Hell Night

The Executioner®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

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

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Epilogue

Prologue

The quiet ambience of the small Parisian café was in direct contrast to the proposed topics of discussion—mass murder and destruction.

Beneath the large shade umbrella on the patio, Benjamin Franklin Davis shifted his chair slightly to block out the setting sun. Behind him, a good-looking Frenchwoman sat on a tall stool, a guitar in her lap, singing a folk song. Although he couldn’t understand the words, Davis listened to her voice. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Davis focused his attention on the café’s door to the patio as his contact arrived. Davis nodded. He would have known the man even if Ibrahim Nasab hadn’t told him he’d be wearing a brown sport coat and an open-collared white shirt. The look in Nasab’s eyes gave him away as a man accustomed to violence.

It was the same look Davis saw in the mirror each morning when he shaved.

Nasab walked to the table and pulled out the chair next to Davis just as the sun sank below the horizon. The woman on the stool continued to strum her guitar, her voice low and husky.

“Do you speak French?” Ibrahim Nasab asked as he settled into his seat.

“I speak English,” Davis almost spit. “The American version. Or I don’t speak at all.”

For a brief moment, Nasab’s eyes filled with hatred, but then the Arab forced a smile. “Then we will speak English,” he said in a thick Middle Eastern accent. “For we have much to discuss.”

Davis nodded. “Indeed we do,” he said. He leaned forward, closer to Nasab so he could lower his voice when he spoke. The odor of some pungent spice filled his nostrils. He was telling himself to ignore it when another pretty Frenchwoman with long brown hair approached their table. She said something Davis couldn’t understand, but Nasab answered for them.

“I have ordered you another cup of American coffee,” the Arab said when she’d left again. “And one for myself.”

Davis nodded, cleared his throat, then glanced around him to make sure no one was paying them any attention. An elderly couple three tables away were the only other patrons on the sidewalk patio, and they hardly looked like potential police or intelligence agents. Davis scanned the office building across the street. Surveillance equipment had become so sophisticated in the past few years that a hidden microphone might be trained on them from any of the windows.

But that wasn’t the case, and he knew it. He had chosen this café at random less than ten minutes ago, and given Nasab the name and address by cell phone. Even if the French or the Americans or the Arabs were on to them, they wouldn’t have had time to get their listening gear set up.

For a moment, the two men sat silently, sizing each other up. Then Nasab asked quietly, “Do you really think this can work?” He had leaned in slightly, too, and if the look on his face meant anything, the movement was as distasteful to him as it had been to Davis. “Our philosophies of life are so very different.”

“Yes,” Davis said. “They are different. But if North Korea can work with Iran and Syria for a common goal, I don’t see why my American Rough Riders and Hamas can’t do the same thing.”

Nasab leaned back in his chair as a gentle breeze began to blow along the sidewalk. The woman on the stool behind Davis continued to sing.

“How do you propose that we join forces?” Nasab asked.

“I see things going down in two parts,” Davis said. “The first part will consist of the same things we’ve been doing separately all along. Bank robberies, random machine-gunnings at shopping malls and other areas where there are lots of easy targets, small bombs and the like.” He glanced at his watch and calculated the time difference between where he sat and Kansas City, Missouri. “Even now, some of my men are preparing to rob a bank later in the day.” He rested his arm on the table. “We’ll make sure everyone knows who it is behind the robbery, and we’ll make sure there are plenty of bodies left at the scene.”

Nasab nodded, then said out loud what all terrorists, the world over, knew in their hearts. “Each death sends horror through a thousand still-beating hearts.”

“That’s right,” Davis confirmed. “And in addition to the strikes you’ve already set up here in Europe, I’d like you to send some of your men to the U.S.” He glanced at the Hamas man’s sport coat, slacks and the rest of his Western attire. “And I’d like them to wear more-traditional Islamic clothing than you have on, if you don’t mind.”

“We can disguise ourselves as Christians and Jews when necessary,” Nasab said. “Won’t robes and headdresses draw attention to us?”

Davis almost burst out laughing. “Of course it will,” he said. “And that’s exactly what we want. It’ll scare the hell out of people, but they won’t get in your way. You’ve heard of political correctness?”

Nasab nodded. “Of course.”

“Well,” Davis went on, “the average American doesn’t know the difference between the Muslim sects, and they’ll be so afraid of offending you that you could probably hide a howitzer under your robe and no one would say anything.” He stopped talking long enough to pull a French cigarette from a crumpled package he’d purchased the day before at a tobacco shop. “They can call it political correctness if they want,” he said as he lit the tip, then cleared his throat. “I call it stupidity. But it’s a stupidity we can use to our own advantage.”

Nasab smiled his understanding.

“We’ll get the anthrax-mail thing going again,” Davis said. “But on a larger scale than whoever did it before. I don’t know who it was, but it was a damn good tactic. I want people afraid to even open their electric bill.”

“That is easily accomplished as soon as my men and I arrive in the U.S.,” Nasab said. “We already have a large supply of anthrax at our disposal. And much of it is already in the possession of our cells in America.”

“Good,” Davis said. “And I want to begin a food-poisoning campaign. It’s easy enough for someone to walk through the fruit-and-vegetable section of any supermarket and inject fresh foods with the poison of their choice.” He stopped talking as the waitress set their coffee on the round metal table. He didn’t open his mouth again until she had turned to go back into the café and was well out of earshot. “Even one death like this’ll make all of America afraid to eat anything that didn’t come out of an airtight can.”

Nasab smiled. “I like the plan so far,” he said. “Then, perhaps once they have quit eating fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and other foods, we can plant men in the canneries. Your Americans will be less suspect than my darker-skinned brethren, and they can poison the canned food, making your countrymen afraid to eat anything.” He paused, chuckled and took a sip of coffee. When he had replaced the coffee cup in its saucer, he said, “And what is the final part of your plan?”

Davis leaned even closer. “Part two?” He grinned. “We attack and destroy the very heart of the American government.” He went on to tell Nasab the exact site, and what he had planned as a joint strike by the Rough Riders and Hamas. “Not as many people will die as they will in the events leading up to it,” he finished. “But just think about the symbolic shock to the United States. No one will ever feel safe again, even in their homes. They’ll know that if we can get in there, we can get in anywhere.”

The smile remained on Nasab’s face. “It will be a true jihad,” he said quietly.

“For you, yes,” Davis said. “I’ve been calling it the Night of Hell. My men are already in America, so they’ll be easy enough to move to the attack sites. You have men in cells all over the country, as well. But I’d like you to start bringing in even more. Through Mexico is always a good way—you’ve proved that. And the Canadian border is still unguarded for the most part. There are dozens of back roads you can take, and no one will even know your men are here. And don’t forget the coasts—both Atlantic and Pacific. One ship pulling up to an isolated spot can off-load hundreds of Hamas operatives.” He paused for a sip of coffee. “You’ll need to bring your own small arms for the most part. If you run short, I can arm some of your men. But I don’t have enough rifles or sidearms for all of Hamas. And we’ll need as many of those suicide-bomb vests of yours as you can smuggle in.”

Nasab frowned. “Your men are going to use them?”

Davis laughed out loud. “Of course not,” he said. “Killing ourselves isn’t quite our thing. But it’s yours, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Ibrahim Nasab said slowly, “it is one of the tactics we employ when necessary, yes. And it is a path directly to Paradise.”

“In any case, suicide bombings are what you’re most famous for, aren’t they?” Davis continued. “The World Trade Center and the Pentagon? All your buddy Bin Laden missed that day was the White House with that last flight. And you’ve blown up thousands of people—including the bombers themselves—in smaller ops against Israel and other spots around the world.”

“You expect all of the suicides to come from my men?” Nasab asked.

“Like I said,” Davis replied. “It’s what you do, isn’t it?”

The Arab forced a smile. “Yes,” he said. “It is what we do. But why stop with the vests? We have small backpack nuclear bombs in our possession. One is all it would take.”

Davis shook his head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I want this to be a surgical strike. Controllable. Besides destroying ninety percent of the United States infrastructure—which we’ll need once we step in and take the reins—a nuke would indiscriminately kill my men, as well as yours.”

