Ripple Effect
Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Nathaniel Hathcock III,

USMC

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Mike Newton for his contribution to this work.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Camp X-ray—Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Lieutenant Jordan Lewis hated meeting with the CIA. He knew the standard rap, of course—brothers in arms, collaborating in the war on terror, all that happy stuff—but there was still something about the Company that set his nerves on edge.

For one thing, it was flat-out wrong for spooks to give the orders—any orders—on a military base run for the better part of a century by the United States Marine Corps. Worse than wrong, it pissed him off.

The job at Camp X-ray was hard enough without demanding that the military personnel on-site kiss Langley’s ass.

And what a job it was, containing several hundred “enemy combatants” snatched from various locales over the past six years, beginning in Afghanistan, proceeding to Iraq, and then some places the civilian public didn’t even know about. Most of the hostiles caged at Camp X-ray would never face a formal charge. Hell, most of them still hadn’t been identified to any court, congressional committee or defense attorneys. They were locked down tight and going nowhere unless Uncle Sam decided, in his own sweet time, that they were clean.

And that was where Lewis found himself compelled to share his space with cloak-and-dagger types who thought the information superhighway ran only one way. The spooks reminded him of leeches. They crept in, latched on to files and prisoners, sucked out whatever they could use, then crept away without a simple thank-you to the men and women who maintained their feeding station. It was damned elitist arrogance, no other way to read it, and it sometimes made Lewis wish that he could punch them out, beginning at the top and working down.

He could’ve borne their snotty attitude a little better if they got results in the real world, but after six years of interrogation, eavesdropping and fudging data, what was the result?

Nada.

Lewis heard the vague pronouncements coming out of Washington, whenever some fat cat believed his job was riding on the line. He’d blather on about the terrorist attacks that had been averted, suspects captured, lives that had been saved—and naturally, all of it was classified.

But Jordan Lewis knew the truth.

He knew that in the years of his assignment to Camp X-ray, there had been no major breaks of any kind. Osama was still out there, and funds kept flowing to al Qaeda from the usual suspects. Most of them, in turn, were cozily in bed with “patriotic” politicians in the States, none of their countries facing any sanctions, threats of military intervention or preemptive strikes.

It was a crazy world, and Jordan Lewis was accustomed to it. He knew that there would always be another war, as long as men could scheme against one another in the halls of power, and he understood his role in that reality. He understood that there were rules, and also times when they were set aside to serve the greater good.

No problem.

He could twist arms with the best of them when it was called for, but he didn’t like some smarmy frat boy from the Ivy League intruding, telling him that he had done it wrong, suggesting that he try another angle of attack or step aside and let them do it, acting all superior while they were showing him the door.

This day, the new arrival was Bob Armstrong, or so he called himself. Lewis suspected that the name was every bit as phony as his smile. Armstrong was roughly the same age as Lewis, spoke with just a trace of a New England accent and was always groomed as if he half expected paparazzi to be waiting for him at the gates.

Some days Lewis thought about trying a change of scene, maybe a tour in Sandland, but he didn’t want to press his luck.

They also serve who only sit with spooks.

To hell with it, he thought. It’s what they pay you for.

And with that thought in mind, Lewis buzzed his orderly. “Corporal,” he said, “show Mr. Armstrong in.”

A moment later, there he was, all styling gel, bleached teeth and Harvard attitude. Wearing a smile as phony as the spook’s, Lewis walked around his desk to shake the agent’s hand.

HASAM KHALED WAS WORRIED, for himself and for the great jihad. A new round of interrogations had begun, and while it had been several months since he was questioned, granting ample time for him to rest, Khaled feared that he might be weakening in custody. He had been too long out of contact with his brothers, and despite his faith in Allah to sustain him, lately there had been no answer to his prayers.

Each time the smug Americans passed by his cage, selecting someone else to grill for information, he was certain they had come for him. Someday they would, and who knew what techniques they would employ this time?

Before, they had progressed from stilted courtesy to bullying and threats, suspension of his so-called privileges. Diet could be adjusted in proportion to collaboration with the enemy, so Khaled lost weight. He didn’t mind the sacrifice of flesh, content to know that Paradise awaited him.

But if he broke, what then?

The whispered rumors frightened him. In place of simple tactics—insults, threats, sleep deprivation—it was said that more effective methods soon might be employed. Torture, perhaps, or forced “repatriation” to some allied country where interrogators weren’t as squeamish as Americans. Or drugs, the kind that robbed even a dedicated warrior of his wits and his determination to resist.

Hasam Khaled was frightened of the drugs. Torture was fearful, but he thought—hoped, prayed—that he could weather beatings, possibly electric shocks, without soiling his honor. Drugs, however, stole a victim’s will and left him helpless, babbling everything he knew to agents of the Great Satan.

And once Khaled began to talk, how could he stop?

There had to be something he could do.

Khaled recalled his training, exhortations that prepared him to give up his life for God’s holy cause. He had been lucky so far, stunned in an explosion that inflicted only minor injuries but killed his two companions and a number of civilians. The Americans weren’t entirely sure whether Khaled was a combatant or a bystander, but they had shipped him to Cuba anyway. Uncertainty had given him a way to dodge their questions, up to now, but if they came at him with drugs…

There was one obvious alternative. He could become a martyr to the cause, not unlike those who strapped explosives to their bodies and then detonated them where it would do the most harm to their enemies. His self-inflicted death, while not as grandiose as an explosion in a market filled with Zionists or U.S. soldiers, still could serve the cause and bring great honor to his name, his family.

Khaled’s imam had been explicit on that subject. Any death in God’s service was commendable. He didn’t have to kill a hundred enemies, or even one. It was enough that he intended to destroy the infidels, and by his death prevented God’s enemies from gaining an advantage in the struggle. If by dying he could snatch salvation from the fingertips of targets marked for death by his comrades, Khaled would be a hero.

And his place in Paradise would be assured.

That vision made him strong—or stronger than he might have been without it.

Escape wasn’t an option, Khaled realized, and while some other inmates of the camp had been released to satisfy the Red Cross or the media, once he was questioned under medication there would be no possibility of freedom. Once they heard his secret, Khaled might be whisked away to the American mainland for further questioning, until the heathen bastards satisfied themselves that they knew everything.

And would it be enough to save them?

Possibly.

Khaled couldn’t be sure. He knew only a name, a fragment of a rumor shared by comrades in the dead of night. He had no details of the master plan itself, but once the name was given to his enemies, the rest might be superfluous. The scouring of dossiers and databases would begin, and ultimately they would have the man himself.

Khaled couldn’t permit it.

There were no weapons in his cell, of course—or none, at any rate, regarded by his captors as a weapon. But the simple cotton robe he wore could serve him as an instrument of suicide.

And when he’d finished with it, they could use if for his shroud.

There was no privacy in Camp X-ray, but neither was Khaled exposed in fact to round-the-clock surveillance. When he pulled the plain white robe over his head, no one except the occupants of two adjoining cages saw him do it. Neither spoke as he stood tall on tiptoes, double-knotting one sleeve of the robe to bars that formed the ceiling of his cage.

Neither adjoining prisoner called out for help as Khaled tied a makeshift noose around his neck and pulled it tight. They offered no objection as he checked the simple hang-man’s rope for length, then climbed the nearest barred wall of his cage for altitude.

The bars were slippery. He almost lost his grip and tumbled back, but that wouldn’t provide enough impact to stun him and prevent his hands from rising to the noose as he began to choke. In case his will to live proved stronger than his faith, Khaled was banking on a sharper drop to render him insensible.

A few more inches now. That should be high enough. The floor seemed far below him, like the bottom of a canyon. All illusion, in his present agitated state.

With one last prayer, Hasam Khaled released his grip and plummeted toward Paradise.

BOB ARMSTRONG DIDN’T CARE much for the spit-and-polish military types. He tolerated them whenever necessary, wore a smiling mask to hide his general contempt for amateurs who meddled in intelligence, and he never under any circumstances gave away the information his superiors had classified as need-to-know.

Sometimes, like now, he’d flatter certain officers with lies or slick evasions when they had to work in tandem toward specific goals, but he would no more tell a grunt in uniform what he was really thinking than he’d drop his pants and wag the weasel at a formal diplomatic function.

Some things were simply not done by professionals. Full stop. Case closed.

But sometimes you had to prime the pump, and so he said, “The truth, Lieutenant Lewis—may I call you Joseph, by the way?”

“It’s Jordan.”

“Ah, my apologies. Then, may I—?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Big smile. “The truth, Lieutenant Lewis, is that Langley’s under fire right now with accusations that we overlook the little things. Nobody seems to care much if a war goes on for years with no result, but we catch hell if we don’t know the dictator of the day’s zip code. You follow me?”

“Not yet,” the Marine said.

“My point is that we want to dot our i’s and cross our t’s, make sure we don’t miss any little thing, regardless of how insignificant it seems.”

“And that affects me…how?” the lieutenant asked.

“I’ve been asked to start from scratch with some of the neglected prisoners. Not my word, mind you. From the top, you know? Wish I could duck it. Big pain in the neck, I realize, but there it is.”

“No problem,” the lieutenant answered somewhat stiffly. “Do you have a list, or are we starting over alphabetically?”

“I have a list,” Armstrong admitted, “but it’s more like alphabet soup. They’ve been prioritized somehow, by someone. You can ask me how, why, who, but I don’t know. God’s truth.”

He was about to put a hand over his heart, but thought that might be overdoing it.

“I don’t require an explanation, Mr. Armstrong,” Lewis said. “When did you want to start?”

“This morning, if that’s feasible.”

“I’ll need your list.”

“Of course.” Armstrong retrieved two sheets of folded paper from an inside pocket of his jacket, passing them across the desk. Lewis unfolded them, blinked once, then tried to mask his surprise as he surveyed the twin columns of small, single-spaced type.

“This looks like nearly half the men in camp,” the lieutenant said.

“Is it?” Armstrong cocked an eyebrow, as if mildly curious. “I couldn’t say.”

“And these have been prioritized, you say? Does that mean that the first, say, dozen on the list are now prime terrorism suspects?”

Armstrong shrugged, his face contorting into something that approximated puzzlement. “Beats me,” he said. “For all I know, they could have ranked them in reverse order, with small-fry at the top. I really couldn’t say.”

“Mm-hmm.” Lewis looked skeptical, to say the least. “And you want to begin with number one, meaning top left on the first page?”

“Correct.”

“And work your way down column one, then back up to the top of column two? Or zigzag down the page?”

Armstrong pretended not to know that the jarhead was making fun of him. “Straight down, I think. If that’s all right with you.”

“Whatever,” Lewis said. “These clowns aren’t going anywhere. You want to start right now?”

“Ideally, yes,” Armstrong replied.

“Suits me. I’ll see if we have an interpreter available.”

Armstrong relaxed and watched the officer go through his pantomime. In fact, as he well knew, Camp X-ray always had interpreters available. It couldn’t function otherwise, with prisoners who spoke at least three languages aside from Arabic.

After another moment on the telephone, Lewis cradled the receiver, donned a tight-lipped smile and said, “I have a man you can use to get started this morning. Later on today, we’re jammed up pretty tight.”

“Where there’s a will….”

“I’ll see what I can do. No promises.”

“Of course.” He didn’t feel like flexing any hidden muscles at the moment. If the jarhead still felt prickly around lunchtime, Armstrong would reach out and pull whatever strings it took to scorch his lazy ass.

“In that case,” Lewis said, “we’re just waiting for the interpreter. He’s coming over from the barracks as we speak.”

“That should be—”

Sudden rapping on the office door distracted him. The sergeant from the outer waiting room entered, flicked a distracted glance at Armstrong, then told Lewis, “Sir, we’ve had another…incident.”

“Explain,” Lewis commanded. When the sergeant looked again at Armstrong, the lieutenant added, “Sergeant, please speak freely.”

