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  Amazon Slaughter

  ( Able Team - 4 )

  Dick Stivers

  Wei Ho was death incarnate. He could slake his thirst for blood whenever and wherever he wanted. He had chosen the hunters of his private army very carefully — they were some of the most vicious hoodlums in the world.

  Now he had his own plutonium factory. And it was protected by a web of organized intrigue. Only one squad could take out Wei Ho and prevent global tragedy: Mack Bolan s Able Team!

  To neutralize Ho s goulish scheme, Lyons, Schwarz, and Blancanales probed to the core of the maniac s domain in South America — but all they found there were blameless native slaves. Would there be a massacre of innocents before the despots could be delivered to hell?

  Dick Stivers

  Amazon Slaughter

  1

  Screams came from the radio, then only electronic hiss.

  “Stop! Stop the truck!” Abbott shouted, his gaunt, heroin-ravaged face twisted with panic. He switched frequencies on his hand radio, praying for an answer from the control room. Then he realized the truck had not slowed. Like a scene from a nightmare, the truck continued forward. Only a hundred yards separated him from the atomic reactor complex.

  “Stop!” Abbott shouted again, grabbing for the steering wheel. The squat, jowly driver stared at him, uncomprehendingly. Abbott repeated the command in Portuguese. The driver hit the brakes.

  Dust swirled around the Renault military truck. In front of them, at the end of the dirt-and-gravel corridor cut through the jungle, the gray hemisphere of the reactor’s containment vessel rose from the raw red earth. The gray rectangles of the other buildings clustered around the dome. Soaring mahogany and mapacu and rubber trees overhung the area, branches and shadows camouflaging the reactor complex from airborne observation.

  Staring at the reactor dome, Abbott felt sweat flow down his body. The radio hissed with static. Abbott knew what the screams meant, and the electronic hiss. But he still watched the dome, hoping to hell that the concrete could contain the atomic and chemical horror that raged inside.

  “Mr. Abbott.” A voice startled him. He turned, saw one of the work-gang overseers approaching the truck. The overseer wore a pith helmet and olive drab green shorts. His bronzed torso and legs streamed sweat. He crossed his hands over the shotgun hanging by its sling from his shoulder.

  “I need a truck to get those Indians back to the compound.” The overseer stepped up on the Renault’s bumper. He glanced to the reactor buildings. “I buzzed the Unit for a truck, but my walkie-talkie isn’t working right.”

  The Renault lurched, rocked on its springs. Dense white smoke billowed from the complex. The earth shuddered mightily as the reinforced concrete walls of the turbine building collapsed outward, jagged sections twisting as they fell. Clouds of white smoke churned into the sky. Then the scene shimmered as waves of heat poured from the gaping holes. The jungle trees overhanging the reactor complex burst into flames.

  “Get us out of here!” Abbott heard himself shouting in English and Portuguese and Spanish, as he watched the nuclear catastrophe.

  Grinding the gears, the driver threw the transmission into reverse, sped backward. The overseer clung to the side mirror as the truck bounced. The truck swerved into a wide backward turn.

  An Indian screamed as he died under the wheels. The other Indians dropped their shovels and ran as fast as their ankle chains allowed. The truck driver did not pause as he threw the truck into first gear and accelerated.

  Abbott shouted into the hand radio, “Explosion at Unit One! Evacuate all work areas. Get our people into the shelters. Issue the oxygen and the anticontamination suits. Turn on the sirens right now and get…”

  “Shut up!” a command blared from the radio. “What’s going on there? We only see some smoke…”

  “You idiot! That’s radioactive sodium hydroxide. That’s gaseous lye. Anybody who breathes that dies! Anyone it touches is contaminated.”

  “Is that Mr. Abbott?” the voice asked.

  “Yes, this is Abbott. Unit One’s exploding. The core could go any second. That’s plutonium! You understand? Plutonium!”

  “Yes, sir. Doing it right away. The alarms…”

  Switching off his hand radio, Abbott leaned from the truck’s window to look back. Swirling red road dust obscured his view of the reactor dome. But above the narrow slash through the jungle, he saw the billowing white cloud of caustic sodium hydroxide. Flames and black smoke leaped from the burning jungle. But he heard no more explosions.

