Collision course

A hijacked tanker train loaded with fuel quickly becomes a high-octane weapon targeted at a massive oil field outside Dallas. The domestic terrorist group behind this savage plot is intent on delivering a double blow of homegrown hell by sending the U.S. economy an incendiary shockwave and slaughtering an entire community of migrant oil workers.

Mack Bolan’s mission turns into a death race to secure the speeding bomb and rescue the innocent hostages being used as human shields. When—and if—he succeeds, his directive expands to capturing the neo-Nazi leader alive. But Bolan’s got a vengeance-hungry rogue FBI agent on his tail, taking aim at anyone standing in the way of his personal vendetta. And when the mission takes to the streets of Houston, Bolan joins a blood pursuit where only the winner survives.

“Go! Bomb! Run!”

The first incendiary bomb went off. Almost, but not quite in the same beat, the others erupted. A white flash and a ball of heat punched Mack Bolan in the small of his back, burning his neck, singeing his hairline. He tried to turn, tried to bring up his arms to protect his head.

Then he was falling. As Bolan floated through the air, as if suspended in space, he turned and saw the finger of thick, black smoke roiling from the instantly flash-burned Chevy, climbing high into the sky in oily ropes.

The pavement rushed up, and darkness claimed him.

Other titles available in this series:

A Dying Evil

Deep Treachery

War Load

Sworn Enemies

Dark Truth

Breakaway

Blood and Sand

Caged

Sleepers

Strike and Retrieve

Age of War

Line of Control

Breached

Retaliation

Pressure Point

Silent Running

Stolen Arrows

Zero Option

Predator Paradise

Circle of Deception

Devil’s Bargain

False Front

Lethal Tribute

Season of Slaughter

Point of Betrayal

Ballistic Force

Renegade

Survival Reflex

Path to War

Blood Dynasty

Ultimate Stakes

State of Evil

Force Lines

Contagion Option

Hellfire Code

War Drums

Ripple Effect

Devil’s Playground

The Killing Rule

Patriot Play

Appointment in Baghdad

Havana Five

The Judas Project

Plains of Fire

Colony of Evil

Hard Passage

Interception

Cold War Reprise

Mission: Apocalypse

Altered State

Killing Game

Diplomacy Directive

Betrayed

Sabotage

Conflict Zone

Blood Play

Desert Fallout

Extraordinary Rendition

Devil’s Mark

Savage Rule

Infiltration

Resurgence

Kill Shot

Stealth Sweep

Grave Mercy

Treason Play

Assassin’s Code

Shadow Strike

Decision Point

Road of Bones

Radical Edge

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Revenge is sweet, sweeter than life itself—so say fools.

—Juvenal

There is revenge, and there is justice. One will destroy you. The other, when you have fought for it, makes it possible for you to go on living. A man who can’t tell the difference is dead inside.

—Mack Bolan

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Phil Elmore for his contribution to this work.

Contents

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

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

EPILOGUE

BPA

CHAPTER ONE

Outside Alamogordo, New Mexico

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, put a single 9 mm bullet through the left eye of the tattooed, skinhead terrorist, stepping over the body just as it collapsed onto the dusty ground. Shifting the FN P90 he wore on a sling across his chest, he let the silenced snout of his Beretta lead the way.

Neo-Nazis, Bolan thought with distaste. A dime a dozen. The domestic terrorists were like roaches, forever scuttling about no matter how many you crushed under your boot.

The soldier continued his slow crawl along the fence line surrounding the ramshackle, clapboard safe house. The structure was a mess; it appeared, at first glance, to be a mass of sun-bleached plywood and faded plastic tarps held together with hope and weighed down with cinder blocks.

A second skinhead sentry risked a look around the corner of the building, probably thinking he had heard something. He had, and it was the second-to-last thing he ever would hear. The very last thing was the muffled clap of Bolan’s Beretta as a 147-grain hollowpoint bullet dug a channel through the sentry’s brain.

Bolan moved quickly, crouched low, staying beneath the sight lines of the open windows. They were covered with heavy plastic over sheets of what was probably Plexiglas. The interior of the safe house buzzed with activity. Heavy-metal music blared from a stereo. Shouts and jeers could be heard. There was a party going on inside. Bolan had to hand it to the terrorists; they were remarkably true to type. When neo-Nazis weren’t preying on those they hated, they spent their free time mired in teenage-mentality hedonism. The fact that they had posted sentries at all surprised Bolan, at least mildly.

Hal Brognola, director of the Sensitive Operations Group based at Stony Man Farm, Virginia, had placed the secure satellite call to Bolan in the middle of the night, waking the Executioner.

“They’re animals, Striker,” Brognola had said, using Bolan’s code name. “Latter-day race cultists, worse than every skinhead and white supremacist gang you’ve taken down in years past. The group calls itself Twelfth Reich.”

“That’s imaginative,” Bolan had commented.

Brognola ignored that. “Their leader is one Shane Hyde. His file and psych profile are long and complicated. ‘Delusional nut job’ is the short version, but with caveats. He’s not so unbalanced that he isn’t also extremely dangerous, nor so wide-eyed that he’ll tip his hand before he’s ready. He has military experience, too. He was discharged from the Army on medical grounds just after Desert Storm. Seems his commanding officer considered him unstable and, after a series of altercations with several black and Hispanic soldiers, Hyde was shuffled around until the Army could be rid of him. He disappeared for a few years after his discharge, only to reappear on the Mexico border at the center of several high-profile immigration disputes.”

“I take it he’s not a fan of illegal aliens.”

“Who is?” Brognola sounded as if he were speaking through clenched teeth. Which meant he was chewing an unlit cigar, something he did under stress. Bolan could hear the edge in his old friend’s voice. “Hyde is an avowed racist, but he’s not just that. He’s got charisma, Striker. He’s smart and he knows how to network. He’s got a real knack for locating, and absorbing into his plans, people who share his outrage over the plight of the white middle class in America. That’s his rallying cry, incidentally. He sees himself as champion of what he calls ‘the only group it’s socially acceptable to oppress.’”

“He hasn’t just talked about it.”

“No. We believe he’s personally or indirectly responsible for at least a score of racially motivated bombings and murders,” Brognola said. “The pace of the crimes tenuously linked to Hyde and Twelfth Reich is increasing, too. They’re getting stronger and growing more bold. Until now they’ve done their best to keep secret, for the most part. The FBI has been on to them, or to parts of several cells, for a while now, trying to build a case that would take the investigation to the top. Hyde’s cagey, though. He’s managed to stay far enough from his handiwork that most of the ‘legitimate’ government agencies don’t have enough on him.”

“That sounds thin, Hal.”

“That’s because that’s not all there is to it,” Brognola said. “The Bureau had a special team on this, not long after the intelligence community started getting wind of Twelfth Reich as a cohesive organization. They put an undercover group on it, three trained operatives. But something went wrong. Two of them never came back. The third lived but, like his fellow agents, he lost his family. Hyde’s people are believed to be behind the arson deaths of seven civilians, all told. They staged simultaneous raids on the agents’ homes, duct-taped whoever they found inside and burned them alive.”

Bolan said nothing for a long moment. Finally, he spoke. “The survivor?”

“Beaten, maimed and left for dead,” Brognola said. “At last word, he was living in an assisted-care facility in San Diego. We believe one of the three agents was tortured badly enough to give up the other two. The corpse’s fingernails and teeth had been removed.”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. He had seen it done, seen the aftermath of such barbarity, more than once.

“After the disaster,” Brognola explained, “the investigation stalled. Any information the agents might have gathered undercover was lost with them. The survivor, Agent Russell Troy, couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it. I’m told he was catatonic for a while. Whatever the reasons, nothing solid on Hyde or his fellow race cultists was produced. Various agencies here and abroad have tried since. Interpol would love to get their hands on Hyde, too, because we’ve traced him to several trips abroad. He is believed to be spearheading a push for renewed racist violence in Europe, and may well be the man behind three different separatist cells. We know he’s been linked to the terrorist group Ausländer Toten, half a dozen of whom were caught with the components of a Russian military surplus nuke in Berlin three weeks ago.”

“So Hyde has his claws in a lot of pies,” Bolan said. “How do we know? If we can’t get anything on him officially, where’s this intel coming from?”

“Largely through the efforts of Bear and his people,” Brognola said, referring to Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, head of Stony Man Farm’s computer team. “He’s tweaked the internet chatter algorithms we use to screen sensitive and secure or encrypted data traffic. In its infancy it was part of the old Carnivore program that most of the public has heard about. In reality, it’s worlds more advanced.”

“But what it gives you isn’t legally actionable,” Bolan said.

“No,” Brognola admitted. “Not even a little. Which is where you come in, Striker.”

“You had my attention at ‘animals.’”

“Twelfth Reich hasn’t yet publicly claimed responsibility for what is now a series of increasingly deadly terrorist attacks. Most of these have been covered up, described as gang killings or the results of failed drug deals, that sort of thing. The hope was to prevent a national panic should the extent of Twelfth Reich’s involvement at the national level—and its body count—come to light. But Bear and his team have intercepted communications from Twelfth Reich cells that tell us something big is coming. We think they’re getting ready to announce themselves publicly. There’ll be no ignoring them when they do.”

“Which means you’ll have a domestically produced al Qaeda on your hands,” Bolan surmised.

“Exactly,” Brognola said. “Imagine the damage it would do to public confidence in the government, and in Homeland Security, if we can’t stop this before it reaches that point. Twelfth Reich strikes conducted multiple times per month, even per week, with sympathetic media outlets serving as mouthpieces for the terrorists. We’ll lose control of the playing field, Striker. We’ll be on the defensive, reacting instead of intercepting. Once we start down that slope we’ve got nowhere to go but utter failure.”

“You really think it will get that bad?”

“I do. Hyde is laying the groundwork with certain talk show figures and journalists he believes are receptive to his message,” Brognola said. “Bear brought us the raw feeds, tied to his keyword sweeps across the web, but to their credit, most of the media figures contacted thus far have since reported the solicitations to the authorities. We’re sitting on them, for now. We don’t want Hyde to know that we know.”

“What do you want me to do?” Bolan asked.

“The Farm has compiled, leveraging the Bureau’s past intelligence, a priority list of targets for you. Some of them are places we think Hyde may go to ground. Others are potential targets. We’ve isolated two of the former, a pair of safe houses located very close to each other in New Mexico, as Priority Alpha. One of these is Shane Hyde’s most likely base of operations. We want you to hit them both, and we want you to find Hyde.”

“Find and eliminate?”

“No,” Brognola said. “That’s the problem. He has intelligence that could put us ahead of the terrorist networks in Europe. We need to know what’s inside his brain. We need you to take him alive.”

Bolan considered that for a moment. “That’s not going to be easy.”

“I know, Striker,” Brognola said. “There are few men I would ask even to try. But we need him breathing and able to tell us what he knows. The Man is getting a lot of pressure from agencies here and abroad. Strings were pulled to make sure we’re on point in this, which means we’re running interference with the National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security and the FBI to keep them out of the mix.”

“They don’t like not knowing who’s handling it,” Bolan offered.

“Yes,” Brognola said. “It’s our job now, but there are plenty of people who’d like to take it from us. The Man himself was very clear about this. The President needs this problem resolved before it starts to seriously hinder his credibility with the international law-enforcement community.”

“The logical thing to do,” Bolan said, “would be to send blacksuits to each target. Simultaneously.”