“Yes, sir. It’s another suicide attempt. One of the inmates tried to hang himself.”

“Which one?”

The sergeant looked down at his cupped left hand, where Armstrong saw a sticky note not quite concealed. “His name’s Hasam Khaled, sir. Just a nobody, as far as we can tell. One of the men on walk-through found him hanging in his cell and cut him down.”

“You said he tried to hang himself. How badly is he hurt?” Lewis inquired, sounding as if he didn’t really care much either way.

“Should be all right, sir. That’s the word for now, at least. The medics have him in sick bay.”

“All right. Dismissed.”

The sergeant wheeled around and left the office, closed the door behind him.

“Lieutenant,” Armstrong said, “I’d like to climb out on a limb here, and suggest a change of plans.”

“Not sure I follow you,” said the Marine.

“I’d like to reprioritize that list a bit.”

“Meaning?”

“I want to put a new name at the top.”

“Okay. Which one?”

“I’ll have my first chat with Hasam Khaled.”

“The loser who just tried to off himself?” Lewis seemed surprised.

“That’s right.”

“You mind if I ask why, exactly?”

As it happened, this time Armstrong didn’t mind at all. “He’s anxious to get out of here by any means available,” he said. “That tells me that he’s either cracked and lost his mind—or maybe, just maybe, has something to hide.”

AT FIRST, HASAM KHALED believed that he had found his way to Paradise, but then he felt the harsh pain in his neck and grimaced as his vision cleared. If this was Paradise, then the imam had lied and there was no reward worthy of sacrifice.

Before that sacrilegious thought could take root in his head, Khaled woke to the fact that he was still alive, apparently sequestered in the camp’s infirmary. He had accomplished nothing, other than inflicting needless pain upon himself.

Hoping the noose might have destroyed his vocal cords, he cleared his throat, then tried to speak. The words were hoarse and painful, but he heard them clearly, even though he whispered.

“Doctor,” someone said beyond his line of sight, “this one’s awake.”

“Good thing,” another voice replied. “I’ve got them breathing down my neck.”

Khaled was functional in English, but he still had trouble with its slang and idioms. Why, for example, would one person breathe into another’s neck, except for purposes of artificial respiration? And the second speaker clearly didn’t require such treatment, since he had ability to breathe and speak unaided.

Faces loomed beside his narrow bed, one man with a white coat over his uniform, the other garbed in the fatigues worn by all guards throughout the camp. Khaled had studied rank insignia for the Great Satan’s military forces, and he recognized the white coat as a first lieutenant, while the other was a corporal of the United States Marines.

His mortal enemies.

“Mr. Khaled?” The white coat peered into his face and raised a fist, the index finger pointed up. “How many fingers do you see?”

He had a normal hand. “Five,” Khaled said.

The white coat raised another finger, to create a V. “How many now?” he asked.

“Still five.”

“He’s yanking you, Lieutenant,” the corporal said.

“You think?”

Scowling, the officer informed Khaled, “You have some visitors. Their sense of humor sucks.”

Khaled did not attempt to turn his head. He’d let his enemies do all the work, while he focused upon resisting them.

A moment later, two new faces flanked his bed. One was a sergeant in his early twenties, while the other was a slightly older man, blond haired, wearing some kind of business suit.

The suit spoke first. “Hasam Khaled?”

Khaled didn’t respond. He was determined to say nothing, come what may. If later he was forced to scream, perhaps it wouldn’t count against him in the eyes of God.

“That was quite an accident you had,” the blonde remarked. The sergeant translated his words to Arabic.

What accident? He’d tried to hang himself. The only accident had been his failure to achieve that end.

“Escape attempts are frowned upon, you realize.”

Escape? Khaled concluded that the blond man was a fool, perhaps insane.

“It adds time to your sentence, get it? And you haven’t even had your trial yet. Honestly, Hasam, what were you thinking?”

That’s for me to know, Khaled thought, tuning out the voice of the interpreter.

“I’d like to help you, if I can,” the American said.

Then kill yourself, Khaled answered silently. It took an effort not to smile, but even thinking seemed to hurt his injured throat.

“Of course, I can’t do anything on your behalf, unless you’re willing to cooperate.”

Never.

“A few quick questions,” the blonde said. “Nothing earth-shattering, you understand. The basic sort of thing. Name, rank and what have you.”

The blonde was lying. Khaled smelled it on him.

“But if you won’t help,” the litany went on, “well…”

Here it comes. First threats, then pain. Khaled tried to prepare himself, but it was difficult, not knowing how his captors would torment him.

“I suspect,” the suit remarked off-handedly, “that you could use some medicine. Sergeant?”

“I’ll fetch the medic, sir.”

Briefly alone, the blonde bent lower, almost whispering. “If you can follow this at all, I really think that you should talk to me, without the needles. Once they start…well, hey, I never knew a doctor who could say, ‘Enough’s enough.’ Have you? Hasam? Okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The sergeant returned with a different white coat, this one balding and grim in the face. The new arrival carried a hypodermic syringe half filled with milky fluid.

Hasam Khaled recoiled—or would have, if his arms and legs hadn’t been pinned by heavy leather straps. All he could do was wriggle, strain against the leather, as the medic with the needle swabbed his arm with alcohol, then spiked him.

Khaled was expecting pain, but in its place euphoria suffused his body. For a moment, he imagined they were killing him—some executions in America were carried out with poisoned hypodermics—but that made no sense. They couldn’t question him if he was dead.

No. They were lulling him with drugs, polluting him with chemicals to make him speak. Khaled determined to resist Satan’s technology at any cost, even if he was forced to bite his tongue and drown in his own blood.

That sounded like a good idea, but when he tried it, Khaled found his jaws unwilling to obey. In fact, the very notion seemed so silly that he nearly burst out laughing.

“Hasam? Earth to Hasam?”

The blonde was speaking once again, his translator echoing everything he said, like an annoying television sound track.

“Feeling better, Has, my man? That’s good. Now, let’s get down to business, shall we?”

Business? I was never very good at business. You can ask my father. He will—

“What I need to know, first thing,” the rude blonde interrupted him, “is why you tried to kill yourself. Just tell me that, for starters, and we’re on our way.”

“Secret,” Khaled whispered, not realizing for an instant that he’d spoken.

Stop! Resist! Say nothing, in the name of God!

“Secret? Now we’re getting somewhere, Hassy. May I call you Hassy? Good. About this secret, now. What is it?”

Although Khaled had spoken English, the interpreter continued with his task.

“Too great. I must…not…tell.”

“We’re all friends here,” the blonde assured him, smiling like a sneaky thief. “You can tell me anything. Don’t be embarrassed. Hassy, I can promise you, I’ve heard it all.”

“Not this.”

“Surprise me, then. I’m always up for something new.”

Khaled could feel the smile form on his face. “You will know soon enough,” he said.

“Will I?” the blonde replied. “All right, then, but I’d like a little preview, if you don’t mind. What we call a trailer, in the States. A glimpse, to you. How’d that be, Hassy?”

Still Khaled resisted, but he couldn’t fight the drugs forever. Finally, weeping for shame and the inevitable loss of Paradise, he spoke a name.

CHAPTER ONE

Cocoa Beach, Florida

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, walked along a quiet, nearly vacant beach at sunrise. It was nearly vacant, since a beach bum and his lady had apparently camped out the night before, somehow avoiding the nocturnal beach patrol to plant their sleeping bags above the high-tide water-line. They were engrossed in each other as he passed, ignoring him, waking to yet another day of—what?

Good luck, he hoped, and wished them well.

A small crab scuttled out of Bolan’s path, chasing the white Atlantic surf as it retreated. In his short-sleeved shirt, Bolan was conscious of a chill wind off the ocean, but he trusted that the sun would warm him soon enough.

Right now, the chill felt good, a respite from the heat he knew was coming, guaranteed.

It was a rare day when he could escape the heat.

He’d spent the past two nights at the Wakulla Inn, taking a unit with a kitchen and more bedrooms than he needed, just to have the space. Two days of beachfront R and R had tanned him, while meandering along the main drag, two blocks from his pad, briefly immersed him in the tourist scene. He’d poked around Ron Jon’s and other surf shops, happily admiring the bikinis, scowling at the baby sharks and alligators slaughtered into knickknacks for the Yankee set.

And life went on.

But not for long.

That morning, he was meeting Hal Brognola, their connection arranged on Sunday evening via sat phone linkup from Stony Man Farm. Bolan hadn’t asked why Hal wanted to meet in Florida, instead of someplace close to Washington. It simply wasn’t done.

As luck would have it, he’d been passing through Atlanta with some time and narcotraffickers to kill, when Hal had buzzed him to request a face-to-face. They met in person six or seven times a year, on average, but usually in proximity to Wonderland, D.C., where the big Fed held down a desk at the Justice Department, six blocks from the White House.

Bolan had never seen Hal’s office. It would be a no-win situation, all around, since he had been America’s most-wanted fugitive—until his death, some years ago, in New York City. Now, with a new face and several identities to spare, he did the same things that he’d done before, but with the covert blessing of his Uncle Sam.

He felt relaxed, ready to roll on whatever assignment Brognola might have for him. He didn’t try to second-guess the man from Justice, having learned from long experience that it would be a futile exercise. Brognola would present the facts and arguments for intervention. Bolan had the option of refusing any job that went against his grain, in which case it would pass to other hands, but he had never exercised that right.

One reason: he and Hal were well attuned to life, society and the preventive maintenance required to keep America the beautiful from turning into something else entirely. Bolan respected the Constitution and the laws that guaranteed all citizens their civil rights, but there were times when something happened to the system and it didn’t work as planned.

Sometimes corruption was to blame, or loopholes in the law that might take years to plug, while predators took full advantage of the gaps to victimize the innocent and weak. At other times, the system’s built-in safeguards made the wheels of justice turn too slowly, costing lives and human misery before a verdict could be rendered, then appealed, then reaffirmed by higher courts.

Brognola found some of the targets for him. Bolan found some others on his own. Financing from the nerve center of operations came from covert budgetary pigeonholes, while Bolan’s pocket money often emanated from the predators themselves. He had no qualms about relieving drug dealers or loan sharks of their blood money, and if the scumbags suffered catastrophic injuries while he was taking out a loan, what of it?

There were always more scumbags in waiting, never any shortage in the world that Bolan had observed.

Downrange, he saw a solitary figure striding toward him, hands in pockets, a fedora planted squarely on its head. He couldn’t swear it was Brognola, but odds against a stranger showing up at the appointed time, in that getup, were next to nil.

Brognola called to him from fifty feet away. “Would you believe I’m on vacation?”

“Not a chance,” Bolan replied.

“Okay, you’re right. Let’s take a walk.”

They walked and talked. The basic pleasantries were brief, whatever passed for personal emotion understood between these battle-hardened warriors and beyond the reach of words. Despite a friendship so deep-seated that both took it rightfully for granted, they had business to discuss.

“Vacation,” Brognola mused. “Sure, I’ve heard of that.”

“You ought to try it,” Bolan said.

“Maybe next year. And look who’s talking.”

“I’ve just had two days.”

“That’s two in how damned long?”

“Who’s counting?” Bolan asked him.

“Right. Okay. So, what I’ve got is something sticky. It’s a problem that I can’t turn loose.”

“I’m listening.”

“What do you know about Guantanamo?”

“It’s ninety miles that way,” Bolan said, with a thumb jerk toward his shoulder. “Cuba. Big Marine base, captured from the Spanish back when Teddy Roosevelt was still a rough-rider. Maintained as U.S. territory since the Castro revolution, more or less to spite Fidel.”

“What else?” Brognola urged.

“Detention blocks for terrorists and terror suspects taken in Afghanistan, Iraq and who-knows-where.”

“Camp X-ray,” Brognola confirmed. “It’s part of why we’re here.”

