style="font-size:15px;"> “Right. You got some shaped charges?”
“I believe we do.” Dirk turned to one of his men. “Penner! Coop here would like you to make him a door!”
The demolition man came forward and stared at the wall. “Okay, assuming concrete, assuming the same diameter as the other tunnels…” Penner mumbled to himself in demo-speak as he put together a breaching charge and then packed the plastique brick against the section of wall. He took a few steps back from his work and pressed his detonator box. “Fire in the hole!”
The detonation was anticlimactic. There was a thump and a pulse of fire around the edges of the charge, but the explosive had been shaped to blow inward against the wall. A two-foot section of the rock wall was gone to reveal that Bolan was right. The tunnel had been bricked up and then covered with a layer of clay and rock. Penner and another commando went at the sagging brick with entrenching tools. They cleared a four-foot entrance and stepped back.
Bolan shone his tactical light down the tunnel. It was exactly the same as the other, and the entrance to the fifth chamber opened into darkness at the end of it. “You better let me go first. This part may be booby-trapped.”
Dirk nodded. “Be my guest.”
Bolan crawled through the hole and slowly went down the tunnel. Dust filled the air from the blast. He went into the chamber and played his light across several pallets laden with crates. The crates had Cyrillic writing on them. Bolan didn’t read Russian, but he didn’t need to. Nor did he need to open any of the crates. He recognized the green circle with the three-lobed, red warning sign for chemical hazard, and he recognized the colored bar code and the serial numbers and letters beneath it.
Dirk came across the radio. “What do we have, Coop?”
“We’ve got cyclosarin nerve gas.” Bolan ran his light across the piled pallets. “A lot of it.”
2
Tent City, Kabul
Aaron Kurtzman was well pleased, and his face showed it across the video link. “Everyone is singing your praises, Striker. Delta Force is oozing goodwill, and Hal said the President wants to clone a hundred of you in assorted colors.”
“Yeah.” It hadn’t been a bad op. Some very unpleasant adversaries had gone down, and something very ugly had been averted.
“You don’t seem pleased. You don’t think you got the right boys?”
“Oh, we got the right Taliban boys, but we didn’t get the thugs who backed their play against the Rangers.”
“You still believe someone betrayed the Rangers’ location?”
“It was more than just a tip-off. The Taliban had intel on composition and numbers, and they had serious backup. Light-support weapons, at least, being used by people who knew what they were doing. Even in the most desperate of circumstances, Army Rangers should have been able to fight their way out of a Taliban ambush. Instead, they were cut to pieces. Even in the face of overwhelming numbers, a few should have been able to escape and evade. We have hundred percent casualties. That’s unheard-of, Bear, but since they were mutilated, beheaded, burned and their bodies stacked like cordwood, it’s a little difficult to determine exactly what happened. So everyone is screaming Taliban.”
“Yeah, well, it’s Afghanistan, Striker—people scream Taliban with good reason.”
“Bear, someone sold that gas to the Taliban. You want to take out a reinforced squad of U.S. Army Rangers with hundred percent casualties? How about starting a firefight in a narrow canyon and then ending it with nerve gas.”
Kurtzman was no longer smiling. “Yeah, nerve agents are nonpersistent. So when help finally arrived, they found spent shell casings and RPG hits and suspected nothing.”
“And the bodies were burned to prevent any telltales of nerve-agent exposure to be found.”
Kurtzman let out a long breath. “Well, that means you’re right. Someone set up the Rangers, someone gave the Taliban nerve agents and someone with the expertise had to be present to deploy the gas correctly.”
“That’s right, and it happened on German army turf.”
“Striker, the Germans haven’t produced chemical weapons since World War II.”
“The East Germans did.”
“Those stockpiles were destroyed—” Kurtzman sighed unhappily “—supposedly. You’re going to have a hard time penetrating the German army.”
“I can’t, and winding a black turban around my head and pretending to be Taliban isn’t going to work, either.” Bolan flipped through his file again. “You said the Shield protection agency has contractors working in the area?”
“For God’s sake, what are you trying to say?”
“Nothing I can prove, and nothing anybody will want to hear. Hell, I’m probably wrong, and frankly I hope I am. But we won’t know unless I go in and tear things open. What I am saying is eighteen Army Rangers are dead. And if the United States Army Rangers are after you, you’d better have a weapon of mass destruction, because that’s the only way you’re going to stop them. I think that’s exactly what happened, and far as I can see there are three possible players. I can’t join the Taliban, and I don’t speak German.”
Kurtzman’s craggy brow furrowed. “So you’re going to join Shield.”
“They’re independent contractors,” Bolan said. “It’s probably the only cover I can use to poke around.”
“They’ve got a waiting list a mile long,” Kurtzman argued. “They’ve got Special Forces guys from all over the world taking early retirement just to join up.”
Bolan nodded. “I know, so I’m going to need a guy they would kill to have join them and then piggyback my way in.”
Kurtzman perked an eyebrow. “You have someone in mind.”
Bolan grinned. “Indeed I do.”
BRIGADIER EUGENE TOLER PEERED at Lieutenant Dirk’s fist somewhat apprehensively. He sighed, rolled his eyes and then shook his head at Bolan. “Mr. Cooper, are we sure this is absolutely necessary?”
Bolan didn’t blame the English officer one bit. The lieutenant’s fists, like a lot of things about him, were oversized for his frame. “I’m afraid so, sir.”
Captain Fairfax stood to one side shaking his head. He had been in Special Forces for decades, and nothing had ever prepared him for the utter surrealty of this situation, much less the fact that he was about to lose his best officer.
Dirk took a deep breath, and his knuckles creaked and popped as he balled up the soup bones. He looked at his hand as if it didn’t belong to him and then at the brigadier. “You ready, sir?”
“Well…right!” The brigadier squared his shoulders, thrust out his jaw, straightened the front of his battle dress uniform and, like English officers and gentlemen since time immemorial, found refuge in Shakespeare. “‘Lay on, McDuff.’”
It
