Ambush Force

Sawyer shoved up his goggles. “Well, I count fifty, and the map says there are four more caves.”

“Most of them are sleeping.”

“Well, how you wanna wake ’em up?”

Bolan reached into his gear bag, pulled out four grenades and handed a pair of them to Sawyer.

Sawyer stared at them. “Frags?”

“Stingballs. Each one holds several dozen hard rubber buckshot pellets.”

Sawyer scowled. “Okay, that will probably wake them up, but then—”

Bolan pulled out a couple of Claymores.

Sawyer frowned. “Claymores? I thought you said you wanted prisoners.”

“Stingmores. These contain hundreds of rubber buckshot pellets.”

Sawyer grinned. “I think I saw this in a movie.”

The lieutenant came up, and Bolan related the plan to him. “Then we hit them with flash-bangs and stomp them,” Bolan finished.

Dirk was grinning as he turned to the two commandos behind him. “You heard the man. They beat ’em, and then we light ’em up!”

Bolan pulled the pins on his grenade. “On your signal, Lieutenant.”

“By all means, please.”

Bolan and Dirk hurled the grenades strategically throughout the cavern.

“Wakey, wakey, eggs and bakey!” Sawyer called out happily.

The men around the campfires jerked and rose, grabbing for weapons. Bolan and Sawyer crouched low and lowered their helmets, and the stingball grenades detonated. Men howled out in Arabic and Pashto as the blunt 20 mm rubber spheres traveling at five hundred feet per second struck them. Everyone else was leaping out of their blankets and rising while others fell around them.

Bolan and Sawyer stuck the stingmore mines into the dirt and pumped the detonator switches. “Gooooood morning, Afghanistan!” Sawyer sang out.

More than one thousand rubber buckshot pellets blasted across the cavern in two intersecting arcs, and men blinking from sleep were scythed down before they knew what hit them. Bolan and Sawyer stayed crouched, plugging their ears with their thumbs and shutting and covering their eyes with their fingers. Orange light still pulsed through Bolan’s eyelids, and thunder rolled through the cavern. The second salvo of flash-bangs detonated moments later, and then Bolan was up and in the cavern with Bravo troop swarming in behind him.

The devastation was almost total. Fifty men lay on the ground, beaten, blinded, deafened and disoriented.

Lieutenant Dirk roared, “A and B Teams! Secure the side tunnels! Everyone else secure prisoners!”

The two teams charged to the side tunnels and aimed overwhelming firepower down them. In the cavern, plastic zip restraints appeared like party favors and moaning, suspected Taliban where swiftly hog-tied.

Gunfire broke out in the right side tunnel. Sawyer bawled back into the cavern. “We got resistance here on the right, LT!”

Dirk shouted orders. “C Team! Reinforce B! D Team, you’re with me! Pincer movement!”

Bolan took point with Sawyer. Both of them had M-203 grenade launchers mounted beneath their rifles. The Executioner nodded at him, and they both fired the weapons down the tunnel and leaned back as the grenades detonated in the chamber beyond. They charged down the corridor, followed by Dirk with A and D teams. The chamber was dimly lit and filled with open metal racks. Two men lay dead on the floor, while another man clutched his face and fired a pistol in the general direction of the entrance. Bolan’s and Sawyer’s bursts peppered the would-be pistolero. He fell into one of the metal racks, and a row of six of them fell like dominoes.

Sawyer stared at the rows of racks. There were scores of them. Possibly a hundred or more. “What? Are they building a treehouse?”

Bolan stared at them. The racks were actually frames consisting of eight hollow aluminum rectangles bolted together. Each was about eight feet long and contained a series of metal hoops within them. Bolan estimated the diameter of the hoops to be approximately 132 mm. “No, those are rocket racks. The hoops inside are the launch rails.” Bolan peered at the dark entrance to the next tunnel and turned to Dirk. “I strongly suggest we don’t throw anything explosive into the next room.”

“Yeah, I hear you.” Dirk spoke into his radio, “Obie, what’ve you got?”

Obradors came back from the other side of the complex. “Two hostiles down. The chamber appears to be some kind of machine shop. Multiple generators and lots of welding equipment. Looks like they’ve been making frames and mounts for something, as well as a bunch of threaded collars, and I mean a lot of them.”

Bolan spoke across the link. “You got a diameter on those collars, Obie?”

“Yeah, uh, about five inches?”

