Don Pendleton - Lethal Risk

The soldier stood, careful to balance himself against the rocking truck, and headed to the open back. As he did, he wondered idly where the farmer had gotten hold of a battered and patched deuce-and-a-half.

Probably cut a deal with someone unloading surplus military hardware after Vietnam, he thought. Climbing onto the tailgate, he steadied himself against the side for a moment, then reached up and grabbed the flapping canvas roof. He pulled himself up and threw a leg over, then rolled on top, careful to situate himself between two of the metal framing ribs that gave the covering its shape. Lying down would also conceal him from any guards on the ground. Pulling out a knockoff Chicago Cubs baseball cap, he jammed it onto his head, counting on the brim to help conceal his face from security cameras.

The canvas was sun-faded and worn, but held his weight without difficulty. The truck lumbered on for a few more miles, with Bolan enjoying the spring sunlight after almost two days of being cooped up in cramped airplane seats and huddled on narrow benches. He was hungry, too—the last time he’d eaten was about twelve hours ago—and looked forward to getting a bite once they reached the city proper.

As they got closer to Beijing, Bolan noticed the smell first—a thick, acrid odor indicating they had reached the edge of the pollution zone around the city. The surrounding landscape was beginning to change from the foothills that had slowly fallen away from the mountains to the north to long sections of plains interspersed with rolling hills. Signs of habitation were becoming more common as well, with small clusters of single-room homes next to gardens or fields.

The farmer had let Bolan know that he’d be stopping on the outskirts of the city, far from its center. Given how sprawling Beijing was, Bolan knew he was at least an hour from the main city, perhaps two or more. He hoped he’d be able to find a ride into the neighborhood he needed to reach. A Caucasian hitchhiking along the road would definitely attract the wrong kind of attention.

With a grinding of worn gears and a belch of black smoke as the farmer downshifted, the truck began slowing. Bolan risked lifting his head just enough to see what they were approaching. He caught the glimpse of a large, metal-roofed, open pavilion that stretched across the entire highway, with a narrow, long building on one side. It was manned not by the standard police, but by what looked like camouflage-clad soldiers carrying assault rifles.

Damn! Bolan dropped back down, wondering if somehow the military was already on to him. The reams of data Kurtzman and Tokaido had provided had said nothing about the military manning city checkpoints.

The truck was about two hundred yards from the checkpoint and pulling into a line. Bolan gauged the height of the roof as he kept an eye on vehicles being inspected before they were allowed to move ahead. He couldn’t get caught here, before his mission had even really started.

His hope that they were doing a cursory inspection was dashed when a panel truck’s roof and underbody was checked with mirrors on poles. The next few minutes passed agonizingly slowly. There were only two positives to the situation. The first was that the soldiers seemed inclined to stay under the shade of the metal roof. The second was that most cars were content to pass the large truck and move through one of the other faster-moving lanes. Bolan divided his attention between the guards ahead and the traffic behind him. It wouldn’t do to be spotted by several civilians on their way to work.

By now the roofed structure loomed large in his vision; they would be driving under it in the next few minutes. Bolan wondered if the old farmer was sweating as much as he was at the moment, and what he would say if they detected the stowaway atop his vehicle. He wasn’t going to let that happen if he could avoid it, however.

He saw cameras mounted at the corners of the building and cursed. They appeared to be aimed below him, but he couldn’t be sure. Maybe I should have stayed inside with the melons, he thought, although the odds of escaping detection there were nonexistent—the guards were doing a thorough job of checking larger vehicles.

By now he was only a few yards away from the roof, which had at least a three-foot gap between the truck’s roof and the bottom of the building’s roof. He was going to have to jump up and swing himself onto it as fast as he could. Any slip-up or hesitation and his mission would be over before it ever really began.

Rising to his hands and knees, Bolan positioned his feet on the nearest metal strut and cast a glance behind him to make sure that no one was watching the truck roof. Five yards…four…three…two… Now!

In one fluid movement he exploded up in a perfectly timed leap. Catching the edge of the roof, he kicked his leg over, rolled onto it and over toward the center. The entire action had taken maybe two seconds.

When he was a few yards in, Bolan flattened himself against the hot metal and listened for any shouts of alarm or honking horns. When he heard no alerts that he had been detected, he rose to a crouch and carefully crept to the other side, listening for the deuce-and-a-half’s diesel engine, laboring at idle underneath him.

The truck inspection seemed to take forever, and Bolan kept glanced back, expecting a shout as a uniformed soldier popped up to arrest him. No one came, however, and eventually he heard the truck’s gears grind as it lurched into motion. Now came the second problem—getting back onto its roof without attracting attention. Ideally, the guards would be facing the incoming traffic, and the other drivers would be more concerned with the soldiers than watching for the unusual sight of a man dropping from the pavilion roof onto an ancient military truck.

The old vehicle pulled out from under the roof and Bolan jumped as soon as he saw the cargo roof. He landed with a bounce, and tried to keep himself as flat as possible, splaying his body as the truck drove away from the checkpoint.

That was too close of an escape, and way too far from my objective, he thought as the skyscrapers of Beijing gradually became visible through the haze of pollution. I’m going to have to disembark and find less conspicuous transportation.

He began looking for a good spot to get off the truck and head into the suburbs.

“Jesus H…” Hal Brognola tilted his head back and let the breath he’d been holding out in a long, steady stream. “Nearly scratched the whole op before it even started. That would have been embarrassing as hell.”

Just because the US government had forbidden Stony Man from assisting its man on the ground didn’t mean they weren’t going to keep an eye on him. Using a network of satellites orbiting the globe, the Farm could pinpoint Bolan’s exact location within a five-minute window. The satellite imagery was so crystal clear that they could read magazine print over someone’s shoulder if they had to.

Stony Man Farm had some of the most advanced technology in the world, including specialized computers used to advance weapons the likes of which the US military could only dream about, and yet all of that was worthless because of the parameters of their current mission.

Brognola and Price were standing in the Computer Room behind Aaron Kurtzman and Akira Tokaido, members of Stony Man’s top-notch cyber team. Kurtzman, a burly, bearded man confined to a wheelchair, had a no-nonsense attitude that could rival Brognola’s on a bad day. Tokaido was a laid-back twenty-something Japanese American who lived and breathed the twenty-first-century computing systems he worked with. They could do things with a computer that Price and Brognola could only dream about. But right now, they couldn’t do the one thing the mission controller desperately wanted to happen—somehow reach out through the monitors and wireless signals and burst transmissions to help Mack Bolan.