HOMEGROWN TERROR

Six US Army Rangers pledge allegiance to an Islamic terror group and send their manifesto straight to Washington. Their deadly demand: broadcast the declaration on all official channels, or they’ll unleash a devastating attack. Caving to the traitors is not an option. With thousands of lives at risk, the White House enlists their best hope of neutralizing this threat:

The Executioner. Mack Bolan wastes no time in tracking down the deserters. But something seems off about this case. It’s not uncommon for the occasional soldier to defect, but six? Before he can unravel the conspiracy, a string of deadly strikes on civilians has him racing along the Eastern seaboard, trying to head off the worst of the carnage. The Executioner will stop at nothing to blaze a fiery path to the truth...and retribution.

Also By Don Pendleton

#375 Salvador Strike

#376 Frontier Fury

#377 Desperate Cargo

#378 Death Run

#379 Deep Recon

#380 Silent Threat

#381 Killing Ground

#382 Threat Factor

#383 Raw Fury

#384 Cartel Clash

#385 Recovery Force

#386 Crucial Intercept

#387 Powder Burn

#388 Final Coup

#389 Deadly Command

#390 Toxic Terrain

#391 Enemy Agents

#392 Shadow Hunt

#393 Stand Down

#394 Trial by Fire

#395 Hazard Zone

#396 Fatal Combat

#397 Damage Radius

#398 Battle Cry

#399 Nuclear Storm

#400 Blind Justice

#401 Jungle Hunt

#402 Rebel Trade

#403 Line of Honor

#404 Final Judgment

#405 Lethal Diversion

#406 Survival Mission

#407 Throw Down

#408 Border Offensive

#409 Blood Vendetta

#410 Hostile Force

#411 Cold Fusion

#412 Night’s Reckoning

#413 Double Cross

#414 Prison Code

#415 Ivory Wave

#416 Extraction

#417 Rogue Assault

#418 Viral Siege

#419 Sleeping Dragons

#420 Rebel Blast

#421 Hard Targets

#422 Nigeria Meltdown

#423 Breakout

#424 Amazon Impunity

#425 Patriot Strike

#426 Pirate Offensive

#427 Pacific Creed

#428 Desert Impact

#429 Arctic Kill

#430 Deadly Salvage

#431 Maximum Chaos

#432 Slayground

#433 Point Blank

#434 Savage Deadlock

#435 Dragon Key

#436 Perilous Cargo

#437 Assassin’s Tripwire

#438 The Cartel Hit

#439 Blood Rites

#440 Killpath

#441 Murder Island

#442 Syrian Rescue

#443 Uncut Terror

#444 Dark Savior

#445 Final Assault

#446 Kill Squad

#447 Missile Intercept

#448 Terrorist Dispatch

#449 Combat Machines

#450 Omega Cult

#451 Fatal Prescription

#452 Death List

#453 Rogue Elements

#454 Enemies Within

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

Enemies Within

Don Pendleton

For Sergeant First Class Leroy Petry, US Army Rangers. Congressional Medal of Honor winner, July 12, 2011.

ISBN: 978-1-474-08238-9

Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

ENEMIES WITHIN

© 2018 Harlequin Enterprises Limited

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Worldwide Gold Eagle, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

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“Grenade!” Grimaldi snapped, already easing off the gas.

“Saw it.” Bolan braced himself for the explosion that was sure to come in four...three...two...

The blast from the bed of the pickup in front of them rocked their car. It must have scared a good year off the driver’s life, then he was back to business, swerving left, then right, trying to get his ride under control while smoke poured from the back. Something had happened to the rear axle as well, but the real danger now was fire.

Finally, the driver gave it up, veered toward the highway’s grassy shoulder and bailed as soon as he’d slowed down enough to make it practical.

“Bikers. Ten-four,” Grimaldi barked.

The pickup detonated when they were a half block past it, already following the Harleys toward Centreville. Bolan reached under his jacket, drew the black Beretta M9 from its shoulder rig and thumbed off the safety.

“You want to take them off the road?” Grimaldi asked.

“Find out if we can catch them first.”

Grimaldi nodded and pressed the accelerator to the floor.

Betray a friend, and you’ll often find you have ruined yourself.

