Stony Man - Triple Strike Part 1

Mack Bolan.

Stony man.

Triple Strike.

CHAPTER ONE.

Eastern Bosnia

United States Air Force Major John Hammer was cruising at twelve thousand feet through the night skies over eastern Bosnia. Hammer was a third-generation Air Force pilot. His grandfather had flown P-51 Mustangs against the Messerschmitts of the Third Reich, his father had blasted North Vietnamese convoys on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and Hammer had gotten his licks in during the Gulf War. He'd been an Eagle driver back then and had blasted two Iraqi air force MiG-29s out of the sky on the first day of the air war.

Now he was flying the world's most advanced spy plane on a top-secret mission over Bosnia, and he was digging it. He knew that Bosnia wasn't much of a war zone, but it was the closest thing to combat flying there was for an American pilot right now. And though his subsonic TR-3 Night Owl stealth plane was a far cry from the Mach 2 F-15 fighters TRIPLE STRIKE TRIPLE STRIKE.

he had flown in the Gulf, it was the hottest thing in the air in this part of the world this night.

The mission that had dragged him out of his bunk back at Aviano Air Force Base in Italy wasn't all that exciting. Flying a snoop-and-p.o.o.p wasn't the same as flying MiG CAP with his weapons hot, no matter how cla.s.sified it was. But it was a real mission, and it was sending him in harm's way again and that was the only thing that counted.

Hammer's eyes swept across the Night Owl's instruments and digital readouts again. His recon data links were on-line and hot, transmitting everything his sensors were picking up to the satellites and ground stations that were tracking him. He hadn't been told exactly what he was looking for, only that it had something to do with a guy with an SAR implant. He had been instructed to fly over an area of several hundred square miles with all of his sensors hot and let the mysterious black boxes in the belly of his bird do their thing. If whoever it was that the bra.s.s wanted him to find was down there, he'd find him or her.

Checking his nay screen, he saw that he was approaching the end of this leg of his search pattern and got ready to make his next scheduled turn. It was a moonless night, which made his matte black aircraft invisible to sight, as well as to radar, but at twelve thousand feet, Hammer really didn't have to worry about anyone on the ground seeing him anyway. He was in his own world with only the stars for company.

"Zero Seven Five," the voice of the airborne mission controller orbiting to the west over the Adriatic Sea came over the earphones in his helmet. "This is Blue Bell Control, over."

"Seven Five, go." Hammer felt his adrenaline surge as he clicked in his throat mike. On this kind of mission, the AWACS plane wouldn't be talking to him unless it was important. One of the rules of stealth on this kind of mission was that he didn't use his radio except in an emergency. Radio transmissions could be detected and used to track his flight path the same as radar.

"This is Control," the AWACS answered. "Be advised that we have picked up a bogey heading your way, vector two-eight-niner. Over."

Hammer automatically looked out of the curved canopy as he reached over to switch on his own airborne radar. Per SOP, Night Owl pilots made their recon runs with their radars shut down so enemy aircraft or ground stations couldn't pick up their emissions and track them, either.

"Seven Five. Do you have an ID on him, over?" he asked as his radar screen flickered on.

"That's a negative," Blue Bell answered. "But he's coming on fast, Mach 1.4. Over."

Suddenly Hammer saw a shadow block out the stars in front of him, and he knew he was screwed big-time. Slamming the control stick forward, he put TRIPLE STRIKE TRIPLE STRIKE.

his plane into a steep dive, but it wasn't fast enough. The other pilot apparently saw him at the same time and put his plane into a dive to avoid him, as well.

The two aircraft didn't hit head-on; in fact they barely touched. But as light as it was, the collision tore the vertical stabilizers off of the TR-3, throwing it into a fiat spin. Hammer barely had time to reach for the ejection handle to his bang seat before the Night Owl started coming apart around him.

The rocket motor in the bottom of his Lockheed-Martin ejection seat blew him through the closed c.o.c.kpit canopy, sending him six hundred feet into the air. At the top of its trajectory, the seat automatically separated from the pilot and the spring-loaded parachute deployed.