“They need another sentry?” Bolan asked.

“I doubt it. Sentries they have plenty of. Also interrogators.” Bolan caught a faint tone of distaste in the big Fed’s voice, covered reasonably well. Both of them recognized that sometimes information had to be gathered swiftly, forcefully. And neither of them liked it one damned bit.

“Interrogators?” he reminded Brognola when silence stretched between them for the better part of a minute.

“Right. A few days back, one of the inmates tried to hang himself and botched it. They revived him, and decided he was worth a closer look. Why now, I’m guessing was the rationale. Why would this nobody, who claims he’s innocent, decide to off himself one afternoon for no apparent reason?”

“It’s a question,” Bolan said.

“And they got answers,” Brognola confided.

“Which involves us…how?”

“I guess you know the rule of thumb for suspects held since 9/11, right? Arrest a hundred, and you may get four or five who know a guy who knows a guy. Arrest a thousand, maybe you find one or two who are those guys. This guy who tried to lynch himself knows people. My guess, he got tired of sitting in his cell, ignored, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. He figured they’d be getting back to him, sooner or later, and he wanted to eliminate the chance of letting something slip.”

“Too bad for him he couldn’t do it right,” Bolan observed.

“Too bad for him, but maybe good for us.”

“How so?”

“Because he knows things,” Brognola said. “Not a major player, now, don’t get me wrong. His face isn’t on anybody’s deck of cards. They never heard of him at Langley, until three, four days ago. At least, they never really thought about him. Way down at the bottom of some list that gathered dust. No one you’d give the time of day. They might’ve turned him loose, another six months or a year, except for the attempted suicide.”

“But now he’s in the spotlight.”

“Sitting right there on the grill,” Brognola said. “Maybe you smell the smoke from here. And one way or another, they persuade this guy to spill his guts. Turns out, he’s been around and knows his way around. Hamas, al Qaeda, PLO—little Hasam Khaled’s got friends all over.”

“But he’s not a major player?” Bolan asked.

“Not even close,” Brognola replied. “But he’s the man nobody notices. Loyal to a fault, likely involved in bombings or some other shit, but mostly, he’s just there. Maybe he brings the big boys tea and sandwiches, stands guard outside the tent or tags along behind them with his AK when they take a stroll. But all the while, he hears things.”

“Which he’s sharing with the Gitmo gang,” Bolan said.

“Bingo. Some of it’s history, you know, like Joe Valachi telling all about the 1930s Mafia in 1961. Khaled isn’t that old, but neither are the groups he’s been involved with. What I hear, he’s talking personalities and troop deployments, plans that failed, others that hit the bull’s-eye, schisms in the ranks—the whole nine yards.”

“That covers lots of ground,” Bolan observed.

“Too much for us to think about. Except, maybe, one thing.”

Bolan said nothing, waiting for it.

“There was one name that stood out,” Brognola said. “I mean, a lot of names stood out, but this one was American.”

“Unusual.”

“In spades. You’ve heard about the so-called American Taliban caught in Afghanistan, and that guy with the shoe bomb that didn’t go off.”

Bolan nodded, still waiting.

“Well, those are the norm when al Qaeda or some rival group gets a Yank in the ranks. Disaffected young men, for the most part. They look for a cause with excitement attached. If they’re rednecks, they go for the Klan or militias. Same thing. Self-improvement through hate.”

“But the new name is different,” Bolan said, not asking.

“And then some,” Brognola replied. “This one worries the hell out of Langley, the Pentagon, maybe the White House. It worries the hell out of me.”

“It’s a congressman? Senator? What?”

“Don’t I wish. If it was, we could stake out his office, tap into his phone lines, whatever. The Bureau could do it and slap him with charges from here to next Easter. It isn’t that simple.”

“Go on.”

“First, the guy’s not in-country. You’ve heard of free radicals? This one’s the ultimate. Maybe we know where he is, maybe not. It’s a toss-up, and knowing’s not bagging.”

“Okay.”

“But he’s not just elusive. He’s skilled, see? He knows the guerrilla game inside and out, and it’s not just in theory. He’s been there, in combat, for our side and theirs. In between he was anyone’s soldier if they could afford him. Turns out, some of our enemies have oil and cash to burn.”

“Sounds tough,” Bolan agreed.

“He’s tough, all right.” Brognola stopped dead in the sand, sun rising at his back. “In fact, he’s you.”

“Say what?”

“I don’t mean you, you. But he’s like you. Special Forces. The same training, same background, plenty of real combat experience before he took a discharge and went into business for himself.”

“Who is this guy?” Bolan asked.

Brognola fished inside his jacket and produced a CD in a plastic case. “His file’s on here, in PDF,” the man from Justice said. “Long story somewhat short, his name is Eugene Talmadge. Born in 1967, joined the Army out of high school. Graduated to the Green Berets at twenty, with a sergeant’s stripes. Like you.”

Bolan was less than thrilled with the comparison, but kept his mouth shut, listening.

“Combat-wise, he served in Panama, the Noriega thing down there—”

Bolan supplied the operation’s name. “Just Cause.”

“That’s it. Then, he was back for Desert Storm in 1991, followed by action in Somalia and Bosnia. Peacekeeping, I believe they called it at the time. In 1995 there was an incident with one of his superiors. It’s in the file, sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“The way it reads, Talmadge had words with a lieutenant and teed off on him. The looey wound up close to brain-dead. Talmadge got a compromise verdict at his court-martial. Guilty of assaulting a superior, acquitted of attempted murder and some other stuff. The Army yanked his pension and he walked with a dishonorable discharge.”

“You don’t buy the verdict,” Bolan said, not making it a question.

“Oh, I’m sure about the verdict,” Brognola replied, “but not about the case. Transcripts are classified, but I got Aaron and his techies at the Farm to do some hacking for me, on the q.t. It turns out that Talmadge’s defense was basically eradicated from the public record.”

“Being?”

“Namely,” Brognola said, “that he caught this officer and gentleman trying to rape a female corporal. Apparently, when Talmadge pulled him off, the looey lost it, started swinging on him, and the rest his history.”

“They hung him out to dry for that?”

“Apparently,” Brognola said. “Today, they’d probably be prosecuting the lieutenant, but the atmosphere in 1995 was different. They had adultery scandals going on, reports of sexual assaults at West Point and Annapolis. I’m guessing that one more black eye was one too many.”

“And Talmadge came out pissed.”

“I’m guessing yes. He shopped around for jobs, but with the DD and his lack of college training, it was pretty much a hopeless case. Before starvation hit, he started doing what he’s good at, but for higher pay than Uncle Sam had ever given him.”

“A merc,” Bolan said. It was more or less predictable, the same course followed throughout history by soldiers of all nations who were left without a service or a war to fight.

“A merc and contract hitter,” Brognola amended. “Once again, it’s in the dossier. To summarize, we’re sure of work he did in Africa, Myanmar and Brazil. That’s soldiering. Talmadge is also the prime suspect in at least eleven contract murders spanning Europe and North Africa, with one in Canada. He does good work, cleans up after himself. No charges pending anywhere.”

“Which brings us back to Gitmo,” Bolan said.

“It does. Our songbird dropped his name last week. No, it didn’t ring a bell at first, but Langley started digging, and the Pentagon pitched in. It set alarm bells ringing when they found his file.”

“What’s he involved in?” Bolan asked.

“Washington supposed it must be some kind of guerrilla training. Make that hoped. Sources confirmed that Talmadge has been seen in Syria, Iran and Pakistan. Also in Jordan, once or twice, hanging around the Bekaa Valley. That’s dope money and Islamic terrorists. He could’ve been on tap for either, or for both. So, training, right?”

“Sounds like it,” Bolan said.

“Until we started looking at his travel record and comparing it to contract hits. A Mossad district chief in Stockholm. An Iranian defector in Versailles. Two Saudi dissidents in Rome. One of Osama’s breakaway lieutenants in Vienna. It goes on like that.”

“He’s helping them clean house.”

“At least,” Brognola said. “One thing I’d say about our boy, he won’t discriminate. From what’s on file, he likes the highest bidder while the money’s flowing, and he moves on when it stops. No job too dirty, in the meantime. In Vienna, where he used C-4, the target had his wife and daughter with him. Talmadge took all three. The girl was four years old.”

“Hard to believe he hasn’t left some kind of trail for the forensics people,” Bolan said.

“It’s like I said. He’s you.”

“Enough with that, okay?”

“Sorry.” Brognola looked contrite, or something close to it. “No offense. I mean to say that he’s professional. Back in the day, you left a trail because you wanted to. Psy-war against the opposition, right? You rattled them by showing where you’d been, and sometimes called ahead to tell them who was next.”

Brognola’s first contact with Bolan had occurred while the big Fed was FBI and Bolan was engaged in a heroic one-man war against the Mafia, avenging damage to his family and rolling on from there to make syndicate mobsters an endangered species.

“It was a different situation,” Bolan said.

“My point exactly,” Brognola replied. “Talmadge has no cause of his own, no faith in anyone or anything except himself. He’ll work for them, kill for them, but he’s not committed. If he left a sign at any of his hits, it would reflect the group that hired him, not Gene Talmadge.”

“But you’ve tracked him anyway.”

Brognola shrugged. “You know how these things work. Combine the testimony of informants and survivors with the various security devices found in airports—biometric scanners are the bomb, apparently—and we can place him near the scene of various assassinations, bombings, this and that. We don’t have photos of his finger on the trigger, but it comes down to the next-best thing. Besides, it isn’t like we’re taking him to trial.”

And there it was. The death sentence.

“The action you’re describing to me has been going on for—what? Eleven years?”

“At least,” Brognola said.

“So why the sudden urgency?” Bolan asked.

“Ah. Because our songbird down at Gitmo didn’t only drop a name.”

“Go on.”

“According to Khaled, al Qaeda has our boy on tap this time, to ‘teach Satan a lesson he will not forget.’ Khaled has no specifics on the nature of that lesson, but we didn’t like the sound of it.”

“That’s understandable,” Bolan allowed.

“So, there you are. We’ve got one kick-ass warrior, seemingly devoid of anything resembling conscience, working for a group that wants to take us off the map. We’d like to stop them—him, specifically—and do it in a way that doesn’t make the Pentagon look like a nuthouse with the inmates in control. You in?”

Bolan frowned, feeling the deadweight of the CD in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said at last. “I’m in.”

A QUARTER OF AN HOUR LATER, back at the Wakulla Inn, Bolan reviewed the CD on his laptop. It began with all the ordinary paperwork for the induction of a U.S. Army private, with the details of its subject’s early life.

Eugene Adam Talmadge had indeed been born in 1967—April 23, to be precise—in Boulder, Colorado. His high-school grades were average, except in sports, where he excelled. A college football scholarship had been on offer, but he’d turned it down to wear a uniform, and then a green beret.

Bolan was somewhat puzzled by that choice, coming in 1985, when there was no threat of a military draft and no war currently in progress to attract daredevil types. Maybe Talmadge decided that he was unsuited to a college campus, even with the free ride offered by its sports department. Maybe he was hoping to accomplish something on his own, not have it handed to him on a silver platter just because he was a jock. Trouble at home? Something so personal it didn’t make the files?

Bolan would never know.

Talmadge had been a standout boot in basic training, and had taken to the Special Forces school at Benning like a duck to water, acing every course except the foreign-language training, where he struggled for a passing score in Spanish. When it came to weapons training and explosives, unarmed combat and survival, though, Talmadge had everything the service could desire, and then some.

Talmadge had killed his first two men in Panama, a couple of Manuel Noriega’s gorillas who weren’t smart enough to lay down their arms in the face of superior force. There was no intimation of a trigger-happy soldier in that case, no hint of any impropriety.

In combat, people died.

