The Executioner slowed and looked back at the American Embassy

Kinshasa might be boiling with political intrigue, but something Bolan had seen or heard in the CIA observation room had put him on edge.

The instant he stepped outside the gate, Bolan knew what it was. No fewer than three different factions watched the front of the embassy. By entering and leaving so openly he had become a target.

Quinn had let him become a new pawn in a game of political intrigue that he neither wanted nor had the time to deal with.

Bolan was diving for cover when the first bullet tried to find a home in his flesh. He rolled behind a burned-out car and came to his knees, reaching for his pistol. He scanned the area where the shots must have come from, but saw nothing. A quick glance in the direction of the embassy showed the marines were alert but not willing to come out to his aid.

The Executioner was on his own. As usual.

Fire Zone

The Executioner®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Fire is the test of gold; adversity of strong men.

—Seneca

c. 3 BC-AD 65

All that glitters isn’t gold. Nobody can put a price on justice.

—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

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Prologue

It was a perfect day to start a forest fire.

The weather in Idaho had been dry all summer long, the result of an overly aggressive La Niña drying up the usual rains that made the mountains come alive with greenery. What was, in good years, a hillside covered with ponderosa pine and juniper now stretched as dry as a tinderbox, not quite brown but far from the vibrant green that the Boise National Forest usually enjoyed. The camo-dressed man moved swiftly through the woods with his twenty-pound pack, heavy footsteps crunching dried pine needles.

He held up a GPS unit to better see the display and adjusted his path according to the satellite-sent information until he came to an area that looked like any other at the edge of a meadow. But this was the spot. The Spot.

He shrugged off the backpack and let it fall to the ground, placing the GPS beside it to verify the exact location. Even with the enhanced number of satellites—he needed at least three for a proper fix—he couldn’t get closer than three yards to the spot. For what he intended, this was good enough. Dropping to his knees, he rummaged through the pack and pulled out two plastic-wrapped boxes the size of bread loaves. He carefully placed each on the forest floor in a pattern he had practiced until it was second nature. Drawing out the last box required more finesse, since it contained the PETN detonators.

As he stripped off the plastic wrapping from the det cord laid into the packages like snowy white intestines, he froze. The wind had died, but his keen hearing picked up sounds from a hundred yards away.

Laughter. Snippets of a bawdy song wailed by a man with a baritone voice, followed by a higher-pitched woman’s complaint. The complaint disappeared suddenly, replaced by a baritone laugh and girlish giggles. He was not alone.

Tipping his head to one side, he homed in on the two hikers moving across a meadow in front of him. Fading back into the forest and letting them pass was out of the question. A quick check of his watch showed that the deadline was rushing down on him. He touched his earbud and considered calling Red Leader. The thought passed as quickly as it had come to him. He knew what Red Leader would say—and it would scorch his ass.

Leaving his partially unwound det cord and blasting caps where he had placed them on the ground, he stood and reached behind to the small of his back. His fingers closed on a sheathed KA-BAR knife. He watched the hikers steadily approaching. As he had thought, a boy and a girl, maybe not out of their teens, intent on an afternoon communing with nature and each other.

The girl saw him first and tugged at her boyfriend’s arm. The boy half turned, misinterpreted her intentions and tried to kiss her. She ducked away and avoided his lips, speaking rapidly.

The boy turned and looked across the meadow. His shoulders slumped in resignation at the realization that what he sought most in the national forest was not going to be found as soon as he had hoped.

“Hello!” the boy called in an attempt to make the most of his bad luck.

The man in camo stood silently, hand behind his back, fingers lightly circling the hilt of the knife. For all his outward composure, inside he seethed. He was going to be behind schedule. Red Leader would do more than scorch his sorry ass if that happened. They were on a tight schedule, and every man had to execute to the second.

“Hi, there,” the girl said more hesitantly. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

The man only nodded. He did not trust his English, though that hardly mattered. Tourists from all over the world came to the Pacific Northwest, and many vacationed to the east in Idaho. He had been told this for his cover.

“You see anybody else out here? In the last hour or so?” The boy came forward, staying a step or two ahead of his girlfriend as if he might be afraid someone would spirit her away.

“No one.” The man went cold inside. Were there others here to slow him and further delay the execution of his mission?

“Good. We were hoping we’d find a spot to, you know, sit and talk.”

“Oh, Jerry,” the girl said, punching him playfully. “That’s not what you said you wanted to do.” She stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. The boy grinned crookedly. The man had a good idea what she had said. She was a typical looking American teenager. Too much meat on her bones, though after the skinny women in his country, he did not mind that so much. But she tittered and appeared pushy. He did not like that in American women. Even the ones he did not spend the night with.

“What’s all that in your pack? Looks like rolls of toothpaste.” The boy came closer, frowning as he studied the contents of the pack. “Thought you were getting ready to cook some lunch. But I’ve never seen anything like—”

He got no farther in his examination of the explosives. The man in camo moved swiftly. Two steps took him behind the boy. A brawny arm circled the neck and lifted up a stubbled chin to expose a vulnerable throat. The quick slash sent blood spewing outward in a bright arterial spray.

The move was so practiced and easy that the girl didn’t realize her boyfriend was dead before she, too, was killed. The knife slid under her rib cage and angled upward as the man grabbed her Radiohead T-shirt and pulled her forward to prevent her escaping his blade. A tiny gasp escaped her lips, followed by a touch of pink froth and then death. He stepped away as she dropped to her knees and finally fell facedown onto the ground.

He drove his knife blade into the drought-hardened ground to clean it off before he returned it to the sheath at the small of his back. Cursing in three languages but sticking with French for the worst of his rant, he unwound the det cord and strung it along the edge of the trees. When he drew out the full ten yards, he placed a detonator cap on the end and carefully attached wires to it. He retreated to where he had begun and placed the thin wire leads on the ground. He repeated the procedure, going along the edge of the forest in the other direction and placed a second detonator. He ran hard to get back to the juncture of the two lines of explosives and fastened the wires to a small receiver.

He had barely finished screwing down the leads to the radio receiver when his earbud crackled with three short, staccato bursts to alert him.

