“I will kill this girl immediately!”

The man’s high-pitched voice threatened to shatter the eardrums of everyone in the Learjet. “You fill a suitcase with old magazines and think we will not open it before we release the woman?”

“Well, Moe,” Bolan said, holding the mike up to his mouth again, “it was all I could think of to do. We didn’t have a million dollars to give you.” Now was the moment of truth. The woman would live or die.

“You have not heard the last from us,” Moe screamed. “And the blood of this young woman is on your hands!”

The radio suddenly went silent.

Bolan saw a woman wearing a red dress—her hands and feet tied together—being shoved out of the Cessna just below them.

“Parachute!” he yelled at the top of his voice as he snapped open his seat belt.

With the unopened parachute clenched in his fist, Bolan never even broke stride as he raced out the door and into the open air thousands of feet above the earth.

Face of Terror

The Executioner®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Jerry VanCook for his contribution to this work.

What is left when honor is lost?

—Publilius Syrus: Sententiae 1st century B.C.

There is no greater dishonor than when a soldier turns traitor. I will make sure those traitors cannot win.

—Mack Bolan

THE MACK BOLAN

LEGEND

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Epilogue

Prologue

Susan McDonald could not have been happier.

As she stood proudly behind her shelf at the teller’s window, she felt the hard granite press lightly against her swelling abdomen. The baby—ultrasound images had already assured her husband and her that it was a boy—was kicking lightly. Susan’s doctor had warned her that soon he’d be kicking like a professional soccer player, that he’d wake her up at night and make her jump in the middle of sentences.

The baby was almost the only thing she could think of these days. Almost. But the other thing was too ghastly to think about, and so unlikely to happen at her branch of the First Federal Bank that she easily pushed it to the back of her mind.

Frank Dutton, the loan officer in charge of this branch office, walked to the front door, where several customers waited to conduct their early-morning banking. Frank selected a key from the large ring he’d produced from his pocket, unlocked the door, then held it open as the customers filed inside.

“Good morning, Mabel. Hello, Tim. Hey, Charlie, how’s the book coming?”

Frank knew every regular customer by name, which was one of the reasons the First Federal Bank’s outpost on South Western had more customers, and did more business, than any of the other branches.

Susan looked down the row of smiling women’s faces at the other tellers’ windows. Most were blond and all were beautiful. That was another reason the customers—at least the males—never seemed to switch banks.

The customer Frank had called Charlie limped toward Susan, leaning on his cane. He had a white beard beneath his well-worn brown fedora, and a tie-dyed T-shirt bearing a picture of Janis Joplin riding a motorcycle covered his chest. Susan knew he was a veteran of the Vietnam War, a former cop and still taught self-defense clinics on occasion. He’d recently taken a medical retirement from the police department because arthritis had set into almost every joint he had—most of which had been broken or dislocated at one time or another during his life of adventure. Now he wrote articles for magazines and was working on a book about his experiences in Southeast Asia.

Susan’s mind flashed back to the one problem that even her baby couldn’t force from her mind, and she knew the sight of Charlie limping forward had forced it to her consciousness. A rash of violent bank robberies had plagued almost all of the major cities surrounding Chicago. And it appeared to be the work of the same gang. The police suspected that the robbers were actually members of an Arabic terrorist cell. Any people inside the bank during the robberies who showed even the slightest sign of resistance were immediately murdered.

Charlie dropped a checkbook on the counter and began endorsing several checks. “Morning, Susie,” he greeted. He passed the checks and deposit slips through the hole at the bottom of the glass that separated them, and was about to speak when the front door suddenly burst into flying shards of glass.

Everyone inside the bank froze.

Susan watched in horror as, one by one, five men dressed in multicolored Army camou outfits with black ski masks covering their faces crunched over the glass inside the bank.

Susan and the others were still glued into position as Charlie produced a silver-colored gun from beneath his T-shirt and turned to face the robbers. He got off three quick shots—all of which looked like they’d hit their targets in the chest by the robbers’ reactions—before another of the men turned some kind of machine gun on Charlie and shot him three times. One of the bullets made the elderly customer drop his pistol, but he suddenly pulled a thin sword out of his cane and staggered toward the men in the Army shirts and pants.

It took only one more round to drop Charlie to the floor.

Susan screamed, which made the other tellers scream. Then the loan officers and customers began screaming, too.

The five robbers were trying to shout over the shrieks in some kind of foreign language. It was probably Arabic, Susan thought. She was about to drop down to her knees behind the counter when one of the men switched to heavily accented English. “Do not move! If you do as I say, no one else will be harmed!”

Susan’s eyes darted back to the three men Charlie had shot, and she saw that they were still on their feet. Bulletproof vests, she thought. She remembered that some robbers in California had worn them a few years ago, and the police had had a terrible time trying to stop them.

The man who had spoken in heavily accented English now fired a burst into the ceiling. “Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up now, all of you, or I will kill each and every one!”

Suddenly, the main lobby of the bank went silent. Susan had planned to drop to her knees a moment earlier, but now those same knees made the decision for her. She sank to the tile floor as if she’d been given a local anesthetic in both legs, and had to force herself to slide in beneath the counter.

From where she now hid, Susan heard the same voice ordering the tellers to come around to the front lobby. Each one who passed her looked down to where she hid. Some were crying. Others were in shock.

Susan realized that if any of the bank robbers came back behind the counter they would easily find her. But the time to surrender had come and gone. Something in her heart told Susan that if she slid out and got to her feet now, she’d be immediately killed.

And so would her baby.

Behind her, through the thin wall, Susan heard the man speaking English order everyone to the carpet. A few seconds later, she heard him speaking in that strange tongue again. A moment after he stopped, she heard the sounds of doors opening and closing from the part of the bank that held the loan officers’ offices and supply rooms.

The robbers were looking for anyone who had hidden, Susan knew, and that realization made her heart pound so hard she feared she might have a miscarriage.

The half door that separated the lobby from the tellers’ area swung open, and two of the men in Army clothes appeared in front of Susan. She pulled her knees tighter against her chest, but the baby inside her kept her from getting her legs out of sight. The two men walked past her and, unless the stress was causing her to hallucinate, neither of them noticed her feet sticking out from under the counter.

The men headed for the vault in the back of the bank. They disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared at the doorway leading back to the tellers’ area. One of them was looking at his wristwatch. A little later, an explosion sounded from the vault room.

Another man wearing a ski mask now hurried through the swing door and followed the first two back into the vault room. They spoke excitedly in their foreign tongue, then came back carrying large cotton money bags.

It took them three trips to get it all.

Behind her again now, Susan could hear the crunch of the broken glass beneath their boots as they began carrying the money out to whatever vehicle awaited them. Then, evidently finished and ready to leave, Susan heard the same man who had done all of the talking speak again. “Allahu Akhbar!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Death to all infidels!”

Then the room erupted with the explosions of all of the men’s machine guns, and Susan closed her eyes again and prayed. Dear God, she mouthed silently. Please spare the life of my child if not mine. Then she began to cry.

She was still crying five minutes later when the police arrived. It took a good minute after that for her to pry her eyes open and face what had happened.

Inside her belly, her baby boy was kicking like a well-trained rooster at a cockfight.

1

They had received the exact location from DEA Special Agent Rick Jessup’s informant only minutes earlier. Which meant they had mere minutes to reach the site of the cocaine transaction before the deal would be over and the drug pushers gone.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, continued to floor the accelerator of the civilian-market Hummer. It was not the kind of vehicle he’d expected to find waiting for him when he’d arrived in Guyman, Oklahoma, earlier that morning.

With its bright yellow paint job, the only advantage it might have was that it stood out so much that no one in his right mind would believe any police agency would have the audacity to use it as an undercover vehicle.

But Bolan knew that would be a short-lived advantage. The bright Hummer might work fine for inner-city surveillance, but as soon as any action started, that advantage would disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Gun smoke.

Then again, Bolan had learned to work within the limitations of the equipment he had on hand, and he did not intend to quit doing so now.

The stakes in this game were simply too high to fold now.

