“I’m just saying shut up. So shut up.”
“Maybe he doesn’t speak English.”
“He speaks English.”
Grimaldi turned back to the man. Raising his voice, he asked, “You speekie English?”
The man looked insulted, but said nothing. “I think you’re wrong,” Grimaldi said. “He doesn’t speak English. Hell, he doesn’t seem smart enough to speak his own language.”
“Bullshit,” Bolan said. “He spoke English like a pro ten minutes ago. He’s just playing stupid.”
“Doing a good job of it, too,” Grimaldi said. “So I suppose we’re going to sit here all night, coddling this dumb-ass until he decides to talk. Him. A guy that doesn’t speak English. I’m telling you, you’re wasting your damn time with this.”
Bolan made a grim face, turned away from the prisoner. “So what the hell do you suggest?”
“Remember Kabul?”
“Don’t even go there with me, Jack.”
“See that’s what I’m talking about. You’re too soft on these people.”
“And you’re mental.”
“I’m just saying it worked in Kabul. It’ll work here. That guy suddenly remembered his English really good after we did that to him.”
“I’m not letting you cut this guy’s balls off, Ace. It’s not going to happen.”
Bolan glanced over his shoulder, saw the man sitting stiff, eyes about to pop out of their sockets.
“What about his ears?” Grimaldi asked. “Can I cut them off?”
Bolan thought about it for a moment. Finally he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “That’s not so bad. You know, you can’t just go around cutting off a guy’s privates. Not right out of the gate, anyway. You gotta at least give him a chance to cooperate. It’s only fair.”
Grimaldi pulled a switchblade from his jacket pocket. He clicked it open with a metallic snick, held it up to the light so it glinted.
“But the ear’s okay?”
Bolan shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”
An evil grin twisted at Grimaldi’s lips. “Righteous,” he said.
The words practically exploded from the man’s lips. “Please,” he said. “I will talk about Shallallab and al-Shoud. I want to tell everything.”
And he did.
BOLAN AND GRIMALDI climbed aboard a Black Hawk helicopter and slipped into the front seats. Each man carried a heavy gear bag packed with weapons and equipment, Bolan had laid his next to his seat, allowing him to perform a last-minute weapons check during the flight.
His right foot positioned on the gear bag to keep it from shifting in flight, Bolan loaded his Heckler & Koch with a sound suppressor and attached extra clips to his web gear. Grimaldi ran a preflight check on the craft.
“I’m glad that guy talked,” Grimaldi said.
“Me, too,” Bolan said. “I was afraid he’d call our bluff.”
“Who said I was bluffing?” Grimaldi joked.
Bolan shook his head. “Forget it. An old tomcat like you could never do that.”
“Your buddy didn’t tell us a lot,” Grimaldi said.
Bolan nodded. “Foot soldier,” he said. “Probably doesn’t know a whole lot.”
Fifteen minutes later, the Black Hawk was aloft with Grimaldi guiding it expertly toward Waziristan, a Pakistani territory.
Straining against the harness holding him in place, Bolan reached into his equipment bag and withdrew a laptop. The pressure of the straps against his recently bruised skin, even through the Kevlar vest, kicked up jolts of pain. He winced, ground his teeth and ignored it. During his War Everlasting, the soldier had suffered much worse, and had the scarred flesh to prove it.
Setting the laptop on his thighs, Bolan popped it open and powered it up. Within minutes he’d lock into a Stony Man computer dump system via an encrypted wireless connection. A digital camera would eventually carry his and Grimaldi’s images electronically to the Computer Room. After a few more keystrokes, Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman appeared on the screen.
“Striker,” Kurtzman said.
“You get the coordinates I sent earlier?” Bolan asked.
“Right,” Kurtzman replied. “I ran them through the National Security Agency’s database and liberated a few things for our use. I’ll send you the satellite pics while we talk. But your guy told the truth. There’s something there, an encampment of some sort, right on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It was an al Qaeda camp at one time before a CIA paramilitary team shut it down a few years ago. After the team arrested the inhabitants, seized all their computers and documents, a couple of F-18s bombed the buildings to rubble.”
“Our boy told us they’ve been setting up the place for months,” Bolan said. “On the surface it looks like an agriculture operation, with animals and the whole thing. They do all their training inside a series of nearby caves to help avoid satellite scrutiny. No outdoor firing ranges, or anything like that. They do a lot of hand-to-hand combat training, classroom work, that sort of thing. There’s also a large concrete building that houses their command functions.”
Kurtzman nodded. “That tracks with what I found out. The intelligence community had tagged the site as suspicious because of its history. But without any hard intel, they had to knock it pretty far down on the priority list. Plus, it’s a crappy target.”
“What do you mean?”
“Guess al-Shoud and his people brought their families along with them. Women, kids, elderly.”
Bolan’s brow furrowed, his lips formed a tight line as he considered the implications. “Lots of innocents on the firing line,” he said finally.
“Right,” Kurtzman said.
“We don’t have much of a choice in this one,” Bolan said.
“Just laying out the facts,” Kurtzman replied. “Hey, Hal wants to speak with you.”
“Go.”
Kurtzman disappeared from view. An instant later Brognola’s weary features appeared on the screen. Since Bolan had last seen him, the big Fed had lost his necktie, but judging by the coffee stain on his right breast, he still wore the same shirt, now unbuttoned at the collar.
“Striker,” Brognola said, “what’s the word on Jennifer Kinsey?”
“Nothing yet,” Bolan stated. “The man we spoke with knew nothing about her.”
“Could he have been lying?”
Grimaldi cut in. “He was pretty motivated to be honest.”
Brognola drank some coffee from a foam cup. “I don’t even want to know what that means.”
“That’s why we wanted to find Shallallab,” Bolan said, “the finance guy. He’s high enough up that he’d know whether she was there. Al-Shoud considers him a confidant.”
“But you’ve got a good fix on al-Shoud?”
“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Bear says we’ve got apparent innocents in the way. I plan to make this a soft probe until I learn more.”
“Keep Barb and Aaron posted,” Brognola said. “I won’t be around.”
“Why?”
“We have an antiterrorism summit at an undisclosed location,” Brognola replied. “Heads