“Red Leader to Red Two, report.”

He swallowed and wiped sweat from his face.

“Red Two here, good to go,” he said.

“Fifteen minutes.” That was all Red Leader said. That was all the time he had to clear out before the explosives detonated along a twenty-yard stretch of forest. The meadow would allow plenty of oxygen to flow in to feed the fire as it moved deeper into the Boise National Forest, feeding off dead undergrowth and dried trees. Within minutes a hundred hectares would be ablaze.

He slung his now-lightened pack onto his back and loped across the meadow in the direction from which the two young lovers had come. He never broke stride as he stepped over their bodies along the way.

RED LEADER PUSHED the night-vision goggles higher on his forehead. It was late afternoon on a summer day. If he used the NVG in the daylight, he would have been blinded by the full sun, but in a few minutes they would be quite useful to him. He moved around the fire tower at the western edge of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, taking care to step over the body of the dead forest ranger. A single shot to the forehead had dispatched an unwanted witness.

Red Leader gave no thought to the dead man, because it was his fault he had died. He was supposed to be out on a road doing a fire danger appraisal. For whatever reason, possibly the typical American laziness, he had returned to the fire tower and found a trespasser had broken in.

Red Leader looked at the PDA and chafed at the delay. The mission was running late by almost five minutes. “Red One, come in.”

“Red One, aye,” came the whisper over the radio. The voice was almost lost in a sea of static. The dry conditions caused interference.

“Are you done?”

“Red Leader, almost finished. Got the det cord strung a bit deeper into the forest than I intended.”

Red Leader looked at the small dot moving on his PDA map display. Red One had gone deeper into the Salmon-Challis National Forest to the east than necessary. That threw off the timetable.

His thumb worked the tiny keyboard until a regional weather report slowly scrolled on the screen. The isobars showed the air pressure. The lines squeezed together, indicating mounting wind to the east.

“Are you done, Red One?”

“All done, Red Leader,” came the smug reply.

Red Leader pressed another button on the PDA. The Salmon-Challis National Forest erupted in a fireball that sent flames blasting a hundred feet into the air. Red One should have been on time. Red Leader pressed another button and started the timer. The emergency response to this fire would be imminent. Minutes.

Even as his timer hit ninety seconds, the ranger’s radio crackled with warnings and orders to call out firefighters.

Red Leader let the fire burn for another eight-and-a-half minutes before triggering the explosives laid by Red Two. All the emergency response in the area was en route to the Salmon-Challis blaze. The fire on the edge of the Boise Basin would be ignored for the time being, since it was smaller in scope.

Smaller but more important. He snapped his head down and brought the infrared goggles over his eyes, squinting as he adjusted the intensity. Even then, blocking out most of the daylight, he saw a wall of intense dancing light. Red Two’s fire burned exactly as they had planned. Heavy smoke from the underbrush would lay a pall over the lower lying countryside as the fire worked its way toward Shepard Peak. Except in extraordinary cases, fires were predictable. They burned upward.

Up the side of the mountain and away from the scene of the real action.

“Blue Leader, you have cover,” Red Leader said. His radio crackled. The burgeoning fires caused even more static interference.

“Moving in now, Red Leader. Rendezvous in three hours. Mark.”

“Red Leader to Blue Leader, out.”

He turned off his radio and reset his stopwatch. Three hours to the second. The carefully planned raid proceeded as flawlessly as it had so many times before. He stepped back over the annoying corpse drawing flies in the small lookout tower and spiraled down the stairs, taking them three at a time in his hurry. There was little enough time to skirt the fires his team had set and reach the rendezvous where the real backbreaking work would begin.

1

No matter where Mack Bolan looked, fire devoured the land. Trees exploded hundreds of feet below him, sending fiery sap close to the V-22 Osprey’s rotors. Looking out over the Idaho forest convinced him that nothing could survive down there. The fire was too intense and spread like…a wildfire.

“Where you want to land?” The voice in his headphones might have been either the pilot or the copilot. Bolan couldn’t be sure, and it really didn’t matter. It took both men’s skill at the controls to keep the tilt-rotor aircraft from being buffeted to pieces in the fierce superheated air currents caused by the fire.

“Not down there,” Bolan said. His keen eyes studied the raging inferno and found nothing. No landing zone was possible when the very earth itself appeared to be on fire. Besides, Salmon-Challis National Forest was not the spot he was most interested in. It might have been the first place to be torched, but he found the other side of the spiny ridge more interesting. More than his gut feeling, the powers that be back at Stony Man Farm agreed. The real evidence of who set the fires was not here but over near Shepard Peak.

“We’re running low on fuel, sir.”

This time Bolan knew who spoke. The pilot leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his unexpected passenger. Bolan had been high up in the Rockies north of Leadville at the end of a mission when Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman had contacted him. Bolan had been looking forward to a much-needed break, possibly taking time to climb Mount Elbert for the solitude it offered and, for a while, simply not worry about someone shooting him in the back.

The V-22 had been dispatched from the 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to pick him up. The altitude near Leadville made helicopters unstable to operate, and the V-22 afforded a quick method of transport. For all the fly-by-wire technology involved in the vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, Bolan was more interested in speed. It duplicated the helicopter’s vertical capability and added an airplane’s range and ability to move him to his target at more than three hundred miles per hour.

“Head due west,” Bolan said.

“The other fire?”

Bolan nodded and the pilot went back to his controls. The Osprey banked sharply, giving Bolan another look at the devastation below. Kurtzman had sent a video taken by a commercial airline pilot who had happened to be above the forest when it erupted in flame. Careful examination of the low-resolution video by the Stony Man analysts had given a chilling view of the first seconds of the fire. Bolan recognized the sudden wall of flame for what it was: detonation of a long string of explosives, probably dat cord. The second fire had erupted almost exactly ten minutes later, showing coordination and intent.

The charred stench made his nose wrinkle as he leaned out the doorway and peered down. Intense heat like a mile-long blast furnace seared his face, but Bolan saw only the courage of the firefighters below risking their lives to keep the fire from spreading and devouring more untold square miles of the tinder-dry forest.