Ever since Jessup’s informant indicated that a large cocaine deal was about to go down in the Oklahoma panhandle, Bolan had dressed and played the part of a wealthy Southwestern businessman. Both he and Agent Jessup wore exotic-skinned boots—Jessup’s were ostrich, Bolan’s anteater—carefully pressed blue jeans and colorful Western shirts with bolo ties of silver and turquoise.

Bolan continued to press the Hummer to its maximum speed while Jessup studied the hand-drawn map he had made while talking to his informant over the phone. “I think it’s the next turn,” he told the Executioner. “Yeah, there’s the motel my guy mentioned.” He pointed at a small set of brick buildings on the right side of the road. “Out in the middle of nowhere just like he said. Almost exactly halfway between Guyman and Boise City. That means we turn right the next time we see dirt.”

The Hummer flashed past the motel and sped on.

Oklahoma’s panhandle was known for its flatness, and the eye could indeed see for miles. The terrain was mostly prairie, with a few occasional wheat fields.

Not the usual sort of place radical Islamic terrorists or mafiosi would pick to do a drug deal. Then again, they might be working off the same sort of psychology the Executioner was using with the Hummer—picking a place so bereft of privacy that no lawmen were likely to even consider it.

In other words, hiding in plain sight.

Bolan saw the quarter-section road ahead and felt his eyebrows lower in concentration as he slowed. Middle-Eastern terrorists doing business with old-school Phoenix mafiosi didn’t constitute an average run-of-the-mill dope deal, either. But Bolan had seen stranger alliances form when there was a buck to be made.

Twelve-thirty p.m., which was what the Executioner’s watch read at the moment, was also a strange time of day for a drug transaction. Both the terrorists and the mafiosi had to have figured that all of the local lawmen had met someplace for lunch.

Bolan twisted the steering wheel and kicked up reddish-brown dust clouds beneath the Hummer’s tires. He leaned onto the accelerator again, driving along the packed-dirt county road only slightly slower than he had on the pavement. His eyes searched the horizon ahead, and he saw Jessup lift a pair of binoculars.

“This ground isn’t as flat as it looks,” the DEA man said. “It looks like you ought to be able to see all the way to Canada. But you can’t.”

“We’re only a few miles south of the Kansas state line and we can’t even see that,” the Executioner replied. “The terrain rises and falls so slowly and gently that it just looks flat. It can still block the view.”

Jessup nodded and dropped the binoculars to his lap. Bolan drove on.

Two and a half miles later, the Hummer topped one of the gentle rises the Executioner had mentioned and suddenly they could see a group of vehicles parked in the middle of a cow pasture. One Jeep and five pickups were parked in a circle roughly a half mile in front of them and a quarter mile or so off the road. Bolan hit the brakes and slowed to a speed that wouldn’t draw so much attention.

After all, the bright yellow Hummer was enough.

“Don’t you think we ought to hurry on in?” Jessup asked, turning toward the Executioner.

Bolan slowed even further and shook his head. “They’ve seen us,” he said. “Right about now, they’re all looking this way and speculating on who we are. Wealthy farmers with more money than good sense who bought a big yellow play toy? Or the law? The law would swoop in fast. But it wouldn’t be fast enough to keep most of them from getting away across the prairie.”

“Not to mention the fact that they’re going to start shooting as soon as it’s obvious the law is after them.” Jessup paused for a low chuckle, deep in his chest. “At least I’m the law,” he said. “I still haven’t figured out exactly who or what you are.”

The Executioner chuckled himself. All Jessup knew was that he had been assigned to work with Bolan—whom he knew as Matt Cooper—for a series of drug deals to which his snitch was privy. He had already seen Cooper bend conventional law so far as to break it. But it was always for a final good, and the end really did always justify the means.

“You’re right about the shooting,” Bolan finally said. “As soon as I turn this baby their way, it’s going to start. So the longer I can stay on the county road, the more it’ll appear that we’re just headed for someplace past them.” He paused and took in a breath. “That means I’m going to wait until we’re right across from them and then cut a hard right their way.”

“Short of bringing in air support, that’s about as good a plan as I can think of,” Jessup said. He leaned forward and slid an AR-15 from beneath the Hummer’s passenger’s seat. Pulling back the bolt of the semiautomatic version of the military’s M-16, he chambered a round, all the time keeping the weapon below the windows of the vehicle.

The Executioner knew he would need both hands on the wheel for the breakneck turn he had planned in the next few seconds, so he left his 9 mm Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun where it lay near his feet. Then, as soon as he was perpendicular to the cars parked out in the cow pasture, he whipped the Hummer their way.

The Hummer fishtailed slightly as it descended into a deep bar ditch. Then it straightened again as it climbed up the other side. The sturdy personnel vehicle punched through the barbed-wire fence between two wooden posts as if it were snapping a dry rubber band. The razor-sharp barbs on the strands dragged across the Hummer’s sides, scratching deeply into the yellow paint job. A second later, they were creating another dust storm behind them. But this time, the clouds flying up through the air from the Hummer’s tires included not only dirt but long blades of wild grass.

Bolan and Jessup had been right in their assessment of the drug dealers’ reaction.

The shooting started immediately.

The Executioner heard several engines roar to life, and then the Jeep and two of the pickups fled from the oncoming Hummer. The loud, frightened mooing of several dozen cattle, who had gathered together deeper into the pasture, rose up between the other noises as the escaping vehicles headed toward them, forcing the animals to part, and causing them to stampede in opposite directions.

The men escaping, Bolan knew, had to be the sellers, who already had their money. The buyers of the cocaine were still loading cardboard boxes into the backs of their vehicles from piles on the ground. But now they were forced to postpone that task and turn toward Bolan and Jessup.

“We can go after the guys with the money,” Bolan said. “Or we can get the guys with the dope right here.” He paused for a second, then added, “But we may not be able to get them both.”

“Let’s go for the dope,” Jessup said without hesitation. “At least we can keep it from getting onto the streets.”

“You’re right,” Bolan agreed. Reaching inside his light jacket, he drew the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R. In the corner of his eye, he saw Jessup kneel his right leg on the seat, then wrap the seat belt tightly around his calf. As Bolan extended the Beretta out the window with his left hand, Jessup leaned out with his entire torso.

Both men began firing simultaneously.

As the Hummer crested a short rise in the pasture, it went momentarily airborne. Both the Executioner and the DEA agent waited for it to settle on flatter ground, then pulled their respective triggers.

A trio of subsonic, nearly inaudible 9 mm hollowpoint rounds rocketed from Bolan’s Beretta. One round struck the shoulder of a man wearing a charcoal-gray suit and striped tie. Bolan frowned slightly, then nodded. The pickups the Mafia gunners had chosen fit right in with the landscape, but their clothing made them stand out.

Next to him, the Executioner heard Jessup pop off three semiauto rounds from his AR-15. They were still at least an eighth of a mile away, and none of the .223-caliber rounds seemed to find a target.

By now, the mafiosi in the field had taken cover around their pickups—three almost identical Toyota Tundras. One was burgundy colored, another green and the third one blue. All were parked with their beds facing the oncoming Hummer, the tailgates were down and the cargo areas roughly half-filled with cardboard boxes.

Cardboard boxes that, the Executioner knew, had to contain kilo after kilo of white powdered cocaine.

A rifle round struck the Hummer’s windshield, then skimmed up off the bullet-resistant material. Only a tiny speck appeared on the glass to show where it had hit. Bolan drove on, squeezing the trigger of his Beretta yet again. This time all three rounds of automatic fire struck the right front fender of the green pickup as the same man he’d hit in the shoulder a little earlier ducked back behind the engine block.

Jessup fired again, and Bolan saw the rear windshield of the blue pickup shatter into thousands of tiny pieces.

“Dammit!” the DEA man shouted as he pulled his rifle back inside the Hummer.

Bolan glanced his way as he sped on toward the pickups. The still-smoking brass case from the last shot Jessup had fired stood straight up out of the breech of the weapon. Such a jam was called a stove pipe and it could come from a faulty magazine, a faulty round or a faulty gun.

Jamming the stock of his AR-15 back against the car seat, Jessup pulled back the bolt and brushed brass out of the weapon with a sweep of his left hand. His eyes stared down into the opening, and when he released the bolt again a fresh round was shoved into the chamber.