An expression of loathing and disrespect curled Nasab’s lips into a frown. “So you do not mind if my men die, only your own?”

“Exactly,” Davis said. “But don’t forget it was you guys wrote the rules on suicide bombings, not us. We don’t do suicide. Or windows.”

The puzzled look returned to Nasab, the joke obviously lost on him.

A long pause followed as the men finished their coffee. Finally, seeing only tiny black grounds in the bottom of his cup, Davis said, “Then it’s decided, right? My American Rough Riders and Hamas will work together for our common goal—the attacks leading up to the big one, and then the one we’re calling the Night of Hell. I’m not kidding myself—it won’t bring the American government completely down. But it ought to drop it to its knees, and from there we may be able to pound it on into the ground.” He started to stick out his hand to shake Nasab’s, then drew it back, remembering whom he was dealing with.

Nasab had almost lifted his own hand. But now he dropped it again. “You have called it the Night of Hell. We have been referring to it simply the American jihad.”

“American jihad,” Davis said. “Night of Hell. Same thing.”

Nasab nodded. “We have one major strike planned right here, tomorrow night in France. It will come the next day after your bank robbery in America, and can serve as one of the attacks leading up to the big night.”

Davis nodded. “We’ve got a few things already planned in the U.S., too. In the meantime, start smuggling your operatives across the border.”

“It is agreed,” Nasab said. “But what are we to do once our joint mission is accomplished?”

Davis stood up, leaving several euros on the table next to his empty cup. Nasab followed him to his feet. “We’ll have to work something out between us,” he said. “But there’s no sense worrying about that now.”

Nasab nodded hesitantly.

Davis could see on the Arab’s face that they were thinking the same thing.

Once the Night of Hell was over, the alliance between them would end. And it would become time for Hamas and the Rough Riders to start killing each other. But that didn’t matter right now. And by the time it did, Benjamin Franklin Davis’s other plan—the one about which Nasab was completely unaware—would have corrected the problem.

“We’ll stay in touch by cell phone,” Davis said as the two men left the sidewalk café and began walking down the street. “My electronics expert has worked on them, and they’re all but untappable.”

“When do we begin?” Nasab asked as they passed a florist’s shop and the pleasant odor of freshly cut spring flowers filled their nostrils.

Davis glanced at his watch. The bank robbery should be well under way by now. “We already have, my friend,” he said. “We already have.”

1

The huge windowpane closest to the bank’s front doors shattered, the tiny shards glistening like snowflakes as they fell through the bright sunlight. But before they had hit the ground, the bank robber in green coveralls and navy blue ski mask dropped the 9 mm Uzi and toppled to the pavement, dead.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, crouched behind the Kia he was using as cover. Up and down the row of cars parked outside the bank in Kansas City, Missouri, SWAT operatives in dark blue BDU blouses and matching pants had their own rifles pointed toward the building.

Bolan had used up most of his 30-round magazine from the M-16 A-2 in taking out the window and the would-be bank robber, and now he shoved a fresh box mag into the rifle. The robbers still inside the bank and the cops behind the cars exchanged gunfire. If the gunfire continued long enough, Bolan knew it would accomplish nothing except getting the hostages inside the building killed.

Turning to the ruddy-complexioned SWAT captain next to him, the Executioner yelled, “Tell your men to cease-fire, Tom! If we don’t establish some kind of dialogue fast, the good guys still inside are going to get killed.”

“Cease-fire!” the captain screamed. Leaning his chin toward the microphone clipped to the epaulet on his left shoulder, he flipped a switch on his nylon utility belt and repeated the order. “Cease-fire!”

As the roar of the gunshots died down, Bolan thought about the strange situation in which he now found himself. He had been at Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorist command post and training grounds. In addition to fielding top-notch assault teams like Able Team and Phoenix Force, Stony Man handpicked exceptional soldiers and police officers from the U.S. and friendly nations for advanced combat training. These men were flown to the Farm blindfolded, then left the same way—never knowing exactly where they’d been or who had trained them. What they did know was that they’d never received such pragmatic or intense instruction anywhere else in the world.

Tom Glasser, the sturdily built Kansas City captain next to the Executioner, had just completed a Stony Man session. When a local snitch informed the Kansas City PD of the upcoming bank robbery planned by the Rough Riders—a faction of the American Nazi Party—Glasser and Bolan had been flown straight from Stony Man Farm.

Bolan let the bolt on his M-16 slide home, chambering a round. The air seemed eerily quiet now. He watched quietly as a uniformed officer, hunkered low beneath the vehicles, approached Glasser’s other side. When he was near enough, the uniform whisper-shouted a phone number.

Glasser wasted no time pulling a cell phone from a nylon carrier on his belt and tapping in the number. A second later, he had one of the bank robbers on the line.

“All right,” he said into the instrument. “Let’s cut the formalities. What do you want in exchange for the hostages?” He thumbed another button and activated the speakerphone so Bolan could hear the other end of the conversation, too.

The raspy cough of a heavy cigarette smoker sounded over the speakerphone. “Every damn penny we’ll be hauling out of this bank,” the bank robber declared. “And five million more for the inconvenience you’ve caused us.” The voice paused and took in a hacking breath. “After that, the usual. A chopper big enough to take thirty people—that’ll include some of the hostages—to the airport, a plane full of fuel ready to take off and a pilot who isn’t a disguised cop.” The man coughed again. “We find a weapon of any kind on him, or anything else that makes us think the flyboy’s a pig, and we’ll blow his head off.”

Glasser looked toward Bolan. Even though he was technically in charge of this operation, the SWAT commander had just spent a month enduring the most rigorous cutting-edge training he’d had in his career, and Bolan had taught several of those classes. Hostage negotiation had been one of them.

Bolan answered the unasked question by silently mouthing the words, “You know what to do. Stall.”

“I don’t have the authority to meet your demands,” Glasser said into the cell phone. “It can be done. But it’s going to take time.”

“You’ve got time,” the man across the street rasped. “Twenty minutes.”

“I can’t even get clearance for the chopper and plane in that length of time,” Glasser said. “Let alone raise five million bucks for you.”

“Well, you’d better try,” the gravelly voice snapped. “Because each minute you’re late means another dead hostage.” There was a pause, then a low, phlegm-sounding chuckle. “I’ll just shoot them, then toss them out the front window you guys blew out so you can see them.” He finished with, “You’ve now got nineteen minutes.” The line clicked dead.

Glasser cut the call at his end and turned once again toward the Executioner. He had known Bolan as Matt Cooper while training at the Farm, and still did. “Any suggestions, Cooper?” he said.

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Get on the phone and start trying to get clearance for the chopper and plane. And check with the local Secret Service field office. See how much counterfeit money they’ve got on hand.” He looked the burly man in the eye. “These guys aren’t going to have the time or the equipment to check out good fakes, and it’ll be a lot easier than trying to talk any other bank or rich individual into gambling with five million real dollars.”

Glasser nodded and began tapping numbers into his phone.

Rising to his feet, the Executioner stayed low, bending over to whisper into Glasser’s ear. “You’re never going to make the twenty-minute deadline,” he said.

Glasser had just hung up the phone. “I know,” he said.

“And if the guys inside are from the Rough Riders, they aren’t bluffing,” Bolan said just as quietly. He remembered a recent intelligence report that Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman—Stony Man Farm’s chief computer expert—had put together about this militant faction of the American Nazi Party. The Rough Riders were suspected in several murders and—like so many homegrown American terrorist groups—relied on bank robbery as their primary means of support.

“Do we know how many hostages are inside?” the Executioner asked.

Glasser shook his head as he touched the cell phone to his ear for the next call. “Not exactly,” he said. “There’ll be twenty to thirty employees, plus however many customers happened to be there at the wrong time.”

Bolan nodded and started to move past the man.

Glasser reached out and grabbed Bolan’s arm. “Where are you going?” he asked.

The Executioner squatted again. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “And if you don’t know it, you can’t accidentally give it away to the enemy.” He paused for a deep breath, then went on. “Just conduct this operation as if I wasn’t here. But when you hear shots fired inside the bank again, move your men in as fast as possible. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“And give me one of those two-ways so I can keep track of you,” the Executioner said.