—Aesop

There are many kinds of betrayal that can rot a man from the inside out. It’s my job to keep the collateral damage in check and seek justice for the victims of treachery.

—Mack Bolan

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 com¬mand 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

Cover

Back Cover Text

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Quotes

The Mack Bolan Legend

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

Prologue

Topsail Beach, North Carolina

Within the United States Army, there is a separate and autonomous military force that investigates serious crimes committed by active-duty service members. The special agents of the Criminal Investigation Command, or CID, are led by the Commanding General, who reports to the Chief of Staff of the Army and to the Secretary of the Army.

At 0315 on an early summer morning, with the crack of dawn still hours distant, CID Task Force Benedict Bravo was embarked on a top-secret mission code-named Quisling. The six special agents in attendance were prepared to drop the net.

The trail had led them, after fits and starts, to Topsail Beach, the southernmost town on Topsail Island, with a year-round population of 383. The team was focused on a summer rental home, a split-level with four bedrooms and a finished basement prone to flooding during hurricanes. The special agents watched the second hands on their jet-black Smith & Wesson military watches, synchronized before assembly at the strike point where, they hoped, the mission would be finished with no one outside the CID any the wiser.

The mission agents were dressed identically in midnight black: knit watch caps, balaclavas covering their faces, modular tactical vests, and rip-stop trousers bloused into their combat boots. Each member of the team wore a Beretta M-9 pistol chambered in 9 mm Parabellum rounds, with fifteen rounds in a detachable box magazine and one live in the chamber, with the pistol’s safety off. Besides sidearms, each carried sundry pyrotechnics, mostly M-84 flash-bang stun grenades, and various long guns approved for service with the CID: selective-fire M-4 carbines chambered for 5.56 mm NATO rounds—one with an M-203 under-barrel grenade launcher—and Mossberg 590 12-gauge pump shotguns with a 20-inch barrel and extended combat magazines, loading double 0 buck and 1-ounce rifled slugs.

Any heavier munitions would be locked inside the team’s civilian-style Humvee, painted matte-black and parked a block downrange from their intended target on this early morning without moon or stars.

Benedict Bravo’s commanding officer was Captain Sedgewick Larkin, a sixteen-year veteran, fitted like his other special agents with a set of ATN PVS-7 standard military-issue night-vision goggles and a Bluetooth communication device that permitted conversation at whisper level with the other members of his team. He understood what was at stake and had impressed it on his men: Lieutenant Gregory DuBois, Staff Sergeant Richard Malvern, Staff Sergeant Leo Edwards, Sergeant Edgar Rankin, and Corporal Payton Luce.

They were the best he had available.

Larkin could only hope they were good enough.

Another quick glance at his watch showed the time as 0329. “Sound off,” he ordered, and stood waiting while five voices in descending order of rank confirmed that each was standing by, ready to move.

That used the better part of half a minute, whereupon Larkin told his strike team, “Do it now!”

* * *

Staff Sergeant Edwards had the long split-level’s back door covered, facing South Shore Drive and the Atlantic Ocean, surging dark and vast beyond. His Mossberg 590 weighed close to ten pounds, fully loaded, fitted with ghost ring sights and a bayonet lug for close-quarters combat, though Edwards had passed on mounting the steel, opting instead for Shock Lock breaching rounds to take the door down.

After the order to advance, he crossed the fifteen yards of grass and pavement in a rush. Angling his Mossberg’s muzzle toward the door lock, a round already chambered and the safety disengaged, Edwards triggered the first shot, then was blinded as the green field of his NVGs suddenly flushed brilliant white.

The door exploded, some kind of propellant charge behind it, striking Edwards with sufficient force to rip the shotgun from his grasp, slamming him over backward in a daze, blood gushing from his broken nose to soak the woolen balaclava. Groping for his M-9, he had nearly reached it when the hazy figure of a man approached, stood over him and aimed a sound-suppressed assault rifle at the staff sergeant’s face.

“Night, night,” the stranger said. “You lose.”

* * *

Lieutenant Gregory DuBois heard the explosion, knew their setup on the split-level had gone to shit, and went ahead regardless. He still had work to do—they all did—and until the captain called them off, he would proceed as planned.