“I can’t give the order not to fire on Shane Hyde to that many men,” Brognola said. “They’ll be walking in there with their hands tied behind their backs. They’ll either hold off too long and get shot up, or they’ll be too quick to fire, and a stray bullet or a miscalculated shot will take Hyde out for good. There’s also the fact that we need to do this more or less discreetly because we’re doing it extralegally. We don’t have enough hard evidence on Hyde and Twelfth Reich, not to justify an operation as decisive as this. We’ve been ordered to cut out a cancer. I need a surgeon. I need you, Striker.”

“Understood,” Bolan said. “What about support?”

“We may be able to draw a certain amount of backup from DHS or the Bureau,” Brognola said. “It will mean admitting that Justice is in charge, which will get my phone ringing. That’s nothing I’m not used to doing whenever you’re in the field. But again, discretion is called for…if not simply because the Man needs this done quickly and quietly.”

“Or he looks as if he’s not in control of the situation,” Bolan said.

“Exactly.”

“And if I don’t find Hyde at this Priority Alpha? Follow-up is going to have to be fast, Hal, if I can’t count on simultaneous containment. Frontal, hard assault will get Hyde’s attention. When word gets out that I’m rattling cages, he and his men will hunt for cover and dig in. I’ll have to run them down site to site.”

“I know,” Brognola said. “I’m transmitting files to your phone now. Jack has orders to report to your location. He’ll bring suitable transportation, something fast with decent range.”

Bolan nodded, though Brognola could not see him. Jack was Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi, a man whose war against society’s predators dated back almost as far as Bolan’s own. “Have him bring me something that goes bang.”

“I’ll make sure the armory sends along a care package.”

“Then I’d better go,” Bolan said, as his phone vibrated under his hand, signaling receipt of Brognola’s data files. “I’ve got a lot of reading to catch up on.”

“You do, at that,” Brognola had said. “Good hunting, Striker. I realize I’m dropping you into a meat grinder. I wouldn’t ask if I had any other option.”

“Yeah,” Bolan said.

“And…Striker?”

“Yeah?”

“You could say no. You always have that option.”

“I know that. Do you?”

“I do,” Brognola had admitted. “You’ve made it very clear that what you do occurs on your own terms.”

“Then you also know why I won’t refuse,” Bolan said. “Striker, out.”

That had been mere hours ago. Now Bolan’s boots were on the ground in New Mexico, his familiar Beretta was in his hand and dead terrorists were already assuming ambient temperature in his wake. A double-edged Sting combat knife rode in a custom Kydex scabbard inside his waistband behind his left hip; a massive .44 Magnum Desert Eagle rode in a similar Kydex holster behind his right. Over the shoulder of his formfitting combat blacksuit he wore an olive-drab canvas war bag, which carried the other munitions and tools he might need. He had not yet deployed his subgun, but he would need it only too soon.

The promised care package had turned out to be the FN P-90, Belgium’s contribution to the world’s most innovative submachine guns. The lightweight bullpup weapon, no longer than the width of Bolan’s shoulder blades, fired 900 rounds per minute of 5.7 mm cartridges to an effective range of 200 meters. Equipped with a tritium-illuminated reflex sight, the weapon fired from a closed bolt for maximum accuracy. It was one of the quietest weapons of its type Bolan had ever fired, with superb ergonomics. Its horizontal magazines were loaded with fifty rounds each.

It was time to knock on the door.

Bolan made sure his Beretta was set to 3-round-burst mode. He reached into his war bag, grabbed a flash-bang grenade and popped the pin with his thumb. Counting silently, he pushed the grenade through the corner of one of the windows, where the Plexiglas didn’t completely cover the gap. Then he quickly made his way across the front of the building to the opposite side of the front door, opened his mouth wide and shut his eyes.

His quick surveillance of the building prior to making his run had told him there was only one entrance. Unless they threw themselves from the windows, the skinheads would have to flee through the—

The flash-bang detonated. The explosion, even contained within the house, was almost loud enough to hurt. The flash left afterimages in Bolan’s vision through his eyelids. The screams and cries from within were immediate and not surprising. The warped wooden door at the entrance was thrown open, and it banged against the front of the building.

The skinhead who stumbled out carried a .45 automatic pistol in one hand. His eyes were clenched shut and streaming tears. He was moaning, producing no words but making a lot of noise. He had probably been near the door when the flash-bang went off. He had obviously taken some of the worst of it. Bolan raised the Beretta and squeezed off a 3-round burst into the center of the man’s chest. He fell, hard, and did not move.

Moving smoothly, with deliberate, gliding strides, the Executioner made for the doorway. He held the Beretta 93R in a firm, two-hand grip as he crossed the threshold. Within the main area of the house, thin plywood walls had been erected to create a warren of tight, mazelike rooms beyond the central party area in which he now stood. Thermal imaging from Stony Man Farm’s satellite photos had told Bolan everything he needed to know about the layout.

There were two skinheads, writhing on the floor, a revolver and a sawed-off shotgun nearby. When the pair heard Bolan’s footfalls, they clawed along the floor for their lost weapons.

The Executioner walked through a kick to the head of the closer target, which snapped the skinhead’s skull to the side. He couldn’t reach both men in time; the second had his hand wrapped around the cracked wooden grips of the oldest and rustiest revolver Bolan had seen in a long time. A single burst from the Beretta put a stop to that.

He heard the scream then. Of course. There would be women here. Wherever there was human trash, there were dissolute paramours. Whatever their sins, if the women weren’t skinhead terrorists themselves, they were innocents.

But there was no way to tell, quickly, which they would be.

He heard the shuffle of feet on the other side of the plywood wall he faced, almost felt the clack of a shotgun pump being racked. He threw himself to the floor as the blast punched first one, then another, then a third quarter-size hole through the crumbling wood. The shooter was loading deer slugs.

From his sight angle on the floor, Bolan could see movement behind the slug holes. He waited until the gunman—who was tall and wide enough, from what Bolan could see, that he must be male—blocked the light over all three holes. Bolan heard the sound of the shotgun pump being hauled back again. He lined up his target at the center of the three-hole group and squeezed the Beretta’s trigger.

The Executioner’s 3-round burst provoked a grunt; the body blocking the holes fell away. Bolan could feel the vibration of the gunman as he dropped to the floorboards.

The soldier pushed himself back to his feet, staying low. The doorway leading beyond was really just a ragged opening in the plywood walls. It offered no true cover, only concealment. He would have to stay mobile to clear the rest of the house. A spray from an automatic weapon could rip through the entire structure with ease, ending his life while mowing down anyone else who happened to get in the way. That option wasn’t open to Bolan.

He heard the scream again, followed by an angry retort. That was a male’s voice.

“Shut up! Stand there! He’s coming!”

That was all Bolan needed. He had the man’s position fixed and, diving through the doorway, he punched the Beretta up and out from the floor, flicking the selector to single shot as he did so.

The skinhead, crouched behind a three-legged wooden table, had a naked, bleached-blond, heavily tattooed woman in a headlock. She wriggled and squirmed, trying to escape the line of fire in which her captor had put her. When she screamed again, the would-be domestic terrorist tightened his arm, choking off her cries. The skinhead glared at Bolan. He held a huge Bowie knife in his hand.

“You just back off, man, or I’ll—”

Bolan fired.

CHAPTER TWO

Bolan’s bullet plowed a furrow through the skinhead’s cheek and kept on going at an angle, blowing his brains out the back of his head. The woman screamed again, falling to her knees as the corpse dragged her to the floor. She had been sprayed with the punk’s blood.

The soldier reached for her, pushing to one knee. She would need treatment for shock.

The blade came up in a wild arc that nearly laid open his face, the lightning-bolt SS tattoo on her wrist flashing across Bolan’s vision. He counter-slashed with the barrel of the Beretta, knocking the Bowie knife aside, feeling the edge dig into the steel of the pistol’s slide. He dropped to a crouch and whipped the pistol against the woman’s temple. She bleated once, then folded. The knife she had taken from her dead companion clattered on the floor.

Boot steps on the plywood floorboards were all the warning Mack Bolan needed. He rolled onto his back and pumped several bursts into the corridor opening as more terrorists approached.

They boiled through the opening like angry ants, firing without aiming. Two had heavy pistols; a third had a semiauto MAC-11. Bullets tore runnels in the floor, the walls and in the stunned woman on the floor behind Bolan. She yelped once as her fellow terrorists killed her.

Bolan breathed. He didn’t think about the enemy fire; he didn’t let the urgency of the moment push him to clumsy haste. He simply aimed and fired, aimed and fired. The 20-round magazine shot free as if of its own accord; the spare magazine rose in his off hand in a single, fluid movement. Then he was racking the slide as he rolled through the filth and debris on the floor of the house, coming up to engage the enemy, pulling the Beretta in close to his body.

He fired from retention, blasting away as the skinheads crashed into him, colliding with him in their panicked rush. He heard the grunt of the first man’s death as 9 mm hollowpoint rounds from the Beretta tore into the skinhead’s gut three at a time. The weight of the collision bore the Executioner back to the floor, under the dying man, his blood soaking them both.

“Get him! Get him!” someone shouted.

“Renny’s in the way!”

“Screw Renny! Kill the bastard!”

Bolan rolled the hapless and dying Renny off his chest to the side. From his back, he had only his legs to protect him. It was enough. As the pair continued to push toward him, dumbly rushing on top of him, he snapped a savage piston kick into the closer man’s shin. His heavy combat boot struck with enough force to produce an audible crack.

The scream the skinhead made was inhuman. Bolan drew his Beretta through an arc that covered both the screaming man and the confused skinhead behind him. He pulled the trigger twice for each, taking them out of play.

Covered in blood, sawdust and pieces of trash, Bolan surged to his feet. He was nearly through the doorway to the rear of the house when yet another skinhead terrorist collided with him, this one from behind.

Instinct had Bolan swiveling before the skinhead could complete the attack. He fired the Beretta empty as the terrorist, an enormous bodybuilder type wearing only camouflage pants, smashed him against one of the plywood walls. The skinhead roared and pulled a double-edged dagger from a leather sheath on his belt.

The Executioner was faster.

He opened his hand and let the Beretta fall away. From his waistband he drew the black-coated Sting dagger. Locking his left hand in an iron grip on the skinhead’s knife arm, he succeeded in stopping the blade as it slashed toward him. The wounded bodybuilder howled again, his eyes bulging with shock and pain.

Bolan’s knife stabbed into a brick wall. The barrier constricted and now the soldier’s own wrist was being crushed under his opponent’s left hand. The two men were frozen like that for an instant, the terrorist’s strength slowly ebbing from his wounded body, his breath coming in rasps and snarls as he tried to bull Bolan over with his superior size.

The soldier had been careful to position his hand on the terrorist’s upper arm, where the dagger could not catch him. The skinhead had taken no such precaution. Bolan curled his dagger around the other man’s wrist, carving his way through and out of his viselike grip.

The bodybuilder didn’t react as Bolan cut to the bone. The man’s tendons gave way, and as they did so, his grip on Bolan’s arm released. The Executioner shoved the knife deep into his flank, jamming the short, double-edged blade in and out.

Finally, the skinhead’s strength gave out. His resistance dissolved and he crashed to the floor like a felled tree.