Glasser waved at one of his SWAT men, a slender sergeant with dark brown hair. “Give Cooper here your radio and mike,” he said. “Then go back to the van and get another one for yourself.”

The sergeant didn’t even bother to ask who Cooper was. Jerking the radio from his belt and the microphone from his shoulder, he handed them over.

The Executioner snapped the radio onto his belt, checked the earpiece connection, then shoved the tiny plastic receiver into one ear. He clipped the microphone to the shoulder of his blacksuit. He looked at his watch.

Not quite ninety seconds had passed since the raspy voice inside the bank had given them their twenty-minute deadline.

The innocents inside had roughly eighteen and a half minutes.

Police cars completely surrounded the bank. Three of the building’s four sides faced streets, and here the vehicles were lined up practically bumper to bumper. To the rear of the bank—beyond the drive-through windows—was a housing complex. Here, the police cars had pulled directly onto the grounds beyond the windows, doing their best to provide a buffer zone between the innocent residents in their houses and the miscreants in the bank. Behind the circle of cars knelt uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives and the rest of Glasser’s SWAT crew, each of the men training a weapon on the bank.

Moving to the rear of the bank, Bolan sprinted for one of the marked units separating the bank from the residential area. But no shots followed him.

Dropping down behind the black-and-white patrol car, Bolan found himself next to a portly patrolman resting his Glock 21 across the hood and aiming it toward the drive-through window into the bank. The man’s uniform cap had been discarded and lay next to him on the ground. Coarse but sparse red-and-gray hair stuck up from his receding hairline and balding pate.

The patrolman glanced at Bolan, then back to the bank.

“You seen any activity through that teller’s window since you’ve been here?” Bolan asked.

The patrolman nodded. “Some. There’s a guy with a ski mask just out of sight below the glass. He pops his head up every few seconds and—” The blue head suddenly appeared as the officer spoke. “There! You see him?”

Bolan nodded. “You see anyone else?”

The balding man shook his head. “Just him.”

The Executioner drew back slightly, taking in the rear of the bank as a whole. The First Fidelity Bank was a one-story building. Awnings covered the three drive-up windows with brick columns supporting what looked like shake-shingle roofs. He wondered whether they would support his two-hundred-plus pounds.

He suspected he was about to find out.

“What’s your name?” Bolan asked the cop next to him.

“Coleman,” said the man. “Call me Ron.”

“You might want to hold back on that familiarity until you hear the rest of what I’m about to say,” Bolan told him.

“Huh?”

“You wearing a vest, Coleman?” Bolan asked.

“You better believe it,” said the man with the sparse red-and-gray hair. “I’ve got a wife and kids I like to go home and see every night.”

“Shock plate inserted?” Bolan asked.

“Right over the old ticker. Thickest steel they make ’em in.” The KCPD officer’s voice was starting to sound suspicious now. “Why?”

“Because I need to use you as a decoy,” the Executioner said. “I’m going up on the roof. And if that blue ski mask happens to pop up at the wrong time and see me, it’ll ruin what I have in mind.”

Now the patrolman’s voice took on a true tone of trepidation. “What is it you expect me to do?”

“Just get up and start walking toward the window. If Mr. Ski Mask shows his head or a weapon or both, take cover behind one of those brick columns. I just need his attention on you and not me.”

“In other words, if someone has to get shot you’d rather it be me than you?”

“No,” Bolan said. “It’s just the way this thing has to go down, that’s all. If you don’t want to do it, say so now. I’ll try to think of something else.” He glanced at his watch. “But I’ve only got eleven minutes to come up with it and pull it off.” He paused, then finished with, “So, Coleman. What’ll it be?”

Bolan could see the concern on the man’s face as he weighed his responsibilities to the job versus those to his family.

“All right,” Coleman finally said. “Tell me exactly what you want me to do.” He paused, then added, “And you can still call me Ron.”

The Executioner smiled. It was a brave man he was working with.

“When I give you the word, just stand up and start walking directly toward the window. If you see the ski mask, make tracks for the brick column. After that, just stay where you are.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Coleman asked.

“Scaling the wall. But don’t look my way under any circumstances. I need that lookout’s attention focused on you, or the inside of the bank’s going to look like a Chicago slaughterhouse.”

Coleman reached up and adjusted his vest, making sure the steel plate was in place. “Makes me wish I’d sprung for the steel-plated jockstrap you can get with these things,” he said. “But what the hell. I’ve already got three kids and the wife and I were talking about a vasectomy anyway.” He turned to face the Executioner. “Say when.”

Bolan slung his M-16 A-2 over his shoulder and waited until the blue ski mask made another quick appearance, then disappeared. “Now!” he said under his breath and rose to his feet at the same time Coleman stood up. Coleman rounded the trunk, and the Executioner cut in front of the front bumper as both men made their way toward the building.

Bolan was running, Coleman walking—as he’d been instructed. So the Executioner reached the brick column supporting the carport several steps in front of the man. Sprinting at full speed, he lifted his right knee almost to his chin as his leather-and-nylon combat boot hit the bricks. His momentum carried him upward, and he got one more step with his left boot before he felt gravity beginning to overcome his own velocity.

Reaching skyward, the Executioner got his fingertips just over the edge of the shake-shingle roofing.

A second later, he had pulled himself up and out of sight on top of the carport.

No sooner had he risen to his knees than he heard several shots fired below him. Looking down, he saw Coleman driven back a step as the rounds clanged off the steel plate in his vest. But the balding cop he didn’t let that stop him. Before the man inside the window could fire again, he dived behind the brick column.

Bolan leaned over the side and looked down. He could see Coleman sitting with his back against the bricks, the sparse and spiky reddish-gray hair pointing straight up at the top of the carport. The Executioner whispered downward, “Ron, you okay?”

The KCPD patrolman was savvy enough not to look upward when he answered. “If you call feeling like you just took three straight hooks to the chest from Buster Douglas okay, then yeah—I’m just peachy.”

The Executioner chuckled. At least the man was out of danger now. He could sit out the rest of this encounter. “Okay,” he said. “Stay where you are.”

Bolan looked down at his wrist. He had a little under ten minutes before the hostages started dying. Switching on the microphone mounted to his shoulder, Bolan realized he had no call letters or numbers of his own, and he didn’t know what Tom Glasser’s were, either. So he said simply, “Cooper to Glasser. Cooper to Glasser. Come in, Glasser.”

“SWAT 1,” Glasser’s voice came back. “This is Glasser, Cooper. You got a call name?”

The Executioner lowered his voice until he suspected it could barely be heard on the other end of the line. “I go by Striker, SWAT 1. And I’m on the roof,” he whispered. “Have you had any more contact with the subjects inside?”

“Negative, Striker,” Glasser came back. He was whispering, too. “But we’ve got the funny money on the way here, compliments of the Secret Service.”

“How about the chopper?” Bolan asked.

“We’re trying to find one big enough. And that’s not easy if you don’t go to the military.”

Bolan immediately understood the reason behind the SWAT captain’s words. The regular military was forbidden from taking action in police matters inside the U.S., and most of the time that was a good thing—it ensured that America would not become a military state ruled by its armed forces. But there were exceptions to that rule, when the use of the armed forces seemed like the only logical answer.

This was one of them.

“See if you can go through the state’s National Guard,” the Executioner said. “If they don’t have a chopper big enough on hand, they ought to be able to get one from the regular army.” He paused and felt his eyebrows furrow as he thought further. “And use this as an excuse to stall some more. Call into the bank on your cell phone and explain the problem with the chopper. See if you can buy some more time.”

“Affirmative, Striker,” Glasser said. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Negative, SWAT 1,” Bolan said as he made his way carefully across the shingled roof one shaky step at a time. “And the fact that I’m up top is for your ears only. We can’t expect fifty men—no matter how good they are—to keep from glancing up and being seen by the bad guys.”

“Roger, Striker,” Glasser said. “That intel stays in-house.”

Bolan finally made it off the carport roofs and onto the flat tar roof of the bank proper. His eyes skirted the building, seeing ventilation shafts, heat and air-conditioning equipment, and a variety of other pipes and housings sticking up out of the dirty black surface. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the building, staying just far enough from the edge that his head couldn’t be seen by the police officers on the ground.

