Pressure Point

While his instincts told him to follow Salim over the railing, Bolan couldn’t bring himself to abandon the man still inside the bus. As the front end of the vehicle rolled past, he cast aside his rifle and sprang forward, landing on the stairwell that led into the bus. The door was closed. Bolan stabbed his gloved fingers through a gap in the rubberized insulation and tugged hard until the door folded in on itself, giving himself enough room to squeeze through.

The exertion took its toll, however. As Salim had forewarned him, Bolan’s labored breathing inside the gas mask left him feeling suddenly light-headed. Sagging against the handrail, he clawed at the mask, yanking it off. His face was layered with sweat, and his dark hair was plastered flat against his head. He doubled over and drew in a deep breath. The move saved his life, as yet another burst of gunfire took out the rest of the windshield, showering him with glass.

Bolan stood back up and peered out at the other truck, which had begun to slow. He suspected the plan to ram the bus had been aborted once the ambushers realized that most of their intended victims had abandoned the vehicle. It was a stroke of good fortune, but there was little time for rejoicing. Turning to the driver beside him, Bolan saw that the man had taken another round, this one to the neck. One look and Bolan knew he was dead.

Unmanned, the bus listed slightly to one side. There was a loud scraping sound as it began to brush against the guardrail. Bolan climbed up out of the stairwell and anchored himself as best he could alongside the fallen driver, reaching past him for the steering wheel. There was little play in the wheel, and the soldier knew he’d need better leverage to ease the bus away from the guardrail. He was concerned that the railing would soon give way under the strain and send the bus hurtling to the bottom of the ravine with him still on board.

Desperate, Bolan quickly pulled the slain driver from the seat and took his place. The steering wheel was slick with blood, but he gripped it as tightly as he could and turned it to the left. The wheel resisted at first, but finally he got enough response to guide the bus away from the railing.

Bolan shot a quick glance over his shoulder. The rear doors were still open, and he could see the roadway behind him. He was running out of straightaway, and there was no way he’d be able to maneuver the bus around the coming bend. It was unlikely the bus would even make it that far. Each time it struck another pothole or crease in the road, its course changed slightly, and no matter how hard he worked the steering wheel, Bolan suspected it was only a matter of time before the bus slammed into the mountain or took out the guardrail. Either way, the bus was a deathtrap.

Bolan lunged from the driver’s seat and sidestepped the slain driver, staggering back down into the stairwell. The door was still folded open. He braced himself in the doorway and stared down at the ground rushing past him. There was only a few feet of clearance between the bus and guardrail. It would have to do.

Pushing away from the stairwell, Bolan leaped to the ground. He landed hard and unevenly, turning his right ankle. A stabbing pain shot up his right leg as he teetered off balance, smashing into the guardrail. He tried to right himself, but his momentum worked against him.

The next thing Bolan knew, he was tumbling over the waist-high railing, beyond which lay the vast, deep maw of the ravine.

CHAPTER THREE

In Bolan’s predicament, ninety-nine men out of hundred would have crashed over the railing, locked in a deadly freefall before they so much as realized what had happened to them. By then, of course, their fate would have been sealed. Bolan, however, had a warrior’s reflexes, honed by experience on a thousand battlefields, and even as he was going over the railing, he was acting on his instinct for survival. He flung out his right arm and the moment his gloved hand came in contact with the upper edge of the rail, he curled his fingers and grabbed hold, breaking his fall. Just as quickly, he swung his other hand to the railing and clawed for purchase. The thickness of the gloves made his grip tenuous, and his feet dangled unsupported below him, but, at least for the moment, Bolan had once again cheated death.

Through the pounding of blood in his ears, the soldier could hear the crackle of gunfire and the squeal of the Bio-Tain truck’s brakes. The bus, meanwhile, drifted off the road into the side of the mountain. Bolan couldn’t see the vehicle, but it sounded as if the bus had only glanced off the rocks, which meant it was likely still on the roll and out of control. If it veered back across the road and struck the railing, Bolan knew he’d be in trouble.