Bolan left the knife lodged in his enemy, scooped up the Beretta and dropped to one knee, ready to slam the other into the dying skinhead’s chest, should he rally and try for another charge. The rattle that caught and churned in the big man’s throat belied any horror-movie last stands. Bolan waited nonetheless, listening carefully for some sign of further resistance.

He counted off a full two minutes in his head. Most men thought themselves patient, but given a full minute of complete silence, they started getting anxious. Bolan was depending on that. If there were more enemies hidden with the house, he would flush them.

He waited through another full minute. Something wasn’t quite right. Scanning the room, he stood, holding the bloody Beretta at the ready. Bracing the machine pistol with his off hand, he took up a position in the doorway. From this vantage he could see the last room of the house, from which the enemies now piled on the floor had come. It was a bunkhouse of sorts. Old wooden twin beds, never intended to be stacked, were sitting one atop another, nailed in place with cross-braces of plywood and metal wire. A makeshift table in the center of the room—just a large wooden utility spool—was piled with cards, trash and empty bottles.

“Striker to G-Force,” Bolan said quietly. He shifted to his right.

The shots that came were fired from underneath the farthest of the “bunks,” ripping through the mattress and tearing holes in the wall a good three feet away. Bolan simply flicked his Beretta’s selector to single shot, took his time aiming, and squeezed off a single round. The bullet punched a hole through the concealed skinhead’s mattress where his skull would be. The hole bloomed crimson and movement from underneath the bed stopped.

Bolan let out a breath.

“G-Force here,” the voice in his ear said.

“G-Force” was Jack Grimaldi’s code name. The Stony Man pilot was even now somewhere overhead, far enough off that the whirring of his chopper’s rotor blades wouldn’t tip off any hostiles. Bolan wore a tiny earbud transceiver, designed in part by Stony Man electronics expert, Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, which transmitted the soldier’s words to Grimaldi and relayed critical communications back to him. The earbud could be connected to Bolan’s secure satellite phone if required, but at the moment, he and his pilot were just connected locally. Grimaldi was Bolan’s lifeline in the sky. Should he become enmeshed in a situation he truly could not handle, Grimaldi would descend, guns blazing. More than once, a well-timed air strike with his colleague at the stick had saved Mack Bolan’s life.

“Stand by, Jack,” Bolan said quietly. He swapped 20-round magazines in the Beretta and ran his hand over its slide. The knife edge had cut a deep gouge into the well-worn bluing on the steel, but hadn’t damaged the machine pistol’s function. He eased the weapon back into its custom leather shoulder holster.

“You forgot about me, cop,” said a voice behind him. “Put your hands up or I’ll just put one in your back.” The shotgun that racked behind him for emphasis had already been chambered. Bolan heard the heavy thump of the loaded 12-gauge shell hitting the debris on the blood-strewed floorboards.

“I’m not a cop,” Bolan said, not moving. His hand was still on the Beretta in its holster under his arm. “I was hoping I could take you alive. You may have information I need.”

“I don’t know jack,” said the skinhead whom Bolan had kicked unconscious. “They don’t trust me with nothin’. I do what I’m told and I like it that way.”

“Figures,” Bolan said.

“Ain’t no way I’m going quietly. I ain’t givin’ up nobody. You ain’t takin’ me alive,” the skinhead said.

“I’ve learned to live with disappointment,” Bolan said. He pulled the trigger.

The bullet fired through the open rear of the leather shoulder holster, the muzzle-flash burning the back of Bolan’s shoulder. Turning, he left the weapon where it was, not knowing if shooting from within the holster had prevented the action from cycling properly. He ripped the Desert Eagle from its Kydex scabbard and extended the weapon, snapping the safety off. The skinhead had taken a round through the heart and was dead.

“You okay down there, Sarge?” Grimaldi said through Bolan’s earbud.

“Affirmative. I had a brief complication.” He looked down at the dead terrorist. “It’s resolved now.”

“Roger.”

“Stand by,” Bolan said. “I’m going to need you to signal the Farm for a cleanup crew.”

“Standing orders on that just came through from Barb,” Grimaldi said, referring to Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller. “She has a blacksuit contingent on hand to liaise with local law enforcement, make sure the dead bodies get written up the right way.”

“Another drug deal gone wrong?” Bolan asked.

“Or something like that,” Grimaldi said. “Maybe swamp gas, a weather balloon…”

“Or a classified training mission,” Bolan supplied. He could hear Grimaldi chuckling in his earbud.

“Yeah,” said the Stony Man pilot. “You’ve got it exactly.”

“All right. Give me a minute to finish up here. Then we’ll hit the second safe house.”

“I assume negative contact?”

“Correct,” Bolan said, his voice carrying a hard edge of irritation. “He’s not here.”

It had been a toss-up determining which of the two safe houses to hit first. This one was farther out than the second, which stood in a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Alamogordo. Bolan had opted for the more remote location first, hoping that, with Shane Hyde in custody, it wouldn’t be necessary to risk a firefight in a more populated area. Now they would have to take that step, and quickly. Vermin had a way of relaying word to one another, even where no apparent means of communication existed. Mack Bolan suspected that all criminals and predators shared, if not a sixth sense, then a heightened cunning that made them wary of situations and scenarios out of the ordinary. Losing contact with the crew here at the safe house would tip off Hyde’s Twelfth Reich terrorists nearby. Of that Bolan had no doubt. He and Grimaldi were already on the clock.

Bolan removed his secure satellite smartphone from one of the pouches on his blacksuit web gear. The phone was equipped with a high-resolution camera, which he used as he moved from corpse to corpse, still cautious, expecting no resistance but prepared to be surprised. At each one, he either leaned in and toed the body over or grabbed a hank of hair and pulled the head back, photographing each dead man—and the dead woman—for Stony Man’s files.

The images would be relayed automatically through the smartphone’s data link to Stony Man Farm, where Kurtzman and his cybernetics team would run them through facial recognition software. These would be cross-referenced with the Farm’s sometimes extralegal databases linked to multiple law-enforcement systems, including those of Interpol. The Farm’s files on the individual terrorists, where appropriate, would be updated to reflect their new status as “deceased.”

Each bit of information was, Bolan knew, a potential puzzle piece to solve future problems. Even data that closed doors was useful, for it helped draw boundaries in the Stony Man sleuths’ search for what was missing.

The frame of the safe house began to rattle, causing dust to filter down from cracks and crevices in the ceiling. The throb of the chopper’s rotors was as familiar as a heartbeat to Bolan, who had made his bones on battlefields far removed, but no less deadly, than this one. The machine that Grimaldi brought in for a landing was, at first glance, the familiar Army Black Hawk. The careful observer would know, however, that the helicopter was anything but.

Bolan’s ride was, in fact, a highly modified HH-60G Pave Hawk, itself a heavily upgraded version of the Black Hawk. The chopper’s fuel capacity had been effectively doubled with the addition of external fuel tanks. Its integrated inertial navigation, global positioning, Doppler navigation and satellite communications systems had the latest Stony Man augmentations, including the encryption technology Grimaldi needed to exchange data and voice with the Farm without fear of being intercepted.

Grimaldi had explained to Bolan, during their flight to the safe house, that the Pave Hawk had an automatic flight control system, including forward-looking infrared enhancement for low-light and night ops. The chopper’s ancillary equipment included a six-hundred-pound hoist with a two-hundred-foot range, full infrared jamming and electronic countermeasures, including chaff and flares, color weather radar and an automatic anti-icing system.

More importantly, one of the two crew-served

7.62 mm machine guns had been replaced with an electric M197 Gatling gun. The three-barreled automatic cannon fired 20 mm rounds at rates of fire up to 650 rounds per minute, all controlled remotely from Grimaldi’s seat. While the Pave Hawk wasn’t as heavily armed as the Cobra and Apache gunships Grimaldi had often flown in support of Bolan and other Stony Man personnel, both men were confident the chopper’s offensive capabilities were sufficient to this mission. What Bolan needed, more than airborne firepower, was the speed and range of the Pave Hawk. Its large extra tanks fueling twin General Electric T700-series motors, each pushing almost 2,000 horsepower, would get him where he needed to be as quickly as was practical.

Bolan boarded the Pave Hawk as the machine started to lift into the air once more; the runners barely had time to kiss the ground. As he piled in, Grimaldi looked back from the cockpit.

“Forgive the observation, Sarge,” he said, “but you look absolutely pissed.”

“I am,” Bolan said. He strapped himself into one of the seats. Shifting the FN P90 on its sling, he looked the weapon over, removing the magazine and checking the action. He had spent a lot of time rolling around on the floor of the safe house, fighting in close contact. He needed to make sure his weapons would function when he called on them. The FN seemed none the worse for wear for riding along with him through the misadventure.

“Are you injured, Sarge?” Grimaldi called back. His earbud transceiver broadcast his words to Bolan despite the noise of the rotors overhead. He looked worried.

“It’s not my blood,” Bolan said. The front of his blacksuit and portions of his web gear were stained darker than the rest. He picked several splinters from the latter and from the crease of his canvas war bag before removing, from the bag, a compact cleaning kit. Then he turned his attention to his pistols.

John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Farm’s armorer, would give him grief for the gouge in the 93R’s slide. He could almost hear the man’s commentary now. Each of the weapons Bolan was issued had been combat-tuned, in most cases by Kissinger’s own experienced hands. The goal was always to increase accuracy while enhancing reliability, goals that too often might seem mutually exclusive. Having spent years responsible for selecting and maintaining his own hardware, Bolan was no stranger to the demands on the Farm’s armorer. He appreciated the support Kissinger provided.

The Beretta had, after all, saved his life.

Grimaldi called out their estimated time to the second target zone. He looked back at Bolan again. “Sarge,” he said, “you okay?”

“Yeah,” Bolan muttered. “But I’m mad, Jack. We’ve just left a trail of corpses behind us, and we’re not much further along. Hyde may or may not be at the second safe house. If he’s not, we keep moving through our priority list.”

“That’s the plan,” Grimaldi said. He looked at Bolan as if unsure where the soldier was going.

“They’re wasting lives,” he explained. “Hyde and his hate-filled kind. Terrorists, predators of every stripe. They have motivations, Jack, and while they’re all equally deserving of being put down, as Hal put it, some make more sense than others.” He cleaned the Beretta as he spoke. “Hyde and his ilk want power, sure, but they’ll never hold it. Power is an abstract to them. They wouldn’t know what to do if they were suddenly in charge, suddenly the kings of their own white-as-snow empire. They kill not for power, not for political change, not for money, but because they hate.”

“We’ve faced a few who answered to that description,” Grimaldi said.

“Yeah, and every time, they were wasting lives.”

They rode in silence. The thrum of the rotor blades vibrated Bolan’s chest. He let his hands work as if of their own accord; he could disassemble, clean and reassemble the familiar Beretta 93-R in the dark, on the back of a camel, in a sandstorm. The image made him chuckle despite his stern mood. The phrasing was Barbara Price’s, shared in a moment’s intimacy after the pair had spent some meaningful and only too rare downtime together. Their on-again, off-again relationship was the most Bolan could offer her. It was, for now at least, something she could accept. Neither pushed the other; they were professionals who knew only too well how quickly fates could turn.

He checked the fit and draw of his Beretta in the custom shoulder holster. The leather had been singed by muzzle-blast but wasn’t otherwise damaged. Replacing the machine pistol’s 20-round magazine, Bolan holstered the weapon, topped off the magazine in his Desert Eagle and secured the hand cannon in its Kydex scabbard.