He had meant what he’d told Glasser. All it would take would be for one of the Rough Riders below him to see one cop straining his eyes toward the roof to know someone was above them. Then the element of surprise would be gone.

The Executioner had hoped to find a return air shaft or some similar means to enter the building below, but he had no such luck. Banks were built with the hope of keeping people out after business hours, and the rough roof of First Fidelity was no exception. There were holes leading down into the building, all right. But the Executioner would have had to have been the size of a house cat to get through them.

With one exception.

Near the street side of the building, above what Bolan assumed would be the bank’s front lobby, was a large skylight. Slowly, he crept toward it, formulating his plan of attack as he went. If the skylight was plastic, he’d be out of luck here, too. He’d have to shoot enough holes through the plastic with the M-16 A-2 to create an opening large enough to drop through. And by the time that had been accomplished, the Rough Riders would have had time to kill the bank employees and other hostages several times over.

But if it was glass…

When he’d drawn near enough that he feared he might be seen be someone looking upward, Bolan dropped to his belly and used his elbows to pull himself the rest of the way to the skylight. Then, slowly—almost ceremoniously—he reached out with his left hand and tapped the clear surface in front of him.

Both the sound, and the feel, brought a smile to his face.

The skylight was made of glass. It would shatter just as quickly, and as surely, as the picture window next to the front door had.

Crawling back a few yards, the Executioner rose to his feet again and activated the mike on his shoulder. “Striker to SWAT 1,” he said. “Come in, SWAT 1.”

“I hear you Striker,” came back into his ear.

Bolan looked at his watch. He had a little over a minute before the twenty-minute deadline. “You buy us any extra time with the National Guard story?” he asked Glasser.

“Negative,” said the SWAT commander. “The guy just laughed, told me he knew a stall job when he heard one, then repeated his threat to start killing one hostage for each minute we were late.”

“Okay,” Bolan said. “Then it’s Plan B time.” He glanced at his watch once more.

Forty-five seconds remained.

He was about to speak to Glasser again when he saw another man in green coveralls and a blue ski mask shove a middle-aged woman directly under the skylight. The late-afternoon sun was at an angle that gave him an almost perfect view through the glass and, he suspected, would block or at least distort what could be seen by anyone looking up through the skylight.

But at this stage of the game he was taking no chances. Bolan took another step back until only the tops of the man’s and woman’s heads were visible. He had already seen all he needed to see.

The man in the coveralls had wrapped his left forearm around the woman’s throat. The short, stubby muzzle of an Ingram MAC-11 submachine gun was pressed against her nape. The watch on his wrist was clearly visible, and Bolan could see the Rough Rider staring at it, counting off the final seconds just as the Executioner was doing above, on the roof.

Bolan glanced at the MAC-11 again. Those submachine guns cycled at a phenomenally fast rate of fire. Unless the man firing the weapon was extremely experienced with it, he could empty the entire 30-round magazine before he let up on the trigger. All of which made the Ingrams less suitable for combat than for assassinations.

But an outright murder was exactly what was going to happen in less than thirty seconds unless the Executioner acted swiftly. The woman’s head would be almost completely gone before the Rough Rider even had time to let up on the trigger.

Bolan looked at his wrist. Twenty-eight seconds.

“Listen and listen fast, SWAT 1,” he whispered into the mike. “Fifteen seconds from the time I stop talking I’m coming down through the skylight. You should hear a few shots from me up top here, then glass breaking. Tell your men that’s their cue—when they hear the gunfire and then the crash it’s time to charge the building.”

“You’ve got it,” Glasser said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Make sure that your men know that once they’re inside the bank, they’re to take orders from me.”

“I’ll make sure they understand it,” Glasser said. “When do we begin the countdown?”

“Fifteen seconds from…now,” Bolan said.

He took a deep breath and squinted through the glass. From where he stood, he had a good angle at the head of the man in the green coveralls. He switched the M-16 to 3-round burst mode, then lined up the sights on the back of the man’s head. The holes he was about to drill through the glass would weaken it and make it shatter even easier.

The Executioner took a final glance at his watch, then returned his eyes to the sights. Slowly, he squeezed the trigger and watched the back of the Rough Rider’s head blow off as three tiny holes appeared in the skylight.

A second after that, he leaped onto the glass in a sitting position and crashed through the skylight into the First Fidelity Bank.

THE EXECUTIONER STRAIGHTENED his legs as he fell through the glass, thankful that the blacksuit was made out of cut-resistant material. Still, he felt a few shreds of glass scrape his hands and face, and by the time his feet hit the floor of the bank’s lobby he could feel tiny drops of blood running down his cheeks.

They mattered little in the grand scheme of things.

The Executioner landed on his feet, right behind the screaming woman and the dead Rough Rider who had fallen to her rear. To his right was a popcorn machine designed and built to look like the type found in old-fashioned movie theaters. Such fake antique popcorn machines seemed, for some reason, to be standard fare in modern banks. They were made out of thin metal and glass, and offered concealment but not cover.

Bolan pivoted on the balls of his feet, turning toward the cashiers’ windows. The first thing he saw were the hostages. Roughly a dozen people who looked like customers lay on their faces on the floor, their hands clasped behind their heads. Next to them, at least twice as many bank employees—both males and females wearing tan slacks and maroon polo shirts sporting the bank’s logo—lay in the same position.

The Executioner’s sudden descent through the skylight had come as a complete surprise to the bank robbers. Like the pair he had already encountered, they also wore green coveralls and blue ski masks. But Bolan noted one major difference.

The masks of these men had been rolled up into simple blue stocking caps. This aided their vision, but it told the Executioner something else, as well.

These Rough Riders weren’t worried about the customers or bank employees seeing their faces, which meant they intended to kill all the hostages.

A Rough Rider with a wide handlebar mustache was the first to recover from the shock of Bolan’s aerial entry. He lifted the Uzi in his hands toward the Executioner.

But Bolan was a fraction of a second faster. The Executioner’s first 3-round burst hit the mustachioed Rough Rider squarely in the chest. Above the explosions of the rounds Bolan heard a high-pitched ringing sound. He immediately realized that Coleman, the uniformed cop outside, wasn’t the only one wearing a Kevlar vest with a steel insert. At least some of the Rough Riders had them, too.

While the trio of rounds from the Executioner’s assault rifle had driven the man with the mustache several paces backward into a desk, they hadn’t stopped him. The Rough Rider began to raise his Uzi again, and more rounds from another direction whizzed past the Executioner’s ears, sounding like angry bees.

Bolan’s next triburst was aimed at his target’s head. The first slug took off the upper right half of his face and blew brains, blood and fragments of skull out the back of his head. The second and third rounds disappeared somewhere in the gore before the Rough Rider slumped to the tile floor in front of the desk.

The Executioner ducked behind the popcorn machine as more rounds from behind the tellers’ windows zipped past him. As he hit the floor, a barrage of fire from a variety of weapons shattered the glass of the popcorn machine and tore through the thin red metal stand.

Suddenly, the First Fidelity Bank lobby appeared to be snowing popcorn and glass, both raining over Bolan where he lay on his side. The unusual combined odor of exploding gunpowder, popcorn and butter filled the Executioner’s nostrils.

Several of the rounds that had ripped through the red metal stand had missed Bolan by millimeters. And the bank robbers knew that sooner or later, if they simply kept peppering the popcorn machine with fire, some of their rounds would find vital organs.

The Executioner knew that, too. Slinging the M-16 over his shoulder, he suddenly dived from behind the machine into the open. Hitting the floor on his right shoulder, he rolled under several bursts of fire just inches above him. The shoulder roll took him all the way to the desk where the man with the mustache lay in death, and the Executioner squeezed in between the dead man and the desk, using them both for cover now. He saw a flash of blue as one of the Rough Riders raised his head to fire through a teller’s window.

Bolan triggered his M-16. The blue stocking cap blew off the top of the man’s head. So did half of the head itself.

Two men in coveralls suddenly emerged through a formerly closed door next to the tellers’ windows. Behind them, Bolan could see a private office. An employee wearing the same maroon polo shirt lay on the floor, bloody and battered but breathing.