  He faced forward again and shouted at the Brazilian driver to go faster. Hurtling over the road, Abbott closed his eyes, visualized the destruction inside the complex, the burning metallic sodium, the hydrogen fires, the technicians cremated alive. He knew that as the seconds and minutes passed without the flowing sodium coolant, the temperature of the uranium and plutonium fuel core would rise. If the fuel melted, if the isotopes and transuranium elements fused, if the metals went critical and he remained within a mile of the complex, he would never feel the flash that vaporized him. Only distance could save him.

  George Abbott, scientist-turned-addict-turned-pirate atomic physicist, shivered with the knowledge of his certain death. He might die in the next minute, the atomic flash reducing him to ash and superheated vapor and charged particles. Or he would die in months or years, destroyed by the cancers eating his body. But his death was certain.

  Death by nuclear explosion. Death by plutonium cancer. Death.

  2

  On the video projection screen, the white of a storm a thousand miles wide swirled over the Atlantic Ocean and the coast of Brazil. Hundreds of miles into the continent, as the vast, river-veined geography turned beneath the satellite camera, the storm feathered to specks that left another thousand miles of Amazon jungle under a cloudless tropical sky. Sunlight flashed from a twenty-mile-wide tributary of the river.

  Raising his voice over the whine of the air force jet’s engines, Hal Brognola, Mack Bolan’s chief liaison officer for the president’s secret antiterrorist force known as Stony Man, touched a pointer to the video screen.

  “Notice this one cloud,” he said, pointing to a smear of white several hundred miles east of the snow-crowned Andes. No other clouds marked that expanse of green.

  “Spectrographic analysis revealed it wasn’t water vapor.” Brognola pressed a control button. The natural greens and blues disappeared, replaced by phosphorescent reds, blues, purples. “This is computer-enhanced videography. Notice that little cloud now…”

  The one point glowed brilliant yellow. As Brognola was speaking, the yellow point had expanded, the camera zooming in until the yellow smear, now streaked and dappled with orange and red, filled the screen. Brognola pointed to the white center.

  “Right there, 1000° Fahrenheit. The National Security Agency parked the satellite over this hot spot, monitored it…”

  The three men of Able Team were leaning back in their leather-upholstered chairs and glancing at the maps of Brazil they held. Gadgets Schwarz interrupted.

  “What was the spectroanalysis?”

  “Sodium oxides. Principally sodium hydroxide. Now the photos.”

  Gadgets stammered, blurted out: “Man, that… it… those oxides could only… Oh, shit. That’s got to be wrong. That means…”

  “It was radioactive…”

  “Radioactive?” Carl Lyons asked. “Like atomic?”

  Brognola pressed the remote control again. Black-and-white images filled the screen. With the pointer, he traced a line across the mottled ground. A break in the jungle showed here and there along it. The breaks suggested a road.

  “Did the Brazilians test a bomb or something?” Rosario Blancanales asked. “Or i
s that Bolivian territory?”

  “Not a bomb,” Gadgets answered, his voice quiet.

  “The site appears to be in Brazil, but only just. It’s only a few miles from territory that Bolivia claims,” said Hal.

  “How much radioactivity?” Gadgets asked.

  “What is this, a guessing game?” Lyons demanded. “Was it a bomb or not?”

  “A bomb factory,” Gadgets answered. “How much radioactivity, Hal?”

  “We don’t know…”

  “A bomb factory?” Lyons asked. “What was it that happened? A nuke went off?”

  “What about local people?” Blancanales broke in. “Any information on what happened to them?”

  “And who set up the factory?” Lyons pressed. “The Brazilians? I didn’t know they had the…”

  “Gentlemen,” Brognola smiled. “If we knew the answers to these questions, you three men would not be en route to the Amazon. Allow me to return to the briefing. A spy satellite has given us a few photos, but not much…”

  Indicating roads and clearings and structures with the pointer, Brognola flashed a series of grainy blowups on the video screen. “They seem to have gone through the jungle in such a way as to maximize their overhead cover. If we hadn’t spotted the sodium hydroxide and the heat, we couldn’t have found the installation.