“Jack,” he said. “Time.”

“Sixty seconds, Sarge.”

Good.

It was time to get back to work.

CHAPTER THREE

Bolan moved briskly through the rear lots of the string of well-tended ranch houses, his boots crunching on gravel and through scrub. There were no manicured green lawns to be found here. Such suburban affectations weren’t practical in this climate. The houses were nonetheless nicely maintained. Some yards were strewed with toys and dotted with play equipment—a sobering reminder that innocents weren’t far removed from the target area.

The hovering helicopter would, of course, have exposed their operation immediately. Grimaldi had been forced to put Bolan down far enough away from the second safe house to prevent the presence of the Pave Hawk from blowing the surprise. While he hadn’t yet seen anyone on the street—the neighborhood was, thankfully, a quiet one—he was certain he had been noticed through windows he passed. He was making no effort to conceal himself, no pretense of being a civilian. The sight of a black-clad man armed for combat and carrying an assault weapon was sure to have the residents dialing 911.

The fallout from that would be managed by Barb Price’s blacksuit liaisons, trusted field operatives and veteran commandos in their own right, who would be running interference for Bolan as they helped the Farm coordinate the thorny issues of jurisdiction and authority. It was just those issues that would have Brognola’s phone ringing before too long, as the many agencies with dogs in the fight started arguing with Justice about just who should be able to tell whom what to do.

Bolan answered to himself first.

The ergonomic and futuristic P90 in his hands was fully loaded. He had semiautomatic and fully automatic modes of fire at his disposal. The two-stage trigger, tuned by Kissinger and similar to that of the Steyr AUG, provided him with crisp fire control from which he could milk single shots or withering, sustained automatic fire.

“Sarge.” Grimaldi’s voice was clear in Bolan’s earbud. “Something strange is going on. I’m getting telemetry from Barb. She says emergency services are being rerouted to your location.”

“Rerouted?” Bolan asked. “What do you mean?”

“Something about a massive false alarm across town,” Grimaldi said. “Multiple mobile phone calls about a fire and hostage situation. Barb says it’s sketchy, but they’re getting confirmation in now. A block of vacant commercial properties was set ablaze, but there are no hostages. Alamogordo SWAT is reporting negative contact. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Decoy,” Bolan said. “It’s a decoy play.”

“Barb says they’re tracking back to multiple 911 calls reporting gunfire in your target zone,” Grimaldi said. “Stuff that took a backseat to what they thought was a terrorist incident in the other direction. Sounds awfully convenient. Sarge, I think we may have missed the party.”

Bolan picked up the pace, jogging now, the FN P90 in his grip as he moved. He didn’t like the sound of that, not at all. A decoy might mean some kind of sacrifice-and-breakout maneuver on the part of Hyde’s men, perhaps to cover the terrorist leader’s withdrawal. There were countless ways the Twelfth Reich cell might have been tipped off to the threat. He couldn’t guess at them. He could only hurry.

As he neared the safe house, he saw smoke. A small fire seemed to be burning at the back of the structure. Neighbors were already coming out of their homes, pointing and crouching, afraid to stand in the open but too curious or worried not to look. When they saw Bolan, some shrank back. One woman screamed. Another man shouted that there was some kind of trouble, pegging Bolan as someone in authority. The soldier could only keep running. He was now closing on the safe house.

The house was, like the others around it, a low ranch. This one had started out a muddy tan, then bleached an uneven beige by the merciless New Mexico sun.

There was a dead man on the porch.

The butt of the stubby FN P90 was already positioned against Bolan’s body; he snapped the weapon up to acquire the sights. The man on the porch was down, lifeless, his limbs turned at angles no living human being could endure. He wasn’t the threat. Whoever had put him there was.

“Hey! What’s happening?” a young man, just a teenager, called from the neighboring house.

“Go back inside!” Bolan warned. “Justice Department!” The kid slammed the door as if monsters were barking up his walk.

Bolan hit the porch in a combat crouch. His boots scattered brass shell casings, which were thick on the porch floor. The front of the house had been shot to pieces, peppered with so many bullet holes that it looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s last ride. He couldn’t tell, from this vantage, exactly what was producing the black smoke curling from the rear of the building.

He struck the door with a powerful front kick, near the knob, not bothering to try it. Molding flew in three directions as the flimsy, hollow-core door slammed against the interior wall. Bolan ignored that; he was already charging inside, ready to flood the room with 5.7 mm rounds.

The living room was a slaughterhouse.

A smoke alarm was squealing. The fire from the rear of the house was gaining momentum; its crackling was growing louder. Smoke drifted in lazy clouds through the L-shaped living area, escaping through bullet holes spidering the bay window at the front of the home. The plaster walls were pocked with similar holes and sprayed with blood. More blood soaked every visible piece of furniture. There was a dead woman on the couch, two dead men on the floor near a card table and a pair of reclining chairs, and another dead man near a very old and very shattered tube television. The man near the television had almost no head. He had taken what was likely a shotgun blast at close range.

Shells were thicker here than they had been on the porch. Bolan crouched and, using a metal pen he carried in his web gear, fished up first one, then another. He checked half a dozen casings throughout the living room. All were .40 caliber. He pocketed several, careful not to touch them.

Crouched low, he moved from body to body, making sure. There were no signs of life. The house was a tomb. It was worse than that, however.

The dead hadn’t merely been neutralized; they had been mutilated, shot again and again in what could only have been postmortem overkill. Bolan filed that fact for analysis even as his mind worked overtime to make sense of what he was seeing.

Had the skinhead safe house been hit by a rival gang? A conflicting security firm? Counterterrorists, perhaps operating without authority on American soil? The first was possible; the second was unlikely, given the Farm’s contacts and Brognola’s knowledge of domestic security operations. The third was possible but didn’t seem to fit. Bolan had only too recently found himself caught between rival security and black-ops personnel from multiple countries, in playing bodyguard and escort to a Very Important Person whom he had to transport to Wonderland. Even at their most vicious, foreign kill teams wouldn’t have wasted the time and firepower necessary to do this kind of job on poorly trained skinhead combatants. An ops team from a nominally allied nation, like Israel, certainly wouldn’t kill so unprofessionally.

The term caught in Bolan’s mind. That was what bothered him. The position of the bodies indicated that the skinheads had barely had time to process the assault on the safe house. They weren’t arrayed behind cover or braced in fatal funnels such as the hallway from the living room to the kitchen. They were, instead, dead where they’d probably been sitting when the attack came. Bolan paused just long enough to snap pictures of the dead, wondering if he would fine Shane Hyde among them. But the Twelfth Reich leader wasn’t there.

He moved down the corridor to the kitchen, holding the FN P90 before him. Two more dead men waited here, one stripped to the waist, his tattoos proclaiming the supremacy of his race and stretching in blues and blacks across his back. He had been shot as he sat at the kitchen table. He lay in a puddle of his own brains amid the mess of an overturned cereal bowl and an opened can of beer.

The fire licking up from the stove and consuming the ventilator hood was almost out of control. Bolan grabbed the dusty fire extinguisher from its strap on the kitchen wall, pulled the pin and sprayed its contents across the stovetop. The extinguisher was long expired, according to its pull-tag, but it did the job. Whatever had been burning was now a black, frosted mess in the center of a charred frying pan.

Food, still cooking on the stove…and the man lying dead at the table had been shot down in the middle of his skinhead’s breakfast of champions. Something about this was very wrong. Bolan took out his phone and photographed the dead men, noting the flashing icon that indicated transmission to the Farm.

“Sarge,” Grimaldi said in his earbud. “The first of the emergency responders is inbound to you in less than three minutes. A pair of uniforms. You’re about to have company.”

“Understood,” Bolan said.

There was a groan from nearby.

At the back of the kitchen, a door that appeared to have been punched several times—perhaps during some skinhead’s drinking binge, producing several fist-size holes in the cheap pressboard—led to the basement. The sounds of pain and distress became louder. They were coming from behind the door, which stood slightly ajar.

Bolan didn’t wait. He simply ripped the door open the rest of the way, angling the short barrel of the P90 against his body so he could target the space without turning his weapon into a lever to be used against him. The gaunt, shaved-headed man lying on the stairs within had full tattoo “sleeves” up his arms. The mesh muscle shirt he wore was ragged and bloody. He was hugging himself, holding his guts in, trying to staunch the massive wound where he had been shot.

“Don’t move,” Bolan ordered. The man held no weapon that the soldier could see, but that didn’t mean he was unarmed. In his time fighting terror and crime, Bolan had seen every sham I’m-wounded ploy in the book. He wasn’t easily fooled. “Who did this?” he said. “Who hit you?”

“I think I’m dying,” the skinhead said. “Hell…I think I’m dying… .”

“Tell me,” Bolan snapped. “Before it’s too late. Before you’re out of time. You can get even. You can hit back at whoever did this. Tell me who it was.”

“You gotta…” the man said. He tried to draw breath and apparently couldn’t. “You gotta…”

Just what it was Bolan had to do, he would never know. The man stopped gasping. The light left his eyes.

That was that. There would be no intelligence to be had here.

“Sarge,” Grimaldi said in Bolan’s ear, “I’m transmitting to the locals. I’m warning them that there is a Justice Department agent on the premises. They don’t like it. I’m not getting confirmation that they’ll hang back.”

“Understood,” Bolan said again. “Out.”

He placed two fingers against the dead man’s neck, knowing he would feel no pulse. A quick check of the skinhead’s pockets revealed nothing. Up once more, Bolan made his way carefully back through the kitchen, just in time to confront a pair of uniformed Alamogordo Police Department officers with their guns drawn.

“Freeze!” they shouted, almost in unison.

“Matt Cooper,” Bolan said, citing the cover identity that appeared on the credentials issued him by Stony Man Farm. “Justice Department.”

“Drop the weapon!” one of the cops called.

“You were contacted,” Bolan said. “You’re interfering in a federal operation.”

“Drop your weapon!” the police officer repeated. His partner looked at him dubiously, though he didn’t lower his own gun.

“Continue pointing that weapon at me,” Bolan said, “and we’re going to have a problem.”

“Are you threatening to fire on duly appointed law-enforcement officers?” the first cop demanded.

“No,” Bolan said. “I don’t shoot the ‘good guys.’ However, if you don’t stop pointing those guns at me—” he paused, and his voice became steel “—I will take them away from you and beat you unconscious with them.”

“Put it down, Jimmy,” the man’s partner whispered urgently.

Reluctantly, the first officer lowered his weapon. The second breathed a noticeable sigh of relief as he did the same.

“How many are you?” Bolan asked. It was only a matter of time before the safe house was swamped with law enforcement and emergency response personnel. He would need to move quickly if he was to find anything useful amid the debris before the place was overrun with competing administrative concerns. The crush of jurisdictional red tape would make Bolan’s job more difficult no matter how well-meaning the cops themselves were.

The officers exchanged glances, probably trying to decide if it was safe to tell Bolan anything sensitive. Stepping toward them and lowering his own weapon, the Executioner removed the Justice Department identification from his web gear and waved it under their eyes. That seemed to mollify them, though the cynical part of Bolan’s mind told him that it shouldn’t have. Were the soldier some sort of assassin or other well-equipped hostile operative, forged credentials would pass such a quick inspection.

“Backup is on the way,” Jimmy said. “We’re it for now. What happened here, Mr.…”

“Cooper,” Bolan repeated. “Agent Matt Cooper, Justice Department.” He leaned on the last two words heavily. It wouldn’t hurt for these men to know he had the authority of Washington, D.C., behind him.