Both of the men coming out the door carried Uzis, and both were well over six feet and broad shouldered. They made the mistake of trying to exit the office at the same time, and for a split second wedged themselves together in the doorway in a scene worthy of The Three Stooges. But the Uzis kept all humor out of the Executioner’s brain as he flipped the M-16’s selector switch to semiauto, then put one 5.56 mm bullet between each man’s eyes.

They fell to the floor, dead.

For a moment, the gunfire died down and Bolan heard the sounds of running footsteps outside the building. He smiled grimly to himself. Glasser and his men were on the way. Their arrival was confirmed by the sounds of window glass breaking and side exit doors being rammed open.

Quickly, Bolan assessed the situation. The fact that the gunfire had died down meant there were a limited number of men who could see him. Which, in turn, meant the Rough Riders had to be scattered throughout the bank. The breaking glass and doors being rammed meant Glasser’s SWAT teams were entering the bank at various positions. They would take care of the offices, vault area and other rooms behind the tellers’ windows. But there was still one place just off the lobby that needed attention. The safe-deposit box room. And the Executioner was the most likely candidate to cover it.

Bolan could see the barred door was on the other side of the lobby, across from him.

And the barred door was open.

The Executioner squeezed out from between the desk and the dead man with the mustache, the M-16 aimed toward the tellers’ windows. There was always a chance that he’d been wrong in his assessment as to the cease-fire, and one or more Rough Riders might be hidden back there, just waiting for an opportunity such as Bolan was now giving him.

But such was not the case. Making his way silently toward the safe-deposit box door, trying to avoid the broken glass, shreds of metal, popcorn and anything else that might make a sound and alert the men in the safe-deposit box room that he was coming.

When he reached the door, the Executioner dropped to one knee and peered inside. Row upon row of safe-deposit boxes were stacked to a height of seven feet or so, and they prevented him from seeing anyone in the room.

But they didn’t prevent his hearing the conversation.

“I can’t open them,” a young female voice pleaded between sobs. “It takes both our key and the customers’.”

“Then you’d better find some other way of getting into them,” said the same cigarette-smoking voice Bolan had heard over Glasser’s cell phone. “Because if I have to shoot the damn things open, and any jewelry or other valuables get damaged, my next shot is going right between those pretty little tits of yours.”

The sobs increased in volume.

A moment later, a lone shot was fired, but Bolan continued to hear the young woman cry. So the round had gone into one of the boxes rather than her chest.

But it was only a matter of time before the raspy voice grew impatient, realized they were already under attack and killed her in order to concentrate his efforts on escape.

Because by now the Rough Riders could be pretty sure that neither a helicopter nor an airplane was in their immediate future.

“Find anything, Carl?” the raspy voice asked.

“Nah,” said a new voice. “Nothing we can use anyway.”

“Then shoot the next one.”

Bolan squeezed through the small opening between the barred door and the wall, trying not to move the door in case its hinges needed oiling. When he’d accomplished that feat, he stayed low, duck-walking his way past the several rows of safe-deposit boxes until he came to a stack just beyond where the two men and the woman were standing. At least he thought there were only two men—because only two men had spoken. He reminded himself that there could be more Rough Riders there, assisting in the pilfering of the boxes, who had kept quiet.

Bolan flipped the selector switch to safety and set the M-16 on the floor. Slowly and silently he drew the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R. If there were more than just the two men, he would take out as many as he could with the near silent Beretta. With any luck, he’d capture the man with the raspy voice alive. He hoped it went down that way at least. Dead men not only told no tales, but they also gave up no intelligence information.

But it was not to be.

Behind them, through the lobby and at the rear of the bank, came the roar of gunfire as Glasser’s SWAT teams entered the building and engaged the Rough Riders spread throughout the bank. The raspy voice on the other side of the stack of steel boxes said, “Okay, that’s it. We need to get out of here. Kill her, Carl, and let’s get going.”

Bolan could wait no longer.

Still squatting, the Executioner leaned around the corner and saw a short, stocky man with a three-day growth of beard lifting a Government Model 1911 .45 to the temple of the openly crying female bank employee. He had already made contact with the muzzle of the .45 by the time the Executioner lined up the Beretta’s sights on him and flipped the selector to semiauto as he’d done with the M-16. But his other suspicions had been accurate. Besides the man with the unfiltered cigarette voice, three more armed men in coveralls stool in the aisle in front of the boxes.

One 9 mm round was all it would take to save the young woman, but it would have to be precisely placed, and he could control that placement better with the Beretta in semiauto mode. The shot would have to go directly into the Rough Rider’s brain stem and shut down all motor functions, lest the man called Carl pulled the trigger of the .45 in a convulsion of death.

Taking a deep breath, the Executioner let out half of it, stopped, then gently squeezed the Beretta’s trigger. The sound suppressor coughed out the bullet. A subsonic, semijacketed hollowpoint entered the man’s brain, and he dropped the .45 as he fell to the floor.

But the shot had drawn the attention of the other men down the aisle toward Bolan, and one of the coveralled men now raised a Heckler & Koch MP-5. With no time to switch to 3-round-burst mode, the Executioner aimed carefully again, hitting the main squarely in the nose. In his peripheral vision, he saw the raspy-voiced man he assumed was the leader take off down the aisle, away from him. But he had no chance to stop him because the second of the third men was now trying to fix the sights of a Glock on the Executioner.

Bolan remembered the vest on the man with the mustache and again aimed high. The shot took the Rough Rider in the scalp. But it was not a kill shot. The man got off one wild 10 mm round from his large-framed Glock. Miraculously it missed both Bolan and the female bank employee. The Executioner fired again.

And this time, his near silent 9 mm round caught the man in the right eye.

The only man left had taken off his ski mask completely, and Bolan could see it stuffed in a side pocket of the coveralls. He fired once more, and the 9 mm slug took out the last Rough Rider’s left eye.

All of the men who had accompanied the raspy-voiced leader into the safe-deposit room were dead.

Bolan rushed up to the young woman, who was sniffling between sobs. “You all right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Thank you,” she managed through the crying.

Bolan looked past her to the end of the aisle. The leader of the Rough Riders was nowhere to be seen. The Executioner carefully searched the rest of the room, but was not surprised when the cigarette smoker didn’t turn up.

The man had used his own troops to give him time to escape.

Picking up his M-16 as he left the room, Bolan could still hear gunfire coming from the rear of the bank. One of the SWAT men was in the lobby, personally holding the front door open for the terrified hostages and telling each one to stay close—they’d need statements from them all.

“Anybody in the teller’s area?” Bolan asked the man as he passed.

The SWAT trooper shook his head. “What’s left of them is in the back. They’ve barricaded themselves in the vault.”

Bolan stopped in his tracks. “You get a look at the vault?” he asked.

The SWAT man nodded.

“Can the door be opened from the inside once it’s locked?”

The man holding the door for the hostages nodded. “I just caught a glance at it earlier when I ran by. And I’m no safe expert, but it looked like it to me.”

Bolan hurried through the swinging door, stepping over several dead bodies in coveralls as he made his way to the back of the bank. He passed several private offices as he ran down an empty hallway. Turning a corner, he passed two more SWAT team members who lowered their AR-15s as soon as they recognized him.

The two men appeared to have gotten Glasser’s orders that Bolan was in charge. They both saluted as he ran by.

At the end of the hallway, Bolan found both the closed and locked vault door, and SWAT Captain Tom Glasser along with more of his men. A half dozen more dead Rough Riders, all dressed in coveralls and blue stocking caps, had been piled unceremoniously against the wall, out of the way.

Which was fine with the Executioner. Terrorists deserved no ceremony when they were righteously killed.

“What’s going down?” the Executioner asked the recent Stony Man Farm graduate.

Glasser’s eyes reflected a deep confusion. “They’ve barricaded themselves in the vault, and they’ve got hostages,” he said. “It’s really no different than when they held the whole bank a few minutes ago. The playing field’s just become smaller.”

“How many of them left?” Bolan asked.

“The bad guys? Five, maybe six. And they’ve got three or four hostages. Can’t be certain.” He paused a second, then went on. “That raspy voice we heard on the phone?”

“Yeah?” the Executioner said.

“He’s one of them.”