Bolan frowned as his suspicions were confirmed. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, your map?” Obradors said.

“What about it?”

“It’s shit. There ain’t no fifth chamber.”

“What do you mean?” Bolan probed.

“I mean there ain’t no tunnel. The wall is blank.”

Dirk looked at Bolan. “And?”

“And ground-penetrating radar doesn’t lie. Tell B and C teams to hold position and don’t touch anything. Especially the walls.”

Dirk gave orders. Bolan jerked his head at the far tunnel. “Let’s see what’s behind door number three.” Bolan moved down the tunnel with Sawyer right behind him. There was no one in the next chamber, but it wasn’t empty.

“Shit,” Sawyer pronounced. “Missiles.”

Bolan stared at the pallets of weapons stacked in pyramids. “No, unguided artillery rockets, 132 mm. The Russians call them Katyushas, or ‘Little Katys.’”

“Jesus, they must have a hundred of them in here.”

Dirk had one of his men videotaping their find. “A lot of them seem to be missing their warheads.”

“Yeah,” Bolan agreed, “and Obie has a machine shop on the other side of the complex making 132 mm threaded collars.”

“Shit,” Sawyer said.

“Shit is right,” Bolan said. “You notice anything else.”

Sawyer looked around the room and stopped. “There’s no tunnel. No fifth chamber. Just like Obie said.”

Bolan clicked on his private link. “Strike Eagle, this is Striker. Give me another GPR pulse, and triangulate the position of the tunnel to chamber five from my position.”

“Copy that, Striker,” Schwarz responded. “Coming up.”

Bolan took out his little computer and watched as the GPR pulses flashed across his screen. Up in the stratosphere, Schwarz was scribbling with his stylus. The pulses faded, and the map of the complex appeared. A dot appeared in the chamber where Bolan was standing.

“That dot is you, Striker.” A straight line appeared on the little map that went from Bolan’s position through the tunnel to the fifth chamber. “The tunnel entrance is exactly ten degrees east from your position.”

“Copy that.” Bolan walked up to what appeared to be a roughly dressed but blank stone wall.

Dirk played the tactical light on his weapon across the rock face. “So, there’s like a secret knob or something?”

“No. The tunnel’s been sealed off from the outside. There probably isn’t even a door, just brick or concrete with a layer of clay and rock molded over it for camouflage.”

Dirk scowled. “You said sealed from the outside?”

“Think about it. If we hadn’t used GPR, what would have happened? We’d have come in, kicked ass, destroyed the rockets and then dropped the caverns with explosives and walked away happy, mission accomplished. We never would have known to look for a fifth chamber.”

“Yeah—” Dirk nodded as he saw it “—and the Taliban could come back later when the coast was clear and dig it up.”

“Right. You got some shaped charges?”

“I believe we do.” Dirk turned to one of his men. “Penner! Coop here would like you to make him a door!”

The demolition man came forward and stared at the wall. “Okay, assuming concrete, assuming the same diameter as the other tunnels…” Penner mumbled to himself in demo-speak as he put together a breaching charge and then packed the plastique brick against the section of wall. He took a few steps back from his work and pressed his detonator box. “Fire in the hole!”

The detonation was anticlimactic. There was a thump and a pulse of fire around the edges of the charge, but the explosive had been shaped to blow inward against the wall. A two-foot section of the rock wall was gone to reveal that Bolan was right. The tunnel had been bricked up and then covered with a layer of clay and rock. Penner and another commando went at the sagging brick with entrenching tools. They cleared a four-foot entrance and stepped back.

Bolan shone his tactical light down the tunnel. It was exactly the same as the other, and the entrance to the fifth chamber opened into darkness at the end of it. “You better let me go first. This part may be booby-trapped.”

Dirk nodded. “Be my guest.”

Bolan crawled through the hole and slowly went down the tunnel. Dust filled the air from the blast. He went into the chamber and played his light across several pallets laden with crates. The crates had Cyrillic writing on them. Bolan didn’t read Russian, but he didn’t need to. Nor did he need to open any of the crates. He recognized the green circle with the three-lobed, red warning sign for chemical hazard, and he recognized the colored bar code and the serial numbers and letters beneath it.

Dirk came across the radio. “What do we have, Coop?”

“We’ve got cyclosarin nerve gas.” Bolan ran his light across the piled pallets. “A lot of it.”

