Triangle Of Terror

3

Major Alan Hawke, United States Special Forces, had heard the rumors, but seeing was, indeed, believing. What was inside the hovel, under medical examination, added a new and nervous wrinkle to the mission. It was just the kind of horror—and hassle—he didn’t need. This wasn’t Task Force Talon of Afghanistan infamy, where he had served under Colonel Braden, and soldiers turned a blind eye, or else. Out here, there were new grunts on the block who might go over his head, flap tongues to starred brass who would land his neck on a chopping block. At that moment, he wrestled with any number of conflicting loyalties as to whom to report to, aware his next move could well lead to a court-martial. But he knew what had to be done.

And he knew he would do it, if he wanted to survive, if he didn’t want his own atrocities brought to light.

Listening to the whapping blades of his Apache helicopter, the two Hueys framing the stone hovel in a white halo from a hundred yards south over his shoulder, feeling the swirling grit sting his neck, he silently urged Task Force Iron Hawk’s medic to emerge with a final report. Feeling the ghosts of fifteen dead Iraqis, he scoured the black walls of the wadi, M-16/M-203 combo ready to cut loose at any rebel who might have fled the firefight some eight hours earlier.

It had been a fluke, stumbling across the building while roving the skies in search of armed runners. Going through the door, ready to shoot, they found the two victims, stricken and stretched out on prayer rugs from God only knew what, though he had his suspicions. A man and a woman, husband and wife, it turned out. His interpreter, donning a HAZMAT suit, had pried from them a very unnerving tale.

And confirmed what he’d been hearing during the briefs the past several months.

He told himself he really had no business this far north, edged up against the Turk border, this neck of rugged mountain country. Kurd-controlled, there was enough ethnic hatred wandering around to mow down any resistance rabble who escaped their steel talons. But his orders didn’t always come direct from Central Command.

The problem was how to avoid reporting what he’d found.

He saw the spacesuit emerge through the doorway, Captain Medley removing his helmet. With no way to read the grim expression, Hawke waited until the man was on top of him.

Medley appeared to gather his thoughts on how to proceed. “The good news is it doesn’t appear to be a bio agent, but I’d like to draw blood, take tissue samples for further examination,” he said.

“No.”

Medley looked aghast. “But, sir—”

“What’s killing them?” Hawke asked.

“Killed.”

Hawke groaned to himself, more an act than anything else, hoping Medley read the noise as disappointment at the lack of information. In this case ignorance was bliss.

Medley continued. “The spasms, the manner in which their limbs locked up, asphyxiation, all classic symptoms of exposure to a nerve agent.”

“Sergeant Ellis informed me they had just returned from across the Turk border, delivering some cargo they could or would not specify.”

“My guess is they handled the agent, a seal broke on a drum, or whatever they were shipping it in. They must have been exposed to high doses given their symptoms.”

“Are you telling me this wasn’t their first trip?”

“That, running the nerve agent in faulty containers, or there’s a good chance they overturned the vehicle, dumped the cargo, got splashed in the process. For a nerve agent, inhalation or direct skin contact will do the deed.”

“If your scenario is correct, they should have dropped right then, across the border.”

“Not necessarily. It would depend on how much of the agent they were exposed to. Either way, they’re long past any atropine injection now.”

Hawke looked his medic dead in the eye. “You are to forget what you saw here. Do you copy, Captain?” He could see Medley didn’t like it, was poised to argue, but seemed to think better of it.

“Yes, sir,” the medic said with reluctance.

“Hop on board then,” he told Medley, then whistled at the four shadows hunkered in the wadi, rotating his raised fist.

So it was true, he thought, holding his ground, waiting while his troops hustled past him to board the Hueys. Whatever had begun in Afghanistan, all the talk he’d heard from CIA spooks dancing with the devil, Braden…

Marching for his grounded Hueys, forging into the whirlwind, Hawke raised his Apache crew and ordered, “Give me one right down Broadway, mister.”

The order copied, he gathered speed. The Hellfire missile flamed away from its pod. As the thunder pealed behind, and suspecting how the sins of the past were about to create hell on earth, he thought, God help us. God help us all.

4

“Calm down.”

“That’s a Presidential Directive, in case you’ve never seen one, Colonel. And in case you haven’t guessed yet, we’ve got an official human shitstorm headed this way. I, for one, can say I don’t much care for the tone from the Oval Office. It damn near hints at treason.”