In Desert Storm, Talmadge had earned a reputation for himself. On the advance from Kuwait, through Iraq, he’d personally taken out at least two dozen members of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard, earning a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in the process. The citation that accompanied his Silver Star praised Talmadge for his bravery and focus under fire, resulting in the rescue of two wounded comrades and elimination of a hostile rifle squad. Details were classified, suggesting that the mission also had a covert side.

His flesh wounds didn’t keep him out of action long. Talmadge had shipped out for Somalia in winter 1992, as part of Washington’s attempt to regulate that nation’s rival warlords and bring order out of chaos. That attempt had failed, but Talmadge scored nine more verified kills during four months in-country. His part in the rescue of a downed Black Hawk crew earned him a DSC—Distinguished Service Cross—and yet another Purple Heart.

He did all right, Bolan thought, moving onward through the soldier’s life on paper.

The sutures were barely removed from Talmadge’s Somalian wounds when new orders dispatched him to Bosnia-Herzegovina, land of ethnic cleansing and religious hatred spanning centuries. More warlords, more atrocities, more combat pay. Talmadge hadn’t been wounded in that conflict, but he had logged seven kills the record keepers knew about. No decorations that time for a job well done.

The Army’s standard paperwork included his record for the next year and a half, until the bitter end. Bolan discovered that the incident in 1995 had happened at Fort Benning. A lieutenant, name deleted, was the so-called victim, with a list of fractures and internal damage ranging from his skull down to his knees. The witnesses included two civilians and a corporal, name deleted, who was almost certainly the female Brognola had mentioned in his summary.

And as Brognola had explained, the transcripts of the court-martial were missing, classified for reasons unexplained. The logic of that void was inescapable: the facts were secret. Ergo, there could be no explanation why they had been classified, or else the secret would’ve been revealed.

Catch-22.

Bolan took Brognola’s appraisal of the case as valid, recognized the anger and frustration Talmadge had to have felt at being railroaded. Any remarks he may have offered to the court-martial were classified along with all the rest, leaving the slate blank. Only the verdict now remained, its stinging condemnation of a former hero sure to follow him for the remainder of his life.

Under the circumstances, Bolan was a bit surprised that Talmadge hadn’t sought revenge against the Army. Then again, when he considered what Talmadge had done throughout the intervening years—what he was doing now—perhaps he had. Brognola might be wrong about the former Green Beret’s coldhearted profit motive. Talmadge fought for pay, of course—he had to eat, like anybody else—but in his work for Middle Eastern terrorists, he had been striking out against the West.

And striking back at Uncle Sam.

Bolan was no armchair psychologist, but it didn’t require a Ph.D. to recognize that Talmadge had his pick of causes and employers in a world where violence was the norm. He could’ve spent more time in sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia if his only goal was money in the bank.

Instead, by working for Hamas, al Qaeda and the like, Talmadge had actually chosen sides, but with a difference. He wasn’t some deluded college convert to Islamic fundamentalist extremism, or a celebrity who craved publicity at any cost. He was a soldier, and he’d made a choice.

Bolan thought he understood Gene Talmadge now, and he could even sympathize with him. Up to a point. But sympathy ran out when Talmadge cast his lot with terrorists and criminals. There was—at least to Bolan’s mind—a world of difference between a mercenary soldier drifting aimlessly, involved in brushfire wars without regard to ideology, and one who set himself on a collision course with the United States and civilized society.

Whatever wrongs Talmadge had suffered at the hands of his superiors, he’d given up the moral high ground when he hired on with al Qaeda and its allies to perpetuate a bloodbath fueled by hatred and fanaticism. Bolan knew that something had to be done, and he seemed the best qualified to do the job.

Brognola’s latest information placed the target in Jakarta, where al Qaeda was supposed to have a thriving outpost. Bolan’s contact on the ground would be an agent from Homeland Security, who had been keeping track of Talmadge and his playmates since the news from Gitmo started making waves.

Whether the Special Forces renegade would still be there when Bolan reached the scene was anybody’s guess, but every journey had a starting point.

CHAPTER TWO

Jakarta, Indonesia

The city smelled of spice and death. Street vendors hawked their wares from pushcarts, many of them mobile kitchens offering the best of Far Eastern cuisine at bargain prices, while the nearby waterfront and fish market contributed aromas from the Java Sea.

Mack Bolan almost felt at home among the thousands of pedestrians and cyclists who thronged the narrow streets fronting Kelapa Harbor. It refreshed old memories of other times in Southeast Asia, when he’d gambled with the Reaper and the game had gone his way.

But Bolan always wondered if his luck would hold next time.

This time.

But while he felt at home, in some respects, Bolan was also well aware that he stood out among the locals, obviously alien. He made an easy target in the crowd, and might not see the hunters coming if they played their cards right. It was really their home, after all, and he was just a visitor with the wrong eyes, wrong hair, wrong skin.

Just like the man he was supposed to meet.

Two strangers in a strange land, who had never met each other previously, but whose movements were directed by a higher power. In Bolan’s case, that power was a man named Hal Brognola, operating out of Washington, D.C. His contact also marched to drums from Washington, but had no clue that Bolan and the team he served existed.

All that was about to change, together with the contact’s life, his whole conception of the world.

And Bolan’s?

He would have to wait and see.

Unlike his contact, Bolan had been forearmed with a photograph to help him spot his fellow round-eye at Kelapa Harbor. If their meeting was aborted for whatever reason, they were supposed to try again that afternoon, at the Jakarta Ragunan Zoo. A hookup near the tiger pit.

For his part, Bolan hoped to get it right the first time, but he always liked to have a fallback option, just in case.

He’d come prepared, to the extent that climate and propriety allowed. With temperatures in the nineties, he could hardly wear an overcoat to cover automatic weapons, so he’d opted for a large, loose-fitting shirt, with slacks and running shoes. Beneath the shirt, he had replaced his usual Beretta with a Glock 19, a compact version of the classic semiautomatic pistol that retained its firepower—two rounds better than the Beretta Model 92—while eliminating the external hammer and safety. Two extra magazines weighted his trouser pockets, with a folding knife that resembled a Japanese tanto.

Bolan had purchased those weapons, and some others that he couldn’t sport in public, from a local dealer recommended by Brognola, who acquired the name and address from an unnamed source. That suited Bolan, since the source wouldn’t know his name, either, or the reason why Brognola needed guns in Indonesia, several thousand miles beyond his legal jurisdiction.

Bolan didn’t know if his contact was armed, or if he had been trained to any serious degree in self-defense. The U.S. war on terror, winding down its first decade with no clear end in sight, had thrown together many strange bed-fellows with a mix of capabilities, knowledge and skills that was almost surreal. Homeland Security, for instance, was neither restricted to the continental U.S.A. nor limited in operations to securing airports, borders and the like. Its agents might be anywhere.

Even Jakarta, on a steamy morning when the city smelled like spice and death.

Bolan had memorized a photo and description of his contact, and he had a name. Tom Dixon. He could pick the man out of a crowd, particularly on these streets, but finding him was only step one of the job at hand.

Bolan preferred to work alone, whenever possible, but there were times—like now—when he required assistance from a local or an agent with specific background, skills, intelligence. Tom Dixon was supposed to fit that bill. And if he didn’t?

Once again, Bolan would have to wait and see.

TOM DIXON DAWDLED at a newsstand, checking out the tabloids while he tried to spot a tail. The hairy monster known to locals as orang dalam had paid another visit to Johor, one paper told him, leaving twenty-inch footprints and scaring hell out of coffee plantation workers in the process. Other headlines clamored about rebels in the countryside and government attempts to crush them, while the price of oil was going up again, no end in sight.

Dixon had drawn the Indonesian posting mainly because his language skills included fluency in French, Bahasa Indonesia and Cantonese. It helped to speak the native tongue, of course, but as a white man in an Asian world, there still were times when he felt totally alone.

Like now.

He’d thought the job sounded exciting when he started. Cloak-and-dagger stuff in an exotic setting, very double-0 and all that rot. He even had a pistol, which he’d qualified to use under instruction from a grizzled combat veteran who looked as if he’d been used for target practice by the Red Chinese back in the day.

He’d rolled into Jakarta thinking it would be a piece of cake—or, at the very least, something to tell the kids about, assuming that he ever married, settled down and got around to siring children. Then the truth had slapped him like a wet towel in the face, and Dixon realized that he might never see the U.S.A. again. Might never make it to his thirtieth birthday.

That understanding hadn’t come upon him all at once, of course. First, Dixon had begun to recognize that learning different languages didn’t make him a native of the world at large. No matter how he honed his accent, he was still a white-bread boy from Mason City, Iowa, at heart. And he had much to learn about survival in a society where life was cheap and might made right.

He’d managed well enough at first, in terms of following instructions and collecting certain information his superiors required, but then he started feeling as if everyone was watching him. At first, Dixon had chalked it up to a first-timer’s paranoia, but he soon discovered that he was, in fact, under surveillance.

Fine.

It could’ve been the government, although Indonesia was a theoretical ally in Washington’s attempt to save the world from all free radicals. Or maybe it was someone else. In which case, Dixon thought, he might be well and truly screwed.

There’d been no move against him yet, but maybe they were waiting for a certain time and place in which to strike. Now, with another agent coming from the States to help him out—or do the dirty work, why kid himself?—he wondered if the other side had finally decided to eliminate him.

All his contacts with Homeland Security so far had been securely routed through the U.S. Embassy, and while he didn’t think there was a leak inside, Dixon was wise enough to know he could’ve tipped his hand a hundred different ways while chasing leads on foreign soil. He spoke the language, but he didn’t know the people well enough to tell if they were working both sides of the fence, scheming to bait a trap that would destroy him and his faceless, nameless ally from America.

How’s that for trust? he asked himself, leaving the newsstand with a last glance back along the street he’d traveled moments earlier. No one immediately hid his face or ducked into a doorway, nothing to betray a clumsy tail.

And that was the point, Dixon thought. No one said the enemy was clumsy, stupid or inept.

It was a part of the established Western mind-set, he supposed, but it was clearly wrong. In Vietnam, peasants in black pajamas, armed with weapons left behind from World War II, had fought the mighty U.S. Army to a standstill after eight long years of war with no holds barred. On 9/11, zealots armed with supermarket boxcutters had seized four high-tech airliners and scored the single most destructive hostile raid on U.S. soil in all of history.

Long story short, it didn’t pay to underestimate the enemy, especially when operating on their enemy’s native soil. Dixon had spent the past two nights without much sleep, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong, and he still had nothing to show for it.

Maybe the new guy from the States, this Mr. X, could put things right. If not, then, what?

James Bond would never take this lying down, Dixon thought.

He was smiling when he hit the fish market, then caught a whiff of what was waiting for him, and his face went blank. Dixon had walked the same ground yesterday, getting familiar with the turf, and knew exactly where to go for his anticipated rendezvous. Along the way, he stopped at different stalls, chosen at random, checking out the fish and casting sidelong glances at his backtrack.

Nothing. Zip. Nada.

Which reassured him not at all.

The pistol underneath his baggy shirt, a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson, felt heavier than usual this morning. He supposed that it was nerves, and hoped he wouldn’t freeze if he was forced to use the gun for once, instead of simply hauling it around with him.

He saw the stall with squids and octopuses heaped in baskets, countless arms entangled as if someone had prepared a latex sculpture of Medusa, daubed with slime. Dixon was almost there when strong hands gripped his biceps from behind and someone aimed a solid kick behind his right knee, dropping him into a crouch.

He felt rather than saw the keen blade drawn across his throat.

BOLAN WAS THIRTY FEET from Dixon when it started going down. He’d made a positive ID on Dixon, had the password turning over in his mind, when suddenly two wiry Asians came at Dixon from behind, out of the crowd.

Each man clutched one of Dixon’s arms, one kicked his right leg from behind, to put him on his knees and, as he dropped, the man on Dixon’s right had drawn a long knife from its hidden sheath, whipping the blade across his target’s throat.

