The Libya Connection (8 page)

Bolan had only one option.

His advantage was that the two mercs obviously expected "Rideout" to pass this loyalty test. They had no suspicions otherwise. These men just wanted someone else to do their dirty work in disposing of the spy, Hohlstrom.

Only one option:
kill
!

Bolan twisted with a fluid sideways movement, moving suddenly low and to the left of the 9mm Beretta that Bruner was aiming in his direction.

Meanwhile from his position at everyone's feet, Hohlstrom went unnoticed by Bruner and Teckert as both men swung their attention to Bolan's maneuver. They did not see Hohlstrom swiftly ease around the AK-47 that had dropped to the deck beside him.

From a low crouch, to the side of the action, the Executioner squeezed off a well-placed round from the Browning. The automatic barked from Bolan's right fist, stabbing out an orange red pencil of fire.

At the same instant Bruner pulled off a round from his Beretta. He fired at where Bolan had been one eye-blink before.

Bolan did not fire on Bruner. He first needed to take out Teckert, who stood closest to Hohlstrom and posed the most immediate threat to the fallen Mossad agent.

Bolan's 9mm round frothed apart most of merc Teckert's skull out the chopper's door into the Sahara night racing by directly behind him, followed by what remained of his corpse.

In the same flick of time, Hohlstrom had rolled onto his side and brought the AK tracking upward toward Bruner. A deadly chatter from Hohlstrom's grip spit a burst of shredders that lifted Bruner to the bulkhead of the helicopter and held him there for a moment, his torso bursting apart. Bruner slumped down to the deck. The bulkhead behind where his body had been pinned was riddled, marred with flesh and blood and smoking shreds of clothing.

Hohlstrom pushed himself to his knees, then wiped away the blood that still oozed down into his eyes from his forehead wound. The Mossad man was injured, but holding on. Staying hard.

Bolan swung his focus to the pilot of the chopper.

The pilot was responding to the action. He had punched into the tac net and was shouting into a hand-held mike something that Bolan could not hear. Now the merc pilot was swinging around in his cockpit, tracking toward Bolan with an old-fashioned army issue Colt .45.

Bolan's Browning again penciled death. The pilot pitched over, his near-lifeless body palpitating to final departure on the floor.

Bolan leaped forward and seated himself in the cockpit. He took control of the Huey, glancing out the Plexiglas for a reading of position on the other two choppers.

Quivers of a past life echoed in from his subconscious: soldiering in the hellgrounds of Vietnam those many years ago, learning all he could about everything involved with surviving in a hostile jungle combat zone; observing things like how to pilot the Hueys, those ever-present big birds of Nam.

The Huey with Doyle was pulling away south and there was nothing Bolan could do to halt it.

The other gunship was responding to the dead pilot's radioed SOS.

The heavily armed chopper was banking around for a kill shot. Bolan reacted quickly, pulling the cyclic control stick hard to his left.

"Hang on!" he shouted over his shoulder at Hohlstrom.

As he spoke, their aircraft was already lurching and dipping in an evasive maneuver.

The other Huey opened fire. Its turret-mounted miniguns rattled off a twin streak of 5.56mm armor-piercing rounds.

A direct raking of the fuselage of Bolan's copter was avoided by his fast evasive response. But the other gunship scored a hit.

Bolan felt the cyclic control stick vibrate wildly in his fist. That was the first warning.

Abrupt silence replaced the screaming whine of the Huey's transmission above and behind Bolan. All engine gauges on the flight-control instrument panel plummeted to zero.

Bolan's chopper had sustained an engine hit. The engine was dead. Bolan had only seconds to react.

To his left side in the cockpit was a collective pitch-control lever that controlled the pitch of the rotors. He rammed it down. With the pitch of the blades flattened, even the whistling outside died away.

Bolan was aiming for autorotation of the blades from the copter's downward momentum.

It was an old trick that worked... sometimes.

It was the only trick he had right now.