Fighting to get his parachute canopy under control, Hammer watched his multimillion dollar, high-tech spy plane turn into aerial junk below him. He looked for the other plane, but didn't see anything, not even the blue flame of its exhausts. But if it was flying as fast as the AWACS had said it was, it would be out of sight by now. Alone in the night sky, he fell with only the sound of the wind in the chute's risers for company.

Checking the altimeter on his parachute harness, Hammer saw that he was getting close to the ground. With no moon to illuminate the terrain below him, he decided to take his chances with what fate had given him rather than trying to pick out a safe landing spot. In the dark, everything down there looked the same, so trying to change direction might well take him into something worse than what waited be-low.

The landing shock took Hammer by surprise and drove the wind out of him. Looking around, he saw that he had landed in a cleared area. He couldn't see much beyond that as he hit the release to drop his parachute harness. He was reaching into the pocket of his flight suit for his survival radio when he felt a blow to the head and everything went black.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia HAL BROGNOL^, Barbara Price and Yakov Katzenelenbogen were crowded into Aaron Kurtzman's computer room at Stony Man Farm watching the real-time readouts that were being sent from the TR-3's satellite data link. The spy plane was transmitting a full range of infrared video, magnetic imaging, electronic emissions, terrain-mapping radar and everything else in its sizable bag of tricks.

This electronic information was all encoded, and usually only the top-secret ann of the government known as the National Reconnaissance Office received it. In their headquarters outside Washington, D.C., electronic and photographic intelligence from spy satellites and aircraft such as the TR-3 flowed in to be decoded and a.n.a.lyzed.

Stony Man Farm didn't need a multimillion dollar facility and a staff of hundreds to decode and study I KIFL~ I KIll[ this cla.s.sified information. All it needed was Aaron Kurtzman and his small cybernetics staff. He had long since worked out a decoding program for the NRO transmissions and could read the data from the TR-3 as it fed in. The Farm would get the information anyway sooner or later, but Kurtzman wanted to know what was happening now.

"We lost him," Kurtzman said, turning in his wheelchair to look up at Brognola.

"What do you mean, you lost him?" Brognola growled around the stub of the unlit cigar stuck in a comer of his mouth. As part of his duties as special liaison to the White House, the Justice Department official was the director of the Sensitive Operations Group, the official name of the Stony Man Farm team. Whenever the President activated Stony Man for a mission, Brognola traveled from Washington as often as possible to oversee the operation.

"I mean that he's gone," Kurtzman replied. "Vanished. My best guess is that he got shot down."

"But that's impossible. That's a TR-3 Night Owl, the most sophisticated spy plane in the world. It's invisible to radar, infrared and everything else they could think of. It's impossible to shoot it down."

"Impossible or not," Kurtzman stated, "he stopped transmitting suddenly. Unless he's had a cat-astrophic electrical failure, which is not too likely, he's down somewhere over Bosnia."

Brognola's hand automatically reached for the roll of antacid tablets in his coat pocket.

TRIPLE STRIKE.

"Wait a d.a.m.ned minute," Kurtzman almost shouted. "I'm getting something. I'm getting an SAR response from one of the Sky Watch satellites." "How did that happen?"

"I'm not sure." Kurtzman's fingers flew over his keyboard, locking in the signal. "But I'd say that the TR-3 pa.s.sed close enough to activate the SAR implant, and it's responding now."

After the near crisis that arose back in 1996 when U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown died in a plane crash while attempting to land at Dubrovnik, all high-ranking U.S. officials visiting the Bosnian region had been given one of the new military SAR-Search And Rescue-implants.

These were subminiature electronic beacons that would respond to a coded signal that could be sent by a satellite, a search aircraft or by the radios of ground-search teams. Designed to be practically in-destructible, the implants had a battery capable of sending the signal continuously for seven days. Since the signal was sent only in response to an activation, the implants could stay "hot" for several weeks, if not months, after their first remote activation.