“Sir, we’re here,” the pilot said. Bolan tapped his earpiece. The static interference almost deafened him. “But we got a problem. We can’t land down there.”

Bolan saw the problem immediately. The fire west of Shepard Peak had devoured too much of the forest for him to get into the spot where he believed the second, more important fire had been set.

“We could get down, but we might never get back into the air. I’m not risking a seventy-million-dollar aircraft, even if the SecDef himself ordered me down.”

Bolan knew the pilot held some resentment toward him personally for being sent on this mission. The orders had come down fast from on high to deliver a single passenger of unknown affiliation to the middle of a forest fire.

“What’s your operational ceiling?”

“Twenty-six thousand.”

“Take me up to fifteen, then you can go home.”

The engines changed pitch as the pilot started an upward spiral. Bolan began getting into his gear. He had to hand it to Kurtzman. The man had anticipated everything. The parachute included with the pack on board when he rendezvoused with the V-22 was exactly what he needed.

“What do you want me to do?”

The pilot’s words spilled from the earpiece dropped onto the deck. Bolan was already out the door and tumbling through the turbulent air above the Boise National Forest. He got a good look at the terrain and how the fire had burned from the obvious line where the blaze had started. It looked as if someone had taken a fiery razor to the ground.

More det cord.

Turning slowly as he fell though the heated air, Bolan arrowed his way toward the seared meadow just to the west of the first ignition point. When he was only five hundred feet from the ground—definitely HALO to avoid the worst of the heated updrafts—he pulled the rip cord. The jerk as the parachute deployed caused his teeth to clack together. Then he hit the ground hard. His knees bent and he rolled in the blackened grass, tangling in the shroud lines as they collapsed rapidly. He finally scraped to a halt and got to his feet. A few minutes later, Bolan had the parachute gathered and weighted down under a rock so it wouldn’t blow around in the hot wind all around him.

It was time for the Executioner to go to work.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

AARON KURTZMAN LOOKED up from his computer console to see the mission controller, Barbara Price, standing in the doorway. The dark circles under her eyes told him she hadn’t slept much in days. She said nothing and didn’t have to. Kurtzman felt the weight of her unspoken question.

“Nothing yet,” Kurtzman said. “Striker has just dropped into the Boise Basin and is doing a quick recon.”

“Have you filled him in?”

“I’m still gathering intel,” Kurtzman said, glancing at his screen. He looked back up. “What more can you tell me?”

“Not much more,” she admitted, heaving a deep sigh. “It seems more and more like an outright attack on the U.S. economy. All the gold was earmarked for delivery to the government to bolster the dollar on world markets. There’s no doubt that the last attack was done by a PMC.”

“Identified?”

Price shook her head and looked even grimmer.

“How many private military companies can there be on the loose within U.S. borders?” Kurtzman asked aloud, but he didn’t expect a response. The question was rhetorical because no one could answer, and they both knew it. The homegrown paramilitary militias had died down over the past few years as government activity against terror cells escalated. This was not the atmosphere a paranoid, super-secret paramilitary group could thrive in. When they were ignored, they flourished in backwoods and the mountains where no one had cared if they blew up old cars with RPGs or shot cutouts of their particular bogeyman. With air travelers having to take off their shoes to check for explosives and everyone jumpy over the slightest thing amiss, the paramilitaries had come under such governmental scrutiny that they could almost be written off.

But not the PMCs. The government used them for security in Iraq and other hot spots around the world. That was fine. What wasn’t fine were the PMCs employed by fat cats as bodyguards and even by dictators as personal armies. Most of the PMCs contained mercenaries honed to a keen edge in a dozen different armies worldwide. The various Special Forces branches of the United States supplied their share, but so did the Russian Spetsnaz, the British SAS and all the other European countries with their super-secret, always denied special ops forces. Kurtzman didn’t even want to think about the disaffected mercenaries operating out of South Africa, Europe and elsewhere. Too many men and women around the world sold themselves to the highest bidder.

“The last two strikes accounted for well over fifty million dollars in gold,” Price said. “That much gold weighs close to two tons. The M.O.s match what’s going down in Idaho. I hope Striker can get on their asses in a hurry. We’ve got to stop them before they bankrupt the country.”

Kurtzman felt a shiver travel up and down his spine. Forest fires were set to divert authorities. The PMC strike team had moved into mines with smelters on-site and killed anyone who had not been evacuated. Then the gold had simply vanished. Tons of it. Gone. Like so much golden smoke.

He touched a screen to get a news ticker scrolling slowly along the bottom and smiled without humor. “Gold just hit nine hundred dollars an ounce today, and it’s still going up. They’re making money even after they steal the bullion. You’ve got to wonder how they transport that much.”

“The question I can’t get a handle on is why they need so much,” Price said.

Kurtzman felt a little colder. Greed was one thing, but this transcended mere avarice. Whoever was responsible for the thefts was amassing enough cold, hard currency to fund a revolution. A big one.

He opened communication with Bolan to get an update.

“Striker, it’s Bear. Report.”

“TWO BODIES,” Bolan told Kurtzman. “Both murdered.” He lightly prodded the man’s head with his feet and saw how the spinal cord had been almost severed with a savage slash. The charred corpse revealed little else. The female with him was harder to evaluate, but Bolan wasted no time figuring it out. She was dead and probably by the same hand. He thought she had been knifed in the belly and then the point driven upward into her heart. Bowels, lungs and heart were cinders, but her head remained firmly affixed to her spine. A murder-suicide was out of the question, since there wasn’t a knife anywhere to be seen.

Kill the man, then the woman. That was how the solitary killer had moved. Professional. Very professional.

“What do you see at the edge of the forest?”

Bolan’s stride lengthened as he went to the worst of the burned area along the meadow. The fire had ravaged the terrain and had moved a mile farther east, where it still roared uphill with voracious intensity. It took only a couple minutes for him to find what remained of one detonator cap and the radio unit that had set off the explosive. He rubbed his fingers over the ground but came up with only soot. Any of the grainy PETN likely used would be completely oxidized.

