Black Death Reprise. Don Pendleton
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in on the soldier’s face and neck, biting and scratching with tiny claws as they sought the source of the offending noise.
Wrapping the scaling cord tightly around his left hand in order to free his right, Bolan planted his feet onto the wall and leaned away until he was parallel to the ground. The extended position shifted his entire weight onto his left forearm, causing the tendons to stand out like steel cables stretched to the point of snapping. While reaching up with his freed right hand to switch the goggles’ power switch to the off position, he swatted the bats away from his face and head. Once the goggles were turned off, the colony departed as abruptly as they had arrived, leaving Bolan hanging straight out at a right angle from the rock wall.
An image flashed through his mind of a previous mission conducted years earlier in the tropical jungles of Guatemala when his five-man task force had been attacked by a similar colony of short-nosed bats. Assuming that most wild bats were rabid, the men who had been bitten were afraid they were destined to die a horrible death until one of them who had studied the animals ensured the group that the species’ reputation was undeserved.
Bolan knew bats had a relatively low probability of carrying rabies, much less than for other mammals such as raccoons or skunks. And when the disease did strike, it would wipe out an entire colony within weeks, limiting the communicable danger to a very narrow time period.
As he pulled on the scaling cord to bring himself into a more upright posture, Bolan knew that the guards he suddenly heard coming around the corner of the north parapet posed a much greater threat to his life than the bites and scratches that stung his face and neck in a dozen places.
Upon hearing the sentries, Bolan immediately stopped reeling himself into the wall, halting when he was still at a forty-five-degree angle to the rough surface. Moving in ultra-slow motion, he drew his Beretta 93-R from the strap holding his knife sheath in place and waited for the men below to pass by.
Since he was unable to use his goggles, Bolan couldn’t get a good look at the guards, but from the sounds reaching his ears, he thought they were walking with rifles slung behind their shoulders. The play in the metal clasp where a sling attached to a weapon’s stock created a distinctive click he had heard thousands of times coming from soldiers with their weapons carried at sling arms.
As they approached his position, he tracked them with his 93-R, hoping they would pass without incident. Not that the combat veteran was adverse to killing them both if they so much as looked up—countless corpses littering hellfire trails across the globe were testament to his willingness to survive at all costs—but Bolan found no pleasure in taking life. He was a quintessential soldier, willing to answer the call of duty as defined by his personal values, but he would not kill cavalierly. Despite a career testifying to the contrary, he held a deep respect for the sanctity of life.
The guards were progressing at a steady pace that would bring them directly below his spot in less than a minute. They were speaking softly in French, their tone and cadence causing Bolan to think they were reciting scripture. Beneath his feet, he could suddenly feel a section of the ancient mortar begin to shift under the burden of his angled weight, sending tiny pieces of centuries-old limestone trickling noisily down the wall.
The men looked up, and appearing as if they were performing a synchronized move they had rehearsed a thousand times, grabbed to pull the rifles off their shoulders.
Bolan’s Beretta coughed twice within the span of a second.
The first round caught a guard square in his upturned face, delivering 9 mm Parabellum lead that jerked his head back while lifting him entirely off his feet. He landed two or three yards away, dead before his body impacted the ground.
His partner was hit in the neck, the force of the steel-jacketed slug spinning him in a graceful pirouette while his severed carotid artery sprayed a crimson geyser, making him resemble for a few moments a pulsating lawn sprinkler. As he crumpled to the ground, his heart pumped four or five progressively smaller spurts, which, under the moonlight, took on a rich black hue.
Bolan slid swiftly down the line, intent on hiding the bodies. He knew his entry would eventually be discovered and he’d be forced to fight his way out, but the longer his presence and his point of access remained unknown, the better his chances for getting away with Dr. Zagorski. When he reached the ground, he dragged the corpses into the woods where he arranged them out of sight behind a clump of elms.
A passing cloud cleared the face of the moon, and in the improved light, an oddity caught Bolan’s eye. Both guards possessed what appeared to be identical diamond-shaped scars about the size of a dime on the back of their left hands, the rough tissue standing out in the silvery moonlight against the smoother neighboring skin. As he turned away from the bodies to resume his entry, the soldier filed the detail into a corner of his mind.
Without the encumbrance of the bats, Bolan’s second attempt to scale the wall went quickly. There was no barrier at the top, and he easily pulled himself over the turret’s lip with one arm. Although none of the satellite photos he had studied contained evidence of a roof patrol, Bolan held his Beretta 93-R in his free hand as he came over the parapet, landing softly on the roof’s pebbly surface. When he was sure he was alone, he retrieved the grappling hook and pushed it into its pouch, laying the bunched cord on top.
Occupying the same footprint as the building it capped, the roof’s area was large. Air pumps and condensers for heating systems were arranged in groups interspaced among communication antennas across the top of the ancient building, indicating various heating and communication zones within. Moving in a crouch to reduce his silhouette, Bolan walked straight to the northwest corner, where a series of unique vents and ductwork characteristic of research laboratories sprouted in the shadow of huge air conditioning units like wild orchards on the floor of a redwood forest. Although the air intake tunnel was large enough for a man to enter, a heavy metal grate had been spot-welded across the opening.
From a pouch on his web belt next to where he carried two M-18 smoke canisters, Bolan withdrew a roll of incendiary tape and a small plastic tube containing a substance like petroleum jelly. Using his combat knife, he cut short sections from the half-inch roll and wound them around each of the dozen crossbeams where the grate was welded to the tunnel’s frame. The tape’s active ingredient was a waxy allotrope of white phosphorous that CIA scientists had altered to prevent its reaction to atmospheric oxygen, thus making it a portable product. They had also developed a reagent designed to eliminate the dense white smoke white phosphorous usually produced while burning, which in addition to being undesirably visible, also contained toxic amounts of both phosphorous pentoxide and phosphoric acid.
Once the tape was in place, Bolan used his combat knife to slice open one end of the tube and quickly smear a dollop of the reagent onto each piece. The goop was a sodium-based oxidant that would react in about a minute with the white phosphorous in the tape, bringing it to its flash point.
Once the tape was coated, Bolan averted his eyes and stood close to the grate in an attempt to shield the flashes. The tape buzzed briefly before bursting into a white-hot exothermic flame, each section of tape igniting in the order Bolan had applied the reactant. The burn-through was quick, less than five seconds, but it had taken slightly longer than fifteen to touch every section, which meant the light intensity peaked at seven seconds for a three-second period before dimming. When the tape wrapping the final crossbeam winked out, Bolan dropped to one knee, drawing his handguns. After remaining motionless for slightly longer than a minute, he concluded that the light from the burning white phosphorous had not been seen.
Holstering both his Desert Eagle and Beretta, he grasped the grate in the middle of its grid and pulled it away from the air vent. Before he climbed into the metal tunnel, he adjusted the night goggles over his eyes and switched the unit into IR mode. Seeing no infrared beams blocking his way, he moved headfirst into the vent.
As he progressed through the air tunnel, Bolan recalled the schematic Akira Tokaido had created on the bank of Cray SV2 supercomputers housed at Stony Man Farm. Using sonar data downloaded from satellite flyovers, the talented hacker had been able to produce a three-dimensional map charting air tunnels from the roof leading into the research lab.
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