Hammer's TR-3 had been sent to see if it could activate a SAR implant that had failed to respond to satellite activation. The man who was wearing that implant was down over Bosnia, and the President was anxious to get him back with as little fanfare as possible. Stony Man Farm hadn't been officially Jntrt. c otmr~r-lElYLb 11IKE tasked with the mission yet, but Brognola knew that it was coming.

"But," Brognola asked, "can you tell which implant is squawking? Wouldn't that Night Owl pilot have been wearing one, as well?"

Kurtzman looked at the electronic code on his screen. "It matches the SAR code we were told to look for."

"It's Richard Lacy, then. He's in Bosnia, right?" Brognola growled around his cigar. He wasn't in the mood to listen to more bad news right now. The disappearance of Richard Lacy on a diplomatic helicopter flight over Bosnia had the Oval Office in an up-roar. Not only was the retired State Department official a valued adviser to the White House, but he was also a close friend of the President. Brognola wanted to be able to report that he had been found.

"It's Bosnia, all right," Katz confirmed. "But it's coming from the Muslim section-the part of Bosnia that's not too happy with us right now. In fact, neither we nor NATO have any PROFOR troops in that area anymore." "Why not?"

"We don't have anyone stationed there because they kept getting shot at, and rather than starting the war again, the UN decided to pull them all out. It's a no-go zone for several hundred miles around that signal location." "d.a.m.n."

"And," Katz continued, "along with Richard Lacy, we now have the presumed wreckage of a su-persecret spy plane and maybe even a pilot down in the area, as well. I think that the President might want to get that back, too. Even wrecked, it's a little too valuable to leave laying around."

"What's the status of Phoenix Force?" Brognola asked Barbara Price.

Though she didn't look like anyone's idea of an operations officer, Price was the mission controller for the Stony Man action teams. The Farm was the world's premier intelligence-gathering operation, but simply gathering the data would be meaningless without having the means to act upon it. What made Stony Man different than all the other federal intelligence agencies was that the Farm could call upon Phoenix Force and Able Team to act on the information they developed. They also had the services of a very special man-Mack Bolan.

"They're standing by," she answered. "I alerted them as soon as you called me about this SAR search. I also contacted Mack, and he's available. Grimaldi has a C-141 on ramp alert at Andrews, and I can have them in the air in under two hours. With a'Lr-to-air refueling they can be on the ground at the air base in Aviano, Italy, in a little over nine hours."

"I almost hate to bring this up," Katzenelenbogen said, "but we're going to need to play this one real close to the vest."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if we stage out of Aviano, we're going to be in the middle of a lot of unfriendly, prying eyes. Every UN bozo and his brother will be there as well as the operatives of the so-called Bosnian republics. Even if we try to stay inside the U.S. compound on the base, there are too many people wandering in and out. We won't be able to scratch without someone watching us. And as sensitive as this operation will be, we can't afford that."

"Do you have a better idea?" Brognola asked. "If you'll remember, we don't own a h.e.l.l of a lot of real estate in that part of the world anymore. We're limited to the number of bases we can use to stage out of."

"Well, I was thinking of creating a Stony Man annex in the middle of the U.S. part of the Aviano base. That way, at least we can keep the prying eyes on the other side of the fence. I'll set up a CP and comm center and take Able Team with me to run it."

Brognola turned to Price. "Do you have Lyons doing anything important fight now?" "They're on stand-down."

"Okay, I'll talk to the Man and see what he thinks."

"We need to get this rolling as soon as possible," Katz reminded him. "So we need a decision now."

As the Stony Man tactical adviser, it was Katz's job to point out the best way to get the job done even when it meant pushing the boss.

II~11"LI-OII~II~E "How so?"

"That State Department guy's been on the ground for a couple of days now and the longer he's there, the less chance we'll have to recover him. If they get it in their heads that he's a spy, they're not going to treat him all that well, and since he's an older man, he might not last very long. Any delay at all is too much."