Instinct let Bolan draw the Glock 19 as Dixon’s legs were buckling. By the time that his attacker had the knife in hand, Bolan was leaning into target acquisition, with his lightweight autoloader braced in a two-handed combat grip.

He didn’t fire a doubletap, for fear of sending one round wild into the crowd. Instead, he stroked the trigger once and slammed a Parabellum hollowpoint round into the knife man’s chest. Before it had a chance to flatten, chewing through a mangled lung, he was already tracking toward his second target, hands rock steady on the Glock.

Without a sound suppressor, the shot was loud. A wailing cry went up from somewhere close at hand, joined instantly by others, but the racket didn’t mess with Bolan’s aim. He had his target zeroed, even as the second would-be killer raised his eyes from Tom Dixon to glimpse the face of death.

The second round drilled through a startled eye, scrambled the dead man’s brain and flattened up against the inside of his skull. Bolan was moving as his gunfire echoed through the fish market, stooping to clutch at Dixon with his free hand, meanwhile checking out the crowd for any further enemies.

He spotted three within two seconds, give or take, identifiable by their reaction to the shots. While normal vendors and their customers recoiled from the explosive sounds, ducking for cover where they couldn’t flee, these others jostled toward the sound, fighting their way upstream against the human tide. One of them had a pistol in his hand, and Bolan didn’t think the other two would be unarmed.

“Come on!” he snapped at Dixon, giving him a yank to put him on his feet and moving in the right direction, which was anywhere away from there. A solid shove for emphasis got Dixon jogging, ramping up into a sprint after the first few yards.

Bolan was close behind him, following and guiding all at once. They had to reach his car somehow, and hopefully without the bloodbath that would follow naturally from a full-scale shootout in the crowded market.

Dixon, running, called across his shoulder, “Christ, I hope you’re who I think you are.”

“I don’t care much for octopus,” Bolan said, giving him the first half of the pass code.

“On the other hand,” Dixon replied as he should have, “I’m fond of squid. Thank God!”

“Pray later,” Bolan said. “Run now. That way!”

They ran, and someone in the crush behind them risked a shot. It missed both fleeing targets, struck a woman off to Bolan’s left and dropped her with a spout of crimson from her neck.

Bolan ducked lower as he ran, his shoulders hunched, braced for the impact of a bullet at any second. Somewhere behind him, whistles started to blow, indicating that police had joined the chase. That meant, in turn, that he and Dixon now had twice as many enemies. If they were honest cops, they’d go for everyone with guns, likely shoot first and ask their questions later.

Bolan and his sidekick neared the eastern exit from the fish market. This time, a burst of automatic fire tore through the crowd, leaving at least four persons wounded, but again the shooter missed his primary targets.

A moment later, they ran out of fish stalls, but the street beyond was every bit as crowded as the marketplace, with bikes and cars thrown in to make progress more treacherous.

“Go right!” Bolan commanded, satisfied as Dixon made the turn and kept on running.

Bolan, for his part, glanced back in time to see an Asian shooter aiming at him with some kind of automatic weapon. As he fired, Bolan lunged forward, pushing through the crowd.

“WHERE ARE THEY?” Kersen Wulandari barked into his handheld radio. “Report!”

Instead of the immediate responses he expected, Wulandari heard more shooting from the fish market, this time a submachine gun’s ripping sound, and he could feel his stomach clenching painfully.

“Report at once!” he shouted, noting but not caring that his driver winced. It made no difference to Wulandari if pedestrians outside the car heard what he said. They wouldn’t understand it, and they’d never volunteer to testify against him.

After several seconds more, with shots, police whistles and screaming from the fish market, a breathless voice came back to Wulandari.

“Targets moving east on Laks Martadinata. Hard to see with crowd.”

“Close in!” Wulandari barked. “Stop them!”

To his driver, he added: “Hurry! You heard the street.”

The black sedan surged forward, winding through a maze of slow and stationary vehicles, cyclists who seemed suicidal and pedestrians who made a game of stepping into traffic without looking either way. Such traffic was one of the main reasons why Kersen Wulandari hated cities.

That and the police.

Given the choice, he much preferred escorting rural drug convoys, but Wulandari would do any job that paid him well enough. This one paid very well indeed, but now he worried that it was about to end in failure and rejection of his claim for payment.

Maybe worse.

The people who had hired him didn’t—what was the American expression?—mess around. Upon receiving word of failure, they might kill him as an object lesson to the next shooters in line.

The good news was that his employer hadn’t specified live capture of the two round-eyes. That would’ve made Wulandari’s task a hundred times more difficult, and killing them was hard enough already.

They reached the intersection of Hajam Wuruk and Laks Martadinata, where his driver turned left into more abominable traffic, leaning on his horn to clear oblivious pedestrians out of the way. Seething with anger and frustration, Wulandari held the radio close to his ear, as if proximity alone could make the others speak to him.

And to his great surprise, it worked.

“Crossing the street,” one of his soldiers blurted out. “I see!”

Which was a damned sight more than Wulandari could assert. Somewhere ahead of them, he heard more gunfire, sounding like a string of fireworks in the middle distance. His foot soldiers were outrunning Wulandari, yet another reason for his anger to be spiked at fever pitch.

“Catch up with them,” he told the driver.

“But—”

“Just do it! Now!” As Wulandari spoke, he reached into a canvas satchel set between his feet and lifted out a Skorpion machine pistol.

“Yes, sir!” the driver answered smartly, giving one more bleat of warning to pedestrians and all concerned before he swung the steering wheel and stepped on the accelerator.

In front of them, three teenage boys, their faces stamped with childish arrogance, slowed down in answer to the driver’s horn, one of them fanning a rude gesture toward the driver. Wulandari smiled at the resounding thump of metal striking flesh, saw one youth cast aside as if he had weighed nothing, while the seeming ringleader was sucked beneath the car. More satisfying sounds emerged from underneath it as the driver floored his gas pedal and caromed into traffic, gaining ground by fits and starts.

It wasn’t easy going, even with a nervous madman at the wheel. They still had to negotiate around the bulk of other vehicles, while scattering pedestrians and cyclists. Wulandari didn’t care how many peasants suffered injury or worse, as long as he wasn’t included in the final tally of the dead.

And if he completed this job, if the men behind it then refused his payment or tried playing any other kind of dirty game with Wulandari, he would make them all regret it to their dying day.

Ahead, he glimpsed men running pell-mell in the street, one brandishing a pistol overhead. He also heard police whistles, their shrill notes grating badly on his nerves.

The targets were to be eliminated, not delivered to the law for questioning. If they were jailed alive, it meant an even greater failure than if they escaped completely. Wulandari didn’t understand the reason for the contract, but he knew that much with perfect certainty.

The targets had to be silenced. That was paramount in the instructions he’d received.

“Get after them!” he shouted at his driver. “Never mind this rabble. Go!”

AS THEY WERE CROSSING Laks Martadinata, dodging bikes and cars, Bolan turned back to catch a quick glimpse of his enemies and gauge their progress. They were gaining, he discovered, and it came as no surprise.

The hunters knew these streets, and they had no compunction about firing in to the crowd to clear a path. Although denied that option, Bolan still had choices, and he chose to exercise one now.

The nearest gunner, lank and wiry, carrying a small machine pistol, unleashed a burst that fanned the air a yard above his targets, peppering an office block directly opposite. Before he had a chance to fire again, Bolan made target acquisition, stroked his trigger once and closed the gap between them with a single hollowpoint round.

The shooter’s head snapped back and he went down, dead index finger clenched around the trigger of his SMG and spraying bullets toward the sky. A driver coming up behind him tried to stop but couldn’t make it, thumping hard over the twitching corpse.

Bolan spun and sprinted after Dixon while the traffic snarled behind him, several cars slamming into one another after some kind of homemade pickup truck rear-ended the small sedan that had flattened his enemy. Cyclists swerved to miss the pileup, several of them toppling from their two-wheelers to the pavement.

Confusion was good.

It would slow the police and maybe the shooters still fit to pursue him. As curious spectators rushed toward the accident scene, Bolan’s stalkers would find it more difficult bucking the tide. With any luck, he thought, the small delay might let him reach his car.

Maybe.

And maybe not.

No choice, he told himself as he began to overtake Tom Dixon. There were limits to how far the pair of them could run, and while Dixon might be familiar with Jakarta’s streets, he wouldn’t know them as well as the natives who hunted them. Sooner or later, fatigue and superior numbers would spell defeat for Bolan and the contact he had barely met.

The parking garage was just three blocks away. If they made it that far, if they could reach his rental wheels, they had a chance.

Bolan refused to entertain defeatist thinking. Catching up with Dixon now, he called out, “Left. Two blocks.” His contact turned at the next intersection, ducking as a bullet struck the wall above him, spraying concrete chips into the crowd.

Another backward glance showed Bolan two shooters when he could readily identify, and he had no good reason to believe they were alone. If even one of them was in communication with a mobile team, somewhere ahead or even running parallel, then Bolan’s race could end in seconds flat with blazing automatic weapons.

He ran on, goading Dixon from behind, and saw the tall, ugly shape of the parking garage up ahead. They’d have to cross the street again, through traffic, but it was a risk they could afford, compared to the alternative.

They covered another block, with no more shots behind them, and he called to Dixon, “The garage. Across the street.”

“Okay,” the young American replied, and with the briefest glance to either side, he plunged into the flow of bikes and cars.

The guy had nerve, at least.

Bolan pursued him, dodging vehicles, ignoring tinny protests from a dozen horns. Behind him, another brief crackle of SMG fire made him dodge to the left, using an ancient panel truck for fleeting cover as the bullets struck a windshield and a motorcyclist to Bolan’s left.

Collateral damage, and he couldn’t do a thing about it in his present situation. Bolan hated it when bystanders were sucked into his war, but in each case where that occurred, the choice belonged to someone else. One of his enemies. To Bolan’s certain knowledge, he had never injured a civilian noncombatant beyond minor cuts and bruises, in the most extreme of situations. Shrapnel did its own thing, and to hell with consequences, but he specialized in strikes of surgical precision, taking out his targets without any street-gang drive-by nonsense that was typically a waste of time and ammunition.

Clearly, those pursuing him had other views on how a battle should be fought.

The hell of it was that they still might win.

Dixon had reached the other sidewalk now, and Bolan joined him a second later, shoving him for emphasis when Dixon slowed to see if he was keeping up.

“Third level,” Bolan rasped at him. “A gray Toyota four-door, backed into space 365.”

“Got it!”

They’d passed the stairs already, which meant running in a long, slow zigzag pattern up one sloping ramp after another, to the third floor of the vast parking garage. There were at least a hundred parking spaces on each level, overhead fluorescent lighting casting pools of shadow between cars that could conceal an army of assassins, if they knew where he had parked.

They don’t, he thought. Why chase us, otherwise?

That logic got them to the third level, but Bolan half imagined running footsteps just below them. Shooters catching up? Maybe a rent-a-cop who’d glimpsed his pistol as they entered?

Bolan palmed the rented vehicle’s keys and thumbed the button to unlock its doors. The dome light flared, helping direct Dixon to the car. While the agent threw himself into the shotgun seat, Bolan slid in behind the wheel, cranked the ignition and released the parking brake.

“They found us!” Dixon told him as the gray Toyota leaped out of its parking space.

“Hang on!” Bolan said to his passenger. “It’s all downhill from here.”

CHAPTER THREE

Three shooters formed a fragile skirmish line across the exit ramp as Bolan’s hired car hurtled toward them, gaining speed with an assist from gravity. The middle man carried some kind of Uzi submachine gun knockoff, while his flankers brandished shiny semiautomatic pistols. When they saw that Bolan wasn’t slowing, the bookends dived for cover, while their seeming leader opened fire.

Too late.