Focusing his full strength on his hands and arms, the Executioner tightened his grip on the rail and began to pull himself upward. He wanted to reach a point where he could swing at least one leg back up onto the roadway. He strained hard against the pull of gravity, slowly rising up to a point where he could see the bus. As he’d feared, it was headed for the guardrail less than twenty yards to his left. He braced himself as it crashed into the barrier. The weathered uprights snapped under the impact, and a thirty-foot section of the railing gave way. The bus went airborne and began to plunge toward the base of the ravine.

Bolan was safe for the moment, but the railing he clung to had loosened and begun to sag under his weight. Freeing one hand, he reached up and hooked his left arm over the upper edge of the barrier. He tried again to swing his right leg up to the edge of the roadway, but it remained beyond reach. As he held on tightly to the railing, there was a loud crash far below him. The bus had slammed into the rocks rising up from the river, and moments later an explosion ripped through the vehicle and echoed across the valley. Bolan glanced over his shoulder and saw a black column of smoke rise from the fiery heap of twisted metal. The farmers on the other side of the river were pointing at the wreckage and shouting to one another as they began to flee their fields.

Bolan’s left arm was starting to go numb. When he tried to shift his position, the railing groaned and there was a dull crack as one of the weakened uprights began to splinter. One way or another, he needed to get off the railing fast. There was no way to get back up to the roadway, so he looked down over his shoulder, surveying the cliff face below him. Just off to his right he saw a few small trees growing out of the side of the precipice. Bolan wasn’t sure if any of them were strong enough to support him, but they were his only hope.

When yet another of the guardrail supports snapped under his weight, Bolan let go of the railing and kicked at the cliff face with his boots, directing his fall toward the trees. The first two snapped under his weight, but a third remained intact long enough for him to close his fingers around its trunk. He swung precariously to one side, extending his right foot until it came to rest on another of the trees directly below him. It felt as if the tree would support him, so Bolan took a chance and eased his grip on the overhead limb, freeing one hand. With considerable difficulty, he wriggled his hand free of his HAZMAT glove, then switched arms and did the same with the other. The tree’s bark bit sharply into his bare palms, but his grip was now more secure than it had been with the gloves.

Spread-eagled against the face of the cliff, Bolan glanced to his right. Major Salim, Sergeant Latek and the other commandos had managed to pull themselves back up to the roadway. Salim and one of the others were still crouched near the railing, trading shots with enemy gunmen up in the mountains. Between shots, the major looked Bolan’s way, then started toward him.

“Hang on!” he shouted, his cry muffled by his gas mask. Once he reached the spot where Bolan had gone over the side, he lay flat against the edge of the roadway and reached down. Even with his arm fully extended, however, Salim’s outstretched fingers remained well beyond Bolan’s reach.

“Your belt!” Bolan called up to him. “Try your belt!”

The Indonesian nodded. He rose to his knees and was unfastening his gear belt when yet another explosion sounded, this time from the roadway.

“The truck!” Salim shouted to Bolan through his mask. “The driver must’ve set off some kind of explosive device!”

Salim’s voice was silenced in midsentence. He went limp, and his arm dangled uselessly over the edge of the precipice. Bolan could still hear gunfire and assumed the major had been hit by a sniper.

Seconds passed. No one came to Salim’s aid. Bolan was stranded. The trees were holding up under his weight, but he had nowhere to go. He was trapped, and as the patter of gunfire increased up above him, he wondered if the commandos were being overrun by their ambushers. If that was the case, any second now he could expect to see one of the jihad gunners standing over him. Pinned to the side of the precipice, he’d be an easy target.

Shifting more of his weight onto his feet, Bolan freed his right hand and unzipped his HAZMAT suit. He reached inside the suit, drawing his .44 Desert Eagle from its web holster. He thumbed off the safety and pointed the pistol at the roadway, waiting for the enemy to show himself.

Moments later, an adversary appeared, but it wasn’t a member of the Lashkar Jihad or the United Islamic Front. It wasn’t even human. Instead, Bolan found himself staring at a roiling, slow-moving cloud the color of pea soup. Bolan knew the cloud had likely been unleashed by the explosion of the Bio-Tain truck. His mind flashed on the briefing papers he’d read on the way to Samarinda: an entire work crew killed in seconds by mingling pesticide vapors.

Bolan shoved his .44 back in its holster but didn’t bother to zip up his HAZMAT suit. Without the gas mask he’d yanked off while on the bus, the suit wasn’t going to do him any good.