Bolan nodded. “Same demands?” he asked.

Glasser nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “but at least we can probably get them to settle for a smaller helicopter this time.”

The Executioner nodded at the attempt at dark humor on Glasser’s part. It was one of the ways cops and soldiers relieved tension.

Then he turned and looked at the vault door.

There would be no skylight to bust through here.

So he would have to come up with an alternate plan, and come up with it fast.

2

“You inside the vault!” the Executioner yelled at the top of his lungs. “Can you hear me?” He got no response. But a few seconds later, the walkie-talkie on Glasser’s hip screeched. Then the voice of a female dispatcher said, “Base to SWAT 1. Come in, SWAT 1.”

Glasser leaned toward the microphone on his shoulder and said, “SWAT 1, here.”

“Ten-four, SWAT 1,” the woman on the other end said. “Be advised we just received a cell phone call from a man claiming to be inside the vault at your location. He wants your cell phone number. Should I give it to him?”

Glasser’s face turned into a mask of both outrage and astonishment. “Of course you should give it to him,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

The woman on the other end either didn’t catch the SWAT captain’s tone or didn’t care. Her voice remained colorless. “Ten-four, SWAT 1,” she said, then ended the call.

Bolan and Glasser glanced at each other as they waited for the call they suspected would be coming from inside the vault. The Executioner had not been surprised that he’d gotten no response to his yelling—the vault door was thick steel and sealed tightly around the edges. What did surprise him was that the Rough Rider’s cell phone had worked from within the vault. He’d have bet against it. But there was no rhyme or reason to cell phones, it seemed, and he was glad he’d been wrong.

Without some way to communicate with the Rough Riders still alive inside the vault they’d remain at this stalemate indefinitely.

Less than a minute after the radio transmission had taken place, Glasser’s cell phone rang. Pulling it from his belt, he glanced to the Executioner.

Bolan reached out for it, and Glasser gave him the phone. Bolan thumbed the talk button, pressed the instrument to his ear and said, “Go ahead.”

“We seem to be at a Mexican standoff,” said the same raspy voice Bolan had heard over the cell phone’s speakerphone earlier.

“I think we’ve got a slight advantage over you,” the Executioner came back. “We’ve got access to all the food and water we need out here. We can just wait you out. Of course you could try eating the money all around you in there. Try the hundreds—I hear they’re the best.”

“Nice try,” said the gravelly voice. “But you don’t have the advantage. We do. You see, any time I decide to do it, my men and I can kill the bank people in here, drop our weapons, then open the door and come out with our hands up.” He laughed in a low, guttural tone. “You’re cops. We’ll be unarmed and you’ll have to take us into custody instead of killing us.”

Bolan turned and walked away from the other men, going to the opposite end of the hallway, out of earshot. In a whisper, he said, “Everybody out here is a cop except me. And I promise you that if you kill those innocent people in there with you, I’ll gut shoot every one of you and make sure you die slow.”

“Bullshit,” rasped the voice inside the vault. “If you weren’t a cop, you wouldn’t even be in the bank right now.”

Bolan’s jaw set firmly, his teeth grinding together slightly. It was the response he’d expected, so he wasn’t surprised. Ironically, it was the truth. He would execute the remaining men if they harmed their innocent hostages. But the man with the cigarette voice would never believe it.

“Okay,” the Executioner said. “You have some plan on how we can all come out of this alive?”

“I’ve already given you the plan,” the voice said. “Five million, and a chopper to take us to the airport.” Then, ironically, he repeated what Glasser had said as a joke. “We can settle for a smaller helicopter now. But it’ll need to carry nine people.”

“How many hostages do you have?” Bolan asked.

“Four.”

“I’ll expect you to let one of them go when the helicopter arrives, you get the five million, and you’re onboard.”

“Fair enough,” the Rough Rider said. “Got a pregnant woman in here I’ll give you just to show good faith. Sort of ‘two for the price of one’ deal.” He laughed over the phone, but the laughter brought on another coughing fit.

Bolan paused. Once the pregnant woman had been freed, there would be five of the terrorists, including the man on the phone, still alive to deal with. That could be crucial information down the road. “I’ll expect you to give me the other three people at the airport,” he said.

“I’ll give you two of the three at the airport.” the Rough Rider coughed.

“What do you plan to do with the last one?” the Executioner asked.

“I’ll cut him loose him when we land.” A chuckle brought on another cough. “You’ll understand, I’m sure, if I don’t tell you exactly where that’s going to be.”

The Executioner noted that the raspy voice rose a little with the man’s final words. That was one of the indicators of a lie. Letting the final hostage go free when they landed would be too risky. What the cigarette-smoking Rough Rider really had planned was to kill the final hostage. They’d either throw him out of the plane once they were in the air or shoot him or cut his throat.

Which meant the Executioner couldn’t afford to let them reach the airplane. He had to end this game either before they got into the chopper or somewhere between the helicopter and the airplane.

“All right,” Bolan said into Glasser’s cell phone. “When do you plan to come out?” He paused a second, then said, “I’d like to get all this done before you die of emphysema.”

An eerie silence filled the wireless cell phone connection, and Bolan could tell he’d hit a sore sport with the man. The raspy-voiced Rough Rider either did have emphysema or lung cancer or some smoking-related disease that was slowly killing him.

Which, Bolan reminded himself, only made the man more dangerous and unpredictable. Men who knew they were dying anyway were often willing to take chances that other men weren’t.

“We’re coming out right now,” the grating voice finally said into his cell phone. “So you boys move down to the end of the hall unless you want some dead bank employees on your hands.”

The Executioner turned toward Glasser and the other SWAT men gathered around him. But he had no need to issue an order. All of them double-timed it down to the other end of the hall. Bolan followed them.

“Are you away from the door yet?” the gravelly voice asked.

“We are,” the Executioner said.

The vault door began to swing slowly open. Then a blue-ski-masked face peered around the heavy steel at Bolan and the rest of the SWAT warriors. Seemingly satisfied, the man wearing the mask and coveralls pushed the vault door the rest of the way open to the wall, making sure no one was hiding behind it.

Stepping brazenly out of the vault, the man who had opened the door coughed as he waved for the men still inside to come out. One by one, they did.

But it wasn’t really one by one. More like two by two. Because three of the men had duct-taped pistols to the backs of the hostages’ heads. More duct tape secured the guns to the Rough Riders’ hands, and a strip of the sticky gray tape was across the eyes of the young man and two women who were pushed out and down the hall. All of the terrorists had pulled their blue ski masks down over their faces again. Their right hands held the pistols. Two AK-47s and an M-16 similar to Bolan’s were slung over their left shoulders, with their left hands grasping the rifles and their fingers inside the trigger guard.

Only the pregnant woman was free of the tape. She was ushered out last, a ski-masked Rough Rider jamming a revolver into her cheek as he guided her down the hall with his other hand.

The gravelly voiced man brought up the rear, cutting off his cell phone and dropping it into a pocket in his coveralls.

Bolan punched the Off button and returned Glasser’s phone to the SWAT commander.

As the procession walked toward them, Bolan stepped slowly forward, reaching out for the pregnant woman.

“No!” the cigarette smoker shouted, bringing up his M-16 and aiming it at the Executioner. The rest of the Rough Riders ground to a halt.

“You get her after we get the five million, and after we’re on the helicopter.”

Bolan nodded and stepped back. At this point, there was nothing else he could do.

The Rough Riders and their prisoners turned the corner and walked down the hall that led to the cashiers’ windows, then the lobby. Bolan, Glasser and the other SWAT men who had been inside the bank with them followed. When they reached the lobby, they saw more SWAT personnel, their AR-15s aimed at the Rough Riders.

Bolan held out a hand, palm down, then lowered it.

The SWAT men let their rifles fall to the end of their slings.

Outside, the Executioner could hear the whopping sound of helicopter blades. As he followed the Rough Riders and hostages through the front door of the bank he saw not one but two small choppers. The markings on their sides announced to the world that they were Kansas City Police aircraft.

The man with the hoarse voice turned in anger. “I said one helicopter,” he practically spit. “And neither one of those is big enough for all of us.”

