Ripple Effect

“At least,” Brognola said.

“So why the sudden urgency?” Bolan asked.

“Ah. Because our songbird down at Gitmo didn’t only drop a name.”

“Go on.”

“According to Khaled, al Qaeda has our boy on tap this time, to ‘teach Satan a lesson he will not forget.’ Khaled has no specifics on the nature of that lesson, but we didn’t like the sound of it.”

“That’s understandable,” Bolan allowed.

“So, there you are. We’ve got one kick-ass warrior, seemingly devoid of anything resembling conscience, working for a group that wants to take us off the map. We’d like to stop them—him, specifically—and do it in a way that doesn’t make the Pentagon look like a nuthouse with the inmates in control. You in?”

Bolan frowned, feeling the deadweight of the CD in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said at last. “I’m in.”

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR LATER, back at the Wakulla Inn, Bolan reviewed the CD on his laptop. It began with all the ordinary paperwork for the induction of a U.S. Army private, with the details of its subject’s early life.

Eugene Adam Talmadge had indeed been born in 1967—April 23, to be precise—in Boulder, Colorado. His high-school grades were average, except in sports, where he excelled. A college football scholarship had been on offer, but he’d turned it down to wear a uniform, and then a green beret.

Bolan was somewhat puzzled by that choice, coming in 1985, when there was no threat of a military draft and no war currently in progress to attract daredevil types. Maybe Talmadge decided that he was unsuited to a college campus, even with the free ride offered by its sports department. Maybe he was hoping to accomplish something on his own, not have it handed to him on a silver platter just because he was a jock. Trouble at home? Something so personal it didn’t make the files?

Bolan would never know.

Talmadge had been a standout boot in basic training, and had taken to the Special Forces school at Benning like a duck to water, acing every course except the foreign-language training, where he struggled for a passing score in Spanish. When it came to weapons training and explosives, unarmed combat and survival, though, Talmadge had everything the service could desire, and then some.

Talmadge had killed his first two men in Panama, a couple of Manuel Noriega’s gorillas who weren’t smart enough to lay down their arms in the face of superior force. There was no intimation of a trigger-happy soldier in that case, no hint of any impropriety.

In combat, people died.

In Desert Storm, Talmadge had earned a reputation for himself. On the advance from Kuwait, through Iraq, he’d personally taken out at least two dozen members of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, earning a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in the process. The citation that accompanied his Silver Star praised Talmadge for his bravery and focus under fire, resulting in the rescue of two wounded comrades and elimination of a hostile rifle squad. Details were classified, suggesting that the mission also had a covert side.

His flesh wounds didn’t keep him out of action long. Talmadge had shipped out for Somalia in winter 1992, as part of Washington’s attempt to regulate that nation’s rival warlords and bring order out of chaos. That attempt had failed, but Talmadge scored nine more verified kills during four months in-country. His part in the rescue of a downed Black Hawk crew earned him a DSC—Distinguished Service Cross—and yet another Purple Heart.

He did all right, Bolan thought, moving onward through the soldier’s life on paper.

The sutures were barely removed from Talmadge’s Somalian wounds when new orders dispatched him to Bosnia-Herzegovina, land of ethnic cleansing and religious hatred spanning centuries. More warlords, more atrocities, more combat pay. Talmadge hadn’t been wounded in that conflict, but he had logged seven kills the record keepers knew about. No decorations that time for a job well done.

The Army’s standard paperwork included his record for the next year and a half, until the bitter end. Bolan discovered that the incident in 1995 had happened at Fort Benning. A lieutenant, name deleted, was the so-called victim, with a list of fractures and internal damage ranging from his skull down to his knees. The witnesses included two civilians and a corporal, name deleted, who was almost certainly the female Brognola had mentioned in his summary.

And as Brognola had explained, the transcripts of the court-martial were missing, classified for reasons unexplained. The logic of that void was inescapable: the facts were secret. Ergo, there could be no explanation why they had been classified, or else the secret would’ve been revealed.

Catch-22.

Bolan took Brognola’s appraisal of the case as valid, recognized the anger and frustration Talmadge had to have felt at being railroaded. Any remarks he may have offered to the court-martial were classified along with all the rest, leaving the slate blank. Only the verdict now remained, its stinging condemnation of a former hero sure to follow him for the remainder of his life.

Under the circumstances, Bolan was a bit surprised that Talmadge hadn’t sought revenge against the Army. Then again, when he considered what Talmadge had done throughout the intervening years—what he was doing now—perhaps he had. Brognola might be wrong about the former Green Beret’s coldhearted profit motive. Talmadge fought for pay, of course—he had to eat, like anybody else—but in his work for Middle Eastern terrorists, he had been striking out against the West.