“I’m looking for this man,” Bolan said. He held up his satellite phone and called up the most recent mug shot of Hyde. “Shane Hyde. A wanted extremist with ties to several domestic terror organizations.” That simplified the issue quite a bit, but it would be enough to get his meaning across.

“You thought he might be here?” the second officer said. “Did you…did you kill all these people?”

“Negative,” Bolan said. He pressed his lips together. Even the implication was disturbing. “This location has been assaulted by a force of armed operatives, size unknown, affiliation unknown.”

“You don’t talk like a Fed,” Officer Jimmy said.

“You talk like a military man,” his partner stated.

Bolan ignored that. He gestured toward the kitchen. “Everything around you is potential evidence. Don’t touch anything. There’s a basement. I intend to investigate.” He turned to leave them. Over his shoulder, he said, “Stay out of my way.”

He didn’t enjoy being brusque with police, who were just trying to do their jobs. He simply didn’t have time to be diplomatic. Hyde wasn’t here and, if he had been, the assault on the safe house opened multiple worrisome possibilities. Had he already been taken out, possibly by one of the terrorist organizations to which he was connected? Had they mounted a daring coup, hoping to silence the security threat Hyde represented to them?

Bolan rejected that idea. Until his strike at the first of the pair of safe houses, Hyde and Twelfth Reich would have no reason to believe they were being targeted. Hyde’s allies, then, would likewise have no reason to be any more concerned than they already were about working with him.

Unless there was something else at ploy here. Some kind of leak, possibly within the web of law-enforcement agencies already homing in on Hyde. The man had, after all, been previously targeted, with disastrous results for the agents involved.

The Executioner dismissed this speculation. There was little value in it. He would simply have to keep moving forward through the priority list until Hyde, or some sign of him, shook loose. Until he could uncover new intelligence, there were no other options.

The temperature dropped to comfortable levels as he descended the open stairway to the basement, flicking on the combat light attached to the FN P90’s rail system. He was ready to fire through the stairs, if need be; he had ambushed plenty of men himself from such a position. The basement was largely empty, however. There were a few cardboard cartons of what appeared to be trash, a water heater, what looked to be a nonfunctioning furnace and several empty metal garage shelves.

Satisfied there was nothing here, Bolan started back up the stairs. It was then that he heard the sound of a thump in the living room.

He hurried back in that direction to find the police officers had ripped a heavy-metal band poster from the plaster wall, ignoring his instructions. They had uncovered a cavity into which a small but sturdy-looking safe had been set. Officer Jimmy and his partner had apparently removed the lockbox and dropped it on the floor of the living room. The safe was oblong, painted black, covered in deep gouges where its paint had been scraped away near the lock and handle lever.

“Don’t touch that,” Bolan ordered. Jimmy looked up, annoyed.

“There was a tear in the poster,” Officer Jimmy’s partner offered. He appeared embarrassed. “We weren’t intentionally—”

“He’s a Fed,” Jimmy said. “He’s not God, Gray. Relax. We’ve as much jurisdiction as anyone until—”

“And what happens when everyone else gets here?” Gray asked.

“How many times you going to try to call it in?” Jimmy said, irritated. He reached for the safe.

“I said,” Bolan interjected, “don’t touch that.”

Jimmy looked up. “Listen, Agent Cooper—”

He held up a hand. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Jimmy asked.

“Oh, crap,” Gray said. “I hear it. Metal moving. Like a spring uncoiling. A rasping sound.”

Bolan pointed. The sound was coming from the safe.

The soldier went to the wall and examined the cavity. There was a piece of simple, light gauge wire jutting from a hook screwed into the hole in the plaster. Removing the safe had torn something free and snapped the wire.

Bolan looked past the two cops and through the damaged bay window. Despite his warning, civilians had begun to gather before the house, milling about and craning their necks for a better look. The squad car belonging to the police sat in the drive, its LED light bar cycling red and blue.

“We’ve got to move this fast,” Bolan said. He suspected a bomb. The safe was booby-trapped. Whoever had hit the house had missed it during their assault. Now the two police officers had triggered some deadly insurance left in place by the skinheads, probably to prevent their secured information from falling into law-enforcement hands.

There was no way to tell how big the explosion might be. Containing even a moderate charge, the safe would become a huge pipe bomb. Pressure would build within it until the safe itself became shrapnel. They had to get it away from the bay window and the civilians beyond.

“Basement,” Bolan ordered. The police officer complied and the three of them managed to lift the safe and shuffle through the corpses and debris toward the kitchen.

“It’s speeding up,” Gray said. “I can feel it vibrating faster.”

“Move, move, move,” Bolan urged. They reached the kitchen. “Dump it down the stairs, then take the back door! Get out!”

The cops shuffled with him as far as the dead man at the top of the basement stairs. Then Bolan used one hand to shove the door all the way open before he put his shoulder under the safe.

“Go!” he commanded.

The cops backed away, through the rear doorway. Bolan heaved with all his strength, feeling the muscles in his shoulders burn, sensing the tipping point as the bomb started to fall down the stairway.

He was framed in the basement doorway, his arms outstretched, his hands open before him as he released the heavy, booby-trapped metal box—

The world burst into blinding flame.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mack Bolan was on fire.

He could hear nothing but the wall of pressure building in his head, ringing through his brain, driving an iron spike through his skull. Angry, unseen ants crawled up his arms, burning him with their touch, tearing at his flesh with their phantom jaws. He tumbled in free-fall, unmoored from gravity. Blunt pain in his shoulder and hip, so different from the sharp, searing agony of his hands and forearms, told him he had crashed into a wall or the floor. He tried to force his eyes open and saw only a black-red miasma of exploding, interweaving Rorschach inkblots, tumbling and rolling through his vision.

Knife blades thrust through his palms in dozens of places. He fought the pain and found the stock of his

FN P90, fought the pain and found the broad, uneven surface of the torn floorboards, fought the pain and made himself put his legs beneath him. His thighs screamed as he stood, swaying and staggering, crashing into another barrier that could only have been the doorway.

From memory, from his flash-picture of the kitchen layout, he found the back door, careened off the frame, found the door again. Pushing, he plunged through, stumbling through the gravel, rolling, crawling, collapsing. The pain in his head worsened, crushing his skull, reaching a crescendo that threatened to burst his sightless eyes from within…and then slowly, tortuously receded, until the jet-engine whine became only the drumbeat of a sledgehammer crashing against his forehead. As the pain diminished, his hearing began to recover, and the blobs of painful light swimming across his vision began to resolve into shapes.

“Cooper. Cooper. Cooper.”

Why did he hear that name? Who was Cooper? What did Cooper want? Was Cooper—

“Agent Cooper!” shouted the mass of burning light that was Officer Jimmy. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”

The lines defining the cop slowed and then stopped crawling. Bolan still saw blooms of actinic afterimage as he blinked, but now he could see, could really see. Jimmy and Gray might have been shouting at him from the bottom of a swimming pool, but he could hear them, too, well enough. They were holding his arms by the elbows.

“Oh, man, Jimmy, look at his hands,” Gray said. Bolan’s vision cleared and he focused on the man’s nametag: Graham, P. The tag on Jimmy’s uniform read Hernandez, J.

“G-Force,” Bolan said. “G-Force. Striker to G-Force.”

“What’s he talking about?” Officer Graham asked.

“The g-forces, Agent Cooper?” Officer Hernandez suggested. “Is that it?”

Bolan reached up and fumbled at his ear. His earbud was gone, lost in the explosion. He patted himself down, searching for his secure satellite phone. He found it, and when he brought it to his face, he saw the ruggedized unit had been cracked almost in two by the force of the explosion. He tucked it back into his web gear without thinking.

Bolan’s hearing cleared further as the sound of squealing tires reached him. He rolled over and onto his hands and knees. As he did, automatic gunfire churned the gravel where he had been. Graham and Hernandez rolled in opposite directions.

The battered, primer-spotted Chevy Caprice swerved as if in slow motion. Bullets fired from the Uzi submachine gun in the hands of the unseen passenger ripped across the flank of the squad car, flattening both tires on the driver’s side. The car continued on, spraying gravel as it crossed the lawn at the far end. It could only have been concealed on that side of the house, between the bullet-riddled safe house and the residence next door.

Bolan didn’t speak. He left Graham and Hernandez to shout after him as he took off from his position on his hands and knees, a track-and-field athlete launching at the starter’s pistol. His target was the beat-to-hell Toyota Camry parked across the street. The car was so dented it looked as if it had been rolled down a hill. It was, however, pointed in the right way: aimed to pursue the Caprice.

The soldier then rolled his battered body over the hood of the car, ignoring the pain, and landed on the other side. He smashed out the driver’s window with the butt of the FN P90, popped the lock and wrenched the door open. Distant alarm signals were jangling in the back of his brain, jarring his awareness every time he used his hands. He ignored them.

Bolan didn’t believe in coincidences, nor did he believe “Matt Cooper” was such important a figure on the national scene as to warrant seemingly random assassination. The would-be killers in the Caprice were linked to whomever had assaulted the safe house and killed the skinheads. The gunner, or the man behind the wheel, could even be Shane Hyde. Stealing a car was the lesser of the possible evils. Bolan needed to catch that Chevy.

Once behind the wheel of the Camry, he was as brutal as he’d been gaining entry. The FN P90 was once again his hammer as he smashed, ripped and tore, gaining access to the wires he wanted. He twisted one pair together and was rewarded with dash lights. Using his Sting knife, he cut sections of insulation from the next pair, struck them and made the engine turn over. Dropping the knife on the seat next to him, he floored the accelerator. The beat-up Camry responded ably, leaving a six-inch length of rubber behind the front tires as he spurred it onward.

He drove straight, grateful that traffic was light. Pushing the car as fast as he dared, he trusted his instincts, following his nose, avoiding turns until he came to a fork. Traffic was heaviest to the left; he bore right, hoping the traffic pattern hadn’t altered in the last two minutes.

The light ahead of him changed. He ignored it, pressing the accelerator to the floor, veering around honking, outraged drivers who brought their vehicles to screeching stops to avoid him.

Bolan clenched the steering wheel, which felt like sandpaper beneath his bloody palms. Each minute turn of the wheel caused a stabbing pain, and when he glanced down he could see the ragged sleeves of his blacksuit and the livid flesh beneath. He was burned badly, maybe seriously.

He flexed his right hand, picturing the butt of the Beretta beneath it, feeling the FN against his body on its sling, the weight of his canvas war bag, the pressure of his web gear over his blacksuit. His body was screaming, racked with pain and vibration, coming alive again as the numbing effects of the explosion wore off.

Curling his hand into a fist hurt. He was ready for it, expected it, and still it hurt badly enough to surprise him. He would need medical attention.

Later.

Far ahead, at the end of the block, he saw the paint-spattered trunk of the Chevy Caprice. He had guessed correctly. His quarry was there and, for the moment, moving slowly enough that he was gaining ground.

The Chevy’s leisurely pace didn’t last when the occupants noticed the speeding Camry. The vehicle shot through a four-way stop and sideswiped a minivan, tearing off its bumper and speeding away. Bolan guided his stolen car around the damaged minivan, feeling the Camry threaten to pull up onto two wheels as it heeled past the obstacle.

