Lethal Payload

“Yeah.” Kurtzman grinned lopsidedly. “It’s a tattoo. He could have made the damn thing up when he was drunk.”

“Bear,” Bolan said, sighing wearily, “what would you make of it?”

“All right. Best guess.” He peered at the sketch again. “The dragon could mean anything, though if I had to bet, it probably has something to do with service in Asia. The owl might mean some kind of night operations. It’s a specialization in the legion. The parachute’s a no-brainer. Your boy was airborne, and in the French foreign legion, the paratroops are the elite.”

Kurtzman wasn’t telling Bolan much he didn’t already know, but he was confirming his suspicions. The computer wizard stared at the sketch again. “These guys could be mercs. It’s not unknown for guys to get out of the foreign legion and go to work for someone else. ‘Legionnaire’ certainly has some prestige attached to it. Maybe the mullah felt that he needed some extra muscle with the United States and Australia hunting him.”

Bolan had considered that. “He already had an island full of muscle with the pandekar and his boys. Both men were also very religious. Al-Juwanyi is Taliban and Regog is part of the al Qaeda cell network in Indonesia. Neither organization is known for hiring outsiders. These guys are definitely part of the puzzle.”

“Okay, but making them fit isn’t going to be fun.”

Bolan was all too aware of that. He trusted his instincts, but there were no facts to back them up or leads to take them anywhere. “What about the cell phone and the documents I collected on the island?”

Kurtzman clicked a few keys on his keyboard. The monitor showed Carmen Delahunt rapidly pounding the keyboard at her workstation. She looked up and blew a lock of red hair away from her eyes. “What’s up, Aaron?”

“Striker is here, and he’s hoping for some answers. Got any?”

She punched up information. “The cell phone’s memory had some numbers in it. Several were to Jakarta, and not surprisingly, they were to phones that were stolen. One led to Bali, and again, dead-ended to a stolen phone. One anomaly was a number that led to French Guiana, which, as you can guess, dead-ended.”

“The French foreign legion has its Jungle Warfare School in French Guiana,” Bolan said. “Bear, I want a country study, now.”

Kurtzman began tapping keys, and a map of South America popped up on his screen. Information began scrolling. They read an encyclopedia-like description of the French colony.

Bolan stared hard at the map inset on the screen. “What kind of transnational issues are we looking at?”

“Very few. They’re always asking for increasing autonomy from France, but in public votes only a small percentage of the population supports seceding from France, and they’re not a violent faction. Their neighbor, Suriname, claims a strip of their territory between the River Litani and the River Marouini, but it’s never come to a military struggle. There is limited illicit marijuana growing along the coast, but that’s mostly for local consumption. Interpol considers them to be a minor drug transshipment point to Europe at best. Unemployment is a problem, but not monumental.”

“What’s the Muslim population?”

Kurtzman could see where Bolan was going. “Miniscule, not enough to register in official population charts. French Guiana is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. The Muslim community are immigrants, and most likely to be businessmen or university-educated professionals working for French companies.” The computer expert’s brow furrowed in thought, and he hit more keys. His map tracked westward and information scrolled. “Suriname, however, does have a significant Muslim population.”

“From Java,” Bolan concluded.

Kurtzman hit a key triumphantly. “Bingo. Suriname was a former Dutch colony, just like Indonesia, and the Dutch imported a lot of Javanese for labor.” He lost some of his exuberance. “But that still doesn’t get us anywhere. The Javanese are in Suriname, and there are almost none to speak of in French Guiana. It’s a nonissue.”

“But our boy had a contact there.”

“He called a phone number there. They’re two tiny countries on the northern tip of South America, and it’s a small world.”

“Our boy was al Qaeda.” Bolan shook his head. “They don’t do anything small. He was on a mission, a high profile kidnapping and murder, and he had presets in his cell phone. Those would all be important contact numbers. One of them was in French Guiana.”