His first round cracked the gray Toyota’s windshield, two or three more struck the window frame and roof with glancing blows and all the rest were wasted as the bumper clipped his knees and rolled him up across the hood, then tossed him high and wide over the speeding car.

Wild pistol shots rang out behind them, none finding their mark, and Bolan’s vacant rearview mirror told him that the bookends had decided not to mount a hot pursuit.

He slowed when they were out of range, hoping to pass the exit booth without another incident, but then he saw the cashier craning a look from his window, obviously trying to pinpoint the source of gunfire. Bolan floored the gas then, surging forward as the clerk ducked backward, out of sight. They hit the flimsy wooden barricade at fifty, smashed on through it and were gone.

More damage to the rental, there, and Bolan knew he’d have to ditch it soon, or else risk drawing more attention from police. Before he thought about new wheels, however, there was still the matter of escaping from their present trap.

They weren’t clear yet. He was prepared to bet his life on that.

To prove his point, a navy-blue sedan bearing two or three men raced head-on toward Bolan’s vehicle, when he had barely cleared the gate of the municipal garage. The grim-faced driver seemed intent on ramming him, but Bolan called his bluff.

Another terse “Hang on!” to Dixon, and he held down the accelerator, holding steady on the steering wheel. Most hit men, in his experience, lacked the fanatic’s common urge toward martyrdom. In short, they shied away from suicide whenever possible—but there were always rare exceptions to the rule.

With thirty yards between them, Bolan wondered if the other driver had the grim resolve to take him out at any cost. A head-on collision at their current rate of speed meant almost certain death, regardless of the built-in air bags or the safety harness that he hadn’t taken time to buckle as they fled. No vehicle created for the world’s civilian markets could save its occupants if they were doing sixty miles per hour and they hit another car doing the same. That made the terminal velocity 120 miles per hour.

And the operative word was terminal.

“Jesus!” Dixon blurted out. “What are you—?”

“Doing,” or whatever else he meant to say, was swallowed by an incoherent squeal of panic, just before the chase car’s driver swerved to save himself, jumping the curb and scattering pedestrians as it decelerated brutally, tires smoking on the pavement.

Bolan took advantage of the lag, however brief, before his enemy could turn and follow him. Accelerating toward the nearest busy cross street, he decided slowing for the turn would be a costly waste of time, more likely to produce an accident than to avert one. It was all-or-nothing time, and Bolan’s life was riding on the line.

“Hang—”

“On, I know,” Dixon finished for him, clutching at the plastic handgrip mounted just above his door. “Just do it.”

Bolan did it, swerving into northbound traffic with a chorus of protesting horns and overheated brakes behind him. He was looking for police cars now, as much as shooters, hoping that it wouldn’t turn into a three-way race.

The press of traffic slowed him, but he still made fairly decent speed. Jakarta’s drivers didn’t dawdle unless they were stuck in traffic jams, and some of them were dare-devils in their own right. He watched for hunters, heading either way, and warned Dixon to do the same.

“I’m on it,” the agent replied, his voice sounding more normal than it had a moment earlier. “Sorry about all that back there.”

“It may not be your fault,” Bolan said, knowing even as he spoke that Dixon probably had missed some sign that he was being followed to the meet, and likely well before.

But, then again, it could’ve been his fault. They’d likely never know unless the trackers overtook and captured them.

How many in the hunting party? Bolan couldn’t say. He’d dealt with three men on the run, a fourth in the garage, with two more seen on foot and two or three in the chase car. Beyond that, he’d be guessing, which was usually a waste of time and energy.

If Bolan couldn’t count his enemies, he would assume they had him covered, both outnumbered and outgunned. He’d act accordingly, and put a damper on whatever latent cockiness he might’ve felt after a hell-for-leather getaway that left him and his contact more or less unscathed.

They weren’t clear yet.

And if he needed any proof of that, his rearview mirror gave it to him, framing a blurred image of the navy-blue chase car.

“Incoming,” Bolan told his passenger. “Get buckled up.”

Bolan followed his own advice, knowing the safety harness wouldn’t save him from a bullet, any more than it would help him walk away from sixty-mile-per-hour crashes into other speeding vehicles. Still, it was something, and he needed any small edge he could get right now.

To stay alive and find out what the hell was going on.

KERSEN WULANDARI CLUTCHED his Skorpion machine pistol so tightly that his fingernails and knuckles blanched, the weapon’s wooden grip printing its checkered pattern on his palm. He didn’t feel it, kept his index finger off the trigger only with an effort, craning forward in his seat and staring at the target up ahead.

“Get after them!” he snarled. “Don’t let them get away this time!”

His driver didn’t answer, fully focused on the street and the traffic that surrounded them. They were already well above the posted speed limit and still accelerating, but the other cars around them made a straight run at their prey impossible.

Wulandari couldn’t fault his driver for not crashing into their opponents’ vehicle outside of the garage. He had no wish to die for what he had been paid to do, the present job, although that risk was always present in Wulandari’s line of work. The trick, he knew, was making sure that other people died, while he survived to joke about their final, agonizing moments with his friends over a round of drinks.

Unfortunately, these damned Westerners weren’t the kind of targets he was used to. They were quick, courageous, deadly. He’d already lost at least three men pursuing them, and now Wulandari didn’t know what had become of those who’d chased the targets into the garage. The building’s steel-and-concrete structure interfered with messages after they ran inside, and there’d been nothing more since the Americans escaped.

All dead?

Wulandari didn’t know, nor, at that moment, did he care.

The men he’d chosen for this day’s assignment had proved adequate on other jobs. All ten were killers, tested under fire in gang wars with the triads and the Yakuza. They hadn’t failed him yet, but once was all it took to make a corpse out of a street soldier.

Three corpses. Maybe six, for all Wulandari knew.

And three more shooters still at large, somewhere, presumably attempting to make contact with the targets.

Scooping up a walkie-talkie in his free hand, Wulandari keyed the button for transmission, snapping at the air, “Car Two! Where are you? Answer!”

Agonizing second later, came the answer. “Passing the art gallery, westbound. Over.”

That had to mean Jakarta’s Fine Art Gallery, below Merak Expressway. They were headed in the right direction, anyway.

“We’re near the Puppet Theater,” Wulandari told his second chase car. “Target fifty meters up ahead. Hurry, before you lose us!”

“Coming!” the tinny voice said before the radio went dead.

Wulandari should’ve felt relieved, with help rushing along behind to join him, but his anger and frustration banished any positive emotion. Even as the fury raged inside him, he was fully conscious of his cardinal mistake.

Don’t get involved.

Killing and kidnapping for money was a business, he understood, and businessmen who let personal feelings cloud their judgment soon went out of business, losing everything they had.

In this case, that could mean Wulandari’s life.

He didn’t plan to die that afternoon, but neither had the men he’d lost so far. Wulandari guessed that all of them had counted on another night of drinking, sex and restful sleep after a job well done. For three of them, at least, those plans were rudely swept aside and cast onto the rubbish heap.

Wulandari didn’t care to join them.

“Speed up, damn you!” he grated, striking at his driver’s shoulder with the hand that clutched his radio. The wheelman grunted, flinched, his jerky move reflected in their auto’s swerving progress.

“Hold steady!” Wulandari barked, but he recognized his own irrationality, refraining from another blow.

The car surged forward, somehow finding still more power underneath the hood. They brushed against a slower vehicle, passing too closely on Wulandari’s side, but he dared not complain. His driver was obeying orders, narrowing the gap that separated them from their appointed targets.

Wulandari found the power button for his window, held it down until the tinted glass was fully lowered and a rush of wind filled up the car. He propped his elbow on the windowsill, bracing the Skorpion, but hot wind made his eyes tear, blurred his target as he tried to aim.

He couldn’t tell the driver to slow down, but if he couldn’t see…

Wulandari reached into his shirt pocket, heard fabric rip as he retrieved his sunglasses and slipped them on. It was a little better when he again poked his head outside the speeding car. Not perfect, but at least he had a chance to aim.

And have his head ripped off or shattered, if his driver brushed against another vehicle.

“Be careful now!” he shouted, words torn from his lips by rushing wind.

Sighting as best he could, Wulandari pulled the trigger, spraying five or six rounds from the Skorpion’s 20-round box magazine. A march of bullet holes across the gray Toyota’s trunk rewarded him, before his weapon’s muzzle rose and sent the last two rounds hurtling downrange, wasted.

“Closer!” Wulandari shouted, reaching with his left hand to extend the Skorpion’s wire shoulder stock.

His driver muttered something unintelligible in the roar of wind, but he produced another surge of speed. Wulandari smiled, lips drawn back over crooked teeth, and steeled himself to try again.

“THAT’S TOO DAMNED CLOSE,” Dixon said, his shoulders hunched against the prospect of a bullet drilling through his seat.

“Tell me about it,” the grim man at the wheel replied.

Dixon had drawn his Glock but knew he couldn’t make a decent shot under the circumstances, swiveled in his seat and leaning out the window where he’d have to fire left-handed. He was in this stranger’s hands, with killers rolling up behind them, spraying the Toyota with machine-gun fire.

Terrific.

“There’s more company,” his wheelman said.

Turning so quickly that he sent a bolt of white-hot pain searing along the right side of his neck, Dixon picked out a second chase car gaining on the first. He knew it wasn’t just another crazy native driver, from the way it swerved through traffic, breaking all the rules to overtake the dark sedan bristling with guns.

We’re toast, he thought, but kept it to himself, as if afraid that saying it would realize his fears.

“Hang on,” Bolan said.

“Right.”

It had become their litany, damned near the only conversation passed between them since their mad race from the drab parking garage. He wondered if the man they’d struck was dead or dying, mildly startled to discover that he hoped so.

One less to come back and bite them in the ass, he thought.

But there were still enough behind them to kill him and the man he knew as Matt Cooper. All the men and guns they needed were in the two chase cars. He didn’t know if Cooper could evade them, doubted it, and doubted even more his own ability to come through any kind of urban gunfight with body and soul intact.

Dixon had trained for this, after a fashion, but he’d never really taken any of it seriously. No one in his graduating class believed that they’d be shooting anyone. They were paper pushers, marginal investigators, only dubbed field agents out of courtesy. Even the posting to Jakarta, with the various advisories upon departure, hadn’t driven home the point.

But he was thrashing in the deep end now, and no mistake about it. Under other circumstances, Dixon might’ve said he had a choice—to sink or swim—but as it was, his choices seemed to be preempted by the driver of the vehicle in which he sat, and by the killers burning up the road behind him, shooting as they came.

“You know this neighborhood?” Bolan asked.

“More or less,” Dixon replied.

“I need some kind of cul-de-sac or parking area where I can get some combat stretch, maybe to turn around.”

Dixon thought hard enough to give himself a headache, which was no great trick just then. “Okay,” he said. “You’re heading for a turnoff to the lake. Penjaringan. It’s on your right. Take that and go down toward the water. There’s a parking lot for tourists. Shouldn’t have too many cars, this hour on a week day.”

“Let’s find out,” Bolan said, as the sign rushed at them. This time, when he made the screeching turn, there was no warning to hang on. Dixon was ready for it anyway, and gripped the handle overhead as if he’d been aboard a subway train racing at top speed through the dark.

“We’ve got at least four guys behind us,” Dixon noted when his driver had the gray Toyota running straight and true again. “There could be twice that many.”

“Right.”

“You plan to take them all?”

“I’m working on it,” Bolan said. “But if you have a plan, I’m open to suggestions.”

“Nope. Not me. Just wondered how you meant to pull it off.” The sinking feeling in his gut told Dixon that he was about to die.

“When you’re outnumbered,” Bolan said, flicking another quick glance toward his rearview, “there are three things you can do. I doubt our friends back there are interested in negotiation or surrender.”

“What’s the third option?” Dixon asked.

“Fight like hell.”

“Uhhuh.”