A sandy-haired man in his late thirties, wearing a suit more expensive than any cop could afford, stepped forward out of the crowd of uniformed and plainclothes officers. “Sir, I’m Peter Johnson, Kansas City Police media officer. I’m sorry, but this was the best we could do at such short notice. After all, you only gave us twenty minutes.” He paused, the smile on his face forced. Bolan also noticed his hands trembling slightly at his sides. “You’re welcome to use both of the helicopters, of course.”

Bolan continued to watch the media officer. Peter Johnson wasn’t used to getting this close to the fire, and the man could feel his eyebrows getting singed. He probably wasn’t even a commissioned police officer—more of a public-relations man. And he wanted his part in this little minidrama over quickly.

“You’re more than welcome to both helicopters,” Johnson said again, his voice shaking.

For a moment, the man with the raspy voice seemed frozen in place, not knowing what to do. Then he motioned for two of the men holding the pistols to the backs of the hostages’ heads toward one chopper. The man guiding the pregnant woman went with them. The rest started toward the other helicopter.

Bolan frowned. This new kink in the situation both helped and hurt. It would be good to have the armed men separated so they had less collective firepower. But separating the hostages would make them more difficult to rescue. If the men in one helicopter heard gunfire from the other, they’d immediately pull the triggers on their duct-taped pistols.

The Executioner watched as the Rough Riders pushed their hostages into the choppers and took seats. The man with the rough voice took the arm of the pregnant woman and shoved her onboard with the others. “I’ve changed my mind,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Since you welched on the single-helicopter agreement, I think we’ll just keep this lady and the little bastard in her belly a while longer.”

Bolan wasn’t surprised. But the man’s sudden refusal to keep his word settled a question that had been in the Executioner’s mind ever since the hostages had been taken. If the man would lie about one thing, he’d lie about others. For all Bolan knew, he would keep all of the hostages when they got to the airplane, then kill every last one of them once they were in the air.

The bottom line was that the Executioner couldn’t afford to even let these men get off the ground in the helicopters.

As soon as the Rough Riders and their hostages were seated, the man with the gravelly voice shouted out, “Where’s the money?”

A uniformed officer holding a briefcase started past Bolan toward the choppers, but Bolan reached for the briefcase himself.

As he so often did, the Executioner came up with his plan of attack suddenly, ironing out the weak points in a few seconds. No, he could not allow the helicopters to take to the air—there was no third chopper handy. The KC police had wisely assumed that the Rough Riders would be on the lookout for an aerial tail. Which meant the terrorists and their hostages would reach the airport and be gone long before he got there via automobile.

It was time to act. The situation was much like he’d faced in the lobby only a few minutes earlier, when the man named Carl had held the .45 to the female bank employee’s head. The difference was that instead of one life to save, this time he had four. And it would all have to be done before the men holding the pistols could react and pull the triggers of the guns taped to the hostages’ heads.

Holding the briefcase in his left hand, the Executioner strode purposefully toward the chopper where the man with the raspy voice sat next to the pilot. With a quick glance to the other chopper, he made sure he was at an angle at which his actions could not be seen. Lifting the briefcase upward, he set it in the gravelly voiced man’s lap. Then, in one smooth, lightning-fast motion, he drew the sound-suppressed Beretta from his shoulder holster.

It took a little less than a quarter of a second for Bolan to get the first shot off and into the brain stem of a Rough Rider holding a Walther PPK taped to the head of a pretty young blond-haired woman. Another quarter of a second, and the other terrorist holding a .357 Magnum pistol taped to the young male hostage’s head went brain dead, as well.

The man with the raspy voice had just had time to look up from the opened briefcase in his lap when Bolan stuck the sound suppressed Beretta into the guy’s mouth and pulled the trigger.

The Executioner had wanted this man alive so he could question him. But it hadn’t worked out that way. So be it, Bolan thought. He’d just have to find another method of learning the ins and outs of the Rough Riders.

Less than one second had elapsed when the Executioner closed the briefcase, hid the Beretta behind it and started toward the other chopper. The angle of the sun made it difficult to see details inside the chopper. But at least he saw no flurries of movement that led him to believe the Rough Riders inside knew what had just happened in the other chopper.

He hoped.

“What are you doin’ bringin’ that thing here?” said a Rough Rider in a slow Southern accent. “It ain’t me who needs to check the money.” As Bolan walked confidently on, a cloud drifted over the sun behind him as if by an act of God, and suddenly he could see clearly into the helicopter. The man who had spoken had his hand taped to the gun which was, in turn, taped to the back of the head of a short, pretty brunette.

“Don’t ask me,” the Executioner said, simply to stall for time while he walked the last several steps. “Your boss told me to come show it to you, too.”

It was enough to confuse the men in the second chopper while Bolan took the final steps to the open helicopter door. When his thighs were pressed against the deck, he dropped the briefcase and put another near silent 9 mm round into the brain stem of the man with the taped hand.

The final Rough Rider was the one who had guided the pregnant woman out of the vault. And though he had the muzzle of his .45 pressed against her head now, it wasn’t taped. And he chose to swing his weapon toward the Executioner rather than kill the woman.

It was a mistake he would not live long enough to regret.

The man had the big automatic halfway to Bolan’s chest when the Executioner fired his last round into the head. The .45 went off but blew past Bolan’s side, harmlessly entering the bank through the broken window to lodge itself somewhere inside the lobby.

Suddenly, all of the Rough Riders were dead.

Bolan looked at the trembling little brunette and said softly, “Relax. It’s all over.” He reached up and flipped the safety on the gun still taped to the back of her head, then pulled a TOPS Special Assault Weapon knife—more usually referred to simply as a SAW—from the sheath on his belt. Carefully, he began cutting the tape away from the young woman’s head. Both she and the pregnant woman were crying, and Bolan had to stop the mother-to-be from hugging him. “Careful,” he smiled as her arms reached out. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your hairdo.”

The woman giggled nervously. “My hair doesn’t seem very important right now,” she said, and circled her arms around the Executioner’s chest, pressing her tear-stained cheek against his as well.

Bolan felt her extended abdomen against his belly. Inside was a totally innocent little boy or girl—a totally innocent baby who had come within a hair of dying by the hand of a group of whacked out, home-grown American terrorists. If not for him, both mother and child would more than likely be dead, and in a sudden epiphany the Executioner was reminded why he’d been put on this planet called Earth and given the special abilities that he had.

To save the weak and innocent from the strong and evil.

Bolan looked back toward the other chopper.

Glasser and one of his SWAT team men were cutting the pistols away from the hostages heads as Bolan had done. The rest of the men stood back, waiting.

As he started toward Tom Glasser, the cell phone in one of the pockets of his blacksuit suddenly rang.

The Executioner walked back into the bank lobby and thumbed the Talk button. “Striker,” he said.

“Hello, big guy,” came the voice of Hal Brognola from the other end of the line. “Anything happening on your end?”

Bolan suppressed a chuckle. “No, Hal,” he said. “Things are actually pretty quiet where I am now.”

“Yeah, now it is,” Brognola said. “But ten minutes ago we were watching the whole bank thing go down on FOX news.”

Bolan stiffened slightly. “Was I on it?” he asked. The last thing he needed was his face splattered all over the newspapers.

“I saw you,” Brognola said. “But there was never a clear shot of your face. The newshounds and ambulance chasers must have been using long-range equipment because the Kansas City PD wouldn’t let them within a country mile of the action. I don’t think you have anything to worry about in regard to being IDed.” The high-ranking Justice official and director of Stony Man Farm’s Sensitive Operations Group paused long enough to take a breath, and Bolan could almost see the unlit cigar sticking out between his teeth.

“Hold on,” Brognola said. “Because we’re about to get hooked into a three-way conference call to the White House.”

Bolan frowned but didn’t speak. While he often took advantage of the equipment, computers, communication networking and other benefits of Stony Man Farm, in truth he answered to no one, though he did operate with the sanction of the President of the United States. He rarely talked to the Man. The fact was, when he and the President actually did speak, it was always something big. Very big. Usually of global importance.

“Hang on a few seconds,” Brognola said. “Aaron’s connecting the three-way call right now.” Aaron was Aaron Kurtzman, Stony Man Farm’s computer wizard.

