Don Pendleton - Stealth Sweep

“And he had just found your lost wallet.” Bolan didn’t phrase it as a question.

“Something like that,” Brognola admitted with a shrug. As his jacket swayed open, he briefly exposed a shoulder holster and an old-fashioned snub-nose .38 revolver.

“Leave them alive?”

“Unfortunately. Getting this to you intact was a lot more important,” Brognola said, placing the laptop on the table. He pushed it over. “I’m eager to hear your opinion on this matter.”

Flipping open the lid, Bolan saw the monitor flicker into a scene of a rainy mountain valley. He concentrated on the brief recording. It was obviously taken from a series of security cameras, grainy and unfocused, shifting abruptly from one angle to another. Then the explosions started, and the recording ended soon after that.

Scowling, Bolan watched it again, then sat back and took a sip of the coffee. It was cold, so he waved at Lucinda for a refill.

“Anything else ya want, sweetie?” she asked hopefully. Her upper thigh pressed warmly against his hand on the table, and she shifted slightly to let him feel the play of the tight nylon against his skin.

“Just the coffee, doll,” Bolan said, leaving his hand in place, but quickly lowering the lid on the laptop. “We’re talking some business, ya know?”

“Yeah, sure,” Lucinda said softly, topping off the mugs.

As she turned, Bolan smacked her on the rear. She gave a little jump, then looked backward with the kind of primordial smile of the sort that once had toppled the city of Troy, and walked away with a pronounced bounce in her step, just to let the man see what he had missed having for desert.

“So, when’s the wedding?” Brognola chuckled, watching as the smiling woman disappeared behind the counter.

“Next week, in Vegas. Come as Elvis,” Bolan replied with a straight face, then returned to business. “All right, from the Cyrillic writing on some of the street signs, and the poor condition of the buildings, I would guess this was taken in the Ukraine.”

“Close. Kazakhstan.”

“Somebody blew up a radar outpost in some remote mountain valley. What does this have to do with me?”

Reaching inside the pocket of his flannel shirt, Brognola produced a small envelope. “On my orders, the NSA did a scan of all cell phones in the area during the time of the attack, and they recovered this.”

It was a blurry shot of a burning building with a bird flying by, silhouetted against the flames. Bolan started to ask a question, then paused. Barely visible in the firelight, he could see that the bird was armed with missiles. Obviously, it was some kind of an unmanned attack vehicle— UAV—a drone. Then the implications hit him. One drone couldn’t have done that much damage in a week. There had to have been several of them, eight, maybe ten. And if their first target was the radar station…

“It looks like somebody cracked the heat-signature problem on the engines,” Bolan muttered, returning the picture.

Tucking the photo away, Brognola nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. In my opinion there is no question of the matter. These shots are of a new type of stealth drone, fast, silent, radar-proof and incredibly lethal.”

“Fair enough. Then why are we meeting here and not in your office?”

“Because nobody else in the Justice Department agrees with me on this. Not even the President thinks that there is any real danger to America.”

“And what makes you think there is?” Bolan asked.

“Just a gut feeling.”

Bolan accepted that. Over their long years working together, he had learned to trust the man’s instincts. They had saved the soldier’s life more than once. “Haven’t the British been secretly working on a new stealth UAV?”

“You know your weapons. Yes, it would have worldwide strike capability, and carry a complement of thermonuclear weapons.”

With that kind of range and firepower, the British drone would be enormous. “How close are they to finishing it?” Bolan asked, leaning back in the chair. It creaked slightly under his weight.

“Decades, at the very least.”

“Then there is no way that this was a field test by the British.”

“Not a chance in hell. And even if the Brits had a working version, why bomb Kazakhstan? There’s nothing there of any importance.” Turning the laptop around, Brognola tapped a few keys and shoved it back. “Or at least, that was what I thought until these pictures were relayed back from a WatchDog satellite doing a pass over the area the next day. Pay close attention to what wasn’t damaged in the strike.”

Arching an eyebrow in frank surprise at the statement, Bolan carefully looked over the wreckage from the attack. The photos were black-and-white, but crystal clear, and he soon spotted the pattern in the destruction.

“Somebody is getting ready to do a Hitler,” Bolan said in a low, hard voice.

“Yes.” Brognola sighed, as if releasing a heavy burden.

Once more, Bolan looked at the pictures of the smashed defensives of the Oskemen Valley, and the completely unharmed bridges, tunnels, electrical power plant and, of course, the old Soviet factories. It would seem that somebody knew their history.

For a long time after World War II, military strategists had analyzed the attack pattern of Hitler’s army, trying to figure out why he would pass by one town to attack another. The strikes almost seemed random, even chaotic, until some clever paper-pusher in the Pentagon compared the invasions to Hitler’s supply list.

None of the blitzkriegs were random—they were all precise hits on factories that he wanted to take intact, scientists he wanted captured alive, or mines that he desperately needed undamaged and fully operational, so that his engineers could regularly upgrade the backbone of his army, the panzer tank.

“Anything else been hit?”

“Unknown. Too many of the smaller countries surrounding China are third world nations. Their capital cities are relatively modern, but the outlying farms are still operated by sheer muscle power.”

True enough, Bolan supposed. “The people operating the drones probably hit the valley during a storm to try to disguise the destruction as lightning strikes,” he stated.

Brognola nodded. “Now, given the location of the valley…”

“Along with its complete lack of nuclear weapons.”

“…I think that we can easily make an educated guess who is behind all this,” Brognola growled, closing the lid on the laptop. “Our old pal, Red China.”

“You mean the Red Star,” Bolan corrected. He had tangled with the Communist spy agency before and found them a lot trickier, and much deadlier, than the KGB had ever been, even in its glory days.

Across the diner, a couple of pimps started shouting at each other over who owned what street corner, and suddenly switchblade knives snapped into view. Instantly, Lucinda hurried over with a pot of boiling coffee. As the pimps rose, she spilled it on the table and everybody quickly retreated to avoid getting scalded. Wheeling out a bucket and mop, the scrawny Latino youth started cleaning up the mess and the frustrated pimps took their fight outside and away from the other customers.

“This could just be an internal coup,” Bolan suggested. “The Red Star has wanted to seize absolute control over China for a long time.”

“Maybe,” Brognola admitted, folding his hands on the table. “But the worst-case scenario is that they’re planning to expand the borders of their nation, and seize everything they can—Russia, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, India—giving them an unbreakable stranglehold on the east, paving the way for a Communist expansion such as the world has never seen before. And after that…”

“World domination?” Bolan said, pulling out some loose bills from his pocket.