“You’re not a pacifist, I hope?” Bolan asked.

“No.”

“All right, then. If you get a chance to use that Smith, remember what they taught you on the range.”

“Center of mass. Don’t jerk the trigger. Double tap, if feasible.”

“Sounds like the ticket,” Bolan said. “And here we are.”

They roared into a spacious parking lot with fewer than a dozen vehicles in sight, all clustered at the far end, near an area of restaurants and gift shops. Lake Penjaringan was popular for boating, fishing and assorted other water sports, but weekends were its busy time.

“I bluffed their wheelman once,” Bolan said, his eyes locked on the rearview now. “I don’t know if he’ll tumble twice, but it’s the only chance we have right now.” And then, “Hang on!”

Dixon couldn’t be sure exactly what the stranger did next, but he seemed to stamp down on the brake and the accelerator simultaneously, meanwhile spinning the wheel rapidly to his left. The net effect included squealing tires, a revving engine and a dizzying 180-degree turn that left rubber scorch marks on the sun-bleached asphalt of the parking lot.

Dixon was still recovering from the bootlegger’s turn, trying to get his stomach back in place, when Cooper floored the gas again and charged off toward their enemies.

This time, two chase cars were approaching, side by side and barreling ahead at sixty miles per hour. Dixon wondered if the drivers were prepared to lose their second game of chicken to this brash American.

“Ready?” Bolan called as his window powered down, right arm extended with his Glock clenched in his fist. “Okay, then. Give ’em hell!”

BOLAN WAS COUNTING on surprise and sheer audacity to give him an advantage over his pursuers, but it was still a gamble. Repetition of a tactic could be perilous, yet Bolan’s options were distinctly limited. He couldn’t drive around Jakarta with the shooters on his tail until his car ran out of gas, nor did he care to bail out in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare and take the battle back to urban infantry maneuvers.

Barring reinforcements, which he didn’t have, the chicken run would have to do—but with a twist this time.

The chase cars were advancing side by side, with several feet of empty space between them, giving the shotgun riders and whoever occupied the back seats room to aim and fire their weapons. Bolan’s angle of attack meant that, unless they rammed him, he would pass along the driver’s side of the vehicle on his right, while Dixon faced the front-and back-seat guns of its companion, on their left. Bad luck for Dixon, but if he had nerve enough, they just might make it work.

Bolan began to fire his Glock when they were twenty yards from impact, three rounds out of eighteen gone before he sighted on the left-hand chase car’s windshield. Two shots drilled through the driver’s side, and then he saw the black sedan begin to swerve off target.

He had a glimpse of someone in the back seat, leveling a weapon larger than a pistol, flinching from the windshield hits. Before the shooter could recover, Bolan triggered two more shots and punched him backward, out of view. A jagged muzzle-flash spit bullets through the right-hand chase car’s roof.

To Bolan’s left, Tom Dixon’s .40-caliber pistol was hammering away, while a Kalashnikov erupted, chattering defiance. Bolan heard a couple of the rifle’s slugs strike home, like hammer blows against the hired Toyota’s flanks. They apparently missed the tires and engine, but Bolan flinched when Dixon grunted, wondering if he’d taken a hit.

They roared on past the chase cars, Bolan’s eyes pinned to the rearview mirror as he asked, “Are you all right?”

Dixon was swiping at his cheek with bloody fingertips. “I think so. Caught a splinter, maybe.”

Lucky.

“Here we go again,” Bolan warned. “This time, don’t expect a break.”

“I’m ready,” Dixon said.

Swerving through the turn, Bolan saw one carload of his assailants stalled, its lifeless driver slumped behind the wheel, the shotgun rider scrambling out on foot. The other car was swinging back around to make another run, with the AK protruding from a window on the driver’s side.

The other side could make a sieve of his Toyota with the Kalashnikov, he knew, chewing him and Dixon into hamburger. The rifle was a killer at three hundred yards, three times the theoretical effective range of Bolan’s Glock, ten times its practical effective range.

He couldn’t duel the rifleman, but he could seize the moment to his own advantage.

If he dared.

Bolan stamped down on the accelerator, hurtling toward his enemies. “Be ready when I make another turn, and brace for impact,” he told Dixon.

“Impact. Jesus.”

Bolan tore across the parking lot, directly toward the second chase car, locked on a collision course. At the last moment, when it seemed explosive impact was inevitable, he swung through another tire-scorching one-eighty, starting so close to his adversaries that the swerving rear of his Toyota struck their front end like a half-ton slap across the face.

The Executioner was out and running, even as the aftershocks of impact shuddered through both vehicles. He saw Tom Dixon moving on the other side, pistol extended as he raced back toward the chase car, his face etched in a snarl.

Then Bolan started firing, pumping Parabellum rounds into his shaken enemies at point-blank range. The AK handler took one through his left eye socket, and another through his gaping mouth for safety’s sake. Up front, the shotgun rider had to have dropped his pistol, fumbling on the floor between his feet as Bolan turned and shot him once behind the ear.

Dixon took out the driver, blasting rounds into his neck and chest. Behind him, Bolan saw the last man from the other chase car hobbling toward them, lining up a shot, and called a warning to his contact.

Dixon turned, fired once and missed, then nailed it on the second try, even as Bolan helped him with a rapid double tap.

And they were done.

Around them, only corpses shared the battleground.

“We’re out of time,” Bolan told Dixon, “and we need fresh wheels. Tell me your story on the way.”

“WHAT KIND OF BACKGROUND do you need?” Dixon asked when they’d cleared the killing ground.

“Start from the top,” Bolan replied, “but don’t go back to Genesis.”

“Okay. I’ve been on-site for just about a year. Before that, I did two years stateside. Nothing relevant. You may know that al Qaeda and some other groups with similar potential have had cells in Indonesia since the nineties. Not surprising, when you think about it, since the population’s mostly Muslim. Eighty-odd percent. And they’ve got reasonable access to material support from China, too.”

Bolan had known that going in. He waited through the appetizer, for the main course.

“Now, this Talmadge character’s been in and out of Indonesia for the past three years, I understand,” Dixon continued. “We hear rumors that he may’ve been involved with some of the activity in East Timor.”

Activity presumably referring to the genocidal action instigated by Indonesian rulers in 1999, when East Timor’s population voted to secede from its parent nation and enjoy self-rule. By the time UN peacekeepers restored a semblance of order and supervised East Timor’s first election in April 2002, an estimated three hundred thousand persons were dead, East Timor’s meager infrastructure lay in ruins and the mostly agricultural economy was belly-up.

“Which side?” Bolan asked.

“Hard to say. The rumors go both ways,” Dixon replied. “Since then, our boy has mostly been a gun-for-hire and part-time training officer for outfits like Hamas, al Qaeda and the Islamic Jihad. No Muslim background that we know of, but he likes those petrodollars. Has three bank accounts, one each in Switzerland, the Caymans and Sri Lanka.”

“It’s a small world, after all,” Bolan remarked.

“And getting smaller all the time, apparently,” Dixon said. “In the past eleven months, Talmadge has logged close to a half a million frequent-flyer miles. We’ve tracked him back and forth to different parts of Europe, to Australia and New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, and once to Canada—B.C., specifically. He’s literally all over the map. Some of it’s visits to his banks. The rest, we’re guessing meets with his employers and some contract jobs that just coincidentally occur when he’s nearby.”

“Has anybody thought of handing him to Interpol?” Bolan asked.

“Thought about it, sure. But on what charge? His bank deposits are straightforward, nothing to suggest a laundry operation. He’s not moving contraband, as far as anyone can tell. The people we can prove he’s spoken to aren’t fugitives—at least not in the countries where they’re living at the moment. On the hits, we can’t prove anything beyond proximity.”

“And now, this Gitmo thing,” Bolan said.

“Right. He’s up to something for the AQ crowd, but what? We’ve covered his apartment in Jakarta. Bugs and taps, the whole megillah, but he doesn’t use the telephone for anything important, and his only visitors are hookers. Once a week, like clockwork, he gets laid if he’s in town. Tonight’s the night.”

“Maybe we ought to crash the party.”

“It’s a thought. Take flowers, maybe?”

“Maybe lilies. But we need another car, first thing.”

“You won’t be trading this one in, I take it,” Dixon said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay.” The younger man considered that, then said, “I’ve never hot-wired anything before. I mean, they didn’t teach car theft or anything like that in training.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Bolan said. “What we need right now is somewhere we can drop this one and not be noticed while we switch the plates to something suitable.”

“My first thought would be HPK,” Dixon replied. “Halim Perdana Kusuma. The airport.”

Bolan thought about it, judging distances. It meant driving three miles or so, across Jakarta, without being noticed by police. “What’s closer?” he inquired.

“There’s Kemayoran, formerly the local airport,” Dixon said. “They’ve turned it into some kind of outlandish shopping mall, but there are parking lots.”

Closer, the warrior knew, from memorizing street maps in advance. “Okay. Let’s try that first.”

“Suits me. You know the way?”

“I’ve got it,” Bolan said. “But just the same, correct me if you see I’m heading off toward Borneo or something.”

“Right.” It was the first time he had seen Tom Dixon smile. “About just now…in case you couldn’t tell, I’ve never killed a man before.”

Bolan could have replied, “First time for everything,” but that would be both flippant and a lie. Most people never killed another human being. Soldiers, cops and criminals were those most likely to take lives, but even then it was a relatively rare event. Millions of soldiers served their tours of duty in peacetime and never fired a shot in anger. Most cops never pulled the trigger on a suspect, making those who did so more than once immediately suspect in the eyes of their superiors. Even most criminals had never killed, restricting their activities to theft, white-collar crimes or petty drug offenses.

Without planning it, Tom Dixon had been drafted into a fraternity whose members shared a single trait: the rare experience of canceling another human being’s ticket to the great arcade of life. Some members of that clique enjoyed it; others never quite forgave themselves. The rest, who spilled blood in the line of duty forced upon them by their times, their conscience or their personality, learned how to live with it.

Bolan couldn’t predict which kind of killer Dixon might turn out to be. In fact, he didn’t care, as long as Dixon managed to perform his duties adequately for the next few hours or days.

Once Bolan left, he could break down and weep, become a raving psychopath or simply go back to his paper-pushing job. It wouldn’t matter to the Executioner.

This day, this job was all that mattered.

But they had blown their cover big time. Everything beyond that point would be a catch-up game.

And Bolan feared that they were running out of time.

CHAPTER FOUR

Jakarta’s Kemayoran district, formerly the site of a major airport, lies in the city’s eastern quadrant, two miles distant from the cooling breezes of the Java Sea. It swelters from the wicked combination of a tropic climate and an overdose of asphalt topped by concrete towers rising toward the humid sky. Pedestrians sweat through their clothes while traveling a block, and those blessed with the miracle of air-conditioning are prone to let it run full blast.

Finding the former airport was no problem. It appeared on Bolan’s maps, and Dixon knew the mall by reputation, while denying that he’d ever shopped there. Bolan cruised the spacious parking lot until he spotted a Toyota the same year and model as his bullet-punctured ride, then parked as close as possible.

It was that hazy time of dusk, between late afternoon and early evening, when floodlights set on timers hadn’t flared to life and mall employees tasked to watch security monitors were thinking more about the night ahead than what was happening on any given one of twenty smallish screens. Bolan was grateful for the hour, but he wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

“You’re watching, right?” he asked Dixon.

“Affirmative.”

Reaching into a bag behind the driver’s seat, Bolan withdrew a foot-long strip of metal and a large screwdriver, both of which he tucked beneath his floppy shirt. He left the car with Dixon, his companion staking out a point midway between the two Toyotas and pretending that he had to tie his shoe while Bolan went ahead.

Another moment placed him in the parking slot beside the target vehicle. He took a final searching look around, then slipped his shim into the narrow gap between the driver’s window and its frame. He found the catch in something like ten seconds, slipped it and was in the driver’s seat a heartbeat later, thankful that the car had no alarm installed.

