Stony Man - Triple Strike Part 18

At first light the next morning, David McCarter drove into the valley toward the French laager with only the gas detector riding on the seat next to him. Checking to see if there had actually been a nerve-gas attack as the Farm thought was a one-man job, and no one was better suited to do it than him. Both Manning and Hawkins had argued about his going, saying that since he was the Phoenix Force leader, he couldn't be spared if the gas was still present.

But, as far as McCarter was concerned, the job was his precisely because he was the leader. His SAS-trained concept of leadership was that the head man got paid the big bucks to lead, not to send men into danger in his place. Plus Kurtzman had a.s.sured him that since the nerve gas involved was likely to have been manufactured to the Russian formula, it would have dissipated in an hour or so and would be completely gone by now.

He stopped the truck a quarter of a mile away from the PROFOR laager and took another reading with the detector. The air was still clean. Picking up his field gla.s.ses, he scanned the silent camp. The French armored vehicles had been parked in a circle with their machine gun and autocannon turrets facing outward.

It had been a good move and would have worked against almost anything they could have expected to come up against in Bosnia. But guns and armored vehicles were no protection against deadly nerve gas. Putting the Toyota in gear, he drove the rest of the way in, keeping one eye on the detector all the way.

The first bodies he came to were right outside the ring of vehicles and would have been the sentries. The bodies bore no visible signs of the cause of death. There were no bullet holes and no blood. Their sprawled postures told of their having died in mid-stride as it were.

The only sign that they had died unnaturally was that most of the faces were in a grimace of death that told of their nervous systems having been attacked. The gas. .h.i.t so fast that the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds probably hadn't even known what was killing them.

Inside the laager, one of the officers in the command vehicle, a captain by the stripes on his rank straps, had died with a radio microphone in his hand. Another officer lay where he had fallen halfway out the back door. Some of the troops were in their sleeping bags under their vehicles, sleeping the long sleep. McCarter hadn't been a stranger to war for more years than he liked to count. He was well acquainted with violent death and had seen every way that a human could possibly die. But there was always something obscene about the victims of gas attacks, either military or civilian.

These men had been soldiers, and putting their lives on the line in combat was part of their job description. But they hadn't been killed in combat like soldiers. They had been slaughtered like so many sheep without even having had a chance to defend themselves.

After making a count of the bodies, McCarter turned the Toyota around and was driving back to rejoin his teammates when he pa.s.sed a single body beyond the ring of sentries. This man was wearing desert camouflage instead of the olive drab battle dress of the French. Stopping the truck, he got out and rolled the corpse over with his boot. The soldier wasn't French unless he was of Algerian extraction, and the uniform was a dead giveaway. The Iranians at the fortress had worn this kind of desert camouflage.

Close to the Iranian's corpse was what looked like a half-exploded round of some kind. Moving in closer to look at it, McCarter thought he caught a faint bitter smell and jerked back. He felt silly because if there was gas present, he would already be dead. But he went back to the track to get the chemical detector to check this round anyway.

When the detector showed that the air didn't con- tain any lingering traces of nerve gas, he looked closer at what he had found. The thin-walled round appeared to be a chemical rocket warhead, but the nose fuse was still intact and hadn't exploded. Seeing the safety pin of the grenade by the corpse's hand, he realized what had happened.

This had been a suicide attack. This Iranian had sneaked up close to the French laager and had detonated some kind of explosive device to rupture the gas warhead.

Suicide bombers weren't as common in Islamic national armies as they were in terrorist bands, but they weren't unknown, either. The lure of immediate entrance into Paradise was strong and enticed many men to martyr themselves.

Leaving the evidence where it lay for the UN to find, he got back into .the truck and drove to where he had left Bolan with the rest of the team.

"They've raised the ante," he informed Bolan as he stepped down. "The French were ga.s.sed."

Hearing the expected, Bolan reached for the radio to make his report to Katz.