  “When Schwarz described the setup as a bomb factory, he was not entirely correct, I think. What we believe they’re manufacturing is plutonium.”

  “But they could take the plutonium to make a bomb,” Gadgets added. “Every terrorist, every fanatic in the world has got the how-to books, but none of them has the plutonium. Yet.”

  “It could be that this group…” Brognola nodded, tapping the satellite photo on the screen “…has the technology and financing to take the next logical step… or insane step… and fabricate nuclear weapons.”

  “But how do we know they can make plutonium?” Blancanales countered. “All we’ve got are those satellite photos.”

  “It’s the sodium hydroxide, Rosario,” muttered Gadgets. “It means a whole lot of sodium hit the environment. And the only reason to have that much metallic sodium in one place is a plutonium breeder reactor. A plutonium breeder uses liquid metallic sodium as a coolant. Most reactors use water as a coolant. The water flows around the core, draws off the heat and becomes steam. The steam runs the turbines to make electrical power. But a breeder needs sodium coolant, both to cool it and to moderate the plutonium fission process. Keeps it from going ‘boom.’ The sodium surrounds and cools the core. It keeps the rate of reaction down. Then it goes through a heat exchanger to heat up the water. The steam makes electrical power. And as a by-product, instead of a pile of used-up uranium 235, you’ve got more plutonium than you started with.”

  “Could this be some kind of supersecret Brazilian power plant?” Lyons asked. “I mean, the government there isn’t going to let a gang of crazies set up a nuke factory.”

  “There is no government where you’re going,” Brognola answered. “No roads, no towns, nothing. All the maps are approximate. What information we have mentions headhunters and cannibals.”

  “Is there no other explanation for what the satellite pictures show?” Blancanales asked.

  “That’s why you three are going!” A voice boomed from the back of the plane. Andrez Konzaki, the Stony Man weaponsmith, was seated behind a conference table. “Why don’t you let Hal finish your briefing? Both of us have to get off in Miami, and I need to talk to you, too. That gives us thirty-five minutes more. No more wasting time, hey?”

  Lyons gave the ex-marine a quick salute. “Yes, sir! No more questions from me.”

  Brognola dropped a thick folder of maps and photocopies in front of each member of Able Team. “The briefing on the satellite intelligence is over. Here’s miscellaneous information on the region. The Indians, the land, the natural hazards. Radiation hazards and decontamination procedures. This jet will take you to an airfield in Peru. You’ll transfer to a DC-3 for the hop over the Andes. Our CIA liaison has arranged a team of Indians to take you into the area.

  “You’ll carry very basic antiradiation gear. Remember, your assignment is only to gather information. If the area is radioactive, you will withdraw. We’ll have a satellite directly over your area of operation. Schwarz will have an instantaneous link to Stony Man. As the situation evolves, your mission directive may change. They’re yours, Andrez. We have twenty-nine minutes before Miami.”

  Lyons went to the back of the executive jet’s luxurious compartment, where the square-shouldered, bull-necked Konzaki had spread equipment over the conference table. “Now we start on the important stuff. What’ve you got for us?”

  “Standard weapons…”

  “The Atchisson! All right! Are the bugs worked out yet?”

  “It wouldn’t be going with you otherwise.”

  Lyons picked up the black-metal-and-plastic assault shotgun. Looking like an oversize M-16, the selective-fire shotgun chambered both standard and Magnum 12-gauge shot shells from a 7-round box magazine or a 20-round drum magazine.

  “What is that monster?” Gadgets asked.

  “That’s the LCKD,” Konzaki told him. “Short for ‘Lyons’s Crowd-Killing Device.’ Just a joke, guys. It’s an Atchisson Assault 12. It’ll be on the market soon. I remanufactured the pressings in titanium to bring down the weight. Added the carrying handle, M-16 style.”

  “Who’s carrying the ammunition for that thing?” Blancanales asked. “Looks like it could go through a hundred rounds a minute.”

  “It could,” Konzaki answered. “But the forestock’s plastic would burst into flames. I packed twelve magazines of double-ought and number two shot mix. The British developed that mix in Malaysia; it works great in the jungle. And two magazines of one-ounce rifled slugs with Kevlar-defeating steel dart cores.”