His target was a set of sliding-glass doors that granted access to the layout’s finished basement on the north end of the house. The lieutenant rushed it, triggering a 3-round out of his M-4 carbine, braced for anything he could think of since the first explosive detonation on the premises. So far, he didn’t know if it had been a booby trap of some kind, planted when their targets flew the coop, or if the men they’d come to take down still remained inside.

In either case, until he had eyes on the enemy or empty rooms, he had to play his hand the same. Assume there was trouble of the life-or-death variety lying in store for him and the other members of his team, fight through it and, for God’s sake, come out on the other end alive.

His tumbling rounds opened the broad glass doors, their tinted panes shattering and cascading like broken sheets of ice. DuBois was ten feet out and closing when he spotted muzzle-flashes well back in the basement recreation room and felt the high-velocity projectiles rip into him below his Mod Tac vest, snapping his femurs, shattering his pelvis. Stunning pain engulfed his legs as he toppled forward, sprawling facedown on the manicured grass.

Somehow he kept his grip on the M-4 and tried to spot the opposition with his carbine’s Burris Optics 5×36 mm AR-536 Red Dot Sight, but they had him zeroed first. A final muzzle-flash flared in front of him, driving a bullet into the lieutenant’s forehead, and his world went blank.

* * *

Staff Sergeant Malvern and Sergeant Rankin rushed the southeast corner of the split-level rental together, targeting a door that should grant access to the kitchen if the floor plans they’d obtained from Pender County’s clerk in Burgaw were entirely up to date and accurate.

Rankin had loaded deer slugs in his Mossberg, never mind nonlethal breaching rounds, and Malvern had an M-651 grenade in the M-203 launcher slung beneath his carbine’s barrel. The gren contained fifty-three grams of CS gas mixture with a burn time of twenty-five seconds. To defeat the gas, both sergeants wore half-mask respirators covering their balaclavas, adding to the alien appearance of their black night-vision goggles.

All they had to do was crash the door, then let it fly and make their way inside.

No sweat.

That was, until it all went straight to hell.

Rankin was set to blow the kitchen door when someone on the inside tripped a charge and blew it outward. The sergeant was quick enough to duck and dodge the flying door, but Malvern wasn’t, grunting as a corner struck his shooting arm and shoulder, spinning him, disarming him and sprawling him supine across the sloping lawn. Rankin triggered a deer slug and pumped the Mossberg’s slide-action to put another in the shotgun’s chamber when the gaping kitchen doorway came alive with muzzle-flashes. Automatic weapons spit full-metal-jacket rounds at the two would-be intruders.

Rankin guessed the shooters had M-249 Squad Automatic Weapons or some other light machine guns on the same pattern. He couldn’t match their cyclic rate of fire with his shotgun. It hardly mattered since the next two slugs doubled him over, nearly disemboweling him.

The sergeant collapsed onto the grass, saw Malvern struggling to rise before another burst sheared off his face and finished him.

Before he died, Rankin rasped into his Bluetooth, “Two down, southeast. Abort if possible.”

* * *

“Abort, my ass!” Captain Larkin broadcast to four dead men, catching a gloomy nod from Corporal Luce, stationed at his side. “We finish it or go down trying.”

“Yes, sir!” Luce answered without hesitation.

“Load an HE round in your launcher,” Larkin ordered, watching as Luce obeyed him with an easy, practiced motion. “No more talk of bringing any subjects in alive.”

“No, sir!” The young man sounded braver than he most likely felt.

“On my mark. Three...two...one...”

They sent both HE rounds hurtling toward the structure’s front windows, aiming for a space the floor plans labeled as its living room. The rounds shattered glass within a split second of each other, vanished into darkness, then exploded with a double flash and clap of man-made thunder that cleared out the window frames and left the front door sagging on its hinges.

“Forward!” Larkin snapped, trusting the corporal to keep pace on his left as he advanced. They only had each other now, and while he couldn’t picture any happy ending to the raid, Larkin was bound to see it through.

It was the only way he knew to soldier, after all.

The light machine guns caught them in converging streams of fire when they were still a dozen yards or so from the house, hot streams of bullets wobbling and crisscrossing in the night.

