Читать книгу: «Line Of Honor»

1

The Sudan

The wind roared through the open door of the helicopter cabin. Mack Bolan’s knuckles went white on the grips of the M-134 minigun as he watched the armor-piercing incendiary cannon shells streak past the cabin like green laser lines in the predawn. He shouted into his throat mike to reach Jack Grimaldi in the cockpit. “Jack! Do something!” The Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot close air support jet was flying right up Dragonslayer’s rear and seemed intent on ripping the girl a new one.

Dragonslayer screamed into emergency war power in response.

The Executioner’s stomach dropped as Grimaldi hauled back on the stick and the helicopter went nose vertical. The Sudanese jet streaked past underneath. The Stony Man pilot shoved the stick forward and kicked the collective. Bolan swung on his chicken straps like a hammock in a gale and caught sight of the glowing red lanterns of the Su-25’s twin Tumansky turbojets. He brought the minigun around and squeezed the trigger. The weapon’s motor whined, and the six barrels spun in a blur. Bolan’s own red laser lines scored the night, and he saw bullet strikes sparkle on the Frogfoot’s fuselage. The minigun could fire up to 3,000 rounds a minute as the electric motor whirled its six barrels at dizzying speed. The problem was that the Executioner was firing .30-caliber rifle bullets, and the boys at the Sukhoi Design Bureau sheathed their attack planes in titanium.

The Su-25 was firing 30 mm cannon shells and just one would light up Dragonslayer like the Fourth of July.

For this particular mission, Dragonslayer was stripped to pass foreign inspection and speed; her mission was search and rescue. Bolan’s gun station was a last-second add-on for hostile-landing-zone suppression.

They had never made it to the landing zone.

The Su-25 fighter pair had dropped out of the sky on them like God’s wrath. Fortunately these Sudanese fighter pilots had no experience in dogfighting. The Sudanese air force had spent the past two decades mostly strafing defenseless villages and refugee camps. The lead Su-25 had made the lethal mistake of trying to go low and turn and burn with Dragonslayer. Grimaldi had simply spun the chopper on its axis and given Bolan a lane of fire. The Executioner had ripped about three hundred rounds right up the Frogfoot’s port-side air intake and put paid to the Sudanese pilot’s account.

Wingman wasn’t having it.

He had intuited the situation. His plane could approach six hundred miles per hour. His 1990s vintage Russian Doppler radar was a joke, but helicopters weren’t exactly stealthy. Dragonslayer was a nice vibrating blob on his screen and the sun was coming up. The Su-25 was twice as fast than his prey and taking advantage of that fact. The Frogfoot pilot was climbing high and then screaming down for gun runs and zooming away before Bolan’s ineffectual return fire could have any effect.

The soldier watched the Su-25 bank hard around in the purple light. “Jack, we’re going to have to do this the hard way!”

“What are you suggesting!” Grimaldi shouted.

“Let’s surrender!”

Bolan could almost hear Grimaldi smiling into his mike. “Okay! Let me see, Su-25, export version, his stalling speed has gotta be, what? Eighty-five? Ninety klicks per hour, give him a nice comfortable…”

Dragonslayer dropped altitude and noticeably began slowing as the pilot throttled back. The Su-25 continued its hard turn in the distance to come up on Dragonslayer’s six again. Sunlight began to pour over the Nuba Mountains to the east. Grimaldi held the aircraft in suicidal-level flight as he continued to drop speed. Bolan had a nice visual on the Frogfoot as it began to close.

“You want me to turn belly-up, as well?”

“No! But let’s lose the ordnance!”

“Right!”

Grimaldi flipped a switch and the explosive bolts holding the M-134 on its mounts snapped like firecrackers. He tipped Dragonslayer just slightly to be helpful, and Bolan shoved the minigun out the door. The soldier hoped the enemy pilot was paying attention. Grimaldi held Dragonslayer steady at six hundred feet and 150 miles per hour. Bolan leaned back in his straps and lodged himself behind the cabin door frame. He reached back and slid his hand around the grips of his grenade launcher.