“Well, it is intriguing, I’ll grant you.” Kurtzman leaned back in his wheelchair and laced his fingers behind his head. “But how you’re going to string this all together into anything significant is beyond me.”

“I’m not.” Bolan leaned back and matched his comrade’s posture. “You are.”

“You know, I knew you were going to say that.” Kurtzman sat straight up. “How do you want to play it?”

“Suriname has a significant Muslim population, predominantly Javanese, and Regog was a Jokuk stylist, heavy into religion and mysticism, and now it looks like at least some splinter sect of it has gone militant. Do whatever you have to to find any practice of Jokuk-style pentjak-silat in Suriname. Find a connection, no matter how tenuous, and then make it lead to French Guiana.”

“All right.” Kurtzman chewed his lower lip in thought. “But this is getting thin, sniper. I trust you, and I trust your instincts, but we are officially grasping at straws.”

“I know,” Bolan said. “But I trust you, Bear. I trust your instincts, and you’ve worked with a lot less.”

Kurtzman laughed. “You keep talking like that, and you’re gonna have a date for the prom.”

Bolan smiled. “Here’s the part where you lose that lovin’ feeling.”

Kurtzman read Bolan’s mind. “You want Akira and me to hack the French foreign legion’s military records.”

Bolan nodded once. “Yeah.”

“Striker, if you’re accepted into the legion and want to change your identity and get away from your past, they do everything in their power to help you. This is the kind of info they’re going to keep protected. You know what kind of a stink it’s going to raise if we get detected breaking into their military databases?”

“So don’t get detected,” Bolan replied.

“Jeez, Striker, hacking France is—”

“Keep it real mission specific. Find Pak Widjihartani if you can, and any other aliases he may have. Find out where’s he’s from and where he’s been. If he was a legionnaire, find out what regiment he served in and where. Other than that specific info, no sight-seeing. Don’t download anything else France or the legion would find sensitive, but I have got to have Pak.”

“All right.” Kurtzman considered the enormity of the task before him. “I’ll lay out a battle plan for Akira and pull up our French translator programs. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of operating systems and safeguards the French foreign legion is using, but I’ll start on the assumption it’s using the same protection of information protocols as the regular French military. I’ll have Carmen download and collate every useful piece of information on the legion that she can find and get a copy made for us. The legion is one of the most colorful military units in the history of mankind, and it should make interesting reading on the plane.”

Kurtzman’s eyebrow rose once more. “I’m assuming you’re getting on a plane.”

“Yeah.” Bolan yawned and nodded. “But I need a nap. I’m gonna take twenty-four hours’ downtime. Then I want to meet with you again to see what we have. Assuming it’s anything, I’ll need Barbara to arrange a flight to Suriname. I’ll need an updated passport and a French visa, and get me a full warload delivered to the U.S. Embassy down there.”

“I’m on it.”

“Okay.” Bolan rose. “I’m sacking out. As soon as you have that information package on the legion, call me.”

“One thing, Striker.”

“What’s that?”

“You be careful about messing in legion business. They have a reputation for killing people who mess with them.”

“I’ve heard that.”

3

Paramaribo, Suriname

Bolan removed the bandage and surveyed the handiwork on his arm. It would have to do.

Sweat stung his arm as he stepped out from the air-conditioned hotel, and his shirt soaked through from the ninety-degree heat and the matching humidity. Suriname sat at the top of South America less than two hundred kilometers from the equator. As a nation, Suriname consisted almost totally of its coastal strip; and once one strolled half a kilometer from the surf and sand, the sea breeze ended and the cloistered heat of the tropical rainforest began. The capital city followed the geography. The Europeans clung to the coast. Modern European Dutch-style businesses and homes clustered along the beaches and the waterfronts of the capital. Once one went inland, the tin shacks of the ever-growing ghettos clawed space out of the jungle.

Bolan put the blissful breeze of the sea to his back and walked into the blast furnace.

He was walking into a part of the capital that most people avoided after dark, and where police went only when heavily armed and in number.