Trapped, all Bolan could do was watch as the cloud spilled over the side of the precipice and crept toward him. It looked almost alive, like some deadly creature on its way to claim some woesome prey that had fallen into its web.

CHAPTER FOUR

As the toxic cloud drew nearer, Bolan quickly deliberated his chances of surviving a fall into the river below. Even if he managed to elude the boulders, it seemed unlikely the river was deep enough to keep him from slamming into the bottom. No. Like it or not, his best chance was to stay where he was and hope the poisonous vapors wouldn’t be as deadly as those that had killed the IMA workers. It was a faint hope. Already he could smell the cloud’s noxious fumes, and his eyes were starting to burn.

This is it, he thought. At long last, his number had come up.

The cloud was almost upon him when two shifting shadows began to sweep across the face of the precipice. When he heard the familiar, throaty drone of four 1600 horsepower turboshaft engines, Bolan felt a sudden stirring of hope.

The Black Hawks.

Bolan glanced up and saw one of the gunships bank slightly as it drifted close to him, so close that he could see the pilot, an olive-skinned Indonesian. The pilot brought the chopper to within twenty feet of the precipice and then hovered in place, its rotors whirring within a few yards of Bolan’s head. The vibration of the rotor wash nearly wrested him from the cliff, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps the Lashkar Jihad had somehow managed to seize the gunship. Then, as he glanced up, he realized that the updraft of the rotor wash was diverting the toxic cloud away from him. The cloud itself was dissipating, as well.

After a few seconds, the Black Hawk pulled away, its mission accomplished. Bolan’s eyes still burned, but the cloud had all but vanished.

The chopper drifted up over the roadway, directing its mounted guns at the sniper positions in the mountains. The second gunship came into view and hovered directly above Bolan, the sound of its rotors echoing off the cliff walls. As the soldier watched, a rope ladder began to inch out the side door. Once the ladder was fully extended, a figure emerged and began to slowly lower himself down the rungs. The man was dressed head-to-toe in HAZMAT gear and carried an extra mask similar to the one Bolan had shed.

The strength in Bolan’s arms was fading. When he tried putting more weight on the tree below him, the trunk began to snap, forcing him to hold tighter to the limb above. His fingers were going numb. He was running out of time.

“Hang tight, Striker!”

Bolan looked up. The man dangling at the bottom of the rope ladder, arm extended toward him, was his longtime colleague John Kissinger. Though officially on the Stony Man payroll as its resident weaponsmith, Kissinger was no stranger to the battlefield. He’d fought at Bolan’s side several times and had been on assignment in Islamabad with Bolan and Grimaldi when they’d received the directive to fly to Indonesia.

“How about a lift?” he shouted to Bolan above the din of the rotors.

“If you insist,” Bolan shouted back.

Once Kissinger was within reach, Bolan freed one hand and quickly transferred his grip to the other man’s wrist. Kissinger responded in kind. When the tree below finally gave way, Kissinger quickly pulled his comrade toward him. With his other hand, Bolan snatched at the ladder. Once his fingers closed around one of the rungs, he swung his right leg up, groping for a foothold.

“Almost there,” Kissinger assured him.

Bolan finally planted his foot on the bottom rung. He let go of Kissinger and grabbed hold of the ladder with both hands. On Kissinger’s signal, the chopper began to pull away from the precipice.

“Nice timing,” Bolan told him once he’d caught his breath.

“Always glad to lend a hand,” Kissinger responded. “But in the future maybe you might want to leave the wall-climbing to Spider-Man.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Jack Grimaldi was already pulling the Black Hawk out of the ravine by the time Bolan followed Kissinger into the passenger compartment. He called out a quick greeting without taking his eyes off the controls, then added, “Looks like somebody tipped off the Lashkar about the surprise party, eh?”

“Something like that,” Bolan replied, coughing slightly. His eyes were still burning. He coughed again, this time with more force. Kissinger, who’d grabbed an M-16 and positioned himself near the open doorway alongside another armed man in camou fatigues, glanced over his shoulder.

“You okay, Striker?”

Bolan nodded. “Yeah. I just caught a little whiff of that fog.”

“We better get you checked out.”