As he got farther from the target zone, with Grimaldi well out of range, he realized his position was worsening. With both his transceiver and his secure phone lost or destroyed, he had no way to call for help except by conventional means—finding an increasingly rare pay phone, or even use a landline, which meant dialing a scrambled trunk line and waiting as the call was routed through a series of encrypted cutouts. He couldn’t do that until he dealt with the immediate threat, followed the immediate lead. He couldn’t risk losing the men in the Chevrolet.

Once he pinned down the killers in the Chevy, then he could call the Farm. They could route Grimaldi back to his location, wherever Bolan ended up. Hell, he would send smoke signals if he had to. It wouldn’t matter once he’d brought the two men down.

Both cars powered through a red light, the Chevy dodging a panel van. Bolan caught an opening created by terrified drivers, all of them pausing to wait out the adrenaline rush caused by witnessing an obvious and flagrant violation of traffic laws before their eyes. The idea almost made Bolan smile, despite the discomfort in his hands and arms. The average civilian would freeze at the sound and sight of gunfire, but run a red light before him and he was apoplectic with outrage.

We all react according to what we know, Bolan thought.

He was drifting. Accustomed to focusing on the combative task at hand, he realized that his injuries were taking their toll. He shook his head, trying to clear it, tromping on the accelerator again and squeezing another few miles per hour out of the abused Toyota. The vehicle wasn’t much to look at, but it responded well, its engine revving gamely as he pushed it for more.

Something was happening ahead. Bolan knew it would be nothing good. The Uzi gunner leaned farther out his window, and as the Chevy passed a slow-moving Smart car, the gunner fired a withering, sustained blast that raked the wheels and punched holes from front bumper to the rear. The Smart car lurched to a stop in the middle of the road, blocking Bolan’s path.

He took the Camry up over the curb, praying the wheels would hold as he struck it at speed. Nothing popped. He managed to get the vehicle back on the road, drawing a line of gold paint across three parked cars doing so. Well, the Camry’s owner probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference… .

Bolan shook his head again and deliberately squeezed the steering wheel. The jolt of pain brought his eyes back into focus. The Chevrolet missed by inches a woman crossing the street. She shouted something he couldn’t hear as the Camry rocked past her.

He had to stop this. He had to stop it now. The danger to innocent pedestrians and drivers and passengers in other cars was too great for a sustained pursuit. Bolan picked his angle. The Caprice was a big, rear-wheel-drive vehicle, much less nimble than the borrowed Camry. It was heavier, but Bolan knew the physics of what he was about to do. He could make it work.

He needed to make the Chevy turn.

Bolan reached to the back of his web belt and found the cylinder of a smoke grenade. The skin of his fingers cracked as he unclipped the lethal orb. Blood smeared the grenade as he wrenched the pin free with his teeth and waited, counting silently in his head. When the canister was almost ready to burst in his fist, he hurled it with all his strength through the broken window of his driver’s door.

The grenade burst in the air. The driver of the Chevy broke right, avoiding the smoke. Moving at high speed, he wouldn’t process that the smoke was harmless; he would simply avoid the potential danger.

As his quarry veered to the side, Bolan cut the arc, aiming the nose of the Toyota for the rear quarter of the Chevy.

It was unorthodox, but it worked. The Chevrolet spun, scraping its passenger-side door along a telephone pole. The two men inside, opting for confrontation over flight, started to climb from the vehicle.

Bolan threw the gearshift into Reverse and jammed his feet on the brakes. The transmission banged heavily and then threw him forward. Slamming on the gas, he shifted again. The Camry lurched ahead once more.

The driver was wearing a black T-shirt, jeans and a windbreaker, and he had a SIG Sauer pistol in his hand.

His eyes were very wide as Bolan crushed the life out of him, pinning him between the open door of the Chevy and the grille of the Toyota. Blood erupted from the man’s mouth. As Bolan backed up again, feeling the Camry’s tire fight against its crushed right front fender, the dying man collapsed back into the Caprice.

Bolan grabbed the back of his vehicle’s passenger seat. Pain shot up his arm. Looking over his shoulder, he wheeled around the stricken Caprice. He was going to use the same tactic again. Bullets ripped holes in the roof and smashed through the windshield only inches from his face. The gunman with the Uzi was hosing him down.

The rear of the Camry ripped the passenger door from the Chevy. Bolan’s stolen ride stuttered under the abuse he was heaping on it, then stopped when he struck the same telephone pole. The gunman ran his magazine dry and, rather than reload and try again, dived back into the Caprice. Suddenly, the Chevy’s engine was roaring and the vehicle was mobile once more.

Bolan threw his door open and jumped from the Toyota. He landed on his feet, stumbled, and managed to recover. The FN P90 was barbed wire in his damaged palms as he brought the weapon to his shoulder and tried to acquire his target.

The Caprice struck another telephone pole. The gunman, practically on top of his dead colleague, went for something out of sight on the floor of the car.

Bolan dropped to one knee and took careful aim. The pain in his hands had the sights jumping around in his vision. The beat of his pulse was a metronome of punishment that rocked its way up his arms with every thud of his heart.

Traffic around the danger zone was slowing. Frightened drivers were honking. Others were screaming. Bolan had to stop this now, before someone wandered into the impromptu battlefield.

His shot was clear.

Bolan squeezed the trigger. Even the light recoil of the 5.7 mm cartridge caused a fresh blossom of pain in his palms when the P90 went off. He fired again and again, punching rounds through the side of the Caprice, trying to hit the Uzi gunner before he could pop up and start spraying the neighborhood anew.

Bullets peppered the pavement by Bolan’s feet. His enemy was shooting back through the car door, crouching down below the window. The danger of ricochet had to be severe, yet he kept on. He was either insane or very daring.

Bolan shifted, duck-stepping from his kneeling position. The Uzi gunner was firing blind. The danger was greater for innocents than to Bolan himself, but thankfully, the area behind him was free of pedestrians. It was, in fact, a small parking lot, where some of the parked cars were taking bullet holes. A car alarm went off.

In the distance, above the cacophony, the first sirens could be heard.

Bolan sprayed out the 50-round magazine on the FN P90, holding the trigger all the way back, grouping his rounds in the car door, where his enemy had to be hiding. The soldier then changed magazines, moving quickly. Even that act hurt him. When he slapped the new magazine home, he saw bloody, partial fingerprints on the plastic. He retracted the cocking lever and adjusted his aim for the rear of the Chevy, where the Uzi shooter seemed to be creeping. He was using shadows on the pavement to gauge the enemy’s movements.

“Hey!” the Uzi gunner shouted. “You out there! Are you law?”

“Justice Department!” Bolan shouted back. “Lay down your weapon! Come out now with your hands where I can see them!”

“No way, pal.”

“Identify yourself!” Bolan barked.

The sirens were louder, but still far enough off that much could happen before emergency personnel complicated the situation. While Bolan normally hoped for the combat stretch to resolve things himself, without endangering others, he had to admit that backup might be useful in this situation. His vision kept fuzzing at the edges.

“Identify yourself!” he repeated. “Who are you? Are you with Hyde?”

“Hyde’s filth!” the gunner yelled.

“What’s your involvement?” Bolan called back.

“Every last one of them is going to die,” the man shouted. “They all deserve it. Don’t try to tell me they don’t!”

“That’s not your call!” Bolan said. “This is bigger than whatever play you’re making.”

There was a pause. Then, from the Chevrolet: “You’d die for them? For white supremacist garbage?”

“I don’t intend to die for anybody today,” Bolan retorted. “Last chance!”

The gunner rolled on the asphalt, his Uzi held before him, stretched along the pavement. Bolan had expected something like that. The blast went wide, as the soldier thought it might; an automatic weapon, especially a subgun, was no easy thing to control on the fly. He took careful aim, braced himself mentally for the slap to his palms, and fired on full automatic, walking his 5.7 mm rounds up the road and into the gunner.

The man saw it coming and tried to roll back. Bolan’s fire stitched him across his shoulder and tore holes in his back. He crawled back behind the Chevrolet, trailing blood without a word.

The passenger door opened. Bolan, on his feet, came around the Chevrolet, his head swimming. He was close to passing out, but cleared the rear bumper of the Chevy in time to see the gunman pulling a leather shoulder bag from the car.

The wounded man’s hand came up with a grenade.

No, Bolan thought. Not a grenade. An incendiary device. The red canister was clearly marked. There were more of the weapons visible in the leather bag. It was possible the gunner and his driver had been a mop-up crew, whose job may well have been to burn the safe house to the ground—and shoot down any stragglers in hiding within, who would be driven outside by the flames. It was a proved tactic when cleaning out a nest of vermin.

The hostiles, whoever they were, hadn’t counted on being interrupted. Bolan’s presence had to have thrown them off their game. Then again, the fire raging in the kitchen would have consumed the house eventually. The occupants of the Chevy might have been waiting to see if that happened, saving them from leaving behind more evidence that wouldn’t quite fit with a nice, clean theory of gang warfare among skinheads and other criminals.

The theories flitting through Bolan’s mind were sound enough but, he realized, disjoined and oddly timed. He was fading on his feet. The muzzle of the FN P90 began to drift… .

The wounded man saw his opportunity and took it. He popped the pin on the incendiary and made as if to throw it.

Bolan shot him.

The Executioner tried to snap his weapon back into position, but his knees were turning to rubber beneath him. He managed to hit his enemy in the chest.

The incendiary, pin freed, fell into the bag of similar bombs.

Every hardwired instinct Bolan had told him to go, and go fast. He turned and found himself stumbling, dragging, rolling. Clawing at the pavement, he nearly fell flat on his face, but then was up and running, pumping his legs, screaming. He let the P90 fall to the end of its sling and bellowed at the bystanders who had not already sought cover from the gunfight.

“Go! Bomb! Run!”

They fled before him, trying to escape the seemingly crazed, bloody man flapping his scorched limbs at them.

The first incendiary went off. Almost, but not quite in the same beat, the others erupted. A white flash and a ball of heat punched Bolan in the small of his back, burning his neck, singeing his hairline. He tried to turn, tried to cover himself, tried to bring his arms up to protect his head.

Then he was falling. As he floated through the air, suspended in space, he turned his head and saw the finger of thick black smoke roiling from the flash-burned Chevy and climbing high into the sky.

The pavement rushed up to meet him.

The soldier didn’t feel the impact. He was suddenly prone, staring at the blue sky, watching the smoke climb to heaven. He was losing all sense of time. He heard voices; he saw faces. Were civilians gawking at him? Trying to help him? He had no idea how long he lay there. It might have been seconds; it might have been hours.

As gray snow crawled in from the edges of his vision, finally carrying him to oblivion, he thought he heard the sound of helicopter rotors.

The darkness claimed him.

CHAPTER FIVE

He woke to find himself staring into Jack Grimaldi’s face.

“Somehow,” Bolan said, “I always knew it would end like this.”

“You aren’t dead, Sarge,” Grimaldi said, grinning widely. “And I’m sure no angel.”

“I was thinking just the opposite.”

“You must be feeling better if you can make bad jokes. Here. Take a sip of this.” Grimaldi handed him a bottle of water and helped the soldier to sit up. Bolan realized they were in the back of the Pave Hawk. He had been lying on an olive-drab Army blanket between the bolted seats.

Bolan took a long sip of water and then looked down at his hands. Grimaldi had sprayed them with translucent, liquid skin. His palms were numb.