2

Tent City, Kabul

Aaron Kurtzman was well pleased, and his face showed it across the video link. “Everyone is singing your praises, Striker. Delta Force is oozing goodwill, and Hal said the President wants to clone a hundred of you in assorted colors.”

“Yeah.” It hadn’t been a bad op. Some very unpleasant adversaries had gone down, and something very ugly had been averted.

“You don’t seem pleased. You don’t think you got the right boys?”

“Oh, we got the right Taliban boys, but we didn’t get the thugs who backed their play against the Rangers.”

“You still believe someone betrayed the Rangers’ location?”

“It was more than just a tip-off. The Taliban had intel on composition and numbers, and they had serious backup. Light-support weapons, at least, being used by people who knew what they were doing. Even in the most desperate of circumstances, Army Rangers should have been able to fight their way out of a Taliban ambush. Instead, they were cut to pieces. Even in the face of overwhelming numbers, a few should have been able to escape and evade. We have hundred percent casualties. That’s unheard-of, Bear, but since they were mutilated, beheaded, burned and their bodies stacked like cordwood, it’s a little difficult to determine exactly what happened. So everyone is screaming Taliban.”

“Yeah, well, it’s Afghanistan, Striker—people scream Taliban with good reason.”

“Bear, someone sold that gas to the Taliban. You want to take out a reinforced squad of U.S. Army Rangers with hundred percent casualties? How about starting a firefight in a narrow canyon and then ending it with nerve gas.”

Kurtzman was no longer smiling. “Yeah, nerve agents are nonpersistent. So when help finally arrived, they found spent shell casings and RPG hits and suspected nothing.”

“And the bodies were burned to prevent any telltales of nerve-agent exposure to be found.”

Kurtzman let out a long breath. “Well, that means you’re right. Someone set up the Rangers, someone gave the Taliban nerve agents and someone with the expertise had to be present to deploy the gas correctly.”

“That’s right, and it happened on German army turf.”

“Striker, the Germans haven’t produced chemical weapons since World War II.”

“The East Germans did.”

“Those stockpiles were destroyed—” Kurtzman sighed unhappily “—supposedly. You’re going to have a hard time penetrating the German army.”

“I can’t, and winding a black turban around my head and pretending to be Taliban isn’t going to work, either.” Bolan flipped through his file again. “You said the Shield protection agency has contractors working in the area?”

“For God’s sake, what are you trying to say?”

“Nothing I can prove, and nothing anybody will want to hear. Hell, I’m probably wrong, and frankly I hope I am. But we won’t know unless I go in and tear things open. What I am saying is eighteen Army Rangers are dead. And if the United States Army Rangers are after you, you’d better have a weapon of mass destruction, because that’s the only way you’re going to stop them. I think that’s exactly what happened, and far as I can see there are three possible players. I can’t join the Taliban, and I don’t speak German.”

Kurtzman’s craggy brow furrowed. “So you’re going to join Shield.”

“They’re independent contractors,” Bolan said. “It’s probably the only cover I can use to poke around.”

“They’ve got a waiting list a mile long,” Kurtzman argued. “They’ve got Special Forces guys from all over the world taking early retirement just to join up.”

Bolan nodded. “I know, so I’m going to need a guy they would kill to have join them and then piggyback my way in.”

Kurtzman perked an eyebrow. “You have someone in mind.”

Bolan grinned. “Indeed I do.”

BRIGADIER EUGENE TOLER PEERED at Lieutenant Dirk’s fist somewhat apprehensively. He sighed, rolled his eyes and then shook his head at Bolan. “Mr. Cooper, are we sure this is absolutely necessary?”

Bolan didn’t blame the English officer one bit. The lieutenant’s fists, like a lot of things about him, were oversized for his frame. “I’m afraid so, sir.”

Captain Fairfax stood to one side shaking his head. He had been in Special Forces for decades, and nothing had ever prepared him for the utter surrealty of this situation, much less the fact that he was about to lose his best officer.

Dirk took a deep breath, and his knuckles creaked and popped as he balled up the soup bones. He looked at his hand as if it didn’t belong to him and then at the brigadier. “You ready, sir?”

“Well…right!” The brigadier squared his shoulders, thrust out his jaw, straightened the front of his battle dress uniform and, like English officers and gentlemen since time immemorial, found refuge in Shakespeare. “‘Lay on, McDuff.’”