The silent Huey went into a descending glide, the air from its downward speed rushing up through the blades, keeping them spinning.

The other gunship opened fire with its machine guns, sending a twin stream of tracer bullets that arced only inches from the plexiglas near Bolan.

All of Bolan's attention centered on the flight controls and life-or-death gauge readings of the aircraft he was attempting to land.

His Huey was sailing in at a fast, steady, dangerous descent.

He glanced at the tachometer. As the speed of his chopper's drop increased, the autorotation of the blades registered as climbing rpm. The needle edged back into the safe zone.

Bolan's copter angled downward at about seventy knots. The trickiest part was yet to come.

Bolan closely monitored those rpm. The collective pitch-control lever to his left and the cyclic-control stick to his right both gouged deep furrows into Bolan's palms.

The mother ship of the mission, carrying Kennedy's official number two, Doyle, plus the cargo and the knowledge of Eva Aguilar's whereabouts, was long gone. Gunship number two was probably aiming to land on the desert floor close below, waiting for Bolan and Hohlstrom to crash — and waiting to kill them if they survived.

Bolan flicked on his landing lights, illuminating the first traces of rocky sand dunes beneath him. Once Bolan had fixed his position, he punched off the lights.

At some fifty feet from the ground, still descending with gut-wrenching speed, Mack Bolan ripped back on the cyclic lever.

The Huey nosed sharply upward until the helicopter almost stood on its tail. The rate of dive was arrested as if a tug wire had been yanked, bringing Bolan's tipped machine to a momentary midair stop.

This
was the critical point of a dead-engine landing.

Truth time.

At the precise moment that the Huey had air-braked with its nose at a new upward forty-five degree angle, the warrior in the cockpit shoved the cyclic forward again.

The chopper's rounded nose dropped into a level position. Bolan was fiercely aware of the blood pounding in his ears from the pitching rate of descent followed by the sudden halt.

The Huey was now only fifteen, twenty feet above the desert floor. Hanging there. The rotors still going.

Bolan eased in on the collective once more, very gently.

The ground came up toward the ship like a hurtling wall. The helicopter hit zero with a crunch, a stunning stop made mad by all the framework and the components and the carried objects continuing on down as if headed for the center of the earth.

It was a stubbornness of physics that led to a grinding, screeching crash as a full load of metal-toting gravity collided with the surface of that earth.

Carried objects included Bolan and Hohlstrom, who were pounded into their crash positions as if by a giant fist. Bolan was winded, his perceptions temporarily shattered, his side bruised by the controls as the wrecked helicopter tilted forward brutally, suddenly burying its undernose in a sand dune.

The smell of gasoline filled the cockpit. Actual vapor stung Bolan's nose.

"Out of here! Out, out!" he called, as if automatically overcoming shock and pain with roaring movement.

Hohlstrom was lifting himself once more from the helicopter's floor. The impact of the landing had knocked him down and damn near out again, then the nose-tilt had sent him sprawling.

Like a man skilled at being big, he had moved through the ordeal with a relaxed rolling motion that had spared him major hurt or rupture. Any puncturing was reserved for the gas line.

Now Hohlstrom was up and leaping from the gas-reeking wreck. But Bolan had already moved clear, was indeed returning for Hohlstrom, his mouth forming further commands to get the hell out.

The vapor seemed to sizzle before it suddenly burst into a mighty
whump,
blasting a fireball of broiling red and orange out across the crash site, spreading a wave of scorching acrid hell that gobbled at the back of the Mossad agent.

Hohlstrom nose-dived toward Bolan, the heat mushrooming over him. He was safe — and his face was half-buried in gritty sand.

Mack Bolan, his features ablaze from the glow that illuminated the environment like sunrise in a gray dawn sky, reached Hohlstrom and hauled him to his feet.

"Here comes whatever's next," he said, glancing up. The two men were near a ridge that would hide them from what was soon to be a landing zone. And a kill zone.

