “Trucks.”

  “It is a Fafniyal patrol. We must go quickly.”

  “That’s not all,” Bolan said. “I hear a helicopter.”

  “Not merely a helicopter. It is a gunship. The Wolf makes use of many Soviet surplus Hind aircraft.”

  “Not good,” Bolan said. “But I think I have a plan.”

  “What is your plan, Cooper?”

  “We run like hell.”

  2

  Bolan and Yenni ran east, through the scrub and rocks, toward a defile Bolan had spotted on the topographical map.

  “Where are we going?” Yenni asked. She didn’t seem winded at all, even sprinting alongside him, working harder to keep up with his long strides.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” Bolan said, casting a wary glance over his shoulder. “Slow down. Pretty soon we’re going to—”

  “You are very slow. You should run faster.”

  “That’s me,” he replied, not breaking stride. “Slow as molasses.” He eased the Beretta 93R from its holster, checked the selector and looked behind him once more. Somewhere high above, the whirring of the enemy helicopter was louder. He couldn’t see the Hind, if Yenni was correct. He hoped she wasn’t.

  Yenni surged ahead of him by a pace, then three. He opened his mouth to warn her.

  She disappeared.

  Bolan dropped in behind her. The almost invisible hole she’d fallen into was nearly as deep as he was tall. He landed heavily on his combat boots, crouching in the dirt. He couldn’t see her in the darkness.

  “I’m all right,” she said without prompting. “You could have warned me.”

  “You could have waited,” he said.

  The “hole” extended in either direction in a straight line. It was five feet wide and five feet deep. In the darkness, against the sky above, Bolan could see Yenni moving to one knee.

&
nbsp; “What is this?” she asked.

  “Leftovers,” he said. “Satellite imaging says these trenches crisscross the area for miles. Immediately after the Arab Spring unrest, when civil war first broke out, the network was dug out by the first rebel forces. From the tactical reports we received—”

  “We?” Yenni asked.

  “From the reports my government received,” Bolan said, ignoring her attempt to pry, “that group of rebels was wiped out before they got a chance to fall back to their trenches. Outdated tactics, used in the wrong context. There’s a right way and a wrong way to make war.”

  “And so the trenches remained.”

  “Yes.” Bolan took out his tablet and brought up the overlaid map grid of their location. “The last time this area was imaged from space, the leading strip of trench went on for several hundred yards. There are cross trenches branching off along its length. The entire area has been dug out.”

  “We must hurry, Cooper,” Yenni said. The chopper was almost on top of them now.

  “Do you have an e-tool in your pack?”

  “Yes,” she said, sounding confused. “Why would you—”

  “Give it to me,” Bolan said. “And your RPG. And then run that way,” he told her, pointing.

  She handed over the folding entrenching tool and unslung the RPG tube. “I have only one round,” she said.

  “It will have to be enough.” Bolan took the rocket-propelled grenade from her and slung the tube over his shoulder, jamming the folding e-tool as far as he could into the outer slash pocket of his jacket. He tucked the RPG round inside the coat, making the garment sag heavily. “I’m heading in the opposite direction,” he said. “Draw them off me, but don’t do too good a job. When I open up on them I want that chopper coming at me.”

  “You’ll be killed.”

  “Sooner or later,” Bolan said, “we all are. Now scram.”

  Yenni looked as if she might ask a question, but instead she closed her mouth, turned and ran without another word. Bolan did the same, fleeing through the rough-hewn trench, increasing the distance between them. The folding e-tool and the rocket-propelled grenade battered his flanks as his coat moved against his body.

  The helicopter roared past.

  He looked up just in time to see the chopper cut through the rectangle of sky delineated by the trench walls. He caught only a glimpse, but there was no mistaking that silhouette. He’d seen it many times before.

  It was definitely a Mil Mi-24, designated the Hind by NATO. Introduced in the early seventies by the Soviets, the Hind was called the “flying tank.” With twin turboshaft engines driving a midmounted five-blade rotor, not to mention a pair of stub wings that served as three-station weapon hardpoints, the flying beast could carry a Gryazev-Shipunov twin-barreled autocannon, AT-2 “Swatter” antitank missiles, and a rocket pod or pods bearing S-8 rockets.

  He pressed himself against the wall of the trench. Voices were coming closer, and the helicopter’s buzzing was receding. Sound echoed strangely inside the old trench network, but as near as Bolan could tell, that meant the chopper was circling around the target site as the ground troops closed in.

  Mack Bolan stopped running. He cocked his head to one side.

  A man fell into the trench at his feet.

  Bolan had time to step back before two more enemy soldiers, both wearing the black armbands of the Wolf, tumbled into the trench. The enemy gunners had obviously been running in pursuit and encountered the trench network as abruptly as Yenni had. Bolan didn’t wait for them to recover, didn’t wait for them to shout a warning. He simply swept the suppressor-equipped barrel of his Beretta across the fallen, scrambling men and stroked the trigger repeatedly.

  The subsonic 9-mm rounds churned through the fallen soldiers. The men writhed and were still. Bolan, wary of a surprise attack should one of them be shamming, rifled through their web gear. He came up with three Kalashnikov rifles and half a dozen loaded magazines, which he quickly shoved into his war bag. Pausing to pop the cover from the first rifle, he ripped its bolt free and threw it as far along the trench as he could. Then he dumped the stripped rifle and checked the other two, pulling back the bolt far enough to verify that a round was chambered in each.

