The Libya Connection (7 page)

April Rose was at the main communications console in the mission-control area of Stony Man Farm.

She ignored an urge to look at the time digits on the rectangular clock beside her, as she had promised herself she would when she caught herself glancing at it three times in one minute only a short while ago.

So far... nothing. No action pattern, no holding pattern, nothing since Jack had parted from Bolan at the airstrip outside Tunis.

Grimaldi was now on call aboard a U.S. carrier cruising the Med.

And April Rose was waiting, keeping vigil...

She looked at the clock anyway. 1430 hours.

With the six-hour time difference, that made it 2030 hours Libyan time.

April Rose was the person whose job was to keep the massive, complex mechanism of Stony Man Farm functioning smoothly. She was also a woman who happened to be very much in love with Mack Bolan.

She tried valiantly to keep her worry under wraps, the way most of the men did who worked around her. She tried not to be a woman.

But it didn't work.

She fretted about Mack Bolan every time her man took off on a new mission in this new war against the forces of international horror.

Hal Brognola came into the room. Stony Man Farm's DC liaison did not directly confront April's inquiring look.

Hal sank into a swivel chair by a smaller console. He stared straight ahead without speaking. He held an unlit cigar between his fingers, but both the stogie and April seemed utterly forgotten.

After a minute, she quietly said, "Hal, what is it?"

He looked at her.

"I just spoke with Layton, the major who's handling this out of the Pentagon's NCB office. Internal Affairs pushed for a briefing and called me in."

"Do we know what it is that Jericho has?"

Brognola finally lit his cigar, but slowly, methodically, as if concentrating on the smallest detail of the procedure.

"The bad news that Jericho has is a live virus called Strain-7. It is a pneumonic virus that has been developed to thrive on dry viscera. Its presence in the human body forces the body's water content to places of maximum dehydration from the heat of body friction. This dries out the flesh real nice for Strain-7. For the victim, it's either death from thirst in ten to twelve minutes, or drowning, literally, from the water intake you need to beat the dehydration fever. That takes two or three minutes.

"The worst minutes imaginable. And the stuff can infect entire populations in days or even hours. It would be an appalling end."

"It's ours, this virus, isn't it?" April asked coldly.

"Yes, April. Well, it was. But it isn't anymore. Now it's Jericho's." The stocky man sat stiffly in the swivel chair, turning the seat idly, in fact nervously. "Okay, we admit it, it's government stuff, acquired from a scientist in the NCB group. The army has been storing it mainly as a resource to assist in the development of its antidote by the government. The original scientist who produced the stuff, as a byproduct of his NCB work, is dead. Died of dehydration. Took about an hour..."

"Hal, why does our country get involved in a horror like that?"

"Ask the boys in the NCB outfit," grunted the fed. "As chief of security at the base where the virus was being stored, Thatcher was able to divert the junk to Houston under military guard. It was loaded on a private jet — Jericho's jet, we now know — and Jericho's merc security force was standing by to take it over when that jet landed in Libya."

April felt a sense of terror.

"God help the Mideast if that virus falls into Libyan hands," she murmured. "God help us all."

"You can see why Mossad has an interest in this," said Hal. "Jesus Christ, sometimes I wish I only knew enough to be chasing street hoods like in the old days."

April turned back to the communications console.

"I'm going to contact Jack Grimaldi," she said, "and see if there's any possible way to reach Mack with this."

Hal's stogie was in need of a light again, and again he forgot about it. "We have nothing on Eve Aguilar to pass along to him, right?" he said.

"Right," replied April as she activated the sending unit. "The
Traveler
was the last we know for sure that Eve was alive."

Jack Grimaldi stood at the rail along a deserted stretch of flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS
Fearless.
The supercarrier was cruising Mediterranean waters, 130 miles off Libya's Gulf of Sidra, on White House sanctioned maneuvers. The
Fearless
glided as smoothly as a skater on ice. The dark sea, far below Grimaldi, was a choppy panoply of sparkling wet stars and moonlight that mirrored the night sky overhead.

The
Fearless
was a floating city. The warship was home to five thousand sailors and airmen for months at a time. The five-deck seagoing airport was a warren of passages, offices, shops, mess halls and crew quarters; a numbering system had been devised to keep people from getting lost. Someone had mentioned to Grimaldi that the Eiffel Tower, if laid on its side, would overhang the flight deck by only five feet.

The Stony Man flyboy was smoking a cigarette, trying to relax.

The angled black flight deck was quiet at this hour. The big flattop's two-hundred-thousand horsepower engines, turning her four shafts with their seventy-thousand-pound propellers, could not be heard up here. The incessant roaring, banging and hissing of steam catapult launches and the thumping and snapping of cable-arrested landings, which had been going on since Grimaldi's airlift to the ship from Tunis via a Sikorsky 70L shipboard helicopter, had only minutes ago been called to a halt until more exercises tomorrow morning.

Grimaldi experienced a momentary sense of oneness with the Med, the alluring but historically much fought-over sea.

He could not relax.

That moon overhead, that same panoply of stars, shone down on Mack Bolan at this moment, wherever he was.