“I’m going to drive right through them,” the Executioner said just as Jessup began to lean out of the window again. “This Hummer’s the best cover we’re going to get.” His eyes narrowed as the brows above them furrowed. “And we may take out some of them in the crash.” He paused for another quick glance over at Jessup. “Better stay in here and put your seat belt on right.”

The DEA special agent understood. Taking a sitting position, he snapped his seat belt and shoulder harness into place, then rested his AR-15 across his lap with the barrel pointing at the door.

The mafiosi behind the pickups didn’t realize what was going to happen until it was almost too late. They continued firing toward the Hummer, their rounds doing little more than make more specks on the windshield.

Then, suddenly, the fact that the huge civilianized military vehicle wasn’t going to stop or even slow suddenly sank into them all at the same time. Six men suddenly emerged from behind the pickups and began running in different directions across the cow pasture.

The Hummer crashed into the tailgates of the burgundy and green Tundras, folded them up into a mangled mass of steel, then blew out all four of the rear tires. The burgundy truck was thrown out and to the left, directly atop one of the fleeing mafiosi.

The man’s lone scream abruptly cut short as he was crushed to death. As soon as they were past the vehicles, the Executioner twisted the Hummer around in a breakneck U-turn and started back toward the crumpled green pickup. It had been knocked onto its side, and one of the mafiosi dived back behind the cab, not seeing any other possible escape.

But the overturned green pickup was no cover for the Hummer, either. Bolan turned the wheel slightly and a second later he and Jessup bumped up and over the wreck, squashing the Mafia soldier below their wheels and what remained of the green Toyota Tundra.

There had been a total of six men—two to a pickup.

The Hummer had taken care of two of them.

Now it was time to pursue the other four running in opposite directions across the wide-open spaces of the pastureland.

Bolan whipped the wheel to the right and accelerated once more. The Hummer dived and jumped over the uneven surface beneath its tires. Ahead, Bolan could see two of the running mafiosi—one wearing a charcoal-gray business suit, the other dressed in a more comfortable track suit—running as best they could. But regardless of the fact that he wore running clothes, the man inside them wasn’t a runner. He was at least fifty pounds overweight and doing more waddling than actual running.

As they closed the gap to roughly ten yards, the fat man pulled a bright nickel-plated revolver from somewhere inside his jacket and threw a wild shot back at the Hummer. Bolan pushed the pedal down harder, and a second later the big vehicle was rolling along right next to the man.

The overweight Mafia man was huffing and puffing like a freight train on its final run before being scrapped. And it looked to the Executioner as if it took all of his last strength to lift the brightly shining wheelgun in his hand toward the open window of the Hummer.

Bolan extended his left hand out the window and tapped the trigger yet again.

All three 9 mm hollowpoint rounds coughed out of the sound-suppressed weapon and into the face and throat of the fat man.

Bolan drew a bead on the other man heading in the direction of the highway. He was on the other side of the Hummer, and Bolan said, “Get ready.”

Jessup nodded and extended his rifle barrel out the window. But for this shot there would be no need to kneel on the seat or strap himself in. He could do it from where he sat.

A lone, frightened and confused cow suddenly appeared in front of them as if out of nowhere. The Executioner twisted the wheel hard, barely brushing past her without hurting her. The mooing sounded more like a roar as they drove on.

Fifteen seconds later, they were next to the man in the charcoal-gray suit. It was the same man Bolan had hit in the shoulder, and he held that shoulder with his other hand as he ran, a grimace of severe pain covering his face. But that hand also held a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, and as the Hummer neared, he attempted to raise it just as his overweight friend had tried with his nickel-plated revolver.

Jessup changed his plans. For life.

The Executioner watched out of the corner of his eye as the DEA agent lifted the barrel of his rifle and carefully triggered a double-tap of 5.56 mm NATO rounds into the mafioso. The first one caught the man in the center of the back, causing him to suddenly halt his running. The second round exploded the back of his head as he fell, leaving no question in either the Executioner’s or Jessup’s mind that he was dead.

Bolan wasted no time.

Another quick U-turn and the Executioner was already flooring the accelerator across the pasture. Ahead, he could see two tiny moving specks that he knew were the final two Mafia soldiers. They were still moving, but they looked as if they were tired. One speck had even slowed to a walk.

Bolan glanced to his right as they passed the wreckage of the other two pickups again. Far in the distance, hustling deeper into the pasture, he could see the Jeep and two pickups that had darted away as soon as the Hummer had left the road. If he and Jessup could just take out these last two mafiosi quickly enough, there was still the chance that they’d have time to catch up to the men escaping with the drug money.

Rolling on across the prairie, Bolan drove up next to the walking man. Dressed like the others, he had taken time to light a cigarette and now huffed and puffed on the unfiltered smoke that was clenched between his teeth.

As the Hummer neared, the man turned and looked back at it.

Bolan wondered if he might be able to take this man alive. If he could, he would. Not out of any sympathy for such a parasite who fed off the misery of others’ addictions, but in order to collect information.

The Mafia man gave him no such chance.

As they neared the man, he turned and raised a small Skorpion submachine pistol. A smattering of bullets hit the windshield but the small, low-velocity rounds barely even marked the windshield. As they drove on, however, nearing the man, his angle of fire changed.

A second before he had a shot at Bolan through the driver’s window of the Hummer, the Executioner extended his hand once more and tapped another 3-round burst into the man’s face. Not even his mother would have recognized him as he settled on the grassy ground of the cow pasture.

Kicking their speed yet another notch, the Executioner came to a man who looked to be much younger than the other mafioso. In his early twenties, Bolan guessed, he was definitely in better shape. But the uneven pastureland was no cinder track, and the ruts and holes—not to mention the mounds that often crumbled under the feet—were slowing him.

The Hummer was still twenty yards behind him when the younger man turned. Instead of a business or track suit, he wore khaki slacks, a blue blazer and a paisley tie around the collar of his white button-down shirt. He looked more like a young attorney than a Mafia soldier, the Executioner thought as he twisted the steering wheel, turning his side of the truck to face this last man, then skidding to a halt.

The young man reached under his left armpit with his right hand.

But that was as far as he got toward his weapon.

The final 3-round burst in the Beretta’s 15-round magazine flew out of the barrel with three quiet burps. All three hit the center of the mafioso’s chest and exploded his heart. He fell straight back away from the Hummer, dead before he hit the ground.

The Executioner turned immediately for the vehicles still escaping across the pasture. They were at least a mile away now, and they’d be hard to intercept. Maybe impossible. It depended on whether they were just fleeing haphazardly or if they’d had some backup plan for a situation such as this.

Bolan frowned. They looked as if they knew what they were doing. And his gut instinct was that this escape route was part of a well-thought-out backup plan.

As he took his foot off the brake pedal and returned it to the accelerator, Jessup said, “You think there’s a chance of catching them?”

The Hummer tore up more wild grass as it picked up speed. “I don’t know,” the Executioner said. “But it won’t hurt to give it a shot.”

BEHIND THE WHEEL of the Jeep, Harry Drake looked up into the rearview mirror. “Those bastards in that Hummer are coming after us,” he told Sal Whitlow, who sat in the passenger’s seat of the vehicle. Like Drake himself, Whitlow wore green camouflage BDUs and a boonie hat. A Russian Tokarev automatic pistol rode in a holster on his belt, and a Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 lay across his lap.

“They’ll never catch us.” Whitlow chuckled, turning in his seat to smile back into the pasture. “That yellow submarine’s almost like a tank. But this Jeep and the four-wheel-drive pickups are enough for this terrain.”

“I hope you’re right,” Drake said as he turned slightly to miss a small scrub tree. “And I hope our ticket out of here is waiting where he’s supposed to be.”

“He will be,” Whitlow said confidently, turning back to face the front. “Joe Knox is solid SAS. I met him several times when we trained with the Brits.”

Drake nodded. He was trusting Whitlow’s judgment, as well as his word. They’d served together as Army Rangers during the first Gulf War, then worn the green beanies of the Army’s Special Forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The two men were more than friends. They were like brothers.

Just the same, Drake was glad he’d downed a Lortab and a Xanax—painkillers—with a mouthful of whiskey right before the yellow Hummer appeared. His nerves had been on edge lately, and the mixture of drugs was sometimes all that kept him from screaming out loud.