Brognola knew only too well that Katz wasn't ex. aggerafing the danger to Lacy. None of the Bosnian factions was known for its humanity. No matter whose hands Lacy was in, if he was in Bosnia, he was in danger.

"Alert Able Team, too," Brognola replied. "And I'll get the clearance."

"They're already at Andrews with Phoenix."

CHAPTER TWO.

Eastern Bosnia

Dragan Asdik waited impatiently for the morning prayers to end so he could talk to the commander of the Iranian freedom fighters who were based out of his castle. Asdik was the lord and master of his valley high in the mountains of Muslim Bosnia and the military commander of the troops in the region. Now that the war for Bosnia wasn't being fought-he knew that it wasn't over, but had just been put on hold-he had been ordered back to his fortress in the mountains to prepare for the next phase of the con-flict.

When the words of the last prayer echoed away, a thin man with intense eyes rose and approached him.

"G.o.d calls the faithful to prayer five times a day," Major Ari Naslin of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security reminded the Bosnian.

Asdik gritted his teeth but remained silent. He needed the Iranian troops far more than he needed to speak his mind. In the three-way battle for Bosnia, I I~11 I.I.. ~,1 I I111..

the Iranian Security Commandos were the unseen trump card waiting to be played. These Islamic freedom fighters, as they liked to style themselves, were a potent weapon that would be brought into full play very soon. And they were a weapon that no one in NATO even knew existed.

The United States-sponsored Dayton Accord, which had been signed in 1995, had been intended to end the war between the Serbs, Croats and Muslims. One of the more prominent issues of the peace agreement concerned the Iranian freedom fighters who had been sent to aid their Bosnian brethren in their fight against the Serbian and Croatian infidels. Under the terms of the agreement, these forces were to be immediately disarmed and returned to Iran.

In apparent compliance with the Dayton Accord, several hundred unarmed, teenage freedom fighters had marched through the streets of Sarajevo on their way to the airport. They had all worn the same kind of uniforms and had carded English and Arabic signs proclaiming that Muslim Bosnia would always re-main Muslim. With great media fanfare at the airport, they had boarded chartered jetliners for the trip back to their homeland.

Any experienced military observer watching this carefully orchestrated charade, however, would have immediately noted how young those men were and that none of them appeared to have seen field duty. None of them bore scars, none of them had the thousand-yard stare that marked a veteran of fighting as savage as the Bosnian campaigns had been, and their boots had all been brand-new. In a struggling nation that could barely equip its own forces, why had al-most four hundred pairs of new combat boots left Bosnia on the feet of these young men? And that was to say nothing of the uniforms, field belts and other essential gear they had worn. The war was over, yes, but the Muslim Bosnians' resolve to build up their army had been greater than ever, and they needed every sc.r.a.p of military equipment they could lay their hands on.

When these men boarded the jets and flew away, the Western media observers considered the problem of the Iranian volunteers in Bosnia to be over. Now they could concentrate on other, more-important matters like the persistent rumors of s.e.xual impropriety in some of the villages in the American zone of control. It was being said that young American GIs were trading cigarettes and videos to the local women for s.e.x and alcohol. If these stories were true, they were scandalous and needed to be investigated immediately.

Several days later, older men who were undeniably veterans of the fighting started to disappear from Bosnian army units in twos and threes. Considering the desertion rate in all of the Bosnian forces, however, this wasn't seen as being unusual. Anyone following these men, however, would have wondered why all of them made their way to Asdik's fortress in the mountains.

But no one from the media followed them.

"It is time to talk to the prisoners again," Asdik said. "The Bosnian Agency for Investigation wants a report on them immediately."

Asdik was forced to share his command with the Iranian, and that included sharing whatever information he obtained from the two Americans in the bas.e.m.e.nt cells of his castle.

1VIAJOR JOHN HAMMER HUNG from ropes holding his arms above his head in his stone cell. "John T. Ham-mer," he repeated for the tenth time since he had been captured the night before. "Major, United States Air Force. Service number 385-63-9081. I request that you inform the nearest American emba.s.sy of my status."