  “How much does all of that weigh?” Blancanales pressed.

  “It’s mine,” Lyons told his teammates. “I’ll carry it. You two take those Matty Mattels.” He pointed to the rifles on the table, a CAR-15 and an M-16/M-203 over-and-under assault rifle/grenade launcher.

  “Yeah, you’ll carry the monster,” Gadgets joked, “but who’ll carry you? And what happens if there’s more than one firefight? You’ll be out of ammunition.”

  Konzaki answered for Lyons. “The Agency files noted that 12-gauge shotguns are the most common hunting weapons in Brazil and Bolivia. There will be ammunition available. But I don’t think you’ll need it. Consider the numbers. I hand-packed the shot rounds. By cutting the wadding and using Magnum cases with a standard charge of powder, I got eight double-oughts and fifty number twos into each round. On full auto, Lyons can put out more than four hundred pellets in one and a half seconds. You get ambushed, that weapon can get you out. There it is.”

  “Fire superiority,” Lyons grinned.

  “Okay,” Blancanales agreed, “but you carry it. What goes on with these rifles? Anything special?”

  “Luminous night-sights, titanium weight reduction, selective-fire sears — one-shot, three-shot, or full auto,” Konzaki said, turning to the field rifles. “And they have barrels bored for the new NATO slug — one twist in seven inches instead of the old one-in-twelve. It’ll give you better accuracy at extreme ranges, less wind drift and enhanced flesh-destroying characteristics.”

  “Tell us more,” Blancanales said.

  “Well, you know all about what happens when a 5.56mm slug hits a body. The new NATO slug spins almost twice as fast. And it has more weight. Sixty-five grains instead of the old forty-grain weight. The NATO slug also has a steel core. It will defeat all soft body armor. I loaded the magazines with steel cores and hunting slugs. Every other round is a hollowpoint.”

  “No Geneva Convention where we’re going,” Lyons commented.

  Konzaki glanced at his watch, continued. “And each one of you will have a Beretta 93-R.”

  He pointed to three web belts carrying holsters and magazine pouc
hes. Blancanales unsnapped a holster flap, slipped out the Parkerized-black pistol. Representing the cutting edge of Beretta’s technology, the auto-pistol featured semiauto or three-shot bursts. An oversize trigger guard and a fold-down grip provided for a two-handed hold. Fitted with a suppressor and firing custom-loaded 9mm cartridges, it killed without a sound.

  “We had some problems with that subsonic ammunition,” Blancanales told Konzaki. “I had to shoot one biker five times to drop him.”

  “Yes. You told me. So I flew out to the Coast for the autopsies on the Outlaws. Of the three slugs in the chest of that creep, one went through his wallet and lodged in rib cartilage. The other two shattered ribs, passed through his lungs and lodged against the back of his rib cage. Though he was definitely out of the action, I considered that substandard performance. Now the subsonics have steel cores. The steel cores do nothing for the shock power, but they have superior penetration characteristics. You can expect through-and-through torso wounds on your targets. But just barely. Ultimately, accuracy is the determining factor.”

  Lyons opened his jacket to touch his Colt Python. “I’m taking my Magnum. Those little Italian toys make me nervous.”

  “Whatever’s appropriate, Mr. Lyons. Different weapons for different situations.”

  They felt the jet bank into a turn. Brognola packed his videotape and maps into his attache case, joined the others around the conference table.

  “We’ll be landing at Miami in one minute. You gentlemen will be in Peru sometime tonight. One thing I want to stress: this is a soft probe. We need information. Not a body count.”

  The three warriors of Mack Bolan’s Able Team glanced at the weapons and ammunition covering the tables, the full-auto shotgun, the assault rifles, the silenced Beretta pistols. Lyons and Gadgets and Blancanales looked to one another, exchanged shakes of the head.

  “Sure, Hal,” said Lyons, smiling. “Anything you say.”

  3

  Dawn light on the snow of the Andes flashed like sheets of pale flame. Outside the small ports of the DC-3, peaks and sheer cliff faces rose against the heavens, which were still night-violet and shot with stars. Gadgets pressed an Instamatic camera against the glass and snapped a photo.