Larkin heard Luce cry out in pain but didn’t see him fall. By then he was too busy stumbling, going down himself, two shattered legs unable to support his weight for another shambling step. He hit the grass chin-first, surprised it wasn’t softer on impact. Before he had a chance to raise his M-4 and return fire, bullets rippled past and through him, putting out his lights with only time enough to hope that Luce’s end would be as relatively merciful.

* * *

As dogs began to bay and yammer through the neighborhood, two figures left the smoky split-level house and stood over the bodies of their last two kills.

“MPs?” one asked the other.

“Have to be. You see the weapons.”

“Want to search for ID?”

“Screw it. We need to get the hell away from here, right now. Tomorrow is a busy day.”

Chapter One

The Tomb of the Unknowns

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, stood some fifty yards south of the marble monument and waited for the changing of the guard.

The flat-faced monument, begun in 1921, had changed somewhat in shape and style over the years, reaching its present height of ten feet six inches, twelve feet long, and mounted on a base of two hundred cubic feet. In front of it, a US Army soldier, clad in full dress uniform but lacking any rank insignia—to keep him from outranking the “unknowns”—went through his measured paces: twenty-one paces due west along a black mat laid before the tomb, a sharp turn with a pause of twenty-one seconds, then back eastward with another twenty-one paces. At each turn, he switched shoulders with the obsolete but fully functional M-14 he carried, keeping his rifle between the tomb and any visitors, thus demonstrating his ability to deal with any threat against the sleeping dead.

Bolan had lost count of his visits to the monument, and to Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres of rolling, carefully tended greenery established in 1864, presently housing more than four hundred thousand graves of persons from America and eleven other nations. That total did not count the lost “unknowns,” believed to number nearly five thousand.

Bolan had friends buried at Arlington. Some he had served with during active duty as a Green Beret. Others he’d known in passing had gone to their rewards after he’d left the service to begin his one-man war against the Mafia. From there, his War Everlasting had rapidly expanded to consume his life.

He visited the sites to commune, reflect, and speak with the dead. And sometimes, like today, to take a meeting with one of his oldest living friends.

Hal Brognola, a high-ranking official of the Department of Justice, chose meeting places where they could blend in, could avoid public scrutiny and be certain that their words would not be overheard, short of a drone soaring on high.

Bolan could not surmise what the big Fed might have in mind this time. Upon receiving the terse text, with nothing listed but coordinates and time of day, he’d gone online to scan the breaking news in search of incidents that might require his special skills to set things more or less back on an even keel.

He’d found the usual drug busts in Florida and Arizona, cartels fighting for their lives in Mexico, feuding between the Mafia and rival ’Ndràngheta over turf in southern Italy and Western Europe, plus a bevy of always plentiful corruption scandals.

Elsewhere, in the outcast state of North Korea, Kim Jong-un was rattling his long-range missiles, threatening destruction to a world of enemies from his Pyongyang palace. French voters had stopped short of choosing a neo-Nazi as their next prime minister; no problem there. The European Union might or might not be disintegrating, but there was nothing he could do or wanted to do about it either way.

Afghanistan, still occupied by US troops after a grueling eighteen years, continued producing some 93 percent of the world’s non-pharmaceutical-grade opium and heroin, uninterrupted since it was the livelihood of Afghan farmers—and the nation’s avaricious leaders. Next door, Pakistan and India still fought a version of the same old border war they’d waged since 1947 when their British overlords had drawn lines on maps to separate the two and hoped for peace. The Middle East, of course, would always be the Middle East, divided on religious lines, with Arabs raging at the occupation of ancestral lands condemned by the United Nations—not that Israel gave a damn.

A world of woes, but nothing had jumped out to demand Bolan’s attention here and now. He knew Brognola would explain the problem. A glance at his watch told him that explanation should begin in five, six minutes, tops.

Reluctantly he turned his back on the unknowns and scanned the acreage of green with its tidy rows of bright-white marble headstones. Each was inscribed in black with more than sixty approved religious emblems for soldiers of faith, an atomic whirl circling an “A” for atheists, and others bearing military emblems, infinity symbols, landing eagles, sandhill cranes, even pomegranates.

Far off, drawing gradually closer, was a husky figure Bolan recognized instinctively, bringing a twitch to lips that rarely smiled these days.