“He knew what he was doing,” Bolan said.

“Latest intel says there is an African PMC on the prowl. We’re pinging the CIA and FBI for info on them now to get a better identification.”

“That’s a mighty big continent.”

Kurtzman did not respond, and Bolan hadn’t expected him to. He ended the call and pulled out his map and oriented himself, then set off running downhill in the direction of the Lucky Nugget Mine, reaching the tall cyclone fence around the property in under a half hour. He took slow, deep breaths and calmed his pounding heart. Having been at altitude in the Rockies for the prior week helped, but the thin Idaho air still took its toll on him.

As he rested, hands on knees, he looked around the mine site. From the dozen signs painted with huge red letters, this property was owned by Lassiter Industries, a multinational conglomerate owning not only gold mines but copper, silver, manganese and every other metal known to man. Rested, he tossed a broken branch against the fence to see if he might get a shock or trigger an alarm. Seeing no response, and hearing only the miles-distant crackle of a forest being destroyed by fire, he scaled the fence, deftly avoiding the barbed wire strands on top, then dropped lightly to the ground inside.

He reached a well-traveled road and saw a couple abandoned trucks. Of the large crew required to work a mine this size, he saw nothing.

Some equipment had been properly shut down, but most had been hastily abandoned. He knew what had happened. Sirens warned of the forest fire. The miners had to evacuate the mine or risk being trapped a half mile underground if the fire swept this way. Those aboveground would work frantically to get the miners to the surface, then they would all jump into trucks and evacuate. The sheriff’s department would be sending constant warnings the entire while. The scream of sirens as the firefighters came in would goad the miners into leaving.

Some might even be volunteer firefighters and join the effort. However it happened, they were all absent from the mine.

But the security staff would remain. Not of their own choosing, but orders would keep them here until the flames came close enough to singe their eyebrows. Bolan jogged to the main gate, which gaped wide. He peered into the glass-windowed guard booth and saw a man slumped on the floor. There was no reason to check his vital signs. The huge hole in the back of the man’s head showed where a single shot had taken him out.

Bolan turned from the guard booth and went immediately to the main office building. The double doors were closed. He tugged at one and it came open easily. The panic bar had not properly locked when the last employee had evacuated.

Halfway down the corridor was the sprawled body of a uniformed woman. She had been shot in the back of the head just like the other guard. Bolan moved from room to room. He found three more murdered security guards. Only one had tried to get his weapon free before six shots had punctured his chest. Examining the entry angles of the wounds convinced Bolan that at least three shooters had sighted in on the poor son of a bitch. From what he could tell, the same caliber weapons had ended the man’s life. The killers probably used identical model pistols. That would go with the military precision shown in this attack.

Bolan searched the building from top to bottom. Whoever had killed the guards had not looted the offices. Computers remained on desks. No drawers had been pulled out and searched. Obviously valuable display ingots remained in glass cases in the hallways. Since he found no one alive in the rest of the building to give him eyewitness information, he exited to search other parts of the sprawling mine complex.

Like a compass needle finding magnetic north, he was drawn to a large shed nearby. Heavy steel doors that had once been held closed by intricate locks stood open. Reaching down, he drew his Desert Eagle and let the muzzle precede him into the well-lit interior. Vaults along the walls were open and empty. The guards positioned at all four upper corners of the building on catwalks had been shot. From the look of it, they had put up a fierce fight but had been overwhelmed by superior firepower.

Walking into the empty expanse in the middle of the building, Bolan saw where a truck had stood next to a loading dock. It took no effort for him to imagine a half-dozen men swarming into the vaults, removing the gold and loading it into the truck before driving away with their valuable cargo.

He had only one more bit of intel to gather. It was surprisingly easy to find the manifests for each of the looted vaults. He kept a running inventory in his head as he read the numbers.

When he finished the tally he stood and stared out the doors where the truck had left.

Three-quarters of a ton of gold stolen. Fifteen thousand pounds. Well over ten million dollars.

His strides long and determined, Bolan left the building, found a car that could be hot-wired easily and roared off in pursuit of the thieves. They couldn’t be more than a few hours ahead of him. With that much of a load on the narrow, winding road leading down into Boise, they wouldn’t be able to match his breakneck pace.

2

The Executioner drove expertly and far too fast for the narrow gravel road. The mining company had maintained the road well, but hitting ninety in the straightaways and only dropping to sixty in the sharp turns took its toll on his acquired car. Every turn left that much more rubber behind and caused an increasingly uneven ride. Before long the punishment he dished out to the car caused the engine to begin sputtering.

He let up on the gas just a little when he saw an eighteen-wheeler lumbering along ahead. He was still miles outside Boise, and a quick mental calculation of the distance traveled told him this could be the stolen gold. Using the engine compression to brake, he took his foot off the accelerator and coasted into a slot directly behind the truck so that he ran in its blind spot only inches away from the bumper. The driver would have seen him approaching and by now had to know something was wrong. If he slammed on the brakes, Bolan would have to act instantly.

Such a sudden stop was what he expected. That was what he would do to try to get rid of the annoying tail he presented if the roles were reversed. But the driver tapped his brakes, sounded his horn and began slowing gradually. Suspecting a trap, the Executioner followed suit until both truck and car were at a dead stop.

He slid the .50-caliber pistol from its holster and got out of the car. Holding the heavy Desert Eagle at his side, he edged around cautiously. The truck driver had already exited the cab, looking madder than hell.

“What do you think you’re doing? This ain’t a demolition derby!”

The man waved his arms around like a windmill. Bolan didn’t see a weapon but recognized the tactic as a diversion. He ducked away, looked under the eighteen-wheeler but saw no one trying to sneak up on him from the other side. He did hear muffled noises from inside the truck.

Whirling back, he lifted his pistol. The sight of the huge bore pointed in his direction caused the driver to gasp. His mouth dropped open. He tried to speak but no words came out, and his flailing arms stopped their wild motion as he held them high above his head.

“What’s in the back?”

“I…you a cop?”

“Open it.”