And striking back at Uncle Sam.

Bolan was no armchair psychologist, but it didn’t require a Ph.D. to recognize that Talmadge had his pick of causes and employers in a world where violence was the norm. He could’ve spent more time in sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia if his only goal was money in the bank.

Instead, by working for Hamas, al Qaeda and the like, Talmadge had actually chosen sides, but with a difference. He wasn’t some deluded college convert to Islamic fundamentalist extremism, or a celebrity who craved publicity at any cost. He was a soldier, and he’d made a choice.

Bolan thought he understood Gene Talmadge now, and he could even sympathize with him. Up to a point. But sympathy ran out when Talmadge cast his lot with terrorists and criminals. There was—at least to Bolan’s mind—a world of difference between a mercenary soldier drifting aimlessly, involved in brushfire wars without regard to ideology, and one who set himself on a collision course with the United States and civilized society.

Whatever wrongs Talmadge had suffered at the hands of his superiors, he’d given up the moral high ground when he hired on with al Qaeda and its allies to perpetuate a bloodbath fueled by hatred and fanaticism. Bolan knew that something had to be done, and he seemed the best qualified to do the job.

Brognola’s latest information placed the target in Jakarta, where al Qaeda was supposed to have a thriving outpost. Bolan’s contact on the ground would be an agent from Homeland Security, who had been keeping track of Talmadge and his playmates since the news from Gitmo started making waves.

Whether the Special Forces renegade would still be there when Bolan reached the scene was anybody’s guess, but every journey had a starting point.

CHAPTER TWO

Jakarta, Indonesia

The city smelled of spice and death. Street vendors hawked their wares from pushcarts, many of them mobile kitchens offering the best of Far Eastern cuisine at bargain prices, while the nearby waterfront and fish market contributed aromas from the Java Sea.

Mack Bolan almost felt at home among the thousands of pedestrians and cyclists who thronged the narrow streets fronting Kelapa Harbor. It refreshed old memories of other times in Southeast Asia, when he’d gambled with the Reaper and the game had gone his way.

But Bolan always wondered if his luck would hold next time.

This time.

But while he felt at home, in some respects, Bolan was also well aware that he stood out among the locals, obviously alien. He made an easy target in the crowd, and might not see the hunters coming if they played their cards right. It was really their home, after all, and he was just a visitor with the wrong eyes, wrong hair, wrong skin.

Just like the man he was supposed to meet.

Two strangers in a strange land, who had never met each other previously, but whose movements were directed by a higher power. In Bolan’s case, that power was a man named Hal Brognola, operating out of Washington, D.C. His contact also marched to drums from Washington, but had no clue that Bolan and the team he served existed.

All that was about to change, together with the contact’s life, his whole conception of the world.

And Bolan’s?

He would have to wait and see.

Unlike his contact, Bolan had been forearmed with a photograph to help him spot his fellow round-eye at Kelapa Harbor. If their meeting was aborted for whatever reason, they were supposed to try again that afternoon, at the Jakarta Ragunan Zoo. A hookup near the tiger pit.

For his part, Bolan hoped to get it right the first time, but he always liked to have a fallback option, just in case.

He’d come prepared, to the extent that climate and propriety allowed. With temperatures in the nineties, he could hardly wear an overcoat to cover automatic weapons, so he’d opted for a large, loose-fitting shirt, with slacks and running shoes. Beneath the shirt, he had replaced his usual Beretta with a Glock 19, a compact version of the classic semiautomatic pistol that retained its firepower—two rounds better than the Beretta Model 92—while eliminating the external hammer and safety. Two extra magazines weighted his trouser pockets, with a folding knife that resembled a Japanese tanto.

Bolan had purchased those weapons, and some others that he couldn’t sport in public, from a local dealer recommended by Brognola, who acquired the name and address from an unnamed source. That suited Bolan, since the source wouldn’t know his name, either, or the reason why Brognola needed guns in Indonesia, several thousand miles beyond his legal jurisdiction.

Bolan didn’t know if his contact was armed, or if he had been trained to any serious degree in self-defense. The U.S. war on terror, winding down its first decade with no clear end in sight, had thrown together many strange bed-fellows with a mix of capabilities, knowledge and skills that was almost surreal. Homeland Security, for instance, was neither restricted to the continental U.S.A. nor limited in operations to securing airports, borders and the like. Its agents might be anywhere.

Even Jakarta, on a steamy morning when the city smelled like spice and death.

Bolan had memorized a photo and description of his contact, and he had a name. Tom Dixon. He could pick the man out of a crowd, particularly on these streets, but finding him was only step one of the job at hand.