They’d met the first time during his campaign against Miami mafiosi, then again in Vegas, when they’d nearly joined forces. But Bolan had resisted government entanglement until the wrap-up of his “final mile” against the Mob, ending with his faked death in New York City’s Central Park, the alteration of his game face—not the first—and purging of all his records, just in case his fingerprints surfaced somewhere down the road.

Since then, he’d risked his life for Hal Brognola and the team at Stony Man Farm—a covert antiterrorist organization based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—a thousand times, eliminated countless threats to the United States and civilized society around the world, but it would never be enough. No victory was ever claimed for good; no enemies were buried or incinerated who could not be easily replaced by other villains, equally as bad or worse.

In short, a warrior’s work was never done.

He started walking toward Brognola’s distant figure, planning on a meet halfway between their present places in the cemetery. At this hour, there were no tourists around, though that was bound to change since Arlington hosted some three million souls per year, or eighty-two hundred per day. It wouldn’t matter, even if they started clocking in by now, since visitors to Arlington were generally on their best behavior, leaving others to themselves, speaking in muted tones, seeking specific markers of the honored dead.

If worse came to worst, a silent glare from the big Fed or Bolan should ensure they were not disturbed. There would be no need to produce the weapons both men carried concealed beneath their jackets.

When they were close enough to speak without shouting, the two old friends greeted each other, closed the final gap and shook hands as they always did, like soldiers in a common cause, too long apart. Each knew the other’s story intimately, understood what set them on converging paths of no return.

Both men knew how their journey would end, beyond doubt, but had not reached that point, although they would be ready for it when it came.

As they released each other’s hands, Bolan asked, “What’s up? Your short text sounded serious.”

“It’s always serious,” Brognola replied. “But this time...hell. I’m not sure what to make of it myself.”

* * *

“I guess you’re current on the US Army Rangers,” Brognola remarked as they made their way through the ranks of polished headstones, weathering to various degrees, one dating back to May of 1864 but lovingly maintained.

“I’ve trained with Rangers on more than one occasion, and fought with them in the field, before Pittsfield. They’re based at Fort Benning. That’s about the size of it.”

Brognola didn’t have to ask what Bolan meant by “Pittsfield.” It was the Executioner’s hometown in Massachusetts where a Mafia loan shark had hooked Sam, his father, and drawn Bolan’s sister, Cindy, into bondage with an escort service after Sam had been beaten, nearly crippled, for defaulting on his debt. Something inside Sam Bolan had snapped and he’d tried to spare his loved ones further shame by wiping out the family. The sole survivor had been Bolan’s younger brother, Johnny, who had shared the tragic story with his older brother, thus launching the Executioner upon his one-man hellfire trail against the Mob.

“Then would it surprise you,” Brognola said, “if I said six Rangers have gone off the grid after declaring their loyalty to ISIS?”

Bolan responded with a frown and said, “Surprise would be the least of it.”

He’d followed ISIS in the media and classified reports from Stony Man. Officially it was a virulent al Qaeda splinter group whose terse initials stood for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Sometimes the leaders called it ISIL—the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—or simply IS, the Islamic State. Their stated goal was to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate, to which end, strangely, they waged war primarily against their fellow Muslims, razing villages and cities, scourging libraries, museums and random monuments of great historical significance to the Islamic culture. All of which, to Bolan, indicated raving psychopaths in charge.

“Six Army Rangers going over?” he echoed, watching Brognola nod.

“And not just any Rangers,” said the man from Justice. “There’s a major, a lieutenant colonel, with a captain, first lieutenant, plus a staff sergeant and sergeant.”

“And we know this how?” Bolan inquired.

“Their so-called manifesto,” Brognola replied, “which they are demanding we publish through official channels, send-ups on the Pentagon and White House websites, plus all major TV networks and the top ten US newspapers, with a combined readership exceeding 8.3 million.”

“But you’ve held it back,” Bolan observed.

“So far. We’re on a ticking clock.”

“What happens when the clock strikes twelve?” Bolan inquired.

“A ‘major terrorist event,’ whatever that means. Mega casualties, no hope of disguising it.”

“You think they can deliver?”

“There’s a chance they already have,” Brognola said. “A teaser, anyway. We’ve kept a lid on it so far.”