Bolan waited for the Russian 30 mm gun to blow him and Grimaldi to hell.

Even over the thunder of Dragonslayer’s rotors he heard the roar of the twin jet engines. The Frogfoot attack fighter pulled up alongside Dragonslayer like a traffic cop pulling over a vehicular offender. Morning light continued to spill over the mountains, and Bolan could see the Su-25 pilot pointing at Grimaldi and then pointing down at the ground.

The Stony Man pilot was waving back and grinning in a friendly fashion.

Bolan swung out on his straps. The M-32 Multiple Grenade Launcher was a 6-shot weapon. The soldier put the reflex sight slightly in front of the Su-25’s port-side air intake and fired. The fragmentation grenade hit the Su-25 wing about six feet back and detonated harmlessly. Bolan dragged his sights forward to increase his lead and fired again. His second frag grenade detonated against the pilot’s armored cockpit glass. Its only effect was to make the man nearly jump out of his seat. Bolan split the distance as the pilot yanked on his stick and fired the launcher four times in rapid succession. The soldier had front-loaded the M-32 with four frag grenades followed by an antiarmor round and white phosphorus.

The third frag missed.

His fourth bomb, the antiarmor and the incendiary grenades arced in the flight and were sucked up by the turbojet one-two-three like golf balls being eaten by a wet-dry vacuum. The Su-25 pilot had the unwitting decency to dive for the deck and take Dragonslayer out of collateral-damage range. Bolan had seen more explosions in his life than most men had had hot dinners. His eyebrows rose slightly as the Frogfoot shot a fifty-yard tongue of white fire from its port-engine nacelle.

Seconds later the Sukhoi disappeared as 3,000 liters of jet fuel came into violent contact with superheated gas, molten metal and a cloud of burning white phosphorus expanding in her belly to fill every internal crevice. Bolan watched as a ball of orange fire and white-and-black smoke fell from the sky like a slow-motion meteor. Bits of jetfighter with less drag fell from the fiery mass in little smoldering black streamers.

“Gosh…” Grimaldi observed. “Nice shot.”

“Thanks.” Bolan leaned back in his strap, broke open the smoking grenade launcher and reloaded. “I don’t suppose we have a fix on our target anymore.”

“No.” Grimaldi sighed. “We lost our window. We’re going to have to wait until target reestablishes contact.”

Bolan snapped his weapon shut on a loaded round. Odds were they weren’t going to get too many more chances. “Take us home.”

“Copy that.”

The Executioner glanced backward and watched the molten mess that had once been an airplane become a smoking hole in the dust of the Sudan.

All of this begged the question of just how exactly two Su-25s had gotten the jump on them. The Sudanese air-defense grid wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art. Grimaldi had flown them in out of Uganda well under their 1980s vintage Soviet radars. For that matter, Dragonslayer had the most sophisticated electronics suite of any helicopter in existence. If the Sudan had been hammering the sky with their radar, Grimaldi would have known it. They hadn’t detected anything until the Su-25 duo had suddenly swooped out of nowhere. Bolan and Grimaldi had been caught flatfooted. There was really only one explanation and it wasn’t a happy one.

Someone had tipped off the authorities.

Lokichogio Airport, Lokichogio, Kenya

GRIMALDI WAS INCENSED. “Okay, someone tattled!”

Bolan pulled a sweating brown bottle of Tusker lager out of the ice chest and wiped it across his own sweating brow. The U.S. Military General Purpose Tent didn’t have climate control. He cracked the bottle and shrugged. “Wasn’t me.”

“Somebody did.”

“You checked her for bugs?”

The pilot scowled. He had gone over every inch of the aircraft before takeoff and triple checked after the Sudanese dogfight debacle. “Nah, you’re right, I should have thought of that.”

Bolan tapped the sat-phone icon on his tablet. He had already given Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman a debriefing and was hoping for some follow-up.

“Bear, what have you got for me?”