The driver swallowed hard and shuffled around, keeping an eye on Bolan and the pistol in his hand. With his fist he banged twice on the door and yelled, “Mr. Kersey, I’m openin’ up.” The driver lifted the locking rod and stepped away when the door swung open.

Bolan was prepared for a hail of bullets. He was not expecting a man and several frightened women looking out.

“What’s going on?”

“Mr. Kersey, he drove up behind and stopped me and stuck that gun in my face and—”

“Shut up.” Bolan wanted answers. “Why are you in the rear of a semi?”

“Are you some kind of police officer?”

“I’m asking, you’re answering.”

“Well, put that damn thing down. My name’s Jerome Kersey and I’m the superintendent of the Lucky Nugget Mine. I work for Lassiter Industries and—”

“You’re all employees?”

“Who’d you think we were? You ordered us to evacuate, and my staff and I were the last ones out. We had to get into this semi because you said the roads were clogged and didn’t want a lot of cars adding to the traffic jam. You are from the State Police, right?”

Jerome Kersey looked around and frowned when he didn’t see any marked patrol cars.

“What’s going on? I did what you people asked, and now you’re pointing a gun at me!”

“Who told you to evacuate?”

“The state police.”

Bolan’s mind worked fast. He saw the huddle of men and women behind the mine supervisor and knew these weren’t gold thieves. There was no point in asking for ID.

“Sorry about this,” he said, holstering his pistol. “Were you told to ship out the gold bullion from the mine?”

“No, of course not,” Kersey said. “That was all locked in the storage vaults.” Then his eyes narrowed as he looked hard at Bolan. “What are you saying?”

Bolan motioned him out of the truck and to one side where they wouldn’t be overheard. He gave the man a quick once-over and saw no suspicious bulges where a gun might be hidden or a knife sheathed.

“I don’t have much time, so listen carefully and answer fully,” Bolan said. Kersey started to protest. He was in charge of hundreds of employees and was used to giving orders, not taking them. The look on his tall, dark-haired interrogator’s face shut him up. He nodded once.

“The security guards left at the mine are all dead.”

“Dead?”

“The gold has been removed from the storage vaults. I estimate about three-quarters of a ton was taken.”

“I don’t have the exact figures, but that would be close.” Kersey had gone white with shock at realizing the magnitude of his loss. Bolan doubted his reaction was from hearing that his guards were dead. The theft of all the gold would be a career-ending event. “Who did it?”

“I’m trying to find out. How long have you been away from the mine?”

“Thirty minutes, maybe a little longer.”

This surprised Bolan. The gold thieves were even more expert than he had thought. Kersey and his staff had barely left the mine before the thieves had moved in. With this new information for his timeline, Bolan doubted killing the guards had taken more than five minutes. That meant the thieves had loaded just shy of a ton of gold and transported it before he had arrived. The slice of time allotted had been enough for them to vanish into thin air.

“Did you hear or see any helicopters?”

“Of course I did. Observation planes all over. Some heavy-lifter choppers with fire retardant or water or whatever the hell they use to put out fires. They’re all over the sky.”

Bolan considered this and discarded an airlift being the method of removing the gold. Every plane would be tracked closely by air controllers directing the slurry bombers to the fire. Any unauthorized plane would be spotted instantly. And Kurtzman had not mentioned any, so there weren’t any.

“This is an incredible gold mining region. More than three million ounces have been extracted since the mine opened,” Kersey said. “You’re kidding about my gold being taken out of the vaults, aren’t you?”

“One large truck would carry it all,” Bolan said. “I didn’t pass such a truck. Yours was the first vehicle of any kind I saw on the road. Are there other roads leading away from the mine?”

Kersey shook his head. Bolan had studied the map and not seen any.

“The entire Boise Basin is filthy with gold,” Kersey went on. He was beginning to ramble. “Centerville, Idaho City and—”

“What about logging roads?”

“This is a national forest. There’s no logging allowed. They hardly allow the railroad crews in and the trains are all diesel electric.”

Bolan had heard enough. He slid behind the wheel of his stolen car and wheeled around, kicking up a cloud of dust as he roared back in the direction of the mine. There had been a side road, but he had ignored it because it didn’t go anywhere but to the railroad tracks running near the mine. For whatever reason, Lassiter Industries had not run a spur line to bring in supplies and ship out gold. But the railroad was still close enough to make that a viable method of getting away with almost a ton of gold.

The dirt road came up on him fast. He stomped on the brakes, swerved the sedan around ninety degrees and lined up with the rutted lanes. Accelerating onto the rocky road, the car bounced around, sending him lurching back and forth in the driver’s seat. Bolan gritted his teeth and drove into the forest. These trees had somehow escaped the fire. As he drove, he appreciated the genius of the robbery even more. The fire had been set to go up the hills and away from this area. Sparks might have ignited the dry underbrush here, but the prevailing winds had made sure that hadn’t happened. Bolan wondered what contingency plan the gold thieves had if this part of the forest had been turned into a blast furnace like the rest of the timberlands.

He skidded around a tight curve and crashed head-on into a truck. He had an instant to brace for the crash, but the other driver was taken entirely by surprise.

The sounds of tearing metal and breaking glass filled Bolan’s ears as the car crumpled around him, but the shock of the air bag deploying into his chest almost knocked the wind from him. The Executioner rocked back, then pushed the deflated bag away. He was covered with talcum-fine powder lubricant used in the air bag and his chest felt as if an angry giant had tried to stomp him flat. Recovering, he kicked open the car door and dived out.

There were two men in the truck. The driver slumped over the wheel, but the passenger shoved an HK53 out the window and fired. Bolan hit the ground and rolled, coming to a prone position with his pistol ready. The shooter in the truck cursed. In his nervous haste, he had fired on full-auto rather than using three-round bursts and had emptied his magazine at all the places Bolan was not. The Executioner fired a single round through the side of the truck door. His target let out a groan, pushed the door open and fell to the ground where he flopped about in pain.

Bolan rose and sighted in, only to jerk to the side. A slug ripped through the air where his head had been a split second earlier. He landed hard on his side and fired three quick rounds. One went through the truck’s windshield. The other two grazed off the now-starred glass. Through the spiderweb of cracked glass, Bolan saw that the driver was now moving. The crash had only stunned him.

