Electronically scrambled, transmitted to an orbiting satellite, relayed to the National Security Agency in Washington, then relayed to Stony Man and decoded, the voice of Gadgets sounded toneless and mechanical, as if synthesized. Yet his friends recognized his idiomatic phrases and oblique humor. Kurtzman recorded the report. April dashed in, took notes.
"We're about ten miles southeast of the Brazilian border. Not that that means anything — everywhere out here is nowhere. We have made contact..."
Throwing open the outer door to the pistol range, April grabbed a pair of ear protectors and jammed them on her head. She fumbled a page of notes, picked it up. Before she had properly fitted the plastic and foam phones over her ears, she elbowed through the inner door. She saw Mack Bolan sighting his .44 Auto-Mag on a fifty-foot target. Andrez Konzaki, standing on his aluminum canes, watched from a step away.
Bolan was committed to constant practice with all his weapons.
The muzzle-shock of the AutoMag in confined space hit April's left ear like a hammer. She staggered slightly, and cupped her hand over her ear.
"Mack!" she cried out, her ear throbbing. "Why bother with bullets? Just point that thing at the bad guys, and let the noise knock them down."
Bolan smiled. He saw the papers in her hand. "What goes on?"
"Able Team finally reported." She passed the notes to the commander of the three blazing counterterrorists now in the Amazon.
Holstering his auto-cannon, Bolan speed-scanned the first page of notes, passing the page to Konzaki. The men read the pages for pertinent details. Konzaki took a microcassette recorder from his coat pocket and verbally listed the weapons and equipment requested by Able Team, "Twenty-five Remington 870s, Parkerized, plastic stocks and foregrips. Mag extensions. Luminescent sites. Twenty-five hundred double-ought buckshot rounds. Three thousand rounds of .308 NATO in H & K magazines. Fifty sets of load-bearing equipment, size small through medium. Ten hand radios. Rations, vitamins, medicine for one hundred people..."
Bolan sat back on the shooting bench, shook his head. "Leave it to Able Team to find the weird action."
"What did you say?" Konzaki slipped off his ear protectors.
"Cuban slave raiders — what do you think of that?"
"I think we should reserve an interrogation room at Langley. Put some questions to those animals."
"I've put out a call for Grimaldi," April told them. "When he calls back, if he can make it, he'll go south."
"We can't wait for him. If he's not available immediately, find a pilot down there who'll land a seaplane on that river."
"And what about the inquiry to the Brazilian authorities?" April asked.
Bolan shook his head. "We have no reason to believe it isn't their reactor down there. They could be running the operation with mercenaries and crazies so they could deny it if it's discovered. Until we know for sure, I won't risk betraying our guys. How quick can you get those shotguns, Andrez?"
"One call for the shotguns and ammunition. One call for the LBEs, one for the radios. I can have it all by the end of the business day."
"I thought they're on a reconnaissance mission," April commented. "But this sounds like they're assembling an army down there."
"Well, it's like this," Mack Bolan, veteran of hundreds of missions himself, told his favorite lady. "It's one thing to give a good man instructions and send him out to do a job. But once he gets there, sometimes he has to do what is necessary. We've got three of the best down there. Three times over if need be, they will do what must be done."
He looked at April penetratingly, yet affectionately, then shifted his eyes to the targets down-range as if contemplating the eternal shapes and moves of his war everlasting, and picked up the AutoMag again to blast some more holes with all the purity and precision of the cosmic balance itself.
That was Mack Bolan. Staying hard. The soul muscle behind Able Team's pulsebeat. Forever.
Your move, Able.
9
Wei Ho walked in his garden. Around him, captive birds sang in the jacaranda trees, the unseasonable lavender blossoms falling from the branches as the tiny birds — yellow, blue, iridescent green — fluttered from tree to tree. Recirculated water splashed over the rocks of an artificial brook. Behind all the other sounds in the domed, sealed garden, the whir of air conditioners rose and fell as the machines created the cool dry environment that Wei Ho demanded. When he drifted through the flowers and trees, enjoying the bird songs and the stereophonic classical Chinese music, he put the Amazon far from his mind, imagined himself to be walking in his garden in Shanghai so many years before.
A chime announced the arrival of Chan Sann and Abbott. Wei Ho clapped. A girl shuffled to him, brushed and straightened his silk robe, then shuffled away as silently as she had come.
Guards preceded the two visitors, stood at their sides as the Cambodian soldier and the American physicist entered. The heavyset Chan Sann stepped forward, bowed stiffly.
"Master, we have lost a patrol. Fifteen soldiers, two officers. One large craft, two hovercraft. Gone."
"How?"
"We do not know. Perhaps Indians, perhaps Brazilian army. The patrol had found a village. They captured several Indians for workers. Then they reported sighting a group of Brazilian soldiers. They captured the Brazilians, then we heard no more from them."
"Where was this?"
"Upriver. In Bolivia. We have depleted the Indians in this area. We must send patrols to other areas to satisfy Mr. Abbott's requirements."
"Send a small plane to overfly the last reported position of the patrol," Wei Ho instructed. "If the river craft can be recovered, send another patrol. If the plane or patrol encounters organized resistance, dispatch a plane with gas. There can be no opposition to our efforts."
"And if the opposition is soldiers of the Brazilian army?"
"Let no man escape."
Chan Sann's square, brutal face never broke its mask-like composure. In 1979 the Cambodian fled his country as the People's Army of Vietnam routed the forces of Pol Pot. Sann and his Khmer Rouge soldiers had joined Wei Ho's personal guard in Burma. As they had for Pol Pot, the Cambodians killed without question. Unlike the American physicist Abbott, they acted instantly on Wei Ho's instructions.
"And now you, Mr. Abbott. More delays?"
The American shuffled forward. Years of heroin addiction had reduced his body to a gaunt wreck. Sweat pasted his thick hair to the sickly gray skin of his scalp. Sun scars marked his nose and sallow cheekbones. The preceding three days had aged the once brilliant atomic theoretician. He carried the stink of fetid mud. Wei Ho stepped back from the odor.
"They die," the American told him. "I can't stop the dying. I thought it was the exposure. I rotated the work gangs. I kept the rem count down. But they died. Even the road gangs, the jungle cutters with no exposure whatsoever, they die."
"Why does this concern me?"
Abbott reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, the action exposing welts of needle scars on his forearms. One of the guards rushed forward, as quick as a snake and seized the addict's hand in mid-motion. Abbott obediently dropped his hand. The guard returned to his stance at attention, watching every move of the visitors.
"I'm sorry... I forgot about your security... My point is, how can you expect me to hold to your timetable? I don't have the technicians, I don't have the workers, I don't..."
"Chan Sann!" The Chinese leader pointed at the Cambodian officer. Wei Ho's never-tanned, never-lined face was a pale frozen mask. The cold, imperious expression like a warlord's, the black hair, the silk robe and the garden created an image repeated a thousand times in the old books of China. "Have you failed in your responsibilities?"