“Particulars?”

“Some kind of noxious gas attack in Baltimore, a shopping mall. Two dead, a couple dozen treated at the hospital for symptoms that resembled sarin poisoning. We’re calling it a leak, natural gas from one of the mall’s restaurants, and squaring it with their insurance carriers. The Rangers gave thumbs-up to burying the news for now, as long as we get cracking on the broadcast of their manifesto by high noon, the day after tomorrow.”

“So much time?”

“It seemed a little leisurely to me, as well,” the big Fed said.

“I’m guessing that this outfit has a name?”

“Funny about that,” Brognola replied. “They haven’t floated one, so far. That strikes me as a clumsy oversight.”

“Unless it’s all a scam.”

“Or that.”

“I can’t help noting that this sounds like something for the MPs at Fort Benning. It’s their home turf, their people going rogue.”

“They tried already. Kicked it upstairs to the CID, a task force supervised directly by the Provost Marshal General.”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Bolan observed.

“You do. They traced their runners to North Carolina, to rented tourist quarters in a tiny town on Topsail Island. Ever heard of it?”

“Can’t say I have,” Bolan replied.

“I hadn’t, either. Anyway, they went in hard last night, a six-man strike team with a captain, a lieutenant and four noncoms. Sent up the balloon at 0330 hours, but they walked into a shit storm. All CID agents were listed KIA on-site, another story that we’ll have to fabricate before we contact next of kin. Call it a training exercise gone wrong, I guess.”

“No casualties on the other side?” Bolan queried.

“Nary a one. They walked out clean, left nothing but the rental property all shot to hell—and one more copy of their manifesto, mounted on a bathroom wall in case we missed the point.”

“Which brings us here.”

“In a nutshell,” Brognola stated. He fished one hand underneath his jacket and produced a DVD, passed it to Bolan, and the warrior tucked it neatly out of sight.

“You’ll find full dossiers and service records on the six alleged defectors,” Brognola went on. “They haven’t got much in the way of family. One has a brother in New Jersey and one guy’s father is a retired Marine. That’s about the size of it. Another one was talking marriage to his girl when he went AWOL, but she swears she hasn’t heard from him since then. We’ve got her covered—taps and bugs, the works—but no contact so far.”

“You’re calling them ‘alleged defectors,’” Bolan noted. “Should I ask if any of them have converted recently and started singing Allah’s praises?”

“Just one Muslim in the bunch, as far as we can tell, and nothing recent. His grandparents were Iraqi refugees, granted asylum by the State Department under Reagan. He was born into the faith and joined the Army out of high school, pulled a tour in Afghanistan without a hiccup and came back wearing a Silver Star, together with a Purple Heart.”

“So, honorable service, then.”

“Nothing says otherwise, until this shit show he’s involved in with the rest of them.”

“You’re doubting the religious motive?” Bolan asked.

“Can’t disregard it, but it doesn’t sit well with me,” the big Fed replied. “You know these types are big on names, if they’re legit. First thing they do is sit around a table and decide what to call themselves.”

“Right.”

“Step two, they normally adopt Arabic names, but none of them has done that, either. Just the one, still going with his birth name.”

“Right.”

“On top of which, we have eyes inside ISIS, overseas and in the States, a couple sleeper cells that think they’re still secure. So far, nobody claims to know these guys, and they’d be trumpeting the news if half a dozen Army Rangers joined their cause en masse.”

“You’d think so, anyway. But if they’re faking the ISIS connection, what’s their end game?”

Brognola gave him a wry smile. “We won’t know that until you run them down.”

“Speaking of which, mobility should be our top priority on this.”

“Agreed.”

“What’s Jack up to, these days?”

“I’ve got him on standby.”

Jack Grimaldi was an ex-Mafia flyboy who could handle anything with wings or rotors. He had first crossed Bolan’s path while working for the Mafia, then converted to the big guy’s cause when he’d decided that his Mob-related life was going nowhere fast. Since then, he had delivered Bolan to hot spots around the world, providing air support as needed on the firing line. And, when necessary, he heard the call to arms and fought beside the Executioner on the line.

“Okay,” Bolan said. “Then I should be good, at least for now.”

