LITMIR.BIZ

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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.”

      CHAPTER TEN

      When asked about possible routes to the top of the hill, the IMA guards directed Bolan to a series of switch-backs leading from a rear entrance to the storage facility. The crisscrossed paths twisted their way around tall patches of wild grass, brambly thickets and scattered stands of gnarled trees. As Bolan and Bahn made their way up the incline, they could see, off to their right, the distant mountains of central Borneo. The peaks, some of them nearly ten thousand feet high, were barely visible through the smoky haze, which by now had stretched itself across the entire length of the valley rain forest.

      Soon they came upon a firebreak, a thirty-yard-wide band of land hacked clear of brush and vegetation. It ran perpendicular to the switchbacks and stretched in both directions for as far as Bolan could see.

      “We take a left here, right?” he said, trying to recall the directions the guards had given them.

      Bahn nodded. “Yeah, we follow this for about two hundred yards, then there’s supposed to be another trail that leads up to the peak.”

      The firebreak was on a slope but the ground was soft, making it easy to walk. There were no signs of boot prints, fresh or otherwise. The break was within plain sight of the storage facility, and there was no way anyone could have used it without being spotted.

      “Assuming Jahf-Al’s here in Indonesia,” Bahn said, changing the subject, “what do you think his agenda is? Other than hiding out, I mean.”

      Bolan shrugged. “The UIF already has a toehold here. If he can tap into the Muslim unrest, Indonesia’s got the makings of a great power base.”

      “True,” Bahn said, “but the Lashkar Jihad’s already pretty much cornered the market on the extremist action. I know they’ve cut some kind of deal with the UIF, but I don’t think stepping aside and letting Jahf-Al run things was part of it. He and Pohtoh aren’t exactly buddy-buddy from what I understand.”

      “That’s the way I hear it, too,” Bolan said.

      Moamar Pohtoh was the Muslim firebrand who’d risen to head of the Lashkar Jihad after his predecessor, Halim Alwyi, had been gunned down in a Sulawesi shootout over a year ago. It was Pohtoh who’d widened the group’s agenda while at the same time consolidating power by killing off a number of Alwyi’s top-ranking subordinates. Pohtoh was no stranger to Jahf-Al, either, and there was supposedly bad blood between the two men dating back to the late 1990s, when they’d trained together at an al-Qaeda terrorist camp in the Afghanistan mountains of Tora Bora. Pohtoh, who hailed from the slums of Jakarta, was purportedly as suspicious of Jahf-Al’s bourgeois Cairo upbringing as he was of the Egyptian’s motivation for creating the United Islamic Front. The Indonesian strongman had gone on record as little as six months ago claiming that Jahf-Al was less interested in the cause of Islam than that of amassing power and trying to rival the infamy of Osama bin Laden. Given the antipathy between the two men, many had been surprised when it had come out that the Lashkar Jihad was accepting input from the UIF.

      “Must be a strange bedfellows thing,” Bolan guessed. “They probably

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