If he was still alive.

No way could Grimaldi relax, knowing what he did.

Grimaldi was joined at the rail by an admiral named Fieldhouse. The task force commander was the only man onboard the
Fearless
who knew what Grimaldi knew.

"They told me in Communications that you had to speak with me, Mr. Grimaldi."

Jack did not take his eyes away from the panorama of Mediterranean night.

"What are my chances of violating Libyan airspace without detection? I've got to reach him."

Fieldhouse paused to frame a reply, balancing the odds in his mind. He nodded at the moonwashed expanse of sea.

"The Gulf of Sidra is where two of our planes made hot contact with two of Libya's Su-22s a while back. Soviet-built fighter planes. Those Sus are at the bottom of that gulf right now. Our intel is that Khaddafi's training program hasn't kept up with the technology he's been acquiring. Yes, his army and airforce do have the equipment to spot you coming in. But whether they actually spot you, and how quickly they respond... well, I'd say you stand a chance of getting in and out again if you fly low. Not a good chance, but some chance. What do you need?"

Grimaldi tossed his cigarette butt over the rail.

He had needed some few minutes alone after receiving the communique from Stony Man Farm. He came up here from the ship's communications room, had filled his lungs with gulps of ocean air and half a cigarette. It was enough.

He could handle it.

"What have you got that will get me in fast under their radar grid and punch hard when I get there, Admiral?"

"My recommendation would be our new Boeing 1041 multirole V/STOL," said Fieldhouse. "We have two of them below, on twenty-four standby-one of them without markings.''

"What kind of armament?"

"The 1041 has air-to-air and air-to-surface missile capability. Unfortunately it's not equipped with cannon or machine guns. But with a flight speed of about Mach 0.8, I'd say she's your best bet for the kind of hit you seem to have in mind." The navy man studied the Stony Man pilot with a long look. "This is a very bizarre mission, Mr. Grimaldi."

Grimaldi grunted grim acknowledgment. "It's a bizarre world, Admiral. I'll take your advice. The 1041 it is. Lead the way, please."

Fieldhouse moved down to the principal hangar belowdecks.

Grimaldi tossed one last look over his shoulder at the dark beauty of the Med. He wondered if the sea would still sparkle in the moonlight and reflect those stars the way it did right now — after everyone was dead.

Yeah. Everyone.

Strain-7 — No one knew for sure exactly what it was capable of. The worst possible guess, of course, was that it had the capability of killing off every human being on the face of the earth...

It was very literally a matter of life and death for most of the planet that Mack Bolan now held in his hands.

And Mack did not know it.

Ah, friend, soldier, go carefully in this night. This dark night in your endless war.

Jack Grimaldi knew that his best friend was walking a lonely trail now, and that he was risking all because he did not want to further endanger Eve Aguilar's life; and yes, Grimaldi could identify with that. The pilot was a man of well-defined, fiery Italian temperament who appreciated completely the powers of love and caring that were the lifeblood of his race and the driving force of a bigger-than-life dude named Mack Bolan. The guy would've made a damn good
Italiano.

Grimaldi and Fieldhouse entered the cavernous hangar of the
Fearless.
Planes, men, activity, the smell of grease and oil were everywhere. Noise echoed off the towering steel walls.

Fieldhouse angled off to make arrangements for Grimaldi's briefing and takeoff.

Grimaldi walked over to the plane he would be flying into Libya. He checked out the aircraft with a growing sense of approval.

The two-passenger V/STOL boasted a forty-one-foot wingspan, and a fuselage length of about forty-eight feet. The aircraft was shiny and new, without markings, and Grimaldi hoped he could bring her back in the same condition. The Boeing 1041 was excellent. It would do, hell yeah.

Jack Grimaldi was finished sitting on his tail.

Bolan and Hohlstrom moved toward Doyle who awaited them by one of the gun-ships. Four of Kennedy's mercs were already aboard the second gun-ship. Three men had climbed aboard the copter that carried the cargo. Bruner and Teckert were aboard the aircraft that Doyle stood next to. The ground throbbed and the air thundered with the powerful whistling of revving turbines.

As Rideout and Hohlstrom approached, Doyle called out to them loud enough to be heard above the waves of sound.

"Where the hell have you guys been? Queer for each other or somethin'?" With a wave of his arm, the guy gave out the orders. "Get in the fuckin' chopper. You guys are riding with Teckert and Bruner. Move it!"

Doyle turned and jumped aboard the mother ship. He slammed shut the side hatchdoor. Seconds later, the aircraft shuddered and lifted off. It was immediately followed by gunship number two.

Bolan and Hohlstrom climbed into the chopper where Bruner and Teckert were waiting. Bolan closed the side door. The pilot raised his collective pitch control lever and the third big bird lifted off.

Bolan could see the floodlit grounds of the villa recede beneath them. The Huey cleared the walls, then heeled over and slid gently away into the Sahara night, traveling in what Bolan determined to be a southerly direction.

Like the other men, Bolan had grabbed a wallstrap for support. He glanced at Bruner and Teckert, then at Hohlstrom, but the constant high-pitched whine from the copter's transmission directly overhead made any conversation difficult.

