Line Of Honor

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

“Copy that, Bear,” Bolan acknowledged.

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

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

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

The next question was how had they been tracked.

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

Bolan considered how he would have done it.

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

“What are you looking for?”

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

“Fast-track it if you can.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bolan was looking for a cold spot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had a very strong feeling he was under surveillance.

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

“So the whole thing is a wash?”

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

“We’re running out of time, Striker.”

“You said Able and Phoenix are currently operating?”

“That is their status.”

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

“Oh…my…God…”

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

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

“Don’t authorize it. Just do it.”

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

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

Kurtzman paused a moment. “In Malaysia.”

“Yeah. Malaysia.”

“What will you need?” Kurtzman asked.

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

“Anything specific you’re looking for?”