Outside, sirens sounded in the distance. Bolan waited silently as they grew louder, and then watched as ambulances and hearses arrived to cart off the bodies of the Rough Riders. He wondered exactly what was going on in Washington. The big story currently was that Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah—based in Lebanon—was firing short-range missiles and rockets at each other with far more innocent civilians being killed than soldiers or militia. It had all started over the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, and quickly escalated into a full-scale war.

Phoenix Force—one of the counterterrorist groups that worked out of Stony Man Farm—was in Beirut right now, trying to cull the terrorists from the innocent Lebanese among whom Hezbollah hid. So the Executioner suspected this call from the President meant he was about to join the other Stony Man Farm crew in the Middle East.

Bolan was rarely wrong. But this was one of those rare times.

“Hello, Hal?” the President’s voice finally said over the line.

“Hello, Mr. President,” Brognola replied. “I’m here. And Striker’s tapped in with us, as well.”

“Hello, Striker,” the Man said.

“Mr. President,” Bolan said. The noise level outside had risen again to the point where it was hard to hear the voices over the cell phone, so he moved into the private office just off the lobby and closed the door behind him. Through the glass wall he could see white-clad EMTs entering the bank to begin removing the dead men up and down the halls. And through the window to the street, he watched the Kansas City SWAT teams and other cops break into small groups to discuss what had just happened.

“We’ve got a problem,” the President declared. “Actually, we’ve got a lot of them.” He paused to draw in a breath. “But we’ve got one big problem, and you’re the only man I trust to handle it. What’s probably the worst, most organized threat to this country that’s ever come across the board is sneaking in under the radar.” He paused again. “If it’s successful, it’ll make 9/11 look like a Sunday School weenie roast.”

Bolan waited silently. He knew the Man would go on as soon as he’d picked the right words.

“You’ll probably find this as hard to believe as I did at first,” the Man finally said, “but an alliance has been struck between the Rough Riders and Hamas.”

Bolan thought about the two groups for a moment. The Rough Riders were fascists who believed in an America that was only for short-haired, white-skinned men and women—preferably of Aryan or Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Hamas, on the other hand, operated throughout the Middle East, with clandestine cells spread all over the world, just waiting to be called upon to create their own versions of September 11, 2001.

Two more disparate terrorist groups could not be found on the face of the Earth.

“You’ll excuse me, sir,” Bolan said, “if it takes me a few seconds to digest that thought.”

“I thought you’d find it as hard to believe as I did,” the President said. “But I’m afraid it’s true.”

“May I ask how you came upon this information?” the Executioner said.

The President sighed. “The CIA got it first. They’ve had a mole inside Hamas for some time now.”

“Can this intel be confirmed?” Bolan asked.

“It’s confirmed,” the President said. “The FBI has a plant inside the Rough Riders. I just got off the phone with their director. The same story came from their informant.”

Bolan felt his forehead furrowing. “These two groups have nothing in common upon which to base an alliance,” he said. “Except the downfall of freedom, democracy and the United States. Their ideologies couldn’t be more different.”

“That seems to be enough for them,” the Man said. “At least for now.”

“Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment if I might, sir,” Bolan said, still frowning. “Assuming they were successful in overthrowing the U.S. government. What do they plan to do then?”

“I don’t know,” the President answered. “And according to the two snitches, neither do the Rough Riders or Hamas. But that doesn’t seem to bother them at this juncture. It appears that they’re willing to put their differences aside for the time being.”

“They’d have to go to war with each other eventually,” the Executioner said.

“Yes,” the Man said. “But like I said, they appear to have agreed to put that on the back burner in order to achieve their initial, common goal.”

“Destroying us,” Bolan said.

“Exactly,” the President affirmed.

“What else do we know?” Bolan asked.

“Not a lot,” the President said. “But both sources report that there’s a list of planned terrorist strikes.”

Bolan stopped speaking as a white-clad man opened the door to the office and looked inside. Seeing no bodies on the floor, and the Executioner’s head shake, he closed the door again and disappeared. “How do we get hold of this list?”

“That’s one of the things I’m hoping you can find out,” the Man said. “Neither the Hamas or Rough Rider informant is high enough up the food chain to have access to it, or know how to get to it. The Rough Rider infiltrator seems to know a little more. According to him, some of the strikes are to be carried out by Hamas, and others by the Rough Riders. But they also have some joint operations planned just to confuse police, militaries and governments around the world.”

“Have you got a place for me to start?” Bolan asked the President.

“The CIA’s informant heard that something’s about to go down at the American Embassy in Paris,” the President said. “But that’s all he knows. He’s got the where and who—Haas—but not the when or how.”

“Tell me,” the Executioner said. “Am I going to have access to either or both informants?”

“You’ll have access to both,” the Man said.

“And what kind of turf-jealousy problems am I going to have to deal with out of the CIA and FBI?”

“No more than the usual.” The President laughed softly. “I’ve ordered both directors to inform their men that you’ve got free rein. I took the liberty of giving them your Matt Cooper name. I hope that’s all right.’

“That’s fine.”

“Anyway,” the Man said. “If you need any help from the FBI or CIA, they’ve been ordered to give it to you. On the other hand, if you want them out of your way, they’re to make themselves scarce.”

“With all due respect to both agencies,” the Executioner said, “I’d prefer the latter. At least for now.”

“Then I’ll make two more phone calls as soon as we hang up,” the Man said. “One man from each agency can hook you up with the informants. Then they’ll disappear.” The President paused for a moment, then added, “But are you sure you don’t at least want one or two men to watch your back?”

The bodies had been cleared out of the building by now, and the Executioner walked back out of the office into the lobby again. With the phone still pressed to his ear, he looked through the broken window once more.

Tom Glasser was still in the parking lot, still glancing occasionally into the bank. The men around him appeared curious about his blacksuit. The stretchy, skintight material was nothing like the navy blue Battle Dress Uniforms they wore, and they were asking questions that Glasser looked like he was ignoring.

“I’ve already got my back covered, Mr. President,” he said.

Brognola had remained silent during the conversation because he’d had nothing to add to it. Now, he did. “You’re talking about the recent blacksuit graduate you’re with at the moment, Striker?” he asked Bolan.

“I am,” the Executioner said. “He’s a good man, the training is still fresh in his mind and he’s just proved to me that he can cross that bridge from classroom to practical application.”

“He’s covered, then, Mr. President,” Brognola said. “The blacksuit he’s talking about is with the Kansas City PD, and he graduated with honors at the top of his class. I can step back into my Justice Department role, make a call to Kansas City, get the man released for special assignment with us and then line him up with phony Department of Justice identification just in case it’s helpful.”

“You do that, Hal,” the Man said. “And, Striker, you’ve got the direct number into the Oval Office, as well as the one in my living area. If you need anything else—day or night—give me a call.”

“Will do, sir,” Bolan replied.

“Then I guess that’s it,” the President said. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a few other matters to attend to.” Without another word, he hung up.

“You still there, Hal?” Bolan asked.

“Still here, big guy.”

“This really is one of the oddest arrangements I’ve ever been around,” the Executioner said. He felt himself shaking his head in awe. “Hamas and the Rough Riders. Who’d have figured on that one?”

“It is odd,” Brognola said. “But it may turn out to be one of the deadliest combinations we’ve ever faced, too.” The Stony Man director paused for a moment, then said, “You want to know what pisses me off almost as much as the terror these groups inflict, Striker?”

“Sure.”

“The name these Nazi militants have taken,” Brognola said. “The Rough Riders.” He paused yet again to clear his throat. “Teddy Roosevelt was one of my favorite presidents.”

“I suspect he’s rolling over in his grave right now, Hal. He’d be the first to shoot every Nazi or Hamas terrorist he saw.”

“Bully,” Brognola said, using one of Roosevelt’s favorite expressions. Then he went almost straight into another. “Want some advice from old Teddy on this mission, Striker?”

“Sure, Hal. Hit me with it.”

“Walk softly,” Brognola quoted, then slightly altered the rest of Roosevelt’s other famous saying. “And carry your big gun.”

The director of Stony Man Farm’s Sensitive Operations Group clicked off as Bolan felt his hand slide down his ribs to the grips of the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle.

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