The Executioner made a quick decision. He got to his feet and circled the truck until he got to a spot where he saw more movement inside. Bolan fired twice more and completely destroyed the windshield.

“Don’t shoot. I surrender. I’m coming out.”

Bolan wanted the man alive but knew a trap when he heard it. These men were professionals and did not surrender after a few shots were exchanged.

“Here’s my rifle.”

A SIG SG-551 short-barreled assault rifle came tumbling out and landed in a patch of weeds beside the road. Bolan saw that the receiver was partially open. The rifle had fired once and then jammed.

“I’m coming out. Please don’t kill me.”

Bolan fired the instant he had a decent shot. The man fell from the cab and landed facedown on the ground. He pushed up and turned to face Bolan. The expression on his face was not one of betrayal at the violation of a surrender but one of utter hatred because he had been outwitted. Then the hand grenade he had intended for Bolan exploded beneath him and lifted his body three feet straight up in the air. The lifeless body crashed to the ground.

Swinging around, Bolan trained his Desert Eagle on the first man out of the truck. He cursed. The man had sneaked off. Bolan needed information, and only one of the mercenaries was left alive to tell him what he needed to know.

He ducked low and looked under the bed of the truck. Nothing. Advancing in a crouch, he went to the rear of the truck and chanced a quick look inside. All he saw was a stack of suitcase-sized wooden boxes partially covered with a tarp. No one could hide under that. Wherever the passenger had gone, it wasn’t to get into the truck to die. Bolan ejected the magazine in his pistol and reloaded. He wanted a full clip when he found his man.

A quick glance showed how his target had rolled into a shallow ditch alongside the road and then crawled away fast. The Executioner’s quarry had reached a small stand of junipers. Knowing he faced a wounded man who was carrying at least a sidearm and maybe grenades like the driver, Bolan used a large tree as cover. He listened hard but heard nothing moving. The animals in the woods had fallen silent, telling him a human had disturbed them. He listened but heard nothing until a deep inhalation told him where to look. Then he caught the scent of sweat, blood and something unpleasant—cooked flesh.

He slipped around the tree and looked up. Partially hidden ten feet up among the foliage of an oak tree limb lay his camo-dressed prey. Bolan fired three times. The heavy .50-caliber slugs ripped enough wood away from the limb to bring it down. Amid the foliage the stunned man stirred and tried to get away. Bolan fired again but just missed and then had to dodge behind the juniper as the merc fired wildly in his direction.

Bolan took no pleasure at being right about how the man was armed. He had a job to do and was taking too long. All the gunfire would attract the rest of the gang. Judging from the ease with which they had moved through the Lucky Nugget Mine complex, he estimated at least ten had taken part in the operation. Added to the ones in the field setting the fires, he might face twice that if he let them home in on him.

“Who are you working for?” Bolan called out, not expecting an answer.

To his surprise, he garnered a heartfelt “Go to hell.”

The accent was faintly European, but Bolan doubted the man had learned English as his second or even third language.

“Africa? South Africa? Afrikaans?”

Bolan wanted to fix his location in the man’s thoughts by calling out all the inane questions. He scaled the tree and kept climbing until he came to a limb strong enough to support him. Bolan slithered out on it like a snake and then trained his weapon on the man below where he struggled to get away from the bullet-riddled tree limb.

His finger drew back smoothly as he squeezed off the shot. The heavy slug tore through the mercenary’s right shoulder, driving him flat onto the ground. His right arm twitched as he tried to lift his pistol. As he reached over with his left hand, he froze. His head came up and he looked down the barrel of Bolan’s Desert Eagle.

“Don’t,” was all Bolan had to say. The man collapsed and lay on the ground, seemingly beaten. Remembering how the driver had been so contrary, Bolan kicked the pistol away from the man’s hand, patted him down and then grabbed his broad belt and heaved. He tossed the man a few feet away, waiting for a hand-grenade detonation.

Nothing.

“Who do you work for?”

“The highest bidder,” the mercenary said. He struggled to raise his body off the ground. His left hand pressed into his belly as if he needed the support to hold in his guts, then he painfully sat up. “Just like you,” he grated out.

“Who do you think I work for?”

The mercenary tried to shrug, but the bullet he had taken to his right shoulder caused him to blanch in pain instead.

“Same as me. Highest bidder.”

“Where’s the gold?”

The man laughed harshly and turned his head. Bolan read more into the man’s quick glance to the right than he did in the words. The mercenary rubbed his left hand along his belly.

“Where were you going in the truck?”

“Going to blow it up. No evidence.” The man lifted his left hand. Bolan fired a round through the man’s head but not before a weak, determined finger pressed the button on a small radio detonator he had retrieved from some hidden pouch. The ground shook so hard it made Bolan think he’d gotten caught in an earthquake. Then the door opened on the blast furnace, and fire raced toward him from the direction of the truck. It had been wired as a gigantic firebomb intended to cover the mercenaries’ tracks.

Instead, it had given birth to a new forest fire that threatened to devour the Executioner.

3

The heat threatened to boil the flesh from Bolan’s face. Throwing his arm up to protect his eyes, he saw the worst had happened. The mercenaries had been driving back to the junction of the main road to blow up the truck. The resulting fire would cover their tracks completely.

He had to admit their scheme had almost worked—and it had almost killed him. If he had not pursued the mercenary he had blown out of the tree so aggressively, he might have been near their truck when it blew. As it was, though, he couldn’t get to his car to escape. Through the wall of scorching-hot flame, he saw the paint on the car he had stolen begin to blister. Then the entire car erupted in a secondary explosion as the flames reached the gas tank.

Bolan headed deeper into the forest. His flesh tingled from the heat. If he didn’t put some miles between himself and the fire, he would be charbroiled in only a few minutes. He fell into a distance-devouring jog that carried him along the dirt road toward wherever the mercenaries had come from. As fast as he was, as determined to escape the fire as he could be, the conflagration crept closer and began to warm his back. He put his head down and put on a little more speed, shifting his gait from a jog to a run.