As the Jeep took a rise, then suddenly plunged downward toward a dry creek bed, Drake twisted his neck and looked at the Ford F250. It was negotiating the rugged ground as well as the Jeep. He turned his head back and saw the Dodge Ram just outside his open-topped vehicle to his right. It was doing fine, too.

Whitlow was right. They had stolen the four-wheel-drive pickups, along with the Jeep, earlier that morning from a farm twenty miles away, and they’d been perfect vehicles in which to deliver the cocaine. And the farmer who had owned all three vehicles wouldn’t need them anymore, either.

He and his wife lay dead on a pile of hay in the barn.

Drake took another quick glance at the Dodge Ram and saw Felix Bundy riding shotgun. Though he couldn’t see past Bundy in the higher vehicle, he knew Donald O’Hara was in the driver’s seat. Both men had been Navy SEALS and served in the Middle East just like Drake and Whitlow. Drake glanced one more time at the Ford F250 as all three vehicles came up out of the creek bed and raced on toward a county section road just past a barbed-wire fence another two hundred yards away. Elmer Scott was behind the wheel of the Ram, with Charlie Ducket riding shotgun for him. The two of them had been U.S. Marine recons and had shot their share of Arabs just like the rest of the team.

Harry Drake instinctively ducked lower behind the Jeep’s windshield as the front bumper burst through the barbed wire. The pickups had fallen in directly behind him, and now he raced up the bar ditch to the dirt road.

Drake frowned, thinking at lightning speed. The county road was a temptation. It would be easier going, with less chance of one or more of his convoy breaking down. But the Hummer would likely catch up to them more quickly if they took the easy route. Besides, once they reached the highway they’d be sitting ducks for Oklahoma highway patrolmen and any small-town cops who got word of what was going on over the radio.

By the time he had decided to go on through the next pasture he was already halfway down the bar ditch anyway. The Jeep popped the barbed wire surrounding the next quarter section as easily as it had the first one, and sent a small herd of Black Angus cattle scurrying away in terror.

As they raced across the pasture, Drake saw the white paint of the helicopter peeking between the branches of a small grove of trees. Behind the controls, he knew Joe Knox would be waiting to take them skyward. He slowed the Jeep and prepared to jump out, abandon it and help the men with the money load the briefcases before they abandoned the pickups.

As soon as he’d ground to a halt, Drake held his hand up to his eyes. Looking out over the pastureland, he could see the yellow Hummer just now crossing the county road and coming up through the hole in the fence that they had made.

“Okay, guys!” Drake yelled above the sound of the whopping chopper blades. “Get that money on board and let’s get out of here!” He slung his AK-47 over his shoulder on the green web sling and hurried to the F250, where he seized four briefcases. “And from now until we’re safely airborne, we change languages just in case!” A grin curled the corners of his mouth, making the ends of his handlebar mustache rise to tickle the sides of his nose.

He had chosen his crew carefully, including in his criteria for recruitment their exceptional combat skills, intelligence, willingness to break the laws of the nation that had trained them and they had defended, but even more for one other skill they all possessed.

Each and every one of Harry Drake’s men spoke fluent Farsi, the national tongue of Iran.

“Aye-aye,” one of the Marines yelled. Drake couldn’t tell which one.

But it didn’t matter. What did matter was that they get the half-million dollars in cash on board the chopper and fly out of here before that big yellow monstrosity of a vehicle arrived and its passengers shot them all.

Drake had a bad feeling about that canary-colored Hummer. Not so much the vehicle itself but the men inside it.

Something told him that at least one of the men—the driver, who had shown such competency in taking out their Mafia associates—was a superior warrior to each and every last one of them.

THE MAN DEA SPECIAL AGENT Rick Jessup had been told to call Matt Cooper continued to guide the yellow Hummer as it bounced in and out of the ruts and mounds that made up the cow pasture. Far in the distance, the specks that Jessup knew were a Jeep and two more pickups were gradually growing larger. As they banked down into another creek bed, then up the other side, he was suddenly able to differentiate between the vehicles. The Jeep was a standard CJ-5 model. One of the pickups was a Dodge Ram, the other a Ford F250.

Jessup couldn’t remember the license numbers he had seen for a brief second as the three vehicles had fled the scene a few minutes earlier. But if memory served him right, they had all had local farm tags.

Which meant the men driving and riding in them had stolen them from somewhere close to this area. And they had to have stolen them recently. No reports of missing vehicles had gone out over the police-band radio mounted in the Hummer. That could only mean one of two things: either the rightful owners hadn’t discovered their property missing yet or they were dead.

Considering the fact that his snitch had told him it was radical Islamic terrorists who had sold the coke to the Mafia, Jessup’s money was on the latter possibility.

The DEA man watched the vehicles ahead of them slow, then stop as they reached a lone grove of trees in the middle of the pasture. Just above the treetops, he could barely make out the whirling blades of a helicopter.

“So that’s their plan,” Bolan said from behind the wheel. The words came out sounding hard and stark after the silence that had reigned over the Hummer for the past several minutes.

“They’ll just abandon the pickups and Jeep. My guess is they were stolen anyway,” Jessup said.

Bolan nodded, then turned briefly toward Jessup. “Take the wheel,” he said.

Jessup reached over and grasped the steering wheel.

The Hummer slowed momentarily as Bolan took his foot off the accelerator and thrust himself backward over the seat into the rear passenger area of the Hummer. But it was done so quickly and smoothly—obviously a much-practiced move—that Jessup was able to slide behind the wheel and take control immediately.

A second later, Bolan had climbed back into the front, now in the passenger’s seat where Jessup had been a second before. Reaching down to the floorboard, the big man lifted his Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun.

Jessup got the Hummer back up to speed as Bolan strapped his leg down with the seat belt. A moment later, he was more out of the window than in, and firing 3-round bursts from the H&K subgun.

Through the windshield, Jessup could see tiny figures loading what looked like briefcases from the pickups onto the helicopter. He also saw the small grass and dust storms erupt as his partner’s 9 mm slugs fell a few feet in front of the men.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jessup watched Bolan raise his point of aim slightly. As more subgun explosions sounded from the other side of the Hummer, he looked out of the windshield again and saw two holes appear in the side of the chopper.

But they were still too far away for the submachine gun to be relied on for accuracy. It was a short-range weapon, and trying to force it to become a sniper’s rifle was like using a screwdriver for a hammer.

Bolan tossed the MP-5 over his shoulder into the backseat and lifted the AR-15 that Jessup had used only minutes before on the Mafia men. He leaned out of the window again, and Jessup could see that the assault rifle was angled more horizontally this time. The 5.56 mm NATO rounds should reach the chopper more efficiently.

Bolan pulled the AR-15’s trigger three times in a row, and a trio of rounds sailed across the grassland and pocked the side of the helicopter—just to the side of the open side door. But they did so as the last of the briefcases was loaded, and the last man in cammies reached up, took the hand of another terrorist and allowed himself to be jerked up into the chopper as it began to rise.

Bolan pulled the trigger several more times as the Hummer raced closer. But they were still too far away for his rounds to be effective, and to complicate things further, his target was moving as well as distant.

Jessup drove on. When the helicopter was perhaps a hundred feet in the air, the pilot turned its nose directly at the oncoming Hummer. Jessup watched as a man in green camouflage, secured to the helicopter by a ballistic nylon strap, leaned out of the same sliding side door through which the men had boarded.

Resting on his shoulder was an OD-green bazooka.

“Twist the wheel!” Bolan yelled. And even as he spoke, he dropped the AR-15 and reached across the Hummer with both hands.

The bazooka’s charge exploded out of the mammoth barrel even as the back blast flew past the rear of the helicopter. Together, Bolan and Jessup turned the wheel as if their very lives depended on it.

The explosion ten feet to one side of their vehicle created a crater in the prairie ground roughly the same size that a hand grenade buried beneath the surface would have made. Bolan looked back up at the sky and saw the man with the bazooka disappear back into the helicopter. Then the chopper rose higher into the air, turned and flew away.