“I’ll be fine,” Bolan insisted. He was blinking harder now, however, and his eyes were reddening. Yet another cough shook through him.

“Fine, my ass.” Kissinger turned to the man next to him. “Rocky, grab that med kit and help him out.”

Although his nickname conjured up images of some towering brute straight out of the boxing ring, Raki Mochtar was, in fact, six inches shorter than either Bolan or Kissinger and weighed barely 150 pounds in full uniform. This was his first field assignment for Stony Man after two years of service with the Farm’s Virginia security detail. He’d had medical training during his stint with the Marines, but it was his family background that had earned him this, his long-sought chance to see action beyond the parameters of the Farm’s compound in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The grandson of Jakarta shopkeepers killed during a demonstration against Sukarno in the late l960s, Mochtar had visited Indonesia numerous times over the past twenty years and was as familiar with the country’s various languages and dialects as he was with its geography and culture. When asked to fly out and rendezvous with Bolan and the other covert ops in Samarinda, the thirty-year-old Mochtar jumped at the opportunity. And now, less than two hours later, here he was in the thick of things. He was eager to make the most of it.

“I’ll see what’s here,” he told Bolan, unlatching a large footlocker strapped to the cabin floor, “but if you’ve been exposed, you really need to go through a full decontamination. There’s probably a setup at the storage site, so—”

“Decon’s going to have to wait,” Bolan interrupted. “We’re in the middle of a firefight here, dammit!”

“But I’m telling you,” Mochtar persisted, “in a case of exposure, it’s vital to make sure you’ve washed off any traces of contaminants before they have a chance to work their way into—”

“Here,” Bolan interjected again, coughing as he reached past the younger soldier for a pair of surgical scissors and an intravenous bag filled with saline solution. “Let’s improvise, all right?”

Bolan shouted for Grimaldi to hold the chopper steady, then slit the top of the IV bag. Holding it high over his head, he craned his neck and quickly spilled the entire contents over his face. The saline stung his eyes but brought immediate relief. He coughed again, then cast the bag aside and told Mochtar, “Now grab some kind of antiseptic and pour it over my hands.”

Mochtar fumbled through the footlocker and uncapped a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Not wanting another reprimand, he fought back an urge to tell Bolan he ought to get out of his HAZMAT suit. Instead, he followed orders and drained the bottle as Bolan rubbed his hands in its flow.

Once he was finished, Bolan grabbed a roll of gauze. As he wiped his hands dry, he told Mochtar, “I didn’t mean to chew you out like that.”

“Not a problem,” Mochtar said. He reached into the footlocker once more, then handed Bolan a small oxygen canister rigged to a lower face mask. “This might help with that cough.”

Bolan grinned at Mochtar. “You catch on fast.”

“I’m trying,” the rookie replied. “You were right. I guess at times like this you can’t worry about going by the book.”

Bolan pressed the mask to his face and opened the canister’s feed line. He was filling his lungs with pure oxygen when the cabin resonated with the staccato blasting of Kissinger’s M-16. Grimaldi had pulled up over the mountain and Kissinger was firing at snipers perched high above the roadway.

The Executioner moved closer to the open doorway and glanced over Kissinger’s shoulder. He saw two snipers wearing the long white robes that were a trademark for the Lashkar Jihad, ducking for cover among the rocks. They were under fire not only from Kissinger, but also from the other Black Hawk. At the base of the mountain, clouds of black smoke snaked up from the bombed-out remains of the Bio-Tain delivery truck’s front cab, while ruptured containers in the rear hold continued to release clouds of toxic vapor. A handful of bodies were scattered about the roadway near the truck, some felled by the gas, others during the exchange of gunfire. Sergeant Latek and another KOPASSUS commando were crouched near a remaining section of guardrail, flanking Major Salim. Latek was firing into the mountains while the other attended to their fallen commander. Apparently Salim was still alive.

Bolan impatiently tossed aside the oxygen mask and shouted to Grimaldi, “Put her down over there by the railing.”

“Will do,” Grimaldi shouted back.

Bolan turned to Mochtar. “We’ll be upwind from whatever’s seeping out of that truck. You think we can skip the gas masks?”

