Path To War

Details were sketchy, with no firm leads or clues as to the whereabouts of the assassins, and the soldier had a nagging tug in his gut he was going in blind for the first tags on his hit parade. What he knew was a CIA storm tracker—a Company operative who gathered and sifted through intelligence on the world’s most wanted terrorists—had been executed, along with three operatives in rural Virginia. Their heads had been lopped off—standard operating procedure these days, it seemed, for extremist executioners—a calling card of a supernatural Islamic beast left behind, which presented at least a narrow window of opportunity as far as identifying the killers. Next there was a senator who headed the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence, his dinner companion—a high-ranking official from the Department of Defense—and their bodyguards gunned down, the suspect fleeing the scene, a ghost in the wind, but not before bringing down the restaurant’s roof with plastic explosive, killing ten diners and employees, and wounding several others. Finally a team of CIA operatives, rumored to be in charge of the Serpent Tank, had been murdered in their D.C. condo, which supposedly doubled as some sort of clandestine after-hours office. As was the SOP of many terrorist attacks, the trio of hits seemed to go down nearly at the same time, according to police and FBI reports.

And all of the kills, Brognola informed Bolan, were the work of a trio of Pakistani assassins known to American intelligence agencies as Al-Jassaca.

So why launch the campaign in Casablanca, he had posed to his longtime friend. Known associates of the assassins had been discovered holed up in an apartment by Moroccan authorities who had pledged full cooperation with their American counterparts, vowing pretty much to bow out, let them bag Habib Mousuami and his brothers in jihad. It was strange, Bolan thought, that the Moroccans, after three recent car bombings, would so graciously step aside. Which put some bogeys on his radar screen.

Trust no one.

Last, but hardly least, two Asian males had been spotted going into the target apartment by an FBI stakeout team, less than an hour ago. Who they were, what they wanted with Islamic extremists…

Well, Bolan had his own methods for extracting information.

It was awkward, manning the wheel, weighted down with the hardware he was taking to the party. The overcoat was customized to stow flash-bang, frag and incendiary grenades. More pockets were stuffed with spare clips for the shoulder holstered Beretta 93-R and the mammoth .44 Magnum Desert Eagle riding his right hip. An Uzi submachine gun was stored on his left hip. Accessible through a special-cut deep pocket. It may prove cumbersome, grabbing for hardware when he hit the front door, but full combat webbing and vest may attract the wary eye of the denizens of the night the alarm sounding to local authorities, slamming the brakes on his mission before it got off the ground. He had been assured by Commander Raz Tachjine, however, that he had complete authority in the city if Special Agent Cooper had any problems with some overzealous police.

The kind of trouble the Executioner was poised to dump along the waterfront and deeper into the area known as Medina would provide nothing but problems of the most bloody kind.

He saw the dome of the Great Mosque looming in the distance, cut the wheel to turn south on Place Mirabeau. It was a seedy part of the big city, the grimy whitewashed apartment buildings somehow oddly stacked and out of place, as they were lined behind rows of palm trees. Another few blocks and he spied the FBI stakeout team in its black van. They had grabbed a corner, just south of Boulevard Mohammed, perfect for watching the front doors to the apartment. Bolan took his handheld radio, patched through to the team leader to let him know he was in the neighborhood. A quick sitrep from Agent Andy Dawkins, and Bolan was informed the players were still hunkered down in their lair. Their standing orders were to sit tight, come in only as backup, or go through the front door themselves if he wasn’t out in fifteen minutes.

The soldier parked, bailed and crossed the boulevard, navigating a quick flight through heavy traffic. He went through the front doors, climbed the steps to the second floor. The aroma of tea and tobacco filled his senses as he marched down the empty hall. He heard a baby crying somewhere and what sounded like a couple engaged in a heated argument from behind another door. All clear in the hallway. At least for the moment.

Bolan reached the target door. He knew the enemy was inside; since their phone had been tapped by his team for weeks, the number traced here to this apartment, and complete with eyeball confirmation.