Jessup turned the Hummer back toward the helicopter as it grew smaller in the distance. Both he and Bolan stepped out of the yellow vehicle and watched.

“Any idea where they might be going?” Jessup asked.

Bolan shook his head. “Even on ground this flat, they’ll be completely out of sight in another minute or so. Especially if they stay as close to the ground as they were. They could keep going, turn right or left, or even fly a few miles one way or another and then double back past us.”

“They might figure we’ll wait here and see,” Jessup suggested.

“They might,” Bolan said. “But it’s not likely. They can spot this yellow Hummer a long time before we see them in the air. Come on.” He got back behind the wheel of the big vehicle as Jessup jumped into the passenger’s side. They drove only slightly slower as they returned to where the three Toyota pickups lay in ruins.

“It’s gonna take a while to get all that coke rounded up, inventoried and loaded,” Jessup said as they neared the overturned truck. “Want me to radio in for some assistance?” He started to reach for the microphone mounted on the dashboard.

Bolan shook his head and Jessup’s arm froze in midair.

“I’ve got a faster and much more efficient way of handling things,” the big man said as he pulled up next to the overturned truck. Quickly dropping down from the Hummer, the Executioner walked to the back of the Hummer and grabbed a five-gallon can of gasoline. Then, walking from truck to truck, he dribbled a trail of gas in his wake, removing the cap to each pickup’s gas tank when he reached it.

Finally, Bolan dripped gas in his tracks as he walked backward to the Hummer once more. Punching the cigarette lighter into the dash, he turned to Jessup as the DEA man got in on the other side. “You don’t smoke, do you?” he asked.

“No,” Jessup said.

Bolan nodded. Pulling the cigarette lighter out of the Hummer’s dash, he glanced for a second at the glowing orange disk inside it, then dropped it out of the window.

The gasoline-soaked prairie grass next to the Hummer immediately started to burn, and the flame worked its way down the individual trails that led to the Toyotas, cocaine and dead men.

Throwing the Hummer into gear, Bolan tore up more grass and dirt as he floored the accelerator and raced back to the county road. He had driven through broken barbed-wire fence and traversed the bar ditch to the road when the explosions began.

2

Bolan watched the flames leaping in the rearview mirror as he drove the Hummer back toward the highway. Next to him, Jessup had turned sideways in his seat and watched as the three exploded pickups, the dead mafiosi and a half-million dollars of cocaine burned. “Well, Cooper,” he said finally, turning back to face the front. “That’s certainly a lot easier than bagging it all for evidence and transporting it for safekeeping until the trial—which won’t be necessary now anyway.” He paused and took a deep breath. “You sure we aren’t going to have to answer for this? I mean, calling this unorthodox behavior for a law-enforcement officer would be the understatement of the century.”

“Don’t sweat it, Jessup,” Bolan said. “Yes, I’m in charge of this operation. But I’m not a law-enforcement officer.”

The DEA man threw his head back against the neck rest atop his seat. “Oh, that’s great,” he said. “So you’re a spook. CIA? Department of Defense? Homeland Security?”

“Uh-uh,” the Executioner said. Ahead, he could see where the dirt rose up to the two-lane highway leading from Guyman to Boise City. “None of those.”

“Okay,” Jessup said. “I’ll quit wondering exactly who you are or who you work for. It doesn’t matter. You’re one hell of a…” He stopped talking for a second, looking for the right words. When he didn’t find them, he continued, “You’re one damn fine fighter. You immediately adapt to whatever situation presents itself.” Across the front seat, the Executioner saw him frown. “But do you not have to answer to anyone? Anyone at all?”

“Just the President,” Bolan said. “And we get along just fine.” He withdrew his scrambled satellite phone and tapped in a number. A few seconds later, Jack Grimaldi answered the summons.

“Yeah, Striker,” the ace pilot acknowledged. “What’s up?”

“We got the dope but missed the money,” Bolan told him. “We’re headed back to Guyman now to meet you.”

“You can do that if you want,” Grimaldi said, “but there’s no need to. I took a little recon flight an hour or so ago. Spotted your bright yellow vehicle on the road. But the important thing here is the terrain I saw. It’s so flat, I’d have to try hard to find a place where I couldn’t land.” He stopped speaking for a second so Bolan could take it all in, then said, “Want me to come to you? It’ll be a lot faster.”

“Sounds fine,” the Executioner said. He pulled off the highway onto the shoulder and threw the Hummer into Park. The entire roadway was asphalt, pocked with holes the size of volcanoes and, in general, rougher riding than the cow pastures had been. Pulling a small handheld Global Positioning Unit—GPU—out of his shirt pocket, he read the Hummer’s coordinates to Grimaldi. “When you start smelling smoke and seeing flames below, you’ll know you’re close.”

“That’s affirmative, big guy,” Grimaldi said. “I’m revving her up now. See you in a few.”

Bolan heard a click in his ear and folded his phone back before dropping it and the GPU into his pockets again. Then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “You never know when we’ll get another chance to rest once this mission gets off the ground,” he told Jessup. “So I’d suggest you take advantage of it now.”

IT SEEMED THAT BOLAN had just closed his eyes when he was awakened by the distinctive sound of twin Pratt & Whitney PW305 turbofan engines. He turned to Jessup, grabbed the DEA agent’s arm and gently shook him to consciousness.

Bolan smiled when the pilot landed and brought the Learjet 60 to a halt less than twenty yards away. His friend controlled whatever craft he was flying as if it were an extension of his body. Aircraft were to Grimaldi what firearms and other weapons were to the Executioner.

When Jessup was awake, both men got out of the Hummer, walked down and then up across the bar ditch, then climbed over the fence. The Executioner found the door to the Learjet already open when he reached it, and Jack Grimaldi grinning at him below his sunglasses.

A second later, Bolan had strapped himself into his seat next to the pilot and Jessup took the seat behind Grimaldi. The ace pilot revved the engines, and the plane began to pick up speed again in preparation for takeoff.

The Executioner withdrew his sat phone and tapped in the number to Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorist headquarters. Bolan maintained an arm’s-length working relationship with Stony Man, and his and the Farm’s missions often coincided.

Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, didn’t answer until the fourth ring. “Sorry, Striker,” she said. “I was busy transferring some data to Bear.”

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman was in charge of the banks of computers and personnel who gathered the Farm’s electronic intel. Kurtzman spent most of his life in front of a computer. Once a strong bear of a man, he had been paralyzed from the waist down during a gun battle years ago and was now confined to a wheelchair.

And he was the best. There were simply no programs into which he couldn’t hack if given enough time, and there was no computer that came close to the power of his own brain. He had proved invaluable to Bolan and the other teams that worked out of the Farm.

“So what’s new on the western front?” Price said.

“We got the Mafia scum and the coke,” Bolan told the honey-blond mission controller. “Just missed the sellers.”

“Did you hear any of them speak?” Price asked.

Under normal conditions, the question would have sounded straight out of left field. But Bolan knew why Price had asked him. “Uh-uh,” he said. “We never got close enough to hear voices. They spoke to us with bullets and a bazooka.”

“A bazooka?” Price said.

“That’s right,” the Executioner said. “They missed.”

“Obviously,” Price said. “You need to talk to Hal?”

“Yeah,” the Executioner said. “Put him on.”

Bolan heard a click in his ear as Price put him on hold and went about her search for Hal Brognola, the Farm’s director. But he was also a high-ranking official within the U.S. Department of Justice. High enough, at least, that no one questioned his frequent and unexplained absences from Washington, D.C., during which time he manned the reins of Stony Man. He was also Bolan’s link to conventional law enforcement, and could get most things done with a simple phone call.

The Learjet continued to gain altitude, then leveled off as Bolan waited. A few minutes later, he heard the voice of another old friend.

“What’s happening, big guy?” Hal Brognola said into the phone.

“Just finished with the coke deal. Killed the bad guys, exploded the dope. There may be a few hundred cattle who get wired if the wind blows in the right direction, but that should be the only damage.”

Brognola laughed. “Better them than humans,” he said. “Barb already told me. Sounds like you came close to catching the pushers, too.”

“Yeah. Too bad we weren’t playing horseshoes.”

“Any idea who they were?” Brognola questioned. “Any chance they were this Islamic terrorist group that’s been robbing banks and creating other forms of havoc all over the place?”