“Switch that to your left hand,” Grimaldi said, “and give me your right.” Bolan extended his right hand, which his friend turned palm-up and began dressing with light gauze.

“How long was I out?” the soldier asked.

“Not long enough,” Grimaldi said. “I gave you some painkillers that will be wearing off soon. There’s more in the medical kit.” He gestured for him to switch hands, then began the process of wrapping his left palm. Bolan sipped more water. It wasn’t cold, but was delicious anyway. His throat felt raw.

He looked out past the unmanned door gun of the Pave Hawk. The chopper sat in the center of a broad expanse of scrub and sun-baked dirt on what he took to be the outskirts of Alamogordo.

“You’re in rough shape, Sarge,” Grimaldi said. “Nothing that won’t get better provided you take a couple weeks’ vacation.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Bolan told him.

“Right.” Grimaldi shook his head. “I shot you up with some of the pain amps in your kit. As much as I dared. It’s going to wear off and you’re going to hurt again. You’ll need to stay on top of that.”

“I can manage.”

“We’ve got a blacksuit squad on-site cleaning up the damage,” Grimaldi said, “and running interference with the Alamogordo PD, who’re hopping mad. All but the two cops whose lives you saved. They’ve been debriefed.”

“Somebody beat us to the safe house. Killed everyone inside.”

“Yeah.” Grimaldi nodded. “The officers kept asking me if you did that. Although I don’t think they really believed it.”

“The house?”

“A complete loss,” Grimaldi said. “The bomb started a fire that burned the place to the ground. You’re lucky. It could easily have killed you and your two new friends.”

“The Chevy,” Bolan said. “Getaway car. Two men. One automatic weapon. They were with whoever hit the safe house.”

“Uh…yeah.” Grimaldi hesitated. “About that. Both men and the car were burned to a crisp. Any clues we might have found inside…well. You get the idea. We’ve had the bodies routed to a facility we control, for autopsy, but running their dental records will take time.”

“Yeah.” Bolan shook his head.

“Here,” Grimaldi said. “I made you something.” He handed over a pair of leather gloves. Bolan held them up curiously. He realized that the fingers had been removed.

Grimaldi held up a pair of medical shears. “These are yours, too.” He put them back in the kit. “Those gloves are sized for my mitts, which are a little smaller than yours. Without fingers, though, it won’t matter.”

Bolan pulled the leather shells on over his hands. They fit snugly but weren’t too tight. The cut-up gloves covered his dressings and protected his scorched palms.

“Thanks, Jack,” Bolan said. “You know you’ve got a pretty decent bedside manner?”

“No, I don’t,” Grimaldi replied. “I’m about to spoil your mood. You want the bad news or the bad news?”

Bolan said nothing. He raised an eyebrow.

“We’ve got a big problem,” Grimaldi explained. He produced a replacement earbud and his own secure satellite phone. “I can use the transmitter here in the chopper to relay to the Farm,” he said. “Use my phone. The earbud is from the spares here.”

“The problem?” Bolan prompted.

“Idle hands,” Grimaldi said. “You didn’t find Shane Hyde at the second target house,” he said. “I know, because I’ve been talking to the Farm while you were out. Shane Hyde and his Twelfth Reich boys have been very busy. If he was here, he was long gone before you got yourself blown up.”

“Doing what?”

“I’ll let Barb tell you that,” Grimaldi said. He pointed to the earbud. “You’re hooked in through the chopper.”

Bolan put the device in his ear. “Striker here.”

“Striker?” Barbara Price sounded worried. “Jack says you’ve sustained some injuries. If you need to come in—”

“Negative,” Bolan said. “I’m all right, Barb.”

She paused. “All right. Striker, what I have for you is significant. Bear and his computer team have identified, through a series of account transfers and our internet chatter algorithms, a hijacking perpetrated by Twelfth Reich.”

“Perpetrated as in already conducted?” Bolan asked.

“As in happening right now,” Price said. “We’ve checked it at the source and we’re confident it’s ongoing. So is the domestic intelligence network. Right now Hal is sitting on DHS and the Bureau, who are gearing up to take action. Hal held out for confirmation from you. He’s pushing hard to get you in on this.”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember O’Connor Petroleum Prospecting?”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “The oil outfit that had some trouble in Honduras when the dictator there nationalized their equipment and took some of their employees hostage.”

“O’Connor has finagled a deal with the relatively new government of Honduras, the powers that are in Guatemala, and the new, moderate regime in Mexico. They’re running a pipeline from newly discovered oil fields in Honduras to a refinery in Mexico, from which they’ll ship oil across the Texas border and around the country. This energy initiative is very important to the Man and, as you know only too well, is the result of some recently resolved political turbulence in all three nations.”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”

“We have identified a series of account transfers, among other things, that helped us identify some suspicious industrial purchases of fertilizer. There were multiple indicators that Bear, on his own time, cross-checked. The pattern emerged slowly—too slowly for us to stop it before it could begin.”

“Stop what, Barb?” Bolan asked.

“Twelfth Reich’s people have hijacked an OPP tanker train,” Price said. “We believe they’ve packed it with ammonium nitrate fuel oil bombs—ANFOs—in cargo cars attached to the tankers. They’re heading for an enormous O’Connor tank field outside of Dallas, one of the largest of its type in North America. The facility is adjacent to a kind of tent city, an encampment that has risen to serve Mexican immigrants working for O’Connor. That’s the target. Twelfth Reich wants to kill those people.”

Bolan frowned. “Likely casualties?”

“Potentially thousands,” Price said.

“Why not evacuate them?”

“These are migrant workers, Striker,” Price explained, “many of them in the country illegally. We can’t prove it, of course. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has swept the area twice now, and each time, the workers return as soon as they find gaps in the security cordon. It’s just too large an area for the INS to patrol. By the time we got enough men in there to link arms and surround it, the train would have arrived. The other problem is that, even if there is no loss of life among the workers, destroying that tank field will deal a serious blow to our economy. The waivers and other incentives needed to get all this moving with OPP were delivered because the nation needs that oil, Striker. Losing that infrastructure will wound us badly.

“The train will cross the border near Piedras Negras,” Price went on. “It will then follow a route through San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth. The terrorists could choose to blow the train themselves at any point, but Hyde and his fanatics don’t just want to destroy a train. They want that tank field. This is their ticket to al Qaeda status, as they see it. Their death blow to the hated American regime. They want to get where they’re going.”

“So we have to stop them before they get there.”

“That’s the problem,” Price said. “We can’t erect a barrier. There’s no time for that, and anything solid enough to halt the train will blow it. Blow the track itself, derail the train, and we risk creating an environmental disaster that will kill whoever’s unlucky enough to be nearby. Strike it from the air, it explodes, taking everyone aboard with it—and that’s if you can reach it. We have intelligence indicating Hyde may be in possession of antiaircraft weaponry, purchased from the Iranians.”

“Not good.”

“It’s worse. This train is one long bomb, but it’s a bomb with hostages aboard.”

“How many?”

“There’s a very special passenger car attached, near the engine,” Price said. “O’Connor, in an effort to protect its employees from the threat of kidnapping, to avoid future occurrences of its Honduras experience, has equipped the train with an armored personnel compartment. There are close to forty employees aboard, all of them O’Connor executives, returning to Dallas from an on-site conference across the border. They attended the opening of the new Mexican refinery, apparently.”

“Those people might already be dead, Barb,” Bolan said.

“They aren’t,” she replied. “The train’s security passenger car is hardened to external assault and has self-contained communications gear. We’ve verified that OPP is in contact with its employees. The terrorists can’t get in, not without damaging the train so badly they risk derailing it themselves. But those people cannot get out, either. Not with Hyde and his skinheads waiting to take them hostage the moment they do.”

“Well,” Bolan said. “Isn’t that a pretty picture.”

“It doesn’t get much more complicated,” Price admitted.

“Not with an unknown element killing our leads,” he muttered. “Jack apprised you of the situation?”

“Fully,” Price answered. “He said you recovered some .40-caliber casings on the scene before the evidence burned?”

Bolan patted himself down.

Grimaldi smiled and waved, giving Bolan the A-OK sign. “I’ve arranged for them to be couriered,” the pilot interjected.

“We’ll run them, for whatever good that will do,” Price said. “I’ll let you know.”

“So what’s the play?” Bolan asked.

“The Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security are running a joint operation outside San Antonio,” Price said. “Hal has been leaning on everyone involved, hard, to get you in on it. There’s been some resistance, but you know how these tugs-of-war usually play out.”

“Hal gets what he wants.”

“Most of the time. It doesn’t hurt to have the Man backing your play.”

“Any chance of getting some backup on this? People I can trust?”

“We’re spread thin covering potential ancillary targets,” Price said. “We believe Twelfth Reich may attempt, through satellite cells, to conduct parallel attacks while we’re occupied dealing with the train hijacking. Able and Phoenix are deployed here and abroad, for some of Hyde’s European allies may be involved. We’ve got blacksuit contingents covering other high-profile target areas. We’re just spread too thin, Striker. Except for our allies in Homeland Security and the FBI, you’re it.” Able Team and Phoenix Force were the Farm’s other field operatives.

“Understood,” Bolan said. “When do we go?”

“As soon as you signal Jack you’re ready to fly.”

“Then I’m ready to fly.” He looked at Grimaldi, stuck up one finger and rotated his hand in the universal “spinning rotors” sign.

“Striker…” Price said.

“Yeah?”

“You’re sure you’re up to this.” It wasn’t a question. The concern in her voice was obvious even through the scrambled, filtered and reprocessed connection.

“I’ll manage,” Bolan said. More quietly, he added, “Like I always do. I’ll see you soon.”

There was a pause. Finally, Price said, “Good hunting, Striker. Again. Out.”

Bolan, forcing himself to move without grimacing, pulled a pack from the locker bolted to the floor nearby. He unzipped the gear bag inside and began rifling through it. Grimaldi made a mock show of tapping his foot impatiently as Bolan shrugged out of his web gear, changed out the stiff, bloody and scorched shirt of his blacksuit, and donned his equipment. Then Bolan began to check through his weaponry, only to find it had been cleaned and reloaded. He looked at his friend curiously.

“You were asleep for a while,” Grimaldi said. “I had to keep busy.”

“Idle hands,” Bolan repeated. He smiled. “Thanks, Jack.” He made a cursory review of both of his pistols and the FN P-90, including removing the slide of the Beretta and checking its custom suppressor. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Grimaldi; this was simply long-ingrained habit, the result of years of trusting his life to the weapons he carried. One of the most basic rules of such weaponry was that you never simply trusted a weapon handed to you; you always checked it, for yourself, to make sure.

Grimaldi returned to the cockpit and began the process of firing up the chopper. He restored the in-flight connection, allowing them to speak to each other over the noise of the machine.

Once they were in the air, Bolan closed his eyes, breathed deeply and focused on his limbs. His hands and forearms were still numb, but rapidly warming. The ache that would pervade them could be blunted with painkillers, but these would fog his judgment and reaction time. He would have to err on the side of more pain, more awareness. He accepted as much and shrugged the thought from his mind. There was no point in dwelling on what couldn’t be changed.