The hulking Bosnian the pilot had nicknamed G.o.dzilla's Little Brother smiled, but it wasn't a pretty sight. "You do not have any 'status,' as you put it, Major Hammer," he said in accented English. "You fell from the sky like a spy, and we do not like spies here."

"I'm not a spy," Hammer said wearily. "I'm an American Air Force pilot a.s.signed to the UN PRO-FOR mission and my plane was damaged in a midair collision. I had to eject to save my life, that's why I parachuted to earth."

"A real pilot would have tried to save his airplane," the Bosnian said with a sneer. "But you abandoned your plane, so you are a spy."

"Look," Hammer said, trying one more time, "if you'll just get hold of the U.S. mission in Sarajevo, they'll tell you who I am."

"Of course they will," G.o.dzilla's Little Brother replied. "They will tell me that you are a pilot, but I know that you are a spy. Do you think that I am a stupid Serb?"

Hanuner wisely refrained from telling his tor-mentor exactly what he thought he was; he wasn't ready to die yet. When the time came that he was ready to check out, however, he would explain it to the big b.a.s.t.a.r.d in great detail.

The Bosnian leaned even closer to Hammer, and the pilot held his breath. G.o.dzilla's Little Brother had breath to match his name. "You will confess to being a spy sooner or later, then I will deal with you. We will not shoot you if that is what you are worried about. In fact my government will be glad to release you, but we have to know what you were doing first."

Reaching up, the Bosnian took the rope from the hook and released Hammer's arms. "I will give you a little more time to think about it," he said. "But sooner or later, I will find out what I want to know."

Throughout the interrogation, the man Hammer had nicknamed the Spider on the Wall again stayed out of the way and let the Bosrdan handle the questioning. The second man's silence was probably a matter of language, as the two of them spoke to each other in what sounded like Arabic. The Spider looked Arabic, as well, so he might be an Islamic military adviser. Hammer wasn't a linguist. But he had picked up a little of the language during his Gulf War tour in Saudi Arabia and, during their conversations, he had caught a couple of words he thought he recognized.

As soon as he was alone, Hammer lay on his nar-row pallet and waited for the feeling to return to his arms. Each time they hung him up that way, it took longer for him to recover. As he waited, he looked around his cell one more time in case there was something he had missed the first few dozen times he had looked. Unfortunately there was nothing he had missed. Four stone walls without windows, a vaulted ceiling and a thick wooden door. It would take more than a Swiss Army knife to get out of there, and he didn't even have the knife.

Since his earliest days in the Air Force Academy, he had been known as the Jackhammer. Part of that was a play on his name and some was because of the way he had dealt with the traditional hurdles of his plebe year. He had battered his way through his first year at the academy, and the nickname had stuck. But since he hadn't brought a real jackhammer with him, his nickname wasn't going to do him much good. If push came to shove, he could always beat his own brains out against the stone walls to escape. But he was keeping that as a last resort if things got too tough.

So far, though, his jailers hadn't gone beyond hanging him by his arms while he was being questioned. Though the pain was slowly taking its toll, he could handle it for a while. Compared to what the pilots had suffered in the Hanoi Hilton, it was a cake-walk. He also knew that there was still the off chance that his SAR implant was working and that some other guy was up there in the second Night Owl looking for him.

He wondered what had happened to the guy he had been sent up to look for. Since he had been in the middle of the primary search area when that MiG came out of the night, maybe the guys who were holding him also had the owner of the other SAR implant in the cell next door. What they wanted with either of them was beyond Hammer. He didn't think for a minute that G.o.dzilla really thought that he was a spy. That was a line out of a bad forties movie.

But beyond the fact that his jailers were Bosnian Muslims, he had no idea what political faction they belonged to or what they wanted out of him. Understanding the tangled politics of the region wasn't his strong point. In fact he could barely name the three major ethnic groups, and the various subfactions in those groups were completely beyond him.