It did no good. The inferno behind him filled the sky with burning sparks that cascaded over the landscape for hundreds of yards. Even sucking smoky air into his burning lungs, Bolan covered a mile in a little over five minutes. And he still wasn’t far enough away to feel safe. It was as if the fire toyed with him, letting him get a little farther toward safety before roaring to catch up and spit burning embers onto his clothing. Thinking to veer away from the fire at an angle, he turned off the road and found the dry undergrowth ablaze. He cut back to the road, hoping to go in the other direction, but found it similarly blocked.

He realized these excursions to either side of the road only wasted time and let the fire surge closer, so he continued along the road, eyes watering and lungs screaming from the acrid smoke. Bolan hoped to find out why the mercenaries had come this way but saw no trace of them or what they had been up to.

Running through the smoke-filled air was making it difficult to breathe. The atmosphere looked like L.A. on a smog-alert day and tasted like the inside of a barbecue pit. Over the loud crackling of fire dogging his every step, he heard the whup-whup of a chopper overhead. Bursting into a small clearing, he saw the small helicopter and waved.

The pilot saw him and came lower, buffeted by strong ground winds kicked up by the fire. Landing was out of the question because takeoff would be impossible. The pilot gestured frantically, pointing to a spot away from the road, then he gunned the engine, rose vertically and beat a hasty retreat.

Bolan wished the pilot had tried for the pickup. No guts, no glory, but the pilot was not a military flyer, and Bolan could not hold his caution against him. It just made his own evacuation more difficult, but the only chance he had was to trust the pilot’s judgment…even if the man might be one of the mercs who had stolen the gold.

The idea died almost as it formed in his head as a working hypothesis. If he had been another of the force that had robbed the gold mine, all the pilot needed to do was leave. Bolan would stumble about until the fire eventually overtook him—unless he was actually on his way clear of the fire. Knowing the danger of analysis paralysis, Bolan lowered his head and, putting every ounce of energy into the run, headed in the direction the pilot indicated. He burst into another clearing before he realized he was leaving a heavily wooded patch and saw a half-dozen firefighters setting up a small camp. Dressed in their bright yellow fire-retardant gear and respirators, they looked like creatures from another planet.

One turned and pushed up his face mask, letting his oxygen line drape down, so he could shout, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Had a car wreck.”

“You from the mine?” The man gave Bolan a quick once-over and dismissed him as an idiot who let himself get caught by staying too long after the evacuation warning had been issued.

“Just out for a drive when the fire cut me off from the main road.”

“That fire was set,” the firefighter said. He looked more intently at Bolan. The Executioner did not have to be a mind-reader to know the firefighter thought Bolan might have set the new fire.

“Something exploded behind me. A truck,” Bolan said. “The fire’s coming this way fast.”

“We know.” The firefighter turned to glance at a laptop showing an aerial view of the area. Bolan got his bearings and realized how lucky he had been sticking to the road in his escape. If he had veered to either side of the road for long, he would be fried by now. The detonation had sent out flames in a V pattern.

“Get him out of here,” ordered another firefighter with three bright orange stripes circling the arms of his yellow fire suit.

“You in charge?”

“I don’t know who you are, but a helo recon pilot just reported you were trying to get away. Said he saw a blown-up truck and a car in the middle of where the fire originated.”

“My car,” Bolan said.

“Buck, get this guy out of here. We don’t have time to worry about civilians. We gotta clear as much brush as we can to slow the advance, and we’re running out of time.”

The one who had spoken initially reached out and took Bolan’s arm.

“You heard the man. We go. You stay out of the fire, and I get to come back and do my job.” The bitterness in Buck’s voice told the story. He was a dedicated firefighter, and Bolan took him away from his job.

“Point me in the right direction. I can find my way out.”

This easy way out appealed to Buck. He rubbed his lips with a gloved hand, made a face, then inclined his head toward the far side of the clearing.

“I’ll get you on a trail leading downhill to the command station. Masterson only told me to get you out of danger. He didn’t say anything about nursemaiding you all the way into Boise.” He pointed and started walking clumsily as he fumbled with the dangling respirator.

“You want to stay in your rig?”

“Takes forever to get it on and take it off. Just don’t go too fast for me to keep up.”

Bolan and Buck walked side-by-side toward the far edge of the clearing. Bolan turned around once to see the towering flames a quarter mile behind. The fire spread faster as it found more dried underbrush. The treetops were exploding with a sound like distant bombs.

“The crowns of the trees are catching fire,” Buck said, obviously worried. “That’s bad. The fire spreads faster jumping from treetop to treetop than when it burns along the ground.”

“You see anybody in the area?” the Executioner asked.

Buck stopped and stared at him. Bolan was sure the firefighter saw the butt of the Desert Eagle in its shoulder holster under his left armpit but said nothing about it.

“Just other firefighters. Two of us have already gotten caught by it.” He saw Bolan’s expression and explained. “The fire. It’s like some wild, uncontrollable beast. Two friends of mine were treated for smoke inhalation and are on the way to the hospital. More of us will join them before it’s over, since this fire covers such a wide area.”

“Arson,” Bolan said. “I caught two of the firebugs, but they got away.”

“You a cop? FBI?”

Bolan had no problem verifying that if it helped him find out more from the firefighter. Stony Man Farm specialized in counterterrorism, and setting such fires counted as terrorism, but the mercenaries he had already brought down only used the forest fires to cover their tracks. Gold theft was their primary mission in spite of the havoc they created.

“Homeland Security,” he said, which was close enough to the truth to be believable.

“You’re doing a piss-poor job of policing the borders,” the firefighter said unexpectedly.

“One job at a time.”

“Yeah, look, keep going in this direction. You’ll reach a creek. Follow that downstream until you see our base camp. There’s a couple hundred people there, so it’s hard to miss.”

Buck started back to his crew to fight the fire, but his radio crackled and the frightened voice sounding from it caused him to grab it frantically.

“Come in, Masterson. Repeat. Repeat. What’s your report?”