Gunship number two now touched down there. The pilot brought his engine to ground idle. The only sound in the night was a lazy, sibilant
swoosh
as the rotors of the healthy Huey continued to turn. Its lights came on, revealing the barren Sahara topography around it.

Behind Bolan, the injured Mossad agent stood steady. He slammed a fresh clip into his AK-47.

"Get
down!"
growled Bolan.

He had discerned movement around the open hatch of the other Huey.

A volley of automatic weapons fire suddenly rattled in the desert quiet. Projectiles whistled by inches above the sprawled figures of Bolan and Hohlstrom, buzzing like a cloud of angry hornets.

Hohlstrom's face was inches from Bolan's on the sand. The Mossad man's eyes were hard and steady.

"We're pinned good," he said.

"Only on our right flank," responded Bolan. "I saw a ridge to our left before I cut the landing lights. Let's make it there before those men swing around behind us."

"I'm with you!" growled Hohlstrom. "Lead the way."

Bolan did exactly that.

The gunfire from the other chopper ceased. Obviously the gunship commander was trying to decide how to play this.

Bolan and Hohlstrom hustled in a low jog toward the sand dune that Bolan had indicated. Both men carried their weapons, ready to use them on anything that moved in the shadows cast in weird, multicolored hues from the other copter's landing lights.

Nothing physical came at them; only the magnified voice of the pilot from the other gunship.

"ARE YOU ALIVE OVER THERE?"

The demand was firm and authoritative.

Bolan's impression of the surrounding terrain, briefly glimpsed as he had brought down the chopper, proved accurate.

The ridge of sand dune that he and Hohlstrom now held visibly, extended to their left in a lazy sweep around and slightly above the open ground separating the two copters. It embraced the rear flank of the pilot's position.

Bolan considered whether the pilot was aware of this.

Whether he was baiting a trap.

Hohlstrom spoke in a whisper, reading Bolan's mind.

"Okay, it just might work. I'm with you, Phoenix. Let's take those bums
out."

The two fighting men were already moving at a low trot, beneath cover of the stony ridge.

They had not gone five yards before more weapons fire erupted from the vicinity of the second gunship The rocky ground seemed to pound beneath Bolan's feet as orange silver strobelike flashes wildly illuminated the wilderness.

Mack Bolan and Hohlstrom continued along their course beneath cover of the ridge, swinging around to the other force's side flank

Death was in the air.

Executioner at work!

The gunship pilot could feel it, could sense it, the death in the air. Something had gone wrong. The orders were for tight formation in forward flight, not garbled messages over the radio and a precipitate drop to the ground under fire.

He glanced at the four other mercs under his command. They stood beside him in the open side door of their gunship.

"You men fall out here and flank out toward our nose," he ordered. He looked at the armed navigator, unable even to remember the guy's name. "You come with me. We'll flank out toward the left. Keep your heads down. All right, let's go. Kill anything that moves."

The five men went EVA and started moving in the darkness toward the other helicopter.

He noticed for the first time that a ridge ran north-south to their right flank. It was possible that...

The night spat chattering gunfire from atop the ridge.

Two mercs emitted short grunts as they were spun around by the impact of the bullets, flurries of twisted arms and legs sprawling to the desert floor.

"Mother of God!" gasped the pilot in a scramble back toward cover.

The machine gun on the ridge stuttered again.

He and the navigator were already making a hurried dash back to the chopper when the pilot heard bullets snuff out the life behind him; he heard the sound of the dead man toppling to the sand.

As fast as he was pumping his legs, as close as his Huey gunship was, time stood still for the merc during that short dash for safety. His heart was hammering. He had the disjointed realization that his forehead wore a glaze of sweat despite the chilled night air.

There was no more gunfire.

Now what the hell?

He sensed movement from his right, from around the tail of the Huey gunship.

From his left, the other remaining merc shouted something unintelligible. More gunfire from that side.

But the pilot only had eyes on the big figure, gripping a Galil in his hands, who stepped into the red-splashed illumination of the copter's landing lights.