Stony Man Farm "McCARTER FOUND the bodies." Yakov Katzenelenbogen's face on the Farm's video screen showed his concern. "It was a French patrol, platoon size, thirty-eight men, and they're all dead. There was another body close by that David thinks was an Iranian who had a chemical-rocket warhead with him, so it looks like it was a suicide attack. The Iranian got in close to the laager site and detonated the warhead." "Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," Kurtzman muttered.

"Have the French headquarters been notified?" Barbara Price asked.

"They had choppers in the air at first light looking for the unit because they lost communication with them last night. They were approaching the site right as our team was pulling out of the area. I told them to move out so they wouldn't get hung up with the um,"

"Good call," Brognola said.

"What are your instructions at this point?" Katz asked formally. He was the Farm's tactical adviser, but the ultimate decisions were on Brognola's shoulders. Particularly a decision of such magnitude.

This was the first time that war gases had been used in Europe since the end of World War I, and it was an important escalation of the long Bosnian cri-sis. The decisions that would be made could have a dramatic effect on the future of Europe, and he didn't want to be the one who had to make the call.

'Tll be d.a.m.ned if I know," Brognola answered. "Until I can get a conference with the President and see what he wants to do, have the guys continue tracking the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and hope that they can make contact before any more of the rockets are used."

"Striker and the team are closing in on them,"

Hunt Wethers commented. "I have them no more than an hour or so behind the targets at this time."

Since Wethers had set up the tracking program that was tagging the Iranians' lxucks, he was keeping watch over the progress of the long-distance chase.

"Can we vector in a NATO gunship to destroy those trucks now?" Katz asked. "This is a serious enough incident that it should be enough to cut through the usual bulls.h.i.t to get some prompt ac-tion."

Brognola thought for a moment. "This has upped the threat," he agreed. "There's no doubt about that, and I'll argue for an immediate air strike, but I can't even begin to guess what he'll say."

"Urge him to take quick action, Hal," Katz said. "Since we've seen that they are more than willing to use the gas, the team is in danger, as well."

"I'11 try my best," Brognola replied, knowing full well that he had little chance of success. Anything that was linked to the UN in any way defied quick action. "But I don't want to pull the guys off them yet. I want them to keep trying to get within striking range. And tell them that if they can attack, I want them to do it immediately. They're the last, best chance we have of putting a quick end to this."

"Will do," Katz said. "But you have to give them warning if you can get an air strike authorized. A bomb blast hitting those rockets would be even more dangerous than launching them, and I don't want our people to be caught in the open."

"I understand." Brognola read between the lines of what Katz had explained. An air strike would release the deadly gas, and nerve gas didn't care whom it killed.

He turned to the bank of printers against the wall and reached for the satellite photos of the French laager that were coming out of the photo printer. "The President will want to see these."

Aviano Air Base, Italy WHILE KATZENELENBOGEN waited to hear back from Stony Man Farm, he mulled over the report McCarter had made about the gas attack. One thing stuck in his mind that he didn't understand. Why had the Iranians made a suicide attack instead of launching the rocket the usual way?

It was true that the trade-off had been good-one Iranian KIA for thirty-eight French. That was a good combat equation, but this hadn't been real combat. Considering that the Iranians had taken a beating in the bombing at the camp, they had to be short on men. Even if those two pickups were packed to the sides of the bed, they couldn't have many more than two dozen men all told.

Maybe there was a simpler explanation. Maybe a suicide bomber had been sent in to take the French out because the Iranians didn't have a launcher with them to fire the rocket from.

Katz was well aware that a rocket launcher wasn't a big deal-a chunk of sewage pipe would work if it was big enough. He even knew that the Viet Cong had often launched Russian 120mm rockets by resting them on crossed sticks stuck in the ground. Using the proper launcher, however, did give a better guarantee of hitting what you were aiming at. But that was only important when you were dealing with conventional HE rocket warheads. With an HE round, if you couldn't hit it, you couldn't blow it up.