“Your team got caught and is surrounded by the fire,” Bolan said. He had experience enough to decipher almost any message coming through intense static and dropping words.

“Go, get out of here,” the firefighter said. He worked at the walkie-talkie but got no response.

“I can help. You can’t do anything by yourself.”

“I can get to them. We have to evac now.”

“It’ll be with casualties,” Bolan said. He had a mission to complete, but he wasn’t going to let Buck try to save the others in his crew alone. That would only add one more death to the impressive list of destruction the gold thieves had already racked up.

“They’ll chew my ass good for this, but you’re right. I need help, and I don’t care if you’re only a civilian. Come on!”

Two of them doubled the chance of rescuing the trapped firefighters.

“I’ll need some equipment in your camp,” Bolan pointed out. He did not give the firefighter a chance to argue. Seconds mattered. They retraced their steps, but Buck did not slow when they came to the stacks of equipment. He plunged on toward the wall of smoke masking the edge of the fire zone.

Bolan scooped up a respirator and goggles. The rest of the equipment—fire-retardant jacket, boots and equipment for clearing brush—was meant for the firefighters who would remain close to the blaze for a long time. He wanted only to rescue the men trapped so he joined Buck and immediately regretted not putting on a jacket or a fire helmet. Tiny sparks landed on his arms and in his hair, burning holes and causing distracting pain. But he had put up with worse in his day. He began squashing the tiny fires in his clothing as if swatting mosquitos.

“It moved fast this way. We never saw it coming because the copter pilot said it was following a dirt road, not coming downhill toward us.”

“The wind changed direction,” Bolan said. He adjusted the face mask and respirator before plunging through the wall of fire. The fierce flames clawed at him like some wild animal, but he burst through and came out in a curiously empty area already burned clean of vegetation. Two of the firefighters were flat on the ground and not moving. Another sat, clutching his leg and uttering curses mostly about the fire. The other two worked to make contact using their walkie-talkies.

“The stream,” Bolan shouted, making himself heard over the roar of the fire. “Where is it?”

“We’ve got fire-resistant blankets. We can weather it. We’re only on the edge.” Buck did not sound confident. One of the unconscious men was the fire team leader, and there did not seem to be anyone left willing to make independent decisions.

“They won’t make it,” Bolan said. He rolled over the unconscious fire team leader, then hefted him up over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Bolan did not wait for the others but headed in the direction Buck had indicated earlier.

He had hardly gone a dozen yards when he found a new wall of fire. Courage had less to do with his action than knowing this was his only chance to survive. Bolan put his head down and charged like a bull. He broke through the dancing flames and came out on the other side. If his luck had not held, he might have found himself in the midst of the raging fire rather than on scorched earth. Weaving through the blackened trees, he headed downhill with his burden and soon found the narrow but deep stream. He dropped his load into the middle of the water. Making sure the unconscious man’s head was propped above the surface, Bolan turned and started back to help the rest of the firefighters.

He got only a few yards back uphill when he spotted four men stumbling along.

“Where’s Buck?”

The lead firefighter shook his head. He tried to grab Bolan’s arm to stop him, but the warrior was not to be deterred so easily. He broke the grip and ran back. The wall of voracious flame he had breached before was gone now, moving on with a speed that amazed him. He swiped at his goggles, removing a thin sheen of soot that had kept him from seeing Buck limping along. The firefighter’s right leg refused to bear his weight. If he kept hopping that way, he would never get to safety.

In a flash, Bolan got to the firefighter’s side and slipped an arm around him to lend some support.

“You’re some kind of madman,” Buck grated out. “Nobody’s paying you to look after me. Hell, they’re not even paying me that much. I’m a volunteer, like the rest of my team.”

Bolan steered Buck off at an angle, goaded by the increasing heat at his back. They finally reached the creek and sloshed into it.

“Where’re the others? Where are they?”

“Get down into the water,” Bolan ordered. He shoved Buck to a sitting position. “They’re a bit farther upstream.”

“You saved Lee? Lee Masterson?”

Bolan immersed himself in the stream and felt every burn and blister on his body turn to ice as the water washed over him. He still had to use his respirator to breathe, but the fire now ran parallel to the stream.

“We’re gonna make it,” Buck said. “You saved me.”

“You’d have made it on your own.”

“Don’t be so sure of that. I think my leg’s broken from a spill I took. If it turned into a compound break, there’s no way I could have made it to safety. Hell, I couldn’t have made it to the railroad tracks, much less here.”

“Railroad?”

“There’s one that runs parallel to the stream, a mile farther downhill,” Buck said. “But what good’re train tracks? They’ve cleared the regular traffic just to be on the safe side. I wish we could get supplies sent by train.” Buck closed his eyes and choked back his pain. Talking kept his mind off his injury. “Even then, the higher-ups don’t like to depend on trains. The heat can actually melt the tracks and warp the rails. Then we’d have a derailment as well as a fire to deal with.”

“Clear the traffic? There was a train that came by recently?”

Buck moaned softly as he clutched his leg.

Bolan rummaged through the firefighter’s pack and found a morphine syringe. He expertly opened the ampule, then injected the drug directly into the injured leg.

“Burns. Never had a shot like that before.”

“You’ll get sleepy in a minute. What about the train?”

“Tracks,” Buck said in a weak voice. “Don’t know the schedule but the boss said they had to get one out of the way ’fore we could move in equipment. Equipment. Need…” Buck drifted off to a troubled sleep, but the pain was bearable for him now, thanks to the narcotic.

Bolan made sure Buck’s head would remain above the water, then yelled for the other firefighters. When he saw the bright yellow jacket with the orange stripes splashing downstream toward them, he knew Buck would be all right. The fire team leader had recovered and would provide needed guidance for the rest of his men.

Bolan left before the fire team leader reached them to ask questions better left unanswered. He made his way in the direction Buck had indicated and saw the railroad tracks.

This was how the mercenaries had gotten the heavy gold away from the area, with little risk they would be found out. Where did they ship it? Like a hunting dog on a scent, the Executioner went to the train tracks and began walking. His mission was just beginning.

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