It was a beauty of a whistling right hook. Brigadier Toler was a big man, but his head whiplashed on his neck as he flew back across the folding table behind him. It wasn’t an act. The folding table collapsed beneath him, and he, his computer, monitor and everything else on his desk hit the floor with a tremendous crash.

Dirk’s voice boomed out at parade-ground volume. “You limey son of a bitch! Good men died because of you!”

“Goddamn it, Lieutenant!” Fairfax bawled. “What in the blue hell do you think you’re doing?”

Toler pushed himself to a sitting position in the wreckage and matched Dirk and Fairfax decibel for decibel. “Mr. Pitt!”

Toler’s aide-de-camp peeked his head in and stared in horror.

“Mr. Pitt!” The brigadier pointed a damning finger at Dirk. “Place that man under arrest!”

“Sir!” The bookish young man visibly braced himself. “Guards!”

“Lieutenant Dirk is an American officer and can only be confined or charged by a U.S. military order!” Fairfax snarled.

“That man serves under NATO Afghanistan Coalition Command, and by God, I’ll see him tried and court-martialed under its bloody aegis!”

Bolan didn’t feel the need to add anything. It was all rolling along very nicely.

Pitt’s voice rose a panicked octave. “Guards…”

It was Fairfax’s turn to be outraged. “You can’t do this!”

“I can and will!” Toler thundered.

“Guards…”

British soldiers with the scarlet-peaked caps of the Royal Military Police came charging into the tent. Toler lurched to his feet. A magnificent shiner was inflating all around his left eye. “Guards! The American lieutenant has just struck a superior officer! Put him under close arrest!”

The MPs’ faces went from surprise to bloodred rage. A Yank had taken a poke at one of their officers. Truncheons rattled out of their sheaths.

Fairfax took a step forward. “By God! If you think—”

Toler roared like a wounded lion. “If the captain opens his bleeding gob again, clap him in irons for obstruction!”

Dirk beckoned the brigadier in. “Oh, you want some more of this? You limey mother—”

The Redcaps dived into Dirk. Dirk disposed of one with a hip throw and staggered one with a right hand before he took a truncheon thrust to the guts and the other two RMPs dived into his legs. Pitt couldn’t have weighed more than 115 pounds dripping wet, but the brigadier’s aide hurled himself into the fray with the enthusiasm and fury of wounded national pride.

The fight went to the ground and became a wrestling match. Dirk was a Special Forces soldier in prime physical condition, but taking down soldiers was what the RMPs were trained to do and numbers and weight told their ugly tale. The Redcaps inexorably got the upper hand, as well as an arm and ankle lock. Then the truncheons began falling on Dirk like rain. They continued to fall until he stopped moving. The Redcaps snapped on the handcuffs and kept Dirk pinned while Brigadier Toler’s aide stood. The young man was shaking with adrenaline reaction, and his broken nose hung on his face like a flattened squid. “Prisoner is secure, sir!”

“Very good, Mr. Pitt. Have him placed in the brig and confined in full restraints. Once he’s properly shackled, fetch a medic around to have a look at him.”

“Yes, sir!”

Captain Fairfax’s face was ashen. “This is intolerable. That man is an American officer!”

“That man will require a lawyer.” Toler’s voice dropped to reptilian coldness. “As his commanding officer, I suggest it is your immediate duty to see to it.”

U.S. military stockade, Kabul

BOLAN WALKED INTO THE CELL and handed Lieutenant Dirk a short, two-page document. “Here you go.”

Dirk took the paper. The Redcaps hadn’t been gentle. His face was lumped as though he’d been attacked by a swarm of Alaskan mosquitoes. He quickly read the first page and flipped to the second and looked at the signatures and seals. “Jesus, I really am eatin’ the big chicken dinner.”

Bolan smiled. “You want salt with that?”

Dirk rolled his eyes ruefully. The big chicken dinner was U.S. military slang for a bad-conduct discharge. Dirk had dodged the bullet. The fix had been put in, but not everyone was in on it. There had been a chance the court-martial could have gone wrong and Dirk could have gotten the full dishonorable discharge. That was something that followed a man around like a pet for the rest of his life. A dishonorable discharge was one of the few stigmas left in American life that was like the mark of Cain. The United States Military was an all-volunteer organization. A person had to want to join up. To be dishonorably discharged implied that you had dishonored your country and the service. Nearly every application for employment in the United States first asked if you had ever served in the United States armed forces and if you had been honorably or dishonorably discharged. Given a choice, it seemed as if most employers would rather hire a thief, a murderer or a pedophile before they would give a job to a man with a dishonorable discharge hanging over his head.