The screwdriver came next, applied with brutal force to wrench the round ignition keyhole mechanism from the steering column. Once that obstacle had been removed, Bolan’s screwdriver doubled as the missing key itself; a simple twist was all that he needed to revive the sleeping engine.

Bolan left it running as he found a switch beside his seat, opened the trunk and exited. Dixon kept watch while Bolan palmed another tool, removed the rental’s license plates, then claimed his various belongings from the now abandoned car: his small toolkit, a slightly larger bag for clothes and shaving gear, a heavy duffel bag that clanked and rattled when he picked it up or set it down.

The latter earned a blink from Dixon, but he didn’t ask. Instead, he settled in the shotgun seat as if the car belonged to him and always had.

Two points for cool.

The second-worst part of stealing any car was exiting the crime scene proper without being spotted. Once they reached a public street, they would become invisible. A second stop, to switch the license plates, would make the switch complete. From that point onward, only a direct comparison of vehicle registration numbers would prove that the plates on their car were mismatched.

A quiet place to park, no witnesses, nothing to make a round-eye draw attention while he touched up small details about his vehicle. Bolan was looking for the perfect spot when Dixon asked, “What will you do with Talmadge?”

“That depends on him,” Bolan replied. It wasn’t quite a lie.

“Because I had a briefing on the Justice ruling, back in 1990-something, authorizing federal agents to arrest suspected terrorists on foreign soil, without a warrant from the local courts. We’re clear on that.”

Bolan suppressed a smile as he replied, “You think the Indonesians might consider that kidnapping? Did they get the memo? Does an order signed in Washington trump local law out here?”

“It does in my book,” Dixon answered. “We’re at war.”

“You’ll get no argument from me on that score,” Bolan told him, “but it didn’t start on 9/11, and it won’t end if and when we bag Osama. As for orders out of Justice, please refrain from telling any local cops or soldiers that you got your go-ahead from the attorney general of the United States. You’ll only make them laugh before they put a bullet in your head.”

“So, what you’re saying is—”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore. This isn’t U.S. soil and never has been. People here salute a different flag, and they’re not bound by anything the President or members of his cabinet may say. We’re fugitives right now, and most of what we do from this point on will be illegal.”

“In the strictest sense, of course, but—”

“In the only sense that matters,” Bolan interrupted him. “We’ve killed nine men. The penalty for murder here is death by hanging or by firing squad. You get a choice, but no appeal. Maybe you think the embassy will intervene if you’re arrested.”

“No,” Dixon said, sounding more subdued. “They made a special point of clarifying that.”

“We’re clear, then,” Bolan said. “You have to watch your step. Forget about what some attorney general said ten years ago, and focus on surviving, here and now.”

“I hear you.”

“Good.”

He found a residential lane where streetlights were in short supply and parked the car. Five minutes later, they were on the move again, wearing the license plates from Bolan’s rental.

It was still a problem, but at least he’d bought some time. Their new car would be flagged as stolen when its owner finished shopping at the mall, but with so many Japanese compacts thronging Jakarta’s streets, its tags would be the main identifier. Those were gone, and by the time some clerk at Bolan’s rental agency decided to report the other car missing, he hoped his work in the vicinity would be completed.

“Next stop,” he said to Dixon, “Talmadge’s apartment.”

“It’s across town,” Dixon told him. “On the west side, off Tomang Raja, near the Banjir Canal.”

“Okay.” A careful U-turn got them headed back in the direction they had come from.

“But I’m still not clear,” Dixon said, “on what you—what we—intend to do with Talmadge.”

“We intend to question him, ideally,” Bolan said.

“And if the circumstances aren’t ideal?”

“Our bottom-line assignment is to stop him doing any further favors for his latest batch of clients. Period.”

“Kill him, you mean.”

“It’s possible,” Bolan allowed.

“Because he’s dangerous. To the United States.”

“He’s dangerous to everyone right now,” Bolan replied. “Al Qaeda and Hamas don’t limit their attacks to the U.S. or Israel. They’ve bombed London, Spain, Kenya and Tanzania. They’re full-service murderers.”

“That’s good.” Dixon was nodding like an athlete getting pumped up for the big game of the season. “Right. That’s very good.”

“Just keep your eyes and ears open,” Bolan suggested. “You’ve already proved yourself. You didn’t freeze. Whatever happens next, you’ll be all right.”

“I’m good,” said Dixon. “We’re the good guys, right?”

“That’s what it says on my white hat,” Bolan replied.

THEIR TARGET’S SMALL apartment house off Tomang Raja stood among a hundred others that were more or less the same, distinguished by their faded colors more than anything unique about their architecture. They reminded Bolan of a minicity he had seen at LEGOLAND in Europe, on another job. Instead of plastic pieces, though, these look-alike apartment houses had been built with lath and plaster, cheaply painted, then abandoned to begin their slow decomposition in the tropic climate.

Sun and rain would do the rest, assisted by the tenants who cared nothing for a landlord’s property, and sometimes precious little for themselves.

Bolan wasn’t surprised that Talmadge would’ve chosen such a neighborhood in which to live. He wouldn’t fear the neighbors—quite the opposite, in fact, if they were wise—and living in a downscale area helped to preserve his anonymity. He would desire a low profile, waiting to make a bigger splash when he retired.

And Talmadge would have enemies, like any other mercenary who had shopped his skills around the troubled planet. There was never time or opportunity to kill them all, as Bolan knew from personal experience. No matter how he tried, regardless of his scorched-earth tactics, there would always be survivors hungry for revenge.

Still, with a new address, new name, new face, new history, he just might pull it off.

Somehow. Someday.

“Garage stalls in the back,” Dixon explained, “along a kind of alley fronting the canal. No parking lot.”

“It’s not a problem,” Bolan said. He’d noticed empty parking spaces on the street and didn’t mind a short walk back from wherever they had to leave the car.

“So, what’s the drill?” Dixon asked.

“We go in and knock,” Bolan said. “Say hello and ask if he can spare a cup of java.”

“Like Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“Without the Bibles,” Bolan said.

“Okay with me,” his contact said. And then, “You sure?”

“What were you thinking?” Bolan asked him. “Climb a drainpipe? Go in through the bathroom window?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Dixon granted. “But it seems to me, he may be waiting for us. Well, not us, but someone. He’s a killer, right?”

“A soldier,” Bolan said.

“Ex-soldier. And a terrorist.”

“You’re thinking he may shoot us,” Bolan said.

“It crossed my mind. Suppose he’s sitting on an arsenal up there? Then what?”

“Has anybody looked inside? The team that bugged his place?”

“They didn’t want to risk it. Went in through the neighbors’ flats and put mikes in the walls.”

Which meant that Talmadge could be sitting on an arsenal—or nothing. Bolan didn’t think he’d be unarmed. It went too much against the grain, against his lifelong training and experience, but there were countless levels of preparedness. It was a waste of time to sit and speculate.

He parked the stolen car a block west of the target, locked its doors and took the slender shim along with him, for when they doubled back. It might look strange, him fiddling with the window when he wanted to get back inside, but Bolan chose that option over leaving it unlocked and trusting thieves to stay away.

Losing a stolen car was one thing, but he wouldn’t risk the hardware in its trunk until he’d had his money’s worth out of the mobile arsenal.

“Just pistols?” Dixon asked him as they left the car and crossed the street.

“If we need more than that,” Bolan replied, “our plan is seriously flawed.”

“About this knocking thing…”

“It’s how they play it, in polite society.”

“Is that what this is?” Dixon asked.

“Hope springs eternal.”

“Right.”

He had a point, of course. Maybe they should’ve loaded up for bear and smashed through Talmadge’s front door with automatic weapons blazing, but the job—at least in Bolan’s mind—was more than simply taking out a soldier who’d gone bad.

They were supposed to find out what Talmadge was doing for his latest sponsors, what their move was meant to be against the country they called Satan. Simply dropping Talmadge in his tracks might stall the plan, but on the other hand, there was a decent chance it could proceed with other personnel and reap the same results.

Whatever those were.

Count on chaos and destruction, maybe catastrophic loss of life, or else selective murders of specific targets carried out with surgical precision. Either way, the zealots who were renting Talmadge and his expertise would want the most bang for their bucks. And at the moment, only Talmadge could reveal who his employers were.

Only the man they’d come to see could give them details of the plan.

Assuming they could make him talk.

That would be easier if he was breathing when they started asking questions, but in games like this the target often literally called the shots. If Talmadge chose to make a fight of it, resisting with the same skills Bolan had and using any weapons within reach, taking the man alive might not be possible.

And if he forced their hands, what then?

Where did they go for answers?

Wait and see. Don’t count him out.

Not yet.

They walked around the block, came in behind the building, with the broad canal exuding stagnant odors on their right, stucco and curtained windows on the left. Bolan counted the buildings, picking out the paint job, and the back door opened at his touch.

So far, so good.

Stairs just inside, and Bolan led the way, knowing that Talmadge had a flat on the third floor. The stairs were solid, maybe concrete under threadbare carpet, so they didn’t squeak.

On three, Bolan let Dixon take the lead, moving along a narrow hallway redolent with smells of cabbage, pork and something else he didn’t want to think about. Maybe a version of despair.

Talmadge had found a place to hide where no one would expect to find him.

No one but the Executioner.

Dixon stood off to one side of the door and nodded.

Bolan reached across to knock.

NOTHING. THE RAPPING ECHOED back at them but brought no answer from inside the flat. No shuffling feet, no verbal challenge. No gunfire.

Nothing.

Dixon watched as his partner reached around the jamb and knocked again, more forcefully. They waited half a minute.

Still nothing.

“Keep watch,” Bolan said as he knelt before the door, extracting something like a wallet from one of his pockets. Dixon saw him open it and withdraw slender lock picks, then turned his full attention to the undemanding task of covering the hallway.

No one had emerged from any of the other flats to catch a glimpse of who was knocking on their neighbor’s door. He guessed it was that kind of place, where people minded their own business and resented nosy neighbors. Even so, he paid attention to the stairs and to the other doorways, keeping one hand on his Smith &Wesson in its belt holster.

Ready to shoot at the first sign of a hostile move.

What a day it had been, and not over yet!

In training, back at Quantico, Dixon and some of his classmates had talked about what they would do if they were ever placed in killing situations, where the only rule worth mentioning was door-die. With one exception, Dixon reflected, they’d been young males, full of piss and vinegar. Without exception, all of them had vowed to tag and bag all enemies of the United States if given half an opportunity.

Now Dixon had been graced with such an opportunity, and he’d surprised himself. He wouldn’t say the killings had been easy necessarily, but neither did he have the sickly feeling he’d expected, like an overdose of early childhood guilt. The shootings had been self-defense, beyond a shadow of a doubt, involving criminals or terrorists. He hadn’t started it, and he was definitely glad to be alive.

“You ever face a situation where it’s them or you,” his range instructor had remarked on one occasion, “make damn sure it’s them.”

Amen.

But he was nervous, like a restless sleeper waiting for his upstairs neighbor’s second shoe to drop before he dared to close his eyes. And Dixon couldn’t shake it.

Was it simple fear of getting caught? Of what came next? What if he—?

Click!

He turned and found the door open, Cooper crossing the threshold with his Glock in hand. A beat behind the action, Dixon drew his Smith & Wesson and followed, covering the left side of a smallish living room while Cooper took the right.

Gene Talmadge wasn’t home.

Dixon inferred it from the silence, then confirmed it with a hasty room-to-room search that left no piece of furniture unturned. He checked the tiny bathroom, while Matt Cooper scoured the closets and looked underneath the bed.

Their man was gone, with roughly two-thirds of the clothing from his bedroom closet. In the bathroom, Dixon found no toothbrush, no shampoo, no comb, no mouthwash.

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