The big dude was moving toward him. The rosy glow of the Huey's lights were reflected, even from this distance, by the man's eyes that looked like chips of ice.

He brought up his AK-47 on the imposing combat figure striding toward him, knowing, even as his life survival instincts flared into crystal clarity, that he was too late.

The sharp report of the Galil was the last sound he ever heard.

Bolan heard the exchange of fire between Hohlstrom and the remaining merc, toward the front of the gun-ship.

Then the gunfire stopped. The Sahara night was utterly silent except for the ghostly whooshing of the gunship's rotor blades rotating in idle.

There was no sign of Hohlstrom.

Bolan moved across the field of dead men, jogging cautiously up to the rocky ridge where Hohlstrom had been inflicting his hits.

Bolan felt a sick premonition that was affirmed the moment he topped the ridge.

The "Swede" was prone in a cleft in the rocks, which had given him a clear view of the ground surrounding the second gunship.

The Mossad agent was not moving.

Bolan bit off a curse as he approached the motionless form. He knelt beside his partner in this firefight and turned the man onto his side.

Hohlstrom had stopped at least one bullet before taking out the remaining merc down below. The agent's throat was a pulpy raw mess. This fighter would fight no more. He and the merc may have died at the same time; certainly within seconds of each other.

Bolan stood. He paused there in the cool night, above the body of his fallen ally. Mack Bolan listened. He watched.

Nothing moved.

He shared this desolation with the dead.

But his mind was also on the second gunship, which was operational. It was a slim chance, but he might still be able to trace Doyle to the south, in the mother ship with that mysterious cargo that all of the mercenaries here had died to protect.

Bolan slipped a silent salute to a good man who had sacrificed his life for a good cause. Then the Executioner turned from Hohlstrom's fallen form and started back down the ridge of that sand dune toward the idling helicopter.

When the sky came alive.

A whistling whine was piercing the darkness to the north. Two jets lanced in with their underbelly floodlamps casting quarter-mile pools of light in front of them on the desert floor as they screamed toward him.

When they were about a quarter mile away, the plane to Bolan's right veered sharply off from its mate, in an easterly sweep. Must be that the pilot of the second gunship had radioed ahead that they were going down, but had not had time for the exact coordinates. The jets were searching. From his Stony Man briefings, Bolan figured that the aircraft left for him to contend with was a Soviet-made Su-22.

Bolan hoped he could make it to the protection of the idling gunship before the Su-22 coming his way could spot him. His numbers had tumbled away, however. Another couple of heartbeats and that big warplane would be directly overhead, and Bolan was less than halfway down the sandy ridge that receded toward the Huey. He would be pinned beneath the harsh glare of the big jet's lights. The Libyan pilot was dusting the rolling terrain at a snug eight hundred feet. He would not miss Bolan.

Bolan acted.

He thumbed the Galil onto its grenade launcher mode. He undipped one of the grenades belted to his hip. He fed the grenade into the weapon's launcher apparatus.

The Galil is supposed to be fired from the tripod position when utilizing the grenade launcher. Bolan did not have time for that. He braced himself for the coming recoil. He triggered the assault rifle. Time had run out.

The Galil's recoil practically knocked Mack Bolan backward off his feet. The world screeched of madness from the big Su-22's engines. Armageddon would sound like this.

The HE impacted the Su-22 seconds after it passed over Bolan's head. The Soviet-supplied warplane blossomed into a wildfire flower. The jet disappeared for an instant, swallowed up by explosion. Then the scorched skeletal remains of the aircraft were visible hurtling into the gloom.

Scratch one Su-22.

Bolan scanned the night. Then he continued jogging toward the Huey gunship, still idling eighty yards away. He quickly spotted the other Libyan jet, maybe two miles to the east.

The second jet was responding by heeling around for a run of its own at Bolan.

It was happening in no time at all.

The Libyan jet sailed in with its wing-mounted miniguns blasting wide open.