“Hard to say, Hal,” the Executioner replied. “We didn’t get close enough to really get a good look at them. And as I suspect Barbara already told you, we couldn’t hear them speaking.”

“So tell me what your hunches are, big guy,” Brognola said. “They usually turn out to be as accurate as anything that can be proved.”

“My guess is that they’re the same bunch that hit the bank in Kansas City yesterday. They drove two pickups and a Jeep to the scene but had a helicopter waiting for them to make their getaway. I’d guess the chopper is theirs, which makes the Oklahoma panhandle only a hop, skip and a jump from K.C. The other vehicles I suspect they stole locally. And recently. There haven’t been any such theft reports come out over the police-band radio.”

“Anything else?” Brognola asked.

“Just that they were well trained. Either in one of the Middle-Eastern terrorist-training camps or some country’s armed forces. They worked with a certain military precision that I can’t quite put my finger on. And one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The guy who fired the bazooka at us—there was something about him I can’t put my finger on. But my gut tells me he’s no more Arabic than you or me.”

“Why’s that?” Brognola asked.

“I can’t say for sure. Maybe something about the way he moved. I really don’t know.”

“You sound like you’re leaning away from the radical-Islamic-terrorist theory,” Brognola said.

“Not entirely. But I’m certainly questioning it.”

“When you think about it, these guys have done a lot of things to make it look like their crimes were for religious and political reasons,” Brognola said. “Almost gone out of their way to convince people of it.”

“That’s what I’m beginning to think,” the Executioner said. “Stop and think about it, Hal. There’ve been three kidnappings and a little over a half-dozen bank robberies attributed to these men. The only witness left alive was that pregnant woman yesterday. She said they spoke Arabic. But do you think she could tell Arabic from one of the other Middle-Eastern languages? Like Farsi, maybe?”

“I doubt it,” Brognola said. “In fact, I’m not sure half of my own agents could.”

“Right,” the Executioner said. “I’m not saying they aren’t radical Muslims of some sort. Just that we can’t be sure yet.”

“So what can I do for you at this point?” Brognola asked.

Bolan glanced to Jessup in the backseat. The DEA man was sitting forward again, straining to hear every word that Bolan said. Turning his attention back to the phone once more, the Executioner said, “I’d like you to pull whatever strings you have to in order to get Jessup assigned to me for the duration of this mission. Think you can pull that off?”

“All it’ll take is a phone call,” Brognola said. “What have you got planned next?”

Bolan glanced behind him, toward the Learjet’s storage area. He had come straight to this mission from another strike in Australia, and was running low on ammo and other equipment. It was definitely time to restock.

“I’m coming in,” the Executioner told Brognola. “We’re running short on supplies.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then Brognola said, “You still have Jessup with you, right?”

Bolan knew what the pause had meant. Stony Man Farm was a top-secret installation. From the road, it looked like a regular working farm in the Shenendoah Valley. Knowledge of its location, as well as its function, was strictly on a need-to-know basis. And Jessup didn’t need to know.

“I’ve got him but I’ll take care of it,” the Executioner said. “Talk to you later.” He hung up.

Reaching under the seat next to Grimaldi, the Executioner pulled out what looked like a black cotton sack. But a small hole right in the middle would have raised the eyebrows of anyone seeing the bag for the first time.

Bolan turned around to Jessup. “I’m sorry to have to do this, Jessup,” he said. “But it’s necessary that you ride the rest of the way to my base of operations wearing this.”

Rick Jessup just shrugged. Then, taking the hood from Bolan, he pulled it down over his head and positioned the hole over his nose so he could breathe.

Then Jessup settled back in his seat, and Bolan turned back and did the same.

AS SOON AS HE’D PUNCHED the proper code buttons on the panel next to the steel door, Bolan heard the buzzer and pushed the door open. The Executioner held the door for Jessup, ushering the still-hooded man inside. He then loosened the cord around Jessup’s neck and removed the hood.

Hal Brognola was already seated at the head of the long conference table in Stony Man Farm’s War Room. A manila file was open in front of the Justice man on the table, and the stub of an unlit cigar was clenched between his teeth.

Seated to the Stony Man director’s left was a distinguished-looking man wearing a navy-blue business suit. Although obviously older, he had a full head of medium-length white hair and a short beard and mustache of the same snowy hue.

Bolan had never seen him before in his life.

“Come in, come in,” Brognola said, looking up briefly from the papers in his file. “Take a seat, both of you.”

The Executioner dropped down onto the padded chair to Brognola’s right. Jessup blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to adjust to the new light, as he took the seat next to Bolan. He continued to squint as Brognola looked up, frowning slightly at Bolan.

“Where’s Jack?” the big Fed asked.

“I put him in charge of overseeing the Lear’s restocking,” Bolan answered.

“You can fill him in while you’re in the air,” Brognola said.

Brognola glanced at the man with the white beard and hair. “First, I’d like to introduce Mr. John Sampson.”

Sampson leaned across the table and shook hands with both Bolan and Jessup. Bolan introduced himself as Matt Cooper. Jessup used his real name.

Brognola spoke again. “Mr. Sampson’s reason for being here, and his role in this mission, will become apparent as we go.” He looked back down at the open file in front of him and said, “So far, this group we’re interested in has been responsible for seven bank robberies in the Midwest, three kidnappings—with two of the victims found dead even though the ransom was paid—and they appear to have a Mexican connection for both cocaine and heroin. That deal you just broke up, it was—”

“I wouldn’t say we broke it up,” the Executioner interrupted. “The guys with the money got away.”

“At least the dope won’t hit the street,” Brognola said, using almost the identical words Jessup had chosen back in the Oklahoma panhandle. He cleared his throat and then continued. “The third kidnap victim is the daughter of a Georgia state senator,” he said. “The FBI’s negotiating her release even as we speak.”

“A release that won’t happen until she’s dead,” Bolan said.

“That’s what the two earlier kidnappings would suggest,” Brognola came back.

“How much are they demanding, Hal?” Bolan asked.

“An even million.”

Jessup let out a high-pitched whistle.

“Are we sure that all these crimes—the drug deals, robberies, kidnaps—can be attributed to the same group of men?” Bolan said.

“Reasonably sure,” Brognola said. “In all of the bank jobs they wore Nam leaf cammies and black ski masks. There’s enough similarities in their method of operation inside the banks to tip the scales that way, too. Some variance in height and weight descriptions, skin color on their hands and such. But that’s to be expected.”

The Executioner nodded. He knew that if a hundred people watched the same crime go down, you’d get a hundred different versions of the story. The human mind played tricks on the average citizen who encountered the unusual life-or-death situation, and investigating officers had to take such things into account.

“The primary link, though, is that everyone at the banks—and I mean everyone— agreed that they spoke a foreign language when communicating with each other. Most thought it was Arabic but weren’t sure.”

“Arab terrorists are always the first to come to mind these days,” Bolan noted. “It doesn’t mean that they aren’t Arabs. But it doesn’t mean that they are, either.”

All of the heads around the table nodded their agreement. Then Brognola said, “And when they shouted out orders to the customers, it was in broken English and heavily accented.”

“Broken English is easy enough to fake, too,” Bolan said. “Not that I’m discounting the possibility that they’re Arabs of some kind. Just playing the devil’s advocate here.”

“I know,” Brognola said, nodding.

“What about the negotiations on the kidnappings?” Jessup asked.

“Same thing,” Brognola said. “All done in broken English, with a heavy accent of some kind. There’s another kind of strange aspect to these abductions, though,” he added.

“And it is?” the Executioner said.

“They haven’t warned the parents about going to the police. Fact is, they’ve ordered them to. Told them they wouldn’t negotiate any ransom or releases with anyone except the FBI.”

“That does sound a little off the wall,” Jessup said.

“Maybe not,” Bolan said, shaking his head. “These men—Arabs, Iranians or whoever they actually are—were trained someplace and trained well. So far, I’d put their skills right up there with our own Special Forces.”

Brognola looked a little surprised. Bolan, he well knew, was former Army Special Forces himself, and now he was comparing these robbers, kidnappers and murderers to other men like himself.

