LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER ONE

      INDONESIA

      “Okay, I think I’ve got the hang of it,” Mack Bolan said, speaking through the condensor microphone duct-taped to the inside of his gas mask.

      “It gets easier once you’ve done it awhile,” Abdul Salim told him. As they both took off their masks, Salim, a decorated major who’d come up through the ranks of Indonesia’s Royal Marine Commandos, added, “The biggest thing to remember is not to hyperventilate.”

      Bolan nodded. The truth was, although this particular mask was new to him, he’d worn similar protective gear on several occasions over the past few years. It was a sign of the times, a concession to the ever-increasing chance of biochemical attacks in the grim, unending war against global terrorism. Bolan missed the days when he could feel secure going into battle shielded only by the thin layer of Kevlar armor beneath his blacksuit. This day he’d even had to forgo the blacksuit in favor of a bulky, mud-colored HAZMAT suit. He’d been issued an armored vest, but it wasn’t made of Kevlar and, in comparison, felt as heavy as chain mail.

      Major Salim was similarly attired. The two men were seated in the rear of a dust-covered white minibus making its way up a narrow, winding, two-lane mountain road seventeen miles north of Samarinda, capital city of Indonesia’s East Kalimantan Province on the island of Borneo. The bus was following its usual itinerary, a scenic route that led to a hilltop textile center long popular with the tourist crowd.

      Those aboard the bus that day, however, were not tourists, and their ultimate destination was not the textile center, but rather a nearby storage facility managed—or mismanaged as many contended—by the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture. The other eleven men in the vehicle were members of KOPASSUS, an elite army commando unit that had seen extensive duty of late battling the rise of Islamic extremism throughout the country’s sprawling chain of islands. They, too, carried gas masks and were suited up in full HAZMAT gear. When Bolan first rendezvoused with the force at a private hangar at Samarinda’s small regional airport, the men had also been issued 10-shot, .45 ACP Heckler & Koch carbines, one of the few such weapons equipped with a trigger guard large enough to accommodate their thick protective gloves. Rounding out their gear, each soldier also carried a belt pack containing ammo clips, three flash-bang grenades and a first-aid kit loaded with ampules and various syringes for use in the event their suits were compromised during the impending raid.

      This was the second time Bolan had joined forces with Abdul Salim. Several years ago they’d worked together putting down a rebel coup across the Java Sea in the province of Sumatra. That insurrection, which claimed the life of Salim’s uncle, renowned freedom fighter Ismail Salim, had been clandestinely backed by the Chinese military. Beijing was out of the picture now, but in their place an even greater threat to Indonesia’s fragile stability had emerged in the form of the notorious Lashkar Jihad. The so-called Soldiers of the Holy War had come into being as a retaliatory force against Christian militants in the Molucca Islands. Over the past two years they had grown in number and expanded their agenda proportionately, embarking on a violent campaign to seize control of the entire country, whose two hundred million Muslims constituted the world’s largest concentration of followers devoted to Islam.

      The Lashkar had been formidable enough as a self-contained entity, but in recent months it had bolstered its might even further by joining ranks with the United Islamic Front, the global terrorist network cobbled together from the ranks of al-Qaeda and other kindred organizations decimated by the U.S. and its allies in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Whereas Abdul Salim had once thought his country was making headway in its efforts to eradicate terrorism within its borders, the UIF connection now tipped the scales in favor of the enemy.

      Over the past two weeks both KOPASSUS and a force made up of KIPAM paratroopers had sustained heavy losses during pitched battles with jihad guerrillas in the provinces of Aceh and Sulawesi. Salim had been wounded by shrapnel in the latter attack—his right thigh still throbbed where he’d been hit—while nearly thirty others had been slain. Almost twice that many had fallen in Aceh. Salim had known most of the victims personally, and their loss weighed heavily. Though he still had his full head of coarse, wavy hair, streaks of gray had infiltrated his mane almost overnight, and his once-youthful features had been increasingly eroded by a deepening of the furrows around his eyes and mouth. The major now looked every bit his forty years, if not older, and though his resolve remained, it had been tempered by weariness. Gone was his proud assertion that the Lashkar Jihad could be eliminated by home forces alone. Much as he was loath to admit it, Salim was secretly relieved that evidence of UIF collusion had brought the U.S. back into the Indonesian fray. Perhaps, with America’s help, the terrorists could be rooted out once and for all, giving his country, for

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