Mochtar stared down at the roadway, then told Bolan, “At this elevation the wind’s always shifting. Besides, to get to Salim we’ve got to go around the truck.”

“Masks then, you’re saying.”

“Full suits would be even smarter,” Mochtar said. “And you should put on a fresh one.”

“I had a feeling you were going to say that.”

There were several unused HAZMAT suits stored in sealed packets behind the footlocker. Mochtar handed one to Bolan, telling him, “Put the gloves on before you change so you don’t recontaminate yourself.”

As he changed, Bolan asked Mochtar, “You seen combat before, Rock?”

Mochtar shook his head. “Just training exercises,” he confessed. “I’m ready, though.”

“Good,” Bolan said, “’cause if they nail you, there’s no playing dead. It’ll be the real deal.”

Mochtar finished transferring a few first-aid items into a fanny pack, then strapped the pack around his waist. “I’m ready,” he repeated.

“Then let’s do it,” Bolan said.

CHAPTER SIX

Once he’d set the Black Hawk down on the tarmac, Grimaldi left the turboshafts running and remained at the controls.

“Go get ’em, guys!” he called out to the others.

“I’ll sit tight as long as I can.”

Bolan suppressed a cough, crouched before the side door of the cabin, then leaped to the roadway, rifle in hand. Mochtar was right behind him. Kissinger dropped to the ground last, carrying a lightweight collapsible stretcher along with his assault rifle.

Almost immediately they were greeted by a hail of gunfire from overhead. The men quickly dropped and rolled to the cover of several large boulders crowding the road’s shoulder.

“Nothing like a little rain on the parade to spoil a guy’s day,” Kissinger groused.

Bolan replied, “Yeah, well, at least there’s a way to stop this kind of rain.”

He raised his rifle to his shoulder and scanned the mountainside until he had one of the snipers in his sights, then squeezed the trigger. The carbine bucked hard against his shoulder. Fifty yards up the mountain, a sniper reeled off the escarpment he’d been perched on and tumbled headlong down the steep facing, striking the road ten yards from the delivery truck.

Before seeking out another target, Bolan stole a quick glance at Mochtar. The younger man was firing uphill as well, hands steady on his rifle, no sign of fear in his eyes. Bolan was relieved. During his years in combat, he’d come across many a soldier who’d frozen when confronted with his first taste of combat. Mochtar seemed in control, though. That was one less thing to have to worry about.

“Let’s see if we can get close to Salim,” Bolan said, glancing down the road. He turned to Kissinger. “Give us some cover, Cowboy. We’ll return the favor once we reach the major.”

“Works for me,” Kissinger said, feeding another ammo clip into his rifle.

Bolan advised Mochtar, “Try to vary your speed and zigzag as best you can. Don’t make yourself an easy target.”

“Got it.”

Kissinger tapped the headset built into his helmet and said, “I don’t want to rush you guys, but Jack says the bird’s taking a few hits and he doesn’t know how long he can keep ’er down.”

Bolan looked back at the Black Hawk. He could see puffs of raised dust where gunfire was pounding the asphalt around the chopper, and several times he heard the plink of rounds glancing off the Black Hawk’s fuselage. The chopper was built to stand up under light fire, but there was no sense pushing their luck any more than necessary.

“Ready?” Bolan asked Mochtar.

“Ready.”

Bolan rose to a crouch; Mochtar did the same. The Executioner held out one hand, index finger extended, flexing his wrist for a three-second countdown. On three, he lunged forward, zigzagging up the road, staying close to the stretch of guardrail that hadn’t been taken out by the runaway bus. Mochtar followed suit, staying ten yards back. Behind them, Kissinger fired steadily into the mountains. The other Black Hawk, meanwhile, provided additional cover, sending a fierce stream of .23-caliber rounds from its Brownings at other sniper positions.

As he ran forward, Bolan surveyed the roadway, trying to account for all the men who’d evacuated the bus before its ill-fated plunge into the ravine. Latek was still crouched alongside the major with another of the commandos, and Bolan saw three men trying to make their way up the steep mountainside. Another three soldiers lay dead on the road, felled either by snipers or the poisonous fog from the delivery truck. That left two men unaccounted for. Bolan hoped they’d turn up alive, but he feared they might have fallen to their deaths at the bottom of the ravine.