With chemical rockets, however, accuracy wasn't really important. What was important was making sure that you were upwind from the target. Dropping the rocket almost anywhere upwind from the intended target would do the trick when the gas was released. And if he a.s.sumed that the Iranians didn't have a launcher, he could narrow down the number of possible targets. If that was in fact the case, the best target would be anyplace where people were gathered in large numbers.

His mind flashed to something Brognola had said about the importance of getting Richard Lacy back in American hands in time for an important meeting. Had it been something about an election? Or was it so he could take part in the renewed peace talks?

Grabbing the phone, he hit the key to activate the video hookup and called the Farm. "I need you to help me with something," he told Aaron Kurtzman. "What's that?"

"Tell me again what was so important about our getting Richard Lacy back on time."

"Katz, that's old news. You're supposed to be chasing after a shipment of nerve-gas rockets, remember."

"To be a little more precise," Katz replied, "I'm supposed to be chasing nerve-gas rockets so they won't be used. And part of solving that puzzle is figuring out who they are going to be used against. I think that your man Lacy might be a key to solving that puzzle."

"I'11 bite how?"

"I think that the Iranians may not have a launcher for those rockets. That would go a long ways to explain why they used a suicide attacker to take out the French when they're low on men. My thought is that if they have to use up a man every time they pop one of those rockets, they'll want to make sure that they get their money's worth. They're going to want to hit a large target."

Kurtzman was silent for a moment. "The elections. They're having another round of regional elections in the Serb and Croatian sections of Bosnia. The Bosnian Muslims have gotten their stuff together as far as choosing their own leaders, but the Serbs and Croats are still working on it. The elections are scheduled to start-" he glanced at the calendar "-in the cities on the day after tomorrow."

"Which cities?"

"Let me find out and get back to you," Kurtzman said. "I know that not all of the cities were chosen as election sites. There was some concern about fraud, and the UN wants to oversee the vote this time, so the elections have been consolidated. People from the outlying districts and smaller towns will have to travel to cast their ballots, and that's why it's a two-day vote."

"That could be it," Katz said. "A bunch of people gathered to vote would be a perfect target for a suicide bomber armed with a nerve-gas rocket."

Kurtzman had worked with Katz long enough to recognize that particular tone in his voice. It meant that he had just put two and two together and come up with twenty two instead of merely four. "I'11 get right on that."

Now THAT HE HAD a likely target, Katz put his battle-trained mind to work to ensure that the attacks weren't carried out. According to McCarter's report, a single man had been responsible for the attack on the French, and it was possible that they would try that tactic again.

A single-man attack had a lot going for it. One man could hide better than a rocket-launching team, and the warhead could be easily concealed. However, considering that the attackers were more than likely Iranians, they probably wouldn't speak the local language. That and cultural differences would make a lone Iranian bomber vulnerable to the security measures that he knew the UN PROFOR monitors would have put in place to protect the election.

Two men would have a better chance, particularly if they came in from different directions. Better yet, two men coming in under the cover of a diversion. If the main body of Iranians attacked a PROFOR outpost, they could draw the UN to that area and reduce the security somewhere else. That was how he would do it, and he couldn't make the mistake of underestimating the enemy commander. So far, he had done a very good job and couldn't be counted on to make a mistake.

The Iranians had pulled off some very skilled terrorist attacks over the years, and while this was being done under the guise of military action, it was a terrorist attack nonetheless. To Katz's mind, any time that a state of war hadn't been declared and the primary targets were civilians, even the actions of soldiers was terrorism pure and simple. He didn't buy the story that any action was justified as long as it got the desired results.

He had sympathy for the Bosnian Muslims. They had been the victims of brutal Serb and Croatian ag-gression ever since the Turks had pulled out of the region. During the Bosnian War, they had taken the most serious casualties both on the battlefield and in the so-called ethnic cleansing that the Serbs had conducted.