Bolan directed a weary smile at his old friend. “Don’t take that wrong, Hal,” he said. “All I’m saying is that as well as being more-than-competent fighters, they’re smart. And they know that while the FBI will be trying to catch them, the Feds won’t pull anything stupid that puts the victim in further jeopardy. They’ll ask for an FBI agent to deliver the money, too, is my guess. Because the Feds’ first concern is getting the girl back safe and sound. Fathers—now, that’s a different story. They aren’t trained for situations like this, and holding up under this kind of pressure is just flat-out impossible for most men. The kidnappers know if they deal with a father or husband, or any other family member, they’re dealing with a loose cannon. Their behavior is completely unpredictable while the FBI agent’s isn’t.”

The room went silent for a few seconds, then Brognola turned toward the man with the white hair and beard. “Now, let me tell you exactly where Mr. John Sampson fits into all this.”

“You want to cut out that ‘Mr.’stuff, please?” Sampson said. “We’re all in this together, and I don’t see any of us wearing military uniforms anymore.”

Brognola gave the man a weary smile. “John was 101st Airborne in Nam,” he said. “Served two tours. Then he went to work in the oilfields of Iran for two years—that was back when the shah was still running the show—before coming back here and starting his own oil company. He sold the oil company a few years ago and became a professor at George Washington University.”

“So what do you teach, John?” Jessup asked. “Geology or something?”

“Not even close,” Sampson said. “Linguistics.”

“John noticed some discrepancies in the way some of the bank robbers spoke,” Brognola cut in. “He just happened to be one of the customers in one of the banks when it was robbed.”

Sampson nodded. “What I did learn, and what I can tell you, is that they weren’t Arabs. Or at least they weren’t speaking Arabic. It was Farsi. Most definitely Farsi.”

Bolan studied Sampson’s penetrating stare. Finally, the man with the white beard sat back in his chair again. “And I can tell you another thing,” Sampson said. “Farsi was a second language with them.”

“How could you know that?” Jessup asked.

Bolan knew the answer, but he let Sampson explain it for Jessup’s benefit.

“Because,” Sampson said, “while they were fluent in the language, a lot of it was what I’d call textbook Farsi. Way too formal for actual speech. You know how people who learned English in a classroom instead of growing up with it talk? It was sort of like that.”

“Iran and Iraq are next-door neighbors,” Bolan said. “It’s not that unusual for people from both countries—especially along the border—to speak both languages.”

“You’re right,” Sampson said, turning back to the Executioner. “But these bank robbers all had really strange accents—the likes of which I never heard when I was living in that part of the world. And believe me, I traveled all over Iran. I still couldn’t place their accents.” He paused long enough to lean back in his seat and cross his arms. “And there’s one other thing,” he said.

Bolan, Jessup and Brognola waited for him to go on.

“When they spoke English, they had these phony-sounding Arabic accents.”

Bolan continued to study the man with the white beard. He appeared to be in decent physical condition, and he was obviously intelligent and well-spoken. In both English and Farsi.

He might just become invaluable during the rest of this mission.

Looking back to Brognola, Bolan said, “When you put all of the facts together—bank robberies, kidnappings for ransom, drug deals—it all comes down to money. Whoever these guys are, they’re trying to get together as much money as they can. And what do you do with money?” he asked.

“Buy things,” Jessup said.

“Exactly.” Bolan nodded. “But they’re hitting so hard and so fast that they don’t have any time to spend any of what they take in. To me, that means they’re getting ready to purchase a specific item that is expensive. There’s something out there that these guys want to buy, and they’re working toward that goal.”

“What do you think it is they want?” Jessup asked.

“I don’t know,” Bolan said. “At least not for sure yet. But I’ve got an idea.”

“What’s that?” Brognola asked.

“Hal,” Bolan replied, “I’d rather not say quite yet because I could be wrong. And I don’t want to unduly prejudice anyone else’s ideas as we go about tracking down these guys.”

Brognola just nodded.

The Executioner turned toward Sampson again. “What’s your immediate future look like, John? Would you be able to take off a few days and work with us? It would sure help to have somebody who can speak Farsi.”

Sampson smiled. “Did I mention that I also speak Arabic and Hebrew?”

Bolan chuckled. “No,” he said. “But that’s two more gold stars for taking you with us. And your military experience won’t hurt, either. Can you swing it?”

Sampson smiled, showing a row of teeth every bit as white as his hair. “I’m a millionaire oilman,” he said. “I can do anything I want.”

“So, do you want to?” Bolan asked.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Sampson shot back. “Just give me some firepower and point me in the right direction.”

“Then it’s settled,” Bolan said, looking back to Brognola again. “They should have the Lear almost loaded by now.” He started to rise.

“Where are you going to start?” Brognola wanted to know.

“I’d say that the state senator’s daughter in Georgia demands priority,” Bolan answered. “Especially since the other two hostages were murdered.”

Brognola nodded. “I’ll call ahead to the FBI field office in Atlanta,” he said. “Tell them to be expecting you.”

THE LEARJET WAS WAITING, with Jack Grimaldi behind the controls, by the time Bolan and Brognola helped the hooded Jessup and Sampson up into the passenger area. The Executioner buckled himself in, then said over his shoulder, “Buckle up. You can take the hoods off about five minutes into our flight.”

Grimaldi had been warming up the engine. But before he could start his takeoff, a figure appeared through the window, running toward them. Bolan turned to watch as John “Cowboy” Kissinger continued to hurry toward them, finally coming to a halt next to the door beside Bolan.

The Executioner opened it.

Kissinger was Stony Man Farm’s chief armorer, and a true master of weaponry and other equipment. He was constantly inventing, or improving, the equipment used by all of the counterterrorists who worked out of Stony Man.

Now, as soon as the door was open, he reached down into the front pocket of his faded blue jeans.

Bolan’s eyes followed Kissinger’s hand, and he watched as the armorer drew a pocket-clipped folding knife. “Check this out,” he told the Executioner, extending the knife in his hand.

Bolan took the folder and looked down at it. It was long and lean, and thicker at the hilt than at the tapered pommel. A thumb-stud opener was screwed into the blade next to a slight, half-moon indentation in the grip. Bolan flicked the stud with his thumb, and the blade sprang open.

The dagger-shaped blade looked to be a shade over four inches in length. But it was ground on one side only. The Executioner read the inscriptions on both sides of the steel. Caledonian Edge, San Mai III, and on the other side, Cold Steel, Japan.

“Looks like a good piece,” Bolan told Kissinger.

“Oh, it is, it is,” the armorer replied. “I polished the rocker a little bit more, but it really didn’t need much custom work. It’s custom-made in Japan already. The blade shape comes from the old Scottish sock knives.”

Bolan nodded and started to hand the knife back.

But Kissinger took a step away from him and shook his head. “Take it with you,” he said. “Then tell me how it stands up in the field. I’m thinking about offering them to everyone here at the Farm who wants one.”

“Will do,” Bolan said. “Always happy to risk my life as your guinea pig for untested products.” He was smiling when he spoke. The truth was, he had complete faith in Kissinger’s judgment.

Kissinger waved goodbye as Bolan closed the door. The Learjet was warmed up now, and Grimaldi began to guide it down the runway. Bolan sat back in his seat. The flight to Georgia would not take long, especially in the Learjet. But what little time it took could still be put to good use.

Flipping open a panel on the armrest nearest the door, the Executioner pulled up a folding work table and spread it across his lap. Next, he placed the file Brognola had given him on the table and opened it.

The only intelligence information he was interested in at the moment was in regard to the kidnapped daughter of the state senator in Georgia, and he found all of the reports held together by a paper clip on top of the rest of the information about the robberies and other crimes.

Behind him, the Executioner could hear Sampson and Jessup whispering softly. Grimaldi, to his side, took the Lear down the runway and into the air. When they had reached flying altitude, Bolan began shuffling through the pages.

Sarah Ann Pilgrim, eighteen, daughter of Henry and Myra Pilgrim, had been abducted by several men when she’d left her seat in the bleachers of a high school baseball field to visit the ladies’ room. Witnesses described her abductors as heavily armed with assault rifles and pistols, wearing green-and-brown Army clothes and black ski masks. The kidnappers had contacted Sarah’s parents the next day, demanding an immediate payment of a million dollars or they’d never see their daughter alive again. Henry Pilgrim, being an honest politician, had cried over the phone that he would never be able to raise that much money.