He palmed a flash-bang, pulled the pin, but held down on the spoon. What the hell, he figured, go in the hard way, get the game jump started, all blood and thunder. Five jackals total were behind the door, he’d been told. One way to find out. He hated not knowing the layout of a target site, but if it was a standard two bedroom, figure foyer leading to the living room…

Digging out the Uzi, he lifted a booted foot, sent it crashing through flimsy wood, just beside the knob, falling back just as the door exploded in countless shards and splinters.

ANOTHER TIME and Special Security Agent Lance Dexter of the Department of Defense would have idled away the waning twilight hours strolling Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, taking in the sights of the tall ships, girl-watching, swilling whiskey, eating lobster and crab at a waterfront restaurant. Given what he knew waited beyond the warehouse door, however, and any thoughts of R and R should have been banished from his mind. He was on a mission, and it wasn’t ordained by God.

He looked both ways down the lot—all clear—then he shucked his sports coat higher up his shoulders, suddenly feeling the weight of the shouldered Beretta M-9. The heavy artillery—M-16, Uzi and Colt Commando—were locked in the trunk of his black sedan. It was an unsettling feeling he experienced, out of nowhere, aware of the experiment under way inside, and he wondered if the human test subject might go berserk, require an extended lead punch…

Well, he had a job to do, and the shadow men overseas were eagerly awaiting his report.

Swiping his magnetic card down the keypad, he punched in his access code. A green light and he was in, the door automatically snicking shut behind. A grim Delta Force sentry, armed with an HK MP-5, nodded curtly as he marched past, quickly moved down the narrow corridor. At the end of the gloomy corridor, lit by only two hanging bulbs, a steel door barred the way to what he thought of as Frankenstein’s laboratory. Another keypad; his access code punched in, only this time he was forced to place his right eye to the retina-iris scan. This part of the security routine always put his nerves a little on edge, as he imagined some sharp object would jump out of the lens and gouge out his eye. The way he understood it, the scan took a digital picture to compare with prior retina-iris scans. One of the high-tech DOD geeks had once explained each human eye had a unique pattern of blood vessels. The iris, the core part of the eye, was a complex weaving of countless connective tissue. In short, every human being had his or her own individual eye marking.

The steel door slid open and he was rolling in, finding the biochem genius—recruited by DOD especially for this task—washing his laptop with a wave of cigarette smoke. Briefly wondering what other vices or skeletons the man had in the closet, he spotted the giant ashtray, carved with the porcelain figure of a naked woman and piled to overflow with butts, within easy arm’s reach of Dr. Teetel. The genius was squat, stoop-shouldered, with a gray Bozo hairdo. He always had the urge to address the man as Ygor, but figured in his own field and own right he was due respect.

Then Dexter looked at the test subject, dead ahead, stretched out on a gurney, just inside the glass bubble, naked accept for underwear, arms and legs strapped. Two more whitecoats were glued to their monitors on each flank of the human lab rat, the subject wired to their laptops, skull and chest. Granted, the man had volunteered for the experiment, known the risks, but Dexter had to wonder about his sanity. No, scratch any pyschobabble. Mr. Smithson had come to them out of desperation, pure and simple, a down-on-his luck mercenary, a degenerate gambler, cash-strapped, who been sought out by the Consortium, offered ten thousand dollars to become Ygor’s monkey.

Dexter stood beside Teetel, caught a whiff of whiskey, flashed him a look, then peered through the boiling cloud. He was uncertain of what he saw on the monitor, but it looked as if the good doctor was playing computer games while getting tanked in the process.

Teetel twitched his head, a wet grin pasting lips. “Ah, Mr. Dexter. So good of you to come. You’re just in time.”

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?” he said in his perpetual squeaky voice.

“What do you mean, ‘what do I mean’? You’re getting paid top dollar, and it looks to me like you’re wasting time, playing a kid’s video game.”

Teetel snickered, shook his Bozo mane. “Mr. Dexter, allow me to explain something. This is no game. What you see is a maze, yes. Those are insects, yes, but who are in the process of self-replicating.”

“Self-what?”