The mountains of Bosnian Muslim dead called out for justice, but this wasn't the way to get it for them. Killing other civilians wouldn't bring back the dead. Further, justice in Bosnia wasn't going to be promoted by anything the Iranians were likely to do. The Western concept of justice wasn't part of their thinking in any way. If they were involved, it was for their own reasons and would benefit the Bosnians only as an afterthought.

The key to solving any tactical problem was to find what was in it for the attackers. If he could figure out what the imams of Tehran had to gain by getting involved in Bosnia, he would know how to counter their moves.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

Bosnia

Major Naslin approached the appointed meeting with the Bosnian Muslims with extreme caution. Dragan Asdik had set up the rendezvous, but that didn't ease the major's mind. Though Naslin had worked closely with Asdik for months, he still didn't completely trust the man. In fact he trusted very few of the Bosnian Muslims he had encountered since arriving in the country, even the ones he was meeting today- and they were the reason he had embarked on the plan.

Though the Bosnian Muslims were followers of the Prophet, they weren't Arab. Being an Iranian, Naslin wasn't exactly an Arab, either, but Arabic culture and thought was the bedrock of Middle Eastern Islam. Having been cut off from the motherland of Islamic thought for so many centuries, the Bosnian Muslims thought and acted too much like their Christian European neighbors for Naslin's tastes. In particular, they were p.r.o.ne to changing their minds when the going got too tough.

That was why the Iranian felt it was so important for his mission to succeed. As soon as the new Bosnian Muslim government was recognized by the other revolutionary Islamic states, it would be reinforced by thousands of troops from several Islamic nations. Iran, Syria and Libya were just three of the Islamic states that had offered arms and men to the Bosnians to help them defend their new state.

Once the new nation was secure and well established, even more Islamic people would come, civilians this time. In effect they would colonize Bosnia and make the country over in the image of the Mid-dle East. The native Bosnian Muslims wouldn't be pushed off their lands like the Serbs and Croats had tried to do to them. Nor would they be imprisoned or restricted in any way. But within a very few years, they would be blended into the new population and would become proper revolutionary Muslims.

Naslin knew that the transition wouldn't be easy, especially once strict Islamic law was imposed. But if it could be done successfully in a nation as corrupt as prerevolutionary Iran, it would work in Bosnia, as well.

The major and the four soldiers with him found the Bosnians at the appointed place. The leader of the Bosnian National Rebirth Party, Hukan Rezak, was a typical Bosnian mountain man, as Naslin called them-a big, bearded, scowling man who, like so many Bosnians, had the light-colored eyes of a demon, not the dark eyes of a proper human. His greeting was short, and he got right down to the business at hand.

"I was told that you would have a dozen trucks and a hundred men with you," Rezak said in good but accented Arabic, "but I only see two trucks and a handful of troops."

"The Yankees bombed our camp," Naslin explained, "and these are all the men I have left."

"And the rockets?"

"I have enough for several attacks if you can get me a Katusha launcher."

"Exactly how many rockets do you have?" Rezak sounded suspicious. The plan that would put him and his party in power depended upon the ma.s.s slaughter of his opponents, and that required having enough of the nerve-gas rockets to make this great killing all on one day.

"I have eighteen, no seventeen, left. I had to use one of them on a PROFOR unit that was blocking my route."

Rezak frowned-attacking PROFOR troops wasn't a wise move. The UN might be a b.u.mbling, uncoordinated ent.i.ty, but even so, like an elephant, it was to be feared. So far, he had been able to keep his organization a secret from the UN. No one in the PROFOR had any idea that the National Rebirth Party even existed, and he wanted to keep it that way until he took over the country.

"Did you leave any survivors behind?" Rezak asked. "The last thing I need right now is for PRO-FOR to connect that with me."

