href="#ua33b3da3-630a-5efd-9baa-c45c125cad89">CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER ONE
INDONESIA
“Okay, I think I’ve got the hang of it,” Mack Bolan said, speaking through the condensor microphone duct-taped to the inside of his gas mask.
“It gets easier once you’ve done it awhile,” Abdul Salim told him. As they both took off their masks, Salim, a decorated major who’d come up through the ranks of Indonesia’s Royal Marine Commandos, added, “The biggest thing to remember is not to hyperventilate.”
Bolan nodded. The truth was, although this particular mask was new to him, he’d worn similar protective gear on several occasions over the past few years. It was a sign of the times, a concession to the ever-increasing chance of biochemical attacks in the grim, unending war against global terrorism. Bolan missed the days when he could feel secure going into battle shielded only by the thin layer of Kevlar armor beneath his blacksuit. This day he’d even had to forgo the blacksuit in favor of a bulky, mud-colored HAZMAT suit. He’d been issued an armored vest, but it wasn’t made of Kevlar and, in comparison, felt as heavy as chain mail.
Major Salim was similarly attired. The two men were seated in the rear of a dust-covered white minibus making its way up a narrow, winding, two-lane mountain road seventeen miles north of Samarinda, capital city of Indonesia’s East Kalimantan Province on the island of Borneo. The bus was following its usual itinerary, a scenic route that led to a hilltop textile center long popular with the tourist crowd.
Those aboard the bus that day, however, were not tourists, and their ultimate destination was not the textile center, but rather a nearby storage facility managed—or mismanaged as many contended—by the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture. The other eleven men in the vehicle were members of KOPASSUS, an elite army commando unit that had seen extensive duty of late battling the rise of Islamic extremism throughout the country’s