“It would be nice if we could talk to someone from the team,” Brognola said, “but I don’t know how practical that is.”

“Rangers are trained the same as Green Berets and Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance—presumably the Company, as well—when it comes to resisting an interrogation. They all undergo hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, plus deprivation of warmth, water and food.”

“Of course,” the big Fed said, “that’s all illegal under various conventions, as we know.”

“And when has that stopped anyone on either side from using them?”

“I see your point. Some say we haven’t been the ‘good guys’ for a long time now, at least since 9/11.”

Bolan didn’t bother telling him to take it farther back, to Vietnam or even to the Philippines during the four-year Tagalog Insurgency kicked off in 1899. There was no point in hashing over ancient history, particularly when the here and now might bite them on the ass within hours or days.

“But if they can’t be caught alive...”

“Where are you parked?” Bolan asked his old friend, cutting their conversation short.

“In the metered garage on Memorial Avenue. You?”

“I found curb space outside, on Schuyler Avenue. I like the walk.”

“And you’ve got local digs?”

“The River Inn on Twenty-fifth Street Northwest, in DC.”

Brognola nodded. “Don’t get too comfortable.”

“When do I ever?”

They shook hands again and went their separate ways, each man freighted with secrets, craving answers he knew would be hard-won, if they could be unearthed at all.

Who was it that had once described the Russian mindset as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”? Bolan had the answer to that up front—it had been Winston Churchill, decades before anyone conceived the thought of ISIS or its killer spawn. This time, however, Bolan didn’t have a span of four decades to end a new Cold War.

He had to crack this riddle soon, before the whole thing went to hell.

Chapter Two

Bolan didn’t drive back to the River Inn at once. Instead he sat inside his rented Audi Compact Executive sedan, opened his laptop and popped in Brognola’s DVD.

The normal warnings stamped on every disk from Stony Man displayed themselves upon launch, as usual. Pointless, he thought, since anyone who’d stolen it would go ahead and watch it anyway, regardless of the threat of three years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

There was no introduction. Just a half dozen icons labeled with the rank and surname of the subjects, waiting to reveal themselves upon command.

He started at the top, with Major Randall Darby, thirty-nine years old, a Ranger for the past fifteen. After fulfilling the Army’s requirements, he’d gone to Ranger school, beginning with the basic “crawl phase,” moving on to “mountain phase” at the remote Camp Merrill near Dahlonega, Georgia, passing on with honors to the “Florida phase” at Eglin Air Force Base, then on again to “desert phase” at Fort Bliss, Texas. Along the way, a journey of sixty-eight days, Darby’s leadership skills were judged by both his trainers and the other members of his squad, producing top marks on both sides.

After training, new Rangers typically found themselves in “the worst shape of their lives,” with common maladies including weight loss, dehydration, trench foot, heatstroke, frostbite, chilblains, fractures, tissue tears; swollen hands, feet and knees; nerve damage and loss of limb sensitivity, cellulitis, contact dermatitis, cuts and wildlife bites. Darby had survived it all, emerging with lieutenant’s bars.

He saw his first deployment overseas in Afghanistan, eight months after the US invasion, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. He spent two years “in the sand,” rotated home for additional training, then flew off again to Iraq, saw action in the Horn of Africa against Somali pirates, fought the militant Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in North Africa’s Greater Maghreb, helped reopen the Transit Center at Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, then rotated back to Fort Benning as a Ranger school supervisory officer.

The file contained full details of Darby’s classified missions, and Bolan reviewed them briefly, spending time enough to satisfy himself that there were no black marks against the major’s name, no indication whatsoever of dissatisfaction with the service or the slightest bent toward any kind of radical philosophy or creed.

And yet...

The next file up belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Knowlton, age thirty-five, a second-generation Ranger whose father, now deceased, had returned from Vietnam minus his right leg and left eye, after the Battle of Khe Sanh in Quang Trị Province, near its wind-down in July 1968. In the process, he had killed an estimated sixty-seven of General Vo Nguyen Giap’s North Vietnamese regulars and secured a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, together with South Vietnam’s Meritorious Service Medal and a lifetime disability pension. His son had joined the Army right after graduating Alabama A & M, passed through Ranger school without a hitch, and served the years of duty every Ranger now