  He had just enough time to lift the barrel as a fourth soldier dived into the trench.

  This man had seen the lip of the excavation coming, or perhaps he’d heard the scuffle or the cough of Bolan’s suppressed Beretta. Either way, he leaped into the ditch as if he intended to make some war.

  Bolan was happy to accommodate him.

  The American soldier triggered his borrowed Kalashnikov and raked the man across the chest. The enemy gunner was dead before he finished hitting the dirt. Farther along the trench, somewhere between his current position and where Yenni had been, more soldiers were piling in from above, their weapons ready. Bolan knew he couldn’t face them all. The trench walls formed a fatal funnel that could work both for him and against him. Without the element of surprise, he would be just as vulnerable to the enemy’s guns as they were to his.

  He opted for distance, moving along the passage in a low crouch, headed away from the soldiers massing between him and Yenni. He could hear gunfire behind him and to his left. At this distance it was hard to tell Yenni’s chopped AK from the full-size Kalashnikovs chattering to meet it, but he thought perhaps he could. He didn’t need her to hold out long, and in fact, he’d meant it when he’d told her he didn’t want her to do too well in drawing fire. It was essential that the Hind eventually fix on him. He just needed a little time to work.

  Footsteps above his head brought him up short. Two lines of the Wolf’s uniformed patrolmen were now paralleling the trench on either side. Bolan crouched low so they couldn’t see him in the darkness. By his rough count, there were five on either side. He knew what they were after, too: they were walking the trench in order to sweep it clean. No doubt there were more doing the same thing in the opposite direction.

  The Hind made a closer pass and a spotlight came alive, one attached to the Hind’s nose cannon. The bright shaft played across the arid scrub and dipped in and out of the trench, back and forth, as the chopper’s pilot walked his craft sideways along the ditch.

  The patrol would see Bolan any moment now. All they had to do was point a handheld light in his direction. He raised his Kalashnikov, making sure the selector was on full automatic, and spun his body in a tight arc. The soldier blasted away at ankle level, chopping down the patrolmen, continuing his spin to raze the feet of the men at his right. Unable to process what had happened, the men simply started screaming. Bolan spared them mercy rounds with the rest of his magazine, burning half his bullets on one side, half on the other. His ears were ringing from the echoes of the gunfire as he hurried on.

  Above him, the Hind abruptly stopped its gliding, sideways pattern. Either its occupants had spotted him, which was unlikely, or they had seen the muzzle flashes of his short engagement.

  He nearly collided with the dirt bank as the trench ended. Judging the height of the walls around him and casting one more glance at the helicopter, he estimated the trajectory he would need.

  It was time.

  He slung the Kalashnikov over his shoulder, where the twin loads of both rifles and the RPG tube weighed him down. The folding e-tool he’d borrowed from Yenni snapped open from either end, forming the shovel blade and a small triangular handle. He twisted the locking collar and was grateful that the unit felt solid. He’d seen plenty of collapsible shovels that were little better than toys. Now was not the time for his tool to fail him.

  Furiously, he began to dig.

  The shooting at the other end of the trenches was chaotic now. The Wolf’s patrolmen seemed to be firing in all directions. That made Bolan smile. Yenni was a skilled guerilla fighter. She was giving them a run for their money.

  The Hind moved heavily, pausing to hover above the ground where Bolan had done his bloody work. The spotlight played over the corpses he had l
eft behind.

  The pilot, as if reading Bolan’s thoughts, brought his nose gun up. The beam of light swept the trench, headed directly for him.

  The Hind’s automatic cannon opened up.

  Around Bolan, the earth itself exploded as the Hind’s shells ripped apart everything in the vicinity. The pilot wasn’t really sure of his target—or Bolan would have been a cloud of meat-laden mist already—but if the barrage kept up, it wouldn’t matter. Bolan’s life expectancy amid that hail of death was not measured in minutes, but in seconds.

  He lifted the RPG tube from his shoulder, aimed and pulled the trigger.

  It was an old trick the Somalis had learned, to bring down American helicopters. The back-blast from a rocket-propelled grenade launcher made it impractical to fire elevated, where the blast would hit the ground at the gunner’s feet. But dig a hole big enough to absorb that blast, and you could use a grenade launcher to take out a helicopter. The key was to strike the chopper at a point vulnerable enough to—

  Bolan’s train of thought left him as he watched the RPG go wide, too wide, trailing smoke as it arced far right of the chopper. He’d been hoping to strike the Hind in the canopy. Hitting the main rotor would be ideal, but that target was too small and too far away. Only blind luck would put the round in the Hind’s relatively vulnerable tail rotor, the key to its steering and stability.

  The rocket-propelled grenade exploded, obliterating the tail rotor.

  Bolan would have smiled if he hadn’t anticipated what would happen next. The chopper, already listing in his direction, started to spin. As it rotated, faster and faster, its massive fuselage looming in the night sky, it began to lose altitude.

  And now the Hind was coming right for him.

  Bolan ran in the opposite direction. There was no time for subtlety and no time for unnecessary weight. He dropped the RPG tube and shed his extra rifles as he went, sprinting for all he was worth along the tunnel. He needed to get out of the dug ditch, or get far enough that flames from the exploding chopper wouldn’t be funneled right to him. If he paused to try to scramble up over the lip of the trench, he might not make it in time. Worse, he might become a target for any of the Wolf’s men still operative at ground level.