Don Pendleton - Pressure Point

“I’m just trying to figure out who tipped off these guys that we were coming.”

“Don’t look at me,” Bahn replied icily.

“I’m not accusing you.”

“Yeah, right.”

Once Bolan and Bahn had hiked around the next bend, the road came to a sudden end and they found themselves at the entrance to the seventy-acre IMA facility. The grounds were enclosed by an eight-foot-high cyclone fence, and the entrance gate was guarded by two uniformed men in their early twenties. The men had their carbines aimed at the new arrivals, and the guns quivered slightly in their hands. They’d obviously heard the earlier assault and seemed fearful of being dragged into the bloodshed. One of them shouted a warning in his native tongue.

“I seem to remember you speak a few languages,” Bolan murmured.

“So that’s why you wanted me to tag along, you little weasel,” Bahn taunted. “And here I thought you were after my body.”

Bolan suppressed a smile. “Business before pleasure,” he responded evenly.

Bahn called out to the guards in Bahasa Indonesian, then quickly explained what had happened back on the roadway. Once she’d finished, the men conferred briefly, then one of them raised the security bar while the other waved them past.

“That was easy enough,” Bahn whispered to Bolan. “Hell, no wonder the Lashkar had such an easy time of it.”

“Ask them how many men were on the Bio-Tain truck when it first showed up,” Bolan suggested.

The bounty hunter stopped alongside the raised bar and spoke again to the guards. Afterward, she and Bolan continued up the driveway, heading toward the storage facility, a two-story building set back a hundred yards from the gate.

“They say there were only six men on the truck,” Bahn reported, “and that includes the driver.”

“There were at least four times that many in on the ambush,” Bolan recalled.

“I know,” Bahn said. “I mentioned that, but they insist they inspected the truck coming and going and there were only six of them.”

“Then there must be a camp around here somewhere,” Bolan theorized.

“That’d be my guess, too,” Bahn said, staring past the grounds, where hazy ribbons of smoke stretched over a vast sprawl of rain forest.

As they continued up the drive, Bolan abruptly changed the subject. “Are you still on speaking terms with your ex-husband?”

Bahn was taken aback. “Excuse me?”

“Frank Dominico, right? Works CIA out of Africa.”

“I know who my ex-husband is, okay?” she retorted. “Why’d you bring him up?”

“You found out about the raid from him,” Bolan guessed.

“I already told you, my sources are confidential.”

“One phone call and I can find out for myself,” Bolan told her.

“All right,” Bahn said, sighing. “Yes, I got it from Frank. Last time we talked, I asked him where Jahf-Al might go after he snuck out of Afghanistan, and he turned me on to the whole FAO stink over the agri-compound here. It sounded like a decent lead, so I flew in a couple of days ago and started sniffing around. I got my hands on a map and figured a way to reach the compound without being seen.”

“Who’d you get the map from?” Bolan asked.

“Don’t push your luck, pal.” She sidestepped the question and pointed to her right as she went on, “I made it as far as the fence over there when I heard all hell breaking loose on the road. By the time I’d high-tailed it up over the mountain, the shooting had stopped and you guys had pretty much wrapped things up.”

“You didn’t really think you were going to find Jahf-Al here, did you?” Bolan asked.

“No,” Bahn admitted, “but I was going to plant a homing device on that truck of his and see if it would take me to him. Which is probably what you guys should’ve tried instead of trying to play John Wayne.”

“Hindsight,” Bolan said.

There were another two guards posted near the front entrance to the storage facility. As Bahn spoke to them, Bolan looked over the building. It was old and decrepit, the walls overrun with vines and the roof patched in several places with thin sheets of blue plastic. Hardly an ideal environment for storing toxic materials, he thought. There was no way he or Bahn were going to attempt to go inside the building without full HAZMAT gear.

“Okay,” Bahn said when she rejoined him. “They said the Bio-Tain crew showed up earlier than scheduled this morning and everything was routine until about an hour ago, when the driver got a call from somebody on his cab radio.”

“The tip-off,” Bolan guessed.

“Probably,” Bahn said. “Anyway, the crew stopped what it was doing and everybody piled back into the truck. The driver said something about an emergency, then drove off.”

“That’s it?”

“Not quite,” Bahn said. “Before they pulled out, apparently one of the workers kept looking up at that hilltop over there. It’s a good hundred yards from where I was hiking, so they weren’t looking at me.”

Bolan glanced up at the hill, half-hidden in shadow. The hill was covered with dense brush and dotted with small trees. Up near the crest was a rock formation that looked vaguely like a raised fist. Bolan told Bahn that KOPASSUS had stationed a surveillance team somewhere in the hills overlooking the compound, adding, “They said they were having trouble seeing the compound because of all the smoke.”

Bahn frowned and shook her head. “It was a little hazy up here, yeah, but not that bad. None of the guards mentioned that, either.”

Bolan pondered the discrepancy a moment, then got on the two-way radio to Kissinger. Cowboy reported that they’d come up empty-handed in terms of looking for other survivors. Bolan wasn’t surprised. He quickly briefed Kissinger on what he had found out, then asked to speak to Umar Latek. Once he had the sergeant on the line, Bolan asked him to think back to the call he’d made to the surveillance team.

“How clear was the reception?” he asked. “Could you tell for sure who you were talking to?”

There was a moment’s hesitation, then Latek replied, “There was some static, yes, but I am sure it was the head of the surveillance team.”

“Are you positive?” Bolan asked. “One hundred percent certain?”

Again Latek hesitated a moment. “It had to be him,” he said finally. “Who else could it have been?”

“I’m thinking the stakeout crew was jumped,” Bolan told him. “I think they were killed, and when you called, I think they squelched the frequency just enough to help mask the voice of whoever told you about the smoke making it hard to see the truck. They were covering, because the truck was already on the way, and they wanted to make sure it would take us by surprise.”

Yet again it took Latek a moment to respond. When he did, his voice was weary. “If that is the case, I am to blame for the ambush,” he told Bolan. “I should have suspected something was wrong.”

Bolan tried to assure the sergeant that if his suspicions were correct, Latek’s mistake had been an honest one. But Latek was inconsolable. He continued to berate himself until Bolan finally interjected, asking the sergeant to put Kissinger back on. He told Cowboy to stay put until Grimaldi returned or sent back another chopper.

“And keep an eye on Latek,” he concluded. “Poor guy sounds like he’s ready to commit hara-kiri.”

“I’ll try talking to him,” Kissinger said. “What’s your plan?”

“I want to find out what happened to that surveillance team,” Bolan said, staring up at the rock formation atop the hillock. “Then we’re going to start looking around for the hole our ambushers crawled out of.”