Another shake of the head and Teetel went on. “We’re talking about creating a form of artificial life here. We’re in what science calls, ‘A-life programming.’ Beyond the synthetic steroid-methamphetamine I created for you people—so you could have your so-called supersoldiers—science wants to understand the bigger picture of evolution, the origins of life, the nature of learning and intelligence. In other words, we’re seeking to create the perfect man here. What I am giving you, on the other hand, is a warrior who requires no food, no sleep, who is virtually impossible to kill—though that concept alone is impossible—but, just the same, one who is just shy of the perfect man, or, for your purposes, the perfect killing machine. These insects you see are in the process of searching out their own energy-food source. They are reproducing—or cloning—themselves, transferring one cell’s nucleus into another cell. As you can see, one or two vanish from the screen, as they are searching out simulated food through a complex series of mazes. Translation—only the fittest, the strongest, survive. Pure Darwin.”

“Well, that’s all very interesting, but what’s cloning have to do with the Z-Clops drug?”

“Z-Clops, good sir,” Teetel said, “has been infused with dopamine and endorphin derivatives, you know, the bio-chemicals relaying messages by way of neurotransmitters?”

Dexter clenched his jaw, resentful of the way the good doctor condescended to him. “I have a basic understanding of all that.”

Teetel pulled a bottle of whiskey out of his desk drawer and dumped a splash in a foam cup. “The dopamine-endorphin derivative infusion self-replicates itself by feeding on other neurotransmitters. In other words, your supersoldiers can go on and on and on. My chemical-molecular software program for Z-Clops is fairly based on this Survival of the Fittest program you now see.”

Dr. Teetel was either half in the bag, eccentric or crazy, but what did they say about genius? Dexter wondered as Teetel pressed the intercom button and told them to proceed. There was a thin line between genius and insanity?

“What I am telling you, Mr. Dexter,” he heard Teetel say as he watched one of the whitecoats inject Z-Clops into Smithson’s arm, “if I am successful here, with a synthetic drug that self-replicates while in the brain, there is a good chance I can eventually do that with human beings—self-replication, that is. And, no, good sir, I am not a ghoul, nor do I seek a Nobel Prize.”

Dexter wasn’t so sure about that as he watched the test subject, waiting for the wonder drug of the ages to kick in, Teetel hitting his cup when—

The first spasms were so violent it looked to Dexter as if Smithson was lifting the gurney into the air. He glimpsed Teetel go tense, jaw slack, saw the whitecoats wearing grim concern on their pink faces, then their test subject convulsed, the left arm suddenly breaking free of the strap. Smithson’s eyes bulged with what Dexter could only call wild-eyed fury, an animal-like bellow blasting clear through the reinforced glass. They were lurching back in there, set to run for cover, as the leg strap burst next, Dexter aware of what he had to do. There was only one way to subdue the test subject.

“Get that door open!” he shouted at Teetel as he unleathered his Beretta and rushed to the far side of the bubble. He was inside, just as the berserker burst another arm binding, the whites of his eyes rolling back in his head. Both whitecoats jumped on the screaming demon, one of them with a syringe in hand, shouting, “Don’t shoot him!”

Dexter was drawing a bead for a shot between the eyes when Smithson suddenly went limp. He stood, watching as they checked his pulse. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

One of the whitecoats nodded, a defeated look on his face. “Cardiac arrest would be my best guess, but we’ll need an autopsy.”

“Forget that. You failed.”

“No, we haven’t.”

Dexter wheeled, found Teetel on his back. “You haven’t, huh? I suppose you have a good explanation.”

“We injected him with too large of a dosage. Our mistake.”

“Your mistake? You didn’t know the risks?”

“We did, and he did, too. Understand, too, this man came to us, a lifelong alcoholic. His kidneys were weak, he had cirrhosis of the liver, two previous heart attacks, and there were indications he was in the first stages of lung cancer.”

“And still you went ahead?”

“He insisted. He needed the money. Or perhaps…”

“Perhaps what? That he was looking to commit suicide?”

Teetel shrugged. “Well, a man with his…lifestyle…that’s a distinct possibility.”

Dexter stowed his weapon. He gave what Teetel told him consideration; decided what the good doctor told him could well be true. For the most part, the soldiers he knew who pledged allegiance to the Consortium were young, figure in prime physical condition, and with a smaller dosage…

Without a word, Dexter brushed past Teetel, anxious to give his report to the shadow men overseas.