Examining the faxed letter with the presidential seal in the Humvee’s headlights, Colonel Braden glanced at General Compton, bared his teeth at the beefy tub in jungle fatigues, then returned to reading their orders.

“Someone talked, Colonel, maybe even someone we thought we could trust. Which, if true, means they know what you’ve been doing down here!”

The more Compton whined, worried, no doubt, about saving his own fatass, the more Braden felt the blood pressure pulsing in his eardrums. He imagined he heard the HK-33 assault rifle slung over his shoulder calling the general’s name. From behind him he heard the splash, witnessed the sight of al-Tikriti’s body, wrapped in a plastic shroud, being dumped in the river by two of Task Force Talon’s finest. It interrupted the man’s bleating for all of two seconds.

“Maybe you want to tell me how we’re going to account for two murdered detainees. Maybe you’ve got a makeup kit I don’t know about that we can use to patch up and mask four more who look like they’ve gone a few rounds with—”

“Calm down!” Braden shouted.

Braden’s hands shook with simmering rage. He scanned the next two lines, but Compton was nearly barking in his ear.

“You listening to me? We are looking at a fat whopping mess that no amount of sterilizing will sanitize unless we burn the whole damn camp down and build it back from scratch. I have cargo back at camp with no manifests, no serial numbers. I have the Brazilian making noise to return to Brasilia and blow the whistle unless he sees—”

“Calm the fuck down! Let me think here!” Braden was seething.

Whether it was the feral look he turned on Compton or that they both knew he was actually the one on the hot seat with blood on his hands, the General shut his mouth. Braden turned his back to Compton, took a moment to survey the walls of lush vegetation flanking the dirt trail, and composed his thoughts. It was one of the last stretches of jungle in this remote outpost, a few miles east of Camp Triangle, where they could dispose of their mistakes. There was a time, he believed, when caimans and ferocious little fish with razor-teeth would have devoured decomposing flesh.

The problem was the new massive hydroelectric generating plant. He hoped the bodies didn’t bob to the surface if they made it to the dam’s wall. That would prove another, perhaps fatal mistake, since it appeared Washington thought it smelled the putrefaction. Listening to the caw and screech of wild birds in the distant veil of black, feeling his nerves soothed by the chitter of insects, he bobbed his head and turned to face Compton.

Braden wadded up the Presidential Directive and tossed it into the brush. “Okay, General, here’s what we do before we greet with open arms and winning smiles this asshole colonel from Washington—”

5

Dead men could talk by the manner in which they died.

He might be thinking in cop terms, more or less, violent death hardly something new in his profession, but Mack Bolan couldn’t help but feel the ghosts of slain American intelligence operatives—a young Marine and a missing civilian who had sounded an SOS to the FBI. The Executioner surveyed the industrial chemical plant from a wooded knoll, his surveillance post roughly forty yards due north of Gate One.

What, exactly, the dead had to do with Wolfe-Binder Chemicals along the Mississippi River he didn’t know. But eight bodies, that he knew of, were already attached to what he believed were several mysteries. He had never talked to the victims before they were murdered—or allegedly committed suicide—but the pieces of a sordid puzzle had been coming together for close to a week. And the mystery darkened with each passing hour.

Several situations begging large nasty questions had been brought to Bolan’s attention by Hal Brognola. His longtime friend was a high-ranking official at the Justice Department, but that was just the public face. In the shadow world of covert ops, Brognola oversaw Stony Man Farm, the high-tech lair in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that housed cyber supersleuths and the warriors who did the dirty bloody work in the field. Off the record, Brognola was liaison to the President of the United States who green-lighted missions for Bolan and the other warriors at the Farm.

This time was no exception.

Soon, Bolan was going to head south, armed with presidential carte blanche to find out if what the dead Marine had claimed about a classified base housing Arab fundamentalists was true.

But first, he had to unravel the mystery of a purported chemical weapons processing plant.

After six hours of watching and assessing, the soldier suspected it wasn’t as virginal as Justice Department and FBI agents had found it a few days earlier. At last count, Bolan had tallied four men in black fatigues armed with HK MP-5s with fixed laser sights and commando flashlights, and military-issue Beretta M-9s for side arms.

The mystery hardforce hovered near what he believed was the main plant, dead center of the compound, as if awaiting orders. On the surface the compound was what it advertised itself to be, but Bolan knew all about classified bases where what the public saw was cosmetic. There was a spider web of pipelines fanning out from processing central, a main generator, and a shack flanked by panels with valves and gauges. Add four two-story storage tanks, a football field stretch of concrete warehouses with forklifts, and all of it painted Wolfe-Binder as innocuous.

The stage job pretty much ended there.

It was the runway, a long asphalt strip to the west, that garnered most Bolan’s attention. The grounded black turboprop was a scaled-down, custom version of a C-130, the kind of bird he’d seen used by spooks who sometimes, in his grim experience, straddled both sides of the fence. Meaning they often pledged allegiance to something other than national security and patriotic duty.

Two armed shadows were at the lowered ramp, one of them on a radio, mouthing what Bolan assumed were orders. Unless he’d missed his guess, they were ready to load the cargo.

Suddenly, he saw two GMCs break from the west gate. They began a slow roll toward the cargo plane. A third matching ride remaining parked roughly midway down warehouse row. Other than hardforce activity, Bolan hadn’t spotted any telltale signs—civilian vehicles for instance—that would betray the presence of a graveyard shift. If and when the shooting starting the absence of an unarmed workforce would make his task that much easier. And, with no guards posted at any of the four gates, the compound had an eerie, dying feel to it.

It seemed everyone was bailing what he suspected was a sinking ship.

Either the federal tour had put nerves on edge, or, Bolan thought, whoever the hardforce swore allegiance to had decided the job was done and it was time to pull up stakes. He decided to hold out a little longer before he made his move, his thoughts weighty with the few facts about this mission as he had them.

Dead intel ops overseas and at home aside, there was the matter of White House leaks. And Brognola had recently discovered the President—at the risk of perhaps his job and legacy—had pulled executive rank and created a group called the Special Countermeasure Task Force. Their function ostensibly being logisticians, intel wizards, super bodyguards. That was merely riddle number one, but for Bolan’s money it would branch out into other darker areas.

Then—perhaps the kicker—there was the former colleague of the Farm’s mission controller, Barbara Price. On the flight down in the Gulfstream to New Orleans, Bolan had received yet more disturbing news from Brognola. Two more suicides had dropped on the big Fed’s radar screen. One of them, a high-ranking CIA official, was believed to be the source of leaks that had, directly or indirectly, caused the executions of operatives overseas—unless, of course the Company man was a sacrificial lamb. But it was the dead man from the NSA who had contacted Price with a mixed bag of fact and rumor—about missing weapons of mass destruction and his suspicions about the SCTF—that knotted Bolan’s gut he was set to stumble into a deep serpent’s hole. Too much coincidence and convenient dead bodies were stacking up, and it reeked to Bolan of conspiracy.

One suicide he could buy, but three smacked of staging, given the grim mystery surrounding murders that were connected, he was sure, to some lurking hydra. Bodies were turning up in a timely fashion when it appeared truth was one songbird away. A suicide note and an alleged sordid lifestyle had been uncovered to smear a dead CIA deputy chief’s reputation, which, up to then, had been sterling.

A young Marine, decorated in the second Gulf war, with a wife and children, was assigned to Gitmo. He’d been transferred to the recently established and classified Camp Triangle. Returning home, armed with a nasty story about the torture and murder of detainees, he’d turned up in his vehicle—apparently on the way to the Justice Department—one 9 mm round through the head, gun in hand, a typed suicide note by the body.

The dead, for damn sure, Bolan thought, were talking to him. No witnesses, no clues, no rhyme or reason, other than someone wanted the truth silenced.

The fact the Man in the Oval Office wanted answers from outside the normal channels signaled to Bolan that perhaps he didn’t trust his new and vaunted miniorg of intel geniuses all of a sudden. And if they had a reach all the way down into Brazil, as Price’s former colleague had alluded…

However it all shook out, the Executioner had come to start the mission west of the Big Easy and easing out near Plantation Country with a bang.

He cradled the M-16/M-203 squad blaster, watching as four hardmen fell out of the GMCs. With an extended 40-round clip locked and loaded in the assault rifle, Bolan figured he’d hold back loading the M-203. He’d be able to choose from a bevy of 40 mm projectiles on his webbing—from fragmentation, buckshot, incendiary and armor-piercing high-explosive rounds—depending on numbers or if it looked like he needed to pack extra punch for a steel door or perhaps set off the cargo in a shock attack. He’d make the call on the spot.

For quiet kills the Beretta 93-R was snug in shoulder rigging, its muzzle extended with a sound suppressor. A commando dagger was sheathed on his right shin for the bloodier option of a slashed throat or a blade through the ribs, into the heart. On his right hip rode the big stainless-steel .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, butt aimed at twelve o’clock for a left-handed draw, just in case he needed to go double-fisted with both side arms in a pinch.

Whatever else he’d need—weapons, gear and sat link—was stowed on the waiting Gulfstream being sat on by two of three Farm blacksuits. The odd commando out was in the vicinity, ready to ride in with the SUV rental once the soldiers put in a call on the radio.

He was all set to go through the front door, but for what? he wondered.

Watching the north, east and west ends of the plant, Bolan felt more satisfied the longer he waited that once he breached the razor-topped chain link fence he would have clear sailing on the grounds. Six halogen lights topped around the fencing weren’t much in terms of illuminating the perimeter. Warpaint over exposed skin to match combat blacksuit, Bolan, a master of stealth and using the night and the shadows to full lethal advantage, would be as near invisible going in as he would get. Whomever the opposition was, they were either overconfident, abandoning the plant or both.

Only one way to find out, the Executioner told himself, and broke cover to go hunting.

HARPER FEARED the ghosts would haunt him wherever he ran, or tried to hide from the truth of the past, present and future. Brazil, his own island in the South Pacific, hell, perched on the top of Mount Everest, there would still be no washing the innocent blood off his hands, or erasing from memory the killings of ordinary folks who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Beyond his personal involvement in carrying out orders, there was the insidious knowledge that he was part of something so monstrous, so diabolical yet so insane it could rip apart an entire nation with ferocious anarchy.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to get out, he considered, to take care of number one. He had no familial strings, some money from the operation already in a numbered account. He might make it in a far-off land, a new identity, start over. How badly did he really need to be part of the coming national, perhaps even global nightmare? How much blood did he need on his head? After all, he wasn’t entirely without conscience. He was still wondering, even vaguely troubled by how many friends and relatives his recent victims had left behind—who might know something and talk—aware, then, that if official powers shone light on his activities he would find himself pleading his case before a military tribunal, tried for murder and treason.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d executed American civilians who wanted to squeal after they had sworn an oath and signed a blood contract to go deaf, dumb and blind on a black project. There were those two aerospace engineers in Nevada, one who had gone “missing” an hour before he was to appear on a cable documentary about UFOs and reverse engineering. And there was that microbiologist, his wife and their teenaged son in Sacramento….

Yet three more civilians here in Louisiana. Two of them had been paid a midnight call, pals of the assistant manager who had sounded the alarm to the FBI. More food for the bayou, he thought, if he wanted to be callous about it, smart if he wanted to congratulate his foresight on getting their home and cell phones tapped, bugs planted under their roofs, which had betrayed loose tongues. If the others wanted to flap their gums—the science crew included—they would turn up victims of any number of creative accidents.

Snowing the G-men from Washington wasn’t that difficult, he reflected, pleased with himself for giving an award-worthy performance as the plant’s manager, all the bogus credentials and manufactured background checks holding up to their intense scrutiny. After all, Wolfe-Binder had been a legitimate industrial chemical plant. The paperwork he showed them was in perfect order when they trooped in, armed with suspicions and warrants. Before their arrival it had been a little tense, he granted, a few frenzied hours of sanitizing, loading up the eighteen-wheeler with contaminated tubes, vats, the disassembled decon chamber, HAZMAT suits, weapons and so forth.

The job here was finished, at any rate, he thought as he gave a last look around.

He stepped through the front door of the main plant, leaving it unlocked. The shop was barren except for a few stainless-steel tables. The documents that could tie him to their people in Brazil and Washington had been shredded. Computers and sat links were already on board their winged ride. Nothing was left now but to roll the last fifty-five-gallon drums into the bird and set off for Brazil.

Marching past the steel facades of the giant storage tanks, he heard engines grinding to life around the corner of the first warehouse. Forklifts geared up to haul the pallets—shipped back in by tractor trailer after the Feds had cleared out—and then they’d be done.