His tears had bought him an extra day. Nothing else.

Knowing that he was out of his league in both the financial arena and in handling terrorists and professional criminals, Henry had called in the FBI. One of the Bureau’s trained hostage negotiators was now in contact with whoever was on the other end of the phone calls, and doing his best to stall for more time. FBI technicians were also trying to trace the calls, but so far their attempts had been fruitless. The kidnappers were using a different cell phone each time they called, and evidently moving around Atlanta in some kind of vehicle. By the time the Bureau men could triangulate a call, they had moved to another area and were using a different phone.

The Executioner finished skimming the reports and closed the file. He closed his eyes, seeing the photograph that had been with the other paperwork now on the back of his eyelids. Sarah Ann Pilgrim was a cute little strawberry-blond girl who had all the earmarks of someday growing into a beautiful, mature woman. She was standing next to what looked like a ski boat of some kind in the picture, clad only in a bikini.

Bolan found his upper and lower teeth grinding against each other in silent anger. He could only pray that the kidnappers were nothing more than perpetrators of crimes for money. If there was a rapist among them—

The Executioner turned his thoughts away from such things. It would do no good to brood over the possibilities. He was already doing everything he could to locate and rescue Sarah Ann, and he would get her to safety as soon as possible.

The Executioner opened the file again and read through all of the reports, then found himself frowning. Shifting the reports regarding Sarah Ann’s abduction to the right side of the table, he began shuffling through the pages that dealt with the robberies. The frown grew deeper as he read on, occasionally referring back to the reports concerning Sarah Ann Pilgrim and the other two victims who had been abducted—and murdered.

The time frames concerning some of these crimes simply didn’t add up. If it was the same men perpetrating all of these crimes, they had kidnapped another girl in Boston, and fifteen minutes later robbed a bank in Wilmer, Minnesota.

Not even Jack Grimaldi could get you from Massachusetts to the southern Minnesota town of Wilmer that fast.

Other bank robberies had gone down during the periods that these camo-clad men had had their kidnap victims in custody and still alive. The parents of the girl from Boston, as well as those of a young man from Albuquerque, had spoken to their children.

So who was keeping an eye on them while the others went running around the country robbing banks? Now the furrows on Bolan’s forehead deepened even further. There had to be at least two factions of this gang or terrorist cell using the same MO. Were they together in this, or separate? Together. They had to be.

The similarities were simply too many to be coincidence.

The Executioner closed the file again as Grimaldi spoke into his microphone, gaining clearance for their landing in Atlanta. The Learjet began its descent, and a few minutes later they were taxiing toward an aluminum-sided hangar reserved for private aircraft.

“Jack, you mind taking care of the paperwork?” the Executioner said as a dark black Chevrolet sedan made its way toward them. It had so many antennae extending up from the hood and trunk that it could only have been a police vehicle of some kind.

“No problem,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll stay here with the plane.”

Bolan opened the cargo door and began removing black nylon cases that, in addition to clothes, held weapons, ammunition, extra magazines and other equipment. Bolan, Jessup and John Sampson lifted their luggage and walked to where the black sedan had parked next to the hangars. The door opened, and a man wearing an expensive suit, a white shirt and black sunglasses stepped out. He wore his black hair in a short flattop cut, and his hairline was just beginning to recede.

“You Cooper?” he asked Bolan in short, clipped syllables. It was obvious that he wasn’t glad to be where he was, doing what he was doing, as he got out of the sedan and walked to the rear of the car, inserting a key into the trunk.

“I am,” Bolan told him. He pointed to Jessup and started to say, “This is Rick—”

“Jessup,” the FBI agent interrupted. “DEA. And the guy with the Santa Claus hair and beard must be the linguistics specialist your man at Justice told us about when he called down earlier.”

By now the bags were in the trunk and the four men found seats in the sedan. The FBI man took the wheel again, Bolan rode shotgun and Sampson and Jessup got into the back. “You haven’t told us your name yet,” Bolan said.

“I’m Special Agent Wilkerson, in charge of the Atlanta office,” came the reply in the same clipped tone.

“Ah, the special agent in charge has come to greet us himself,” Jessup said from the backseat.

Bolan felt his jaw tighten slightly. The competition between the DEA and FBI was legendary. He just hoped Jessup and Wilkerson didn’t let it get out of hand.

If they did, the Executioner would have to come down on them both, hard and fast. Such rivalries did nothing but get in the way on a mission like this.

Before Wilkerson could reply, Jessup went on. “We’re a pretty informal group, you’ll find,” he said.

Wilkerson threw the automobile into Drive and started toward an exit.

The DEA man continued talking. “What’s your first name, Wilkerson?”

“Special,” Wilkerson said with even more venom in his words than he’d already shown.

“Cute,” Jessup said. “Very cute. So I suppose that would mean you’ve got three middle names? Agent, In and Charge?

“That’s right, DEA man,” Wilkerson said.

“Mind if I ask you one more question?” Jessup said.

“Go right ahead.”

“Who stuck the broom handle up your ass?” Jessup asked quietly and calmly.

Bolan had not entered into the conversation because, so far, his words hadn’t been needed. But now it appeared that the anger Wilkerson was exhibiting went far and above the usual interagency squabbling. It was time to nip it in the bud.

By now, the sedan had left the airport, navigated a cloverleaf entrance ramp and was on the divided highway leading into Atlanta. But as soon as Wilkerson heard Jessup’s remark about the broomstick, an angry snort shot from his nostrils. He twisted the Chevy’s wheel hard to the right, pulling it over onto the shoulder of the highway before throwing it violently into Park.

Turning, he rested one arm on the back of the bench seat that both he and Bolan occupied. “Okay, you want to know why I’m pissed off?” he said. “I’ll tell you. We—the Atlanta FBI office—already have everything under control. We don’t need your help, and we particularly don’t like having you guys thrust down our throats by whoever the bigwig friend of yours in Justice is. But you want to know the worst thing of all?” Now he looked directly at the Executioner. “It’s being told we all—even me, the SAC—have to take orders from this Cooper character who none of us has ever met or even heard of.”

Bolan surprised him by letting a friendly smile encompass his face, then saying, “I don’t blame you. I’d be mad if I was in your shoes, too. But you don’t have the whole picture of what’s going on.”

Wilkerson looked confused as his eyes locked with those of the Executioner. Bolan’s was a response he hadn’t counted on, and the look on Jessup’s face told the Executioner that it wasn’t the feedback he’d have gotten if the DEA man had had a chance to answer the accusation.

“And you have the whole picture?” Wilkerson asked in the semisurly voice Bolan had grown to expect out of the man.

“No,” the Executioner said. “If we had the whole picture, all this would be over and the bad guys would be in jail or dead. But let me say—and I say this with all due respect to you and the rest of the Atlanta FBI—while we don’t have all the pieces to this puzzle yet, we’ve got more than you guys do. So let’s work together, okay?”

There was only a trace of anger left in his voice as Wilkerson pulled the black FBI sedan back onto the divided highway. Several minutes went by in silence as they made their way into the city. Then, suddenly, Wilkerson blurted out, “Greg.”

Bolan turned in his seat. In the corner of his eye, he could see the two men in the backseat were as puzzled as he was. “What’s that mean?” Bolan asked. “Greg who?”

“Greg,” Wilkerson said again. “Short for Gregory. It’s my first name.” He glanced up into the rearview mirror and his face lifted in a genuine smile. “And I’ve only got one middle name, just like most people.”

“What is it?” Jessup asked.

“Wild horses couldn’t drag that out of me,” Wilkerson said as the outskirts of Atlanta appeared in the distance.

“I think I like the first name you gave us earlier better,” Jessup said. “Special. Has a nice ring to it.”

The look on Wilkerson’s face betrayed his confusion. “I’m not sure what you mean by that,” he said.

“Tell you what,” Jessup said. “Why don’t you start off our newfound friendship by telling us where we’re going, Special?”

Now, all of the rest of the warriors in the car got the joke and laughed.

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