Naslin wanted to laugh at this slow-thinking man. "Of course there were no survivors. Anyone who gets even a whiff of the gas dies. Nothing was left behind to point to either you or me." Except, of course, for the body of the martyr who had detonated the warhead. But Naslin was confident that there was no way to get information from a dead man.

Rezak heard the unvoiced contempt in Naslin's an-swer and frowned. Like Dragan Asdik, he had no love for the Iranians, but he welcomed their arms and supplies. His group wasn't a part of the Bosnian national army. In fact it was an outlawed party, so there was no way that he could draw supplies from them. Were it not for the Iranian connection, his men wouldn't even have small arms, to say nothing of the rockets that would be his springboard to power.

The plan to use the nerve-gas rockets to free his country had originated with Rezak. The way he saw it, in the aftermath of freeing Bosnia from everyone who wasn't Muslim, he would be positioned well to become the leader of the new regime. Now, though, Naslin was telling him that his plan couldn't be carried out as he had envisioned it.

"How is it that the Americans learned about your camp?" he asked. "I was told that it was a secret."

"I do not know." Naslin didn't feel like going into the story of Richard Lacy and the capture of the Yankee pilot. "All I know is that they attacked us without warning with one of their stealth fighters."

The mention of the almost mythical, radar-invisible plane was enough to calm the Bosnian's fears of Iranian incompetence. Though no one in Bosnia had ever seen a stealth fighter, the stories of their unimpeded sorties over Baghdad during the Gulf War were legendary. ff the entire armed might of Iraq hadn't been able to even damage one of them, there was no hope that a small Iranian unit could defend itself from one of them.

"But," Naslin continued, "with the rockets I have left, we can still carry out the plan. It is true that it will be more difficult. We will have to choose the targets more carefully and may not get the results we originally planned. But it is still possible to free your country from Serbian and Croatian domination as you want."

"With so few rockets, we will have to attack the Serbs first and eliminate them. They are the main enemy. The Croats can live a little while longer."

Serbs or CroafiansmNaslin could hardly tell the two of them apart. Both groups, though, were enemies of Islam and would have to be exterminated sooner or later. For now, though, he was willing to allow the Bosnian to pick the targets for his rockets, and killing the Serbs first was fine with him. Since there were fewer Croats, they could be easily taken care of later-ff need be, with AKs.

"Agreed," Naslin said. "Now, to ensure success, can you get me a Katusha launcher? I need one of the single-barrel types, or if that is not possible, a three-barrel launcher."

"That may be difficult." Rezak frowned. "I do not have one available right now. The authorities confiscated all of our heavy weapons and put them in holding areas."

"Can these holding areas be attacked? Is there any way we can free a launcher?"

Rezak thought for a moment. "There is one of the UN artillery parks not too far from here. And the garrison is not very large."

"Take me to it."

BOLAN AND McCARTER were both studying the map while Hawkins and James refueled the truck from another deserted gas station. Encizo and Manning stood guard, but again the village seemed to be completely empty. They knew, though, that they were being watched by the frightened eyes of those who had gone into hiding at their approach.

"It looks like they're headed for Spivak," McCarter said as he plotted the latest locations of the Iranian vehicles he had just received from Aviano.

"That's as good a bet as any," Bolan replied.

Katz was sending them updates every half hour, and they were slowly closing the gap. But since they were in the same kind of truck that the Iranians were driving, they didn't have any advantage over them.

Not even with Hawkins taking care of most of the driving ch.o.r.es.

McCarter was convinced that if he looked into the Southemer's background, he would find that Hawkins had a misspent youth making white-lightning runs through the back country of Georgia or Ken-tueky. Either that or he'd grown up around a NASCAR track. McCarter was an accomplished race car driver him~eff, but Hawkins had a real flair for rough-road driving.

Even so, they were still behind their prey and time was running out. "Catch up with them," McCarter told him as soon as they were refueled.

"I'm on it, boss."