The good news was that despite Brigadier Toler’s highly credible Old Testament thunder, the United States would not let its soldiers be tried by foreign military tribunals whether or not they had the NATO or United Nations stamp of approval. The court-martial had been one of the swiftest ones in recent history. The reasons for the lieutenant’s actions were considered top secret. Mission information leading up to the incident had been redacted. His two Silver Stars for conspicuous bravery had been mentioned early and often, as was the fact that while Brigadier Toler may well have been a superior officer, he was but an officer in the service of the United Kingdom rather than the United States and not Lieutenant Dirk’s commanding officer. Dirk had been uncomfortable with it, but the question of race had been brought up in relation to Dirk’s brutal beating at the hands of the Royal Military Police.

Dirk had gotten the big chicken dinner.

Bad conduct didn’t go on your employment record. While a bad conduct discharge also implied that a person had screwed up—screwed up royally, no doubt of that—at least the person hadn’t dishonored the country. But one look at Dirk’s face told Bolan the big chicken dinner did not taste good. Dirk had devoted his life to serving his fellow citizens, and he had just been handed his walking papers. He was no longer a Delta Force lieutenant. He was now citizen Richard Lincoln Dirk.

Dirk gave Bolan one last, long, hard look. “Full presidential pardon?”

“Full pardon, reinstatement and promotion to captain. Guaranteed.”

“I don’t suppose you can you get that for me in writing?”

“The President has expressed his willingness to do it in his office and invite your mother.” Bolan handed Dirk a second piece of paper with the presidential seal on it. “But yeah, you can have it in writing.”

“Damn…” Dirk looked at the signature on the presidential stationery. “You really can make the magic happen. I’ve seen a few sealed orders in the past two years, and that is the Man’s John Hancock.”

“Check the small print. Pardon, reinstatement and promotion posthumously should you die during the course of this mission. I insisted on that.”

“That’s mighty considerate of you.”

Bolan shrugged. “You ready to get out of here?”

“Damn straight. I know a kebab place two blocks from here that treats soldiers right, and the girls upstairs treat ’em even better. The owner imports them from Germany, and if you want to meet mercs, that’s where they hang out to get hired.”

“It’s on me.”

“Goddamn right it is,” Dirk agreed. “And get me a gun. I’m feelin’ kind of naked here.”

Bolan drew a 9 mm Beretta Model 92 from the back of his belt. “Hold on to this. It was the first thing I could lay my hands on. Give me twenty-four hours, and I can get you anything else you want on special order.”

“You sweet man.” Dirk took the pistol and checked the loads. “Let’s party.”

Lars Shishlik Haus

KEBABS AND BLONDES weren’t the only advantages of the Shishlik Haus. A half German, half Afghan named Lars Obiada ran the establishment, and he could only be described as a war profiteer. Soldiers at war always had their paychecks in their pockets and very little to spend them on. They were always looking for women and liquor. Both were hard to come by in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Obiada provided both, as well as some of the best hashish available. He had lived in Germany for the first twenty years of his life and served in the Bundeswehr, so any German coalition soldier in Afghanistan got his first drink on the house. The Shishlik was always dripping with German soldiers on leave, as well as soldiers from other coalition countries.

The blondes and hash were upstairs, black-market goods and gambling were in the back and the opium den was in the basement. The smell of the best kebabs in Kabul hit you the second you walked through the front door, and the bar was only ten steps away.

Bolan and Dirk gave their handguns to the coat-check thug at the door and took a seat at the crowded bar. Angry German rap music vibrated the walls. The proprietor was a huge man, and his Teutonic Afghan ancestry made for an interesting mix of blond hair, black eyes and a biker’s black mustache and beard. He threw his arms wide as he became aware of Dirk. “The Diggler!”

“My man, Lars!” Dirk grinned.

Obiada poured two shots of whiskey into a glass without being asked. “And for your friend?”

Bolan peered at the row of bottles behind the bar. All were German imports. “I’ll take a liter of the Paulaner hefeweizen.”

The proprietor filled a massive mug full of cloudy yellow beer, dropped in two lemon slices and slid it Bolan’s way. “We have not seen Lieutenant Diggler in some time.”