The pilot reached the desired altitude, about three thousand feet. The climb leveled off into a smooth forward cruise.

Bolan gazed beyond the Huey's Plexiglas windows and saw that the three choppers were maintaining a loose formation, twelve to fifteen rotor widths apart, with the two gunships slightly higher to either side of the copter that transported Doyle and the cargo.

Bolan's Galil was strapped over his left shoulder. His belt was equipped with grenades. His right hand never drifted far from the Browning hi-power riding low at his right hip.

Each of the other men toted equal fire power. Teckert and Bruner both carried .357 Magnums on the hip in fast-draw holster. Teckert was gripping a Beretta Model 70 assault rifle in his right hand while the German wore his Galil by the shoulder strap, like Bolan. Hohlstrom had his Beretta pistol in a shoulder holster. An AK-47 was strapped across his left shoulder.

Bolan admired the way Hohlstrom carried himself. The guy was a pro. Mack Bolan preferred working solo or with the trusted members of his Stony Man operation in backup. But since he and the "Swede" were in a situation where they had to work side by side, he was glad this unexpected partner was a man by all appearances exceedingly capable and tough.

As the men grouped together in the bay of the aircraft, Teckert looked at Hohlstrom with the attitude of someone about to shout above the constant, near deafening engine roar from over their head. But he did not speak.

Teckert
moved.

So did Mack Bolan.

Bolan saw it coming. He dropped to his left, un-leathered the Browning, and stayed put.

Hohlstrom had leaned forward to give an ear to Teckert, expecting the guy to shout something as Teckert had appeared ready to do. But yeah, Hohlstrom saw it coming too. He jerked back, tugging his Beretta from its underarm holster in a lightning-fast cross draw. Exceedingly capable.

Except that it was two-to-one.

Bruner executed a fast downward judo chop with his right hand. The Beretta clattered to the deck from Hohlstrom's fist.

It was a fractured splinter of time. The steady throb from the chopper's machinery grumbled around the scene of violence.

Hohlstrom back-stepped in an attempt to unshoulder the AK-47.

Teckert closed in before Hohlstrom's action was complete. Teckert used both hands to heft the Beretta Model 70 he was toting in his right hand. He smashed the assault rifle, butt forward, full force into Hohlstrom's high forehead. The dull
thwack
carried even above the Huey's engine noise.

Hohlstrom's knees buckled. He slumped to the chopper's deck, at the other men's feet, blood streaming down his face and into his eyes.

Teckert stepped away, the butt of his rifle smeared with red.

Bruner, hoisting up Hohlstrom's Beretta, had swung around to cover Bolan. The German froze, staring into the bore of Bolan's Browning automatic.

It was a standoff.

Bolan shifted the Browning's aim between Bruner and Teckert. Bruner did not drop the Beretta. Teckert had reversed his rifle to take aim on Hohlstrom. Everyone had a gun except the fallen man.

The Israeli agent was stretched out facedown, holding his forehead but not making a sound. The guy was holding his pain inside. He appeared only semiconscious.

Bruner did not blink an eye at the handgun in Bolan's fist. "PUT THAT GUN AWAY, MY FRIEND," he yelled above the engine noise. "THESE ARE DOYLE'S ORDERS!"

Bolan gave a curt nod toward Hohlstrom. He did not holster the Browning. "I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS!"

"HOHLSTROM'S A GODDAMN SPY!" Teckert shouted at Bolan. "AN ISRAELI!"

Bolan retained his two-hand grip in a bent-knee stance, the Browning hi-power continuing to arc between the two standing mercs.
Teckert and Bruner did not know how close they were...

But a squeeze of Teckert's trigger finger and Hohlstrom would be dead. Bolan was sizing his options.

"HOHLSTROM'S A BUDDY!" Bolan shouted at the other two. "WHAT PROOF DO YOU HAVE?"

"KENNEDY'S GOT PROOF!" yelled Teckert. At their feet, Hohlstrom was wiping the blood from his eyes.

Bolan moved around an iota, to keep tabs on the chopper pilot up front. The pilot did not turn from his flight controls. The big Huey continued rumbling through the desert night.

Bolan could almost smell the dramatic fuse burning inside this helicopter, getting ready to ignite an explosion.

Bruner stepped wide around Hohlstrom's fallen form, drawn up into a fetal ball a few feet inside the copter's side door.

Bruner unlatched the door and yanked it open. Freezing desert night air whistled in through the gaping hatchway. The Huey's engine roar and the sounds of the whirling rotor blades overhead pounded in.

"NOW WE FIND OUT ABOUT YOU, MR. RIDEOUT," screamed Bruner.

Teckert, standing next to Bruner, indicated the sprawling figure at their feet with the Beretta assault rifle that he still aimed at Hohlstrom's head. "DOYLE SAYS, YOU ICE THE KIKE!"

The German at Teckert's side was still aiming his Beretta pistol at Bolan's head, and he gave a nod at the desert night speeding by outside the open hatch.

"PUSH HOHLSTROM OUT," Bruner ordered Bolan. "RIGHT NOW."