Starting with his feet and moving up his legs, he tensed and then relaxed his muscles. As his focus moved up his torso, he rolled his shoulders, working the kinks out, feeling the tightness give way. Years of combat had left him a patchwork of scars and potential recurring stress injuries. The human body simply wasn’t built for the kind of punishment Bolan put himself through. If he allowed himself to dwell on it, he supposed he would have to chalk it up to effort of will. He was, after all, extremely well motivated. What he did, what he asked the men and women of Stony Man Farm to do with him, and what they did of their own will and motivation, wasn’t normal. That of itself was a shame, for a country as great as the United States deserved a citizenry whose every member thought superhuman effort preserving freedom was the norm.

Bolan couldn’t, and never had, faulted any man or woman for not following the path he himself had chosen. Lesser men and women might wrongly conclude that this wasn’t a choice at all; that circumstance, and tragedy, had forced Bolan to do what he did, to fight as he fought. That, of course, was ridiculous. Most men, confronted with the deaths of those they loved, grieved and absorbed the tragedy, soldiered on as best they could in the most benign sense of the word.

The men and women of Stony Man Farm weren’t truly the exception, for deep down, Bolan believed every man and woman had the potential, and the desire, to fight for what he or she valued most. It was simply that the counterterrorists with whom Bolan worked were exceptional, and that was the best way to describe them.

He snapped open the replacement satellite phone that Grimaldi had loaned him. A brief update bar appeared and, when it finished scrolling, the phone’s screen indicated that its new code assignment was STRYKR2. Grimaldi and Price had wasted no time getting him back up and running.

As Bolan watched, the send-receive icon started to blink. Data files began coming in, automatically shunted to a folder on the phone’s desktop, the wallpaper of which was still a graphic of Grimaldi’s choosing: a buxom woman in a red-white-and-blue bathing suit. Despite the grim scenario he faced, Bolan found himself smiling. Some things, he reflected, never changed. Jack Grimaldi was a constant in the universe.

Bolan supposed he was, too.

There were worse things to be.

The data files contained everything the Farm had managed to gather so far on the OPP hijacking. A complete map of the route the train was supposed to take, as well as an overlay indicating the route the Twelfth Reich terrorists intended to use, was included. Bolan called up several photographs taken of the migrant work camp, some of which were overhead shots, obviously taken by satellite. Others were news photographs taken when the camp was first established. Scans of those articles and wire releases were included.

While Grimaldi flew them to the target zone, Bolan read through each file. He never missed an opportunity to familiarize himself with data the Farm supplied. The war he fought wasn’t merely a conflict of guns and explosives, of tooth and claw and steel and fire. It was just as much a game of intelligence. There was no way to tell when a discrete piece of data might provide a crucial, missing puzzle piece; no way to predict when a seemingly unimportant bit of information would help him achieve his short- and long-term combat goals. Whenever possible, he assimilated, and committed to memory, as much of the Farm’s analysis and data as he could.

The schematics for the train and, more importantly, the armored passenger unit, were included. These were of specific interest because of the challenge they represented. He would have to find a way to free the hostages, but depending on the battlefield conditions he faced, would have to do that without killing the very people he was trying to save.

The plans had been sent by OPP. Barbara Price had appended notes to the files, adding that the management of the petroleum prospecting company was apoplectic over this latest turn of events. Bolan thought it bitterly ironic that the very precautions OPP had tried to take to safeguard its personnel—at great expense in customizing an already state-of-the-art train—had made it possible for the hostage situation to come about.

Standard procedure, were the hostages under the direct sway of the terrorists, would be to treat them as already dead, or at least potentially so. As harsh as that might seem to the uninitiated, it actually increased the array of options available for counterterror response. An operation planned with that cold, hard fact as its premise could focus on the most expedient method for neutralizing the terrorists, taking into account the possible rescue of innocents. Once the threat was resolved, any hostages rescued alive would be a bonus.

In the case of the OPP train, the hostages were confirmed alive and likely to remain so. While Hyde and his skinhead scum were doubtless angry to be cut off from their victims, the presence of the OPP employees was serving the same purpose from the terrorists’ perspective. In point of fact, the reality of the train’s passenger compartment served Hyde better than if he had guns to the hostages’ heads. Force response to the hijacking had to take into account the fact that the employees were thus far unharmed and could be released if the train was taken intact. Any action that might damage the train and kill the hostages would be deemed unacceptable…unless and until the conscious, deliberate decision was made to sacrifice those men and women.

Bolan would do whatever was in his power to prevent that from happening. Innocents didn’t die on his watch; not if he could help it. That didn’t mean that bystanders and allies, friends and loved ones, the innocent and the guilty alike, hadn’t died before him and beside him.

He had learned hard lessons; he had made hard choices. More would lie before him before the mission was done.

His thoughts returned to the assault on the second safe house. Knowing who they faced, or why—that was the most challenging aspect of the current hunt. Quantified, defined problems, even big ones, were easy enough to solve, either with force, intelligence, or both. The unknown…that couldn’t be resolved until it was faced, and rarely could it be faced until it was defined.

So. That was the question.

Who did he face, and why?

CHAPTER SIX

Nuevo Laredo

Russell Troy sat on the edge of the sagging motel bed, squeezing a red rubber ball. The cracked and worn sphere was small enough to fill his palm. To squeeze it until its largest cracks touched required all the strength in his left hand. The first three fingers of that hand were numb. They always would be.

The last two fingers were missing.

They had told him at the rehabilitation facility in California that the nerve damage was severe and permanent. He was lucky, they had informed him, to retain any function in the hand at all—function that could be improved through the exercises they prescribed. There was no reason, they had assured him, that he couldn’t go on to live a reasonably normal life.

They were welcome, he thought, to go straight to hell.

They had given him a ball to squeeze. It wasn’t white. It wasn’t gray. It wasn’t really anything. It was, in fact, the exact same color of the walls of his room, the same institutional not-quite-beige that some smug puke with multiple degrees in psychology had probably determined was the least offensive to the most number of people.

Except that the residents of the San Diego rehab center weren’t people at all. Not anymore.

They were treated with something that wasn’t kindness but never quite dipped into indifference. The staff members were mildly solicitous of his well-being and of the well-being of his fellow…inmates was the word that came to mind. The creaking and many-times-converted old house was an asylum, a sanitarium. It was a kind of holding tank, as he saw it, for people who were neither dead nor alive.

Most of them had been, as he had, undercover operatives. Their departments and branches of service varied; at least one of the worst cases was a former Special Ops soldier who, somewhere in Afghanistan, had run afoul of the counterinsurgents he was training to fight the Taliban. They’d taken his tongue and his eyes, among other things. He sat slumped in a wheelchair on the front porch most days, indifferent to the sun on his scarred face.

There were half a dozen others, although two or three were rarely in residence, spending time in and out of the hospital for continuing reconstructive surgeries. There was a woman everyone called Jane but whose real name was Karen. She had told him that much, from amid the bandages swathing her face and arms. From acid, poured over her as she sat strapped in a metal chair, in some godforsaken garage.

Karen was with the Bureau and had worked a Mob case in Philadelphia. They had found her and taught her a permanent lesson. She spoke rarely, but seemed to find Troy easy enough to talk to.

The smile was stillborn on his face. Of course he was a good listener. He never talked. He hadn’t spoken a word to any of them—not the staff, not the patients and not to his sister when she came to visit from Salt Lake City. Liz hadn’t known what to do with him, hadn’t known how to react to what he had become. She had fussed over him, had made small talk. Finally, she simply sat with him quietly and held his right hand as they looked out the second-floor window. She had told him he was welcome to come live with her and Paul.

“Whenever you’re finally ready to come home,” was how she’d put it.

Home. Now he did laugh. It was a miserable bark, a sardonic, bitter bleat that bore little resemblance to mirth. There was no home for him. There never would be again.

He flexed the ball, over and over. The anger lent him strength. The cracks in the rubber skin touched. He flexed them further. The knuckles of his three remaining fingers were white. His fingertips were blue.

They had made him watch. They had videotaped it. They played it for him, explaining to him in exquisite detail exactly why everything they were doing to his wife was his fault, was payback for his betrayal. It had to be a video, for by the time they showed it to him, it was far too late. They wanted nothing from him; they sought no information; they were interested only in making him suffer before he died. His last thoughts were to be of loss and impotence and astonishing shame.

He hadn’t been there in person because it had happened while he was being beaten a hundred miles away, while his hand was being clenched in a shop vise at the back of the decrepit garage where…where…

He stopped. It was happening again. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember their names. Couldn’t remember the men who had been working with him, who had been part of his undercover team. It was an ambitious operation with a large budget; he remembered that. He was given unprecedented free rein, the authorization to conduct his cover and to bend, judiciously, the laws as he saw fit. He had done his best to blend in. He had taken drugs. He had beaten other gang members, sometimes close to death. He had rutted with the whores the Twelfth Reich vermin kept around. He had lived his cover, had been one of them. Even now, he could mouth the words of their hate, read the lines of his script as if he truly despised all the “mud people” Hyde and his zombie acolytes so feared and loathed.

They had given him literature to read, at first. It was mindless drivel, written by people who were barely literate themselves. One was a charming piece of claptrap, a novel about a man whose hobby was shooting interracial couples. Another was the book reportedly the inspiration for major terrorist bombings, complete with formulas for making explosives. Still another was one he recognized, an anarchy handbook long ago discredited even in anarchist circles as containing faulty information that would get the reader killed if he tried to reproduce what the book contained.

Hyde’s idiot skinheads fancied themselves geniuses. Never had so many people had such a high opinion of themselves with so little justification. In their minds, it was everyone else who was stupid.

It was easy to be among them, easier than it should have been. Like all deep-cover operatives, he had felt himself slipping away, felt himself starting to like the freedom. Even amid the dissolution, the depravity, the debauchery that was killing his soul and sucking the life from his eyes, God help him, he had enjoyed some of it.

Now and again he would remember that. He would feel it in his stomach, like a sucker punch deep in his guts. When those times came he couldn’t escape the memories fast enough, couldn’t tamp them down hard enough, couldn’t displace them with thoughts of his home and his family and the wife he had betrayed and neglected for his job. He had taken hot shower after hot shower, trying to get the stink of their rat holes and their cigarettes off him. He had gone to doctors, hoping for reassurance, hoping for a rubber stamp on a test form somewhere that told him he was going to be okay, he wasn’t scarred forever, he wasn’t damaged goods.

It was his weakness, he knew, that had eventually undone him. One of Hyde’s toadies had gotten curious and followed him. Once there, the skinhead had seen something, read something, found something out that exposed Troy for other than what he seemed. Troy never knew exactly what it was. A name on a clinic form, an incautious word on the phone to his wife…there was no way to know. He was distracted; he had thought his cover inviolable, had begun to think of himself, in unguarded moments, as one of Hyde’s street soldiers. He had gone to the clinic in…where was it? He couldn’t remember. Places, names, people, they swirled through his head like wisps of fog, evaporating when he tried to catch them. The doctors had told him it might be like that, especially concerning anything to do with the trauma. What trauma? Something had happened. He didn’t remember. It didn’t matter.

He looked down at the rubber ball in his fingers. Sara. It had belonged to Sara. His daughter.

Troy was up before he realized he was on his feet, ripping the mirror from the wall above the entertainment center, throwing it to the floor. It cracked when it landed, but he put his foot through it anyway, feeling the glass splinter under his shoe, relishing the sound of destruction. Still holding the ball, he drew the .40-caliber Glock from the holster clipped to his waistband and smashed the barrel into the television, sundering the flat screen. The telephone flew across the room when he hurled it. He kicked over the wooden chair next to the bed.

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