Kurtzman came on the line instantly from the Computer Room at Stony Man Farm, Virginia. “Not much. That was a very interesting story you told me. I’d have to say the most interesting development is that there have been no new developments.”

“No reaction from the Sudanese?”

“Not a peep. Nothing about unauthorized incursions into their airspace, much less any fuss about losing two of their attack fighters.”

“So the question is, who knew about us?”

“Someone tattled!” Grimaldi muttered.

Kurtzman had clearly heard the pilot. “Striker, unless you think Farm security has been compromised, I’m putting tattling on the low-order-of-probability list.”

“Then we were spotted, raised red flags, and someone put the tell-tale on us,” Grimaldi stated.

“That’s the way I see it, too, but I’m finding it kind of hard to fathom. Did you check Dragonslayer for bugs?”

Grimaldi reddened. You didn’t see the man lose his cool very often. However, the Stony Man pilot was nearly always the ambusher rather than the ambushee. He had flown into suicidal situations and threaded the eye of the needle more times than Bolan could count. Getting ghosted and jumped out of the blue, or in this case the black, was an infrequent and unwelcome experience. Grimaldi glared at Bolan and raised his hands heavenward.

“Copy that, Bear,” Bolan acknowledged.

“Then let’s break it down. Who would have noticed you?”

Bolan grabbed his tablet and his beer, and stepped outside the tent. Grimaldi followed. Lokichogio Airport was a small facility and also extremely busy. It had become a hub for international and private aid and mercy missions in heartbreaking numbers. A small city of tents, container-unit shelters and prefabs littered the grounds around the main airport. Bolan and Grimaldi were posing as a private courier operation for a Farm-fabricated nongovernmental organization, or NGO. The tent they had brought with them. Dragonslayer’s landing pad was a mostly level square of ground that someone had packed down with a lawn roller. Amenities were few. Bolan wanted to stay out of town, but the ad hoc city of aid workers was serviced morning, noon and night by roach coaches and street hawkers of all descriptions.

The fact was, between the humanitarian crises in the Congo, South Sudan, Darfur, as well as Ethiopia and Somalia, dozens of nations and NGOs were in a constant flux of representation. With that many interests, and that much money and aid flying in from all over the world and flying out in all directions, the city had also become a hotbed of smuggling and international intrigue. Kurtzman was right. Bolan’s two-man team and Dragonslayer had attracted attention. They had barely been in Kenya more than forty-eight hours and had hoped to be out in the morning, long before any interest they attracted could materialize into anything.

The next question was how had they been tracked.

Anyone stupid enough to walk up to Dragonslayer to try to put a GPS tracking device on her would have set off her security suite, incurring Bolan’s and Grimaldi’s immediate wrath. Assuming someone with ninja-quality skills had succeeded, Grimaldi’s pre- and postflight electronic security sweeps would have detected any invading electronic device.

Bolan considered how he would have done it.

“Bear, can you get me some satellite imaging?”

“What are you looking for?”

“I want some high-magnification infrared on Dragonslayer,” Bolan replied.

“Well…” Kurtzman considered the weird request. “She isn’t moving, is she?”

“No.”

“Well, what I’m most likely to see is a pair of glowing exhausts.”

“Run a full infrared spectrum analysis,” Bolan ordered.

“Okay…that’s going to take a few minutes.”

“Fast-track it if you can.”

“All right.” Far off in Virginia, Kurtzman clicked keys and made the magic happen. “The Pentagon has two birds that have a window on your position. You officially have high priority, but it’s going to take a few moments to receive the command codes. Hold on. Syncing in your tablet…”

Bolan’s tablet peeped at him and he touched an icon. The farthest flung, northwest corner of Kenya appeared in infinite shades of gray. The view plunged down through the atmosphere as the satellite locked on to his signal and began increasing its magnification. The haphazard mess that was Lokichogio resolved into a city and then an airport. Suddenly, Bolan found himself with a top-down view of Dragonslayer.

In the infrared imaging, her engine cowls still glowed a dull bone-white against the green-gray of the fuselage from the evening’s earlier excursion.

“Tracking is locked and imager is calibrated, Striker. We looking for anything in particular?”

“Just a hunch. Let’s start from the bottom and take it through the spectrum.”

“That’s not exactly this bird’s job, but let’s see what we can do. Starting at 0.7 micrometers.”

A micrometer was one millionth of one meter, and it was often used in measuring infrared wavelengths. Point seven micrometers was the nominal edge of visible red light, and the spectrum extended out to 300. Such measurements went far beyond the ability of the human eye. Dragonslayer’s engines were one-offs, custom built specifically for a single aircraft, and powerful out of all proportion to her size. Like staring into the sun, most minor fluctuations in her infrared signature would be impossible for most instruments to detect. However, the right instrument using the proper filters could stare directly into the sun and detect heat variations all over the sun’s surface as well as within it. Bolan was looking for a fluctuation that a high-intensity infrared imaging satellite, most likely a hostile one, would detect. Particularly a satellite that was on station, for that purpose, and that knew exactly what it was looking for and had a good idea where.

Bolan was looking for a cold spot.

The image of Dragonslayer slowly changed like a black-and-white photo polarizing. “There,” Bolan said.

“I see it,” Kurtzman acknowledged. “Increasing magnification.”

The corner of Bolan’s mouth quirked as his hunch was vindicated. The back slope of the main rotor housing was spackled with mysterious spatters of glittering white light.

“Man!” Grimaldi was incensed. “Someone done gone and gooed my girl! Rat…bastards!”

It was a trick Bolan himself had used. You could design chemicals to give off infrared light at specific wavelengths, suspend them in a clear, fast-drying gel and use them to mark objects or even people for unwitting targeting or tracing. If Bolan had to bet, someone had unloaded on Dragonslayer with a silenced, high-powered air rifle loaded with the equivalent of paint balls filled with infrared-emitting gel. It wasn’t the sort of assault that would have triggered any of Dragonslayer’s security sensors, and if Bolan was the shooter he would have timed his shots to the nearly constant 24/7 roar of takeoffs and landings.

The soldier glanced over at the fuel truck and found his spackle-sniper’s position. It was currently parked fifty yards away and serviced the helicopter park. Bolan looked out across the shelters and prefabs to the airport proper.

He had a very strong feeling he was under surveillance.

“Bear, I’m calling this mission FUBAR. We’re marked and can’t operate out of this theater.”

“So the whole thing is a wash?”

“No—” Bolan stared northeast toward the cauldron that was the Sudan “—we’re just going to have to do it the hard way.”

“We’re running out of time, Striker.”

“You said Able and Phoenix are currently operating?”

“That is their status.”

“I can’t use blacksuits for this gig. I need mercs.” Blacksuits were the military and police personnel who rotated onto the Farm to provide security duty for a period of time.

“Oh…my…God…”

“Find them for me, Bear. Break into databases and find me some reliable men.”

“I don’t know if I can get that authorized by—”

“Don’t authorize it. Just do it.”

“And to finance and equip this little jaunt I am…” Kurtzman’s voice trailed off.

“I’m going to give you a password and an account number and authorize your access to an account a friend opened for me in Labuan. I had to stash away someone’s ill-gotten gains.”

Kurtzman paused a moment. “In Malaysia.”

“Yeah. Malaysia.”

“What will you need?” Kurtzman asked.

“About a squad, a lean one. Like I said, I want you to hack the databases, deal with each individual directly.”

“Anything specific you’re looking for?”

Bolan considered the Sudan again. “Any experience in the desert is good. Some French or Arabic is a plus, so would being able to ride a horse.”

“What’s the pitch?”

“I’ll make the pitch. You offer them a first-class round-trip ticket and ten thousand euros to hear me out.”

“Some of them might think its some kind of trap. I think you need to give me a little more.”

“All right, we’ll lead with the truth. Tell them it’s a rescue mission that’s probably suicide, and tell them to meet me in Chad.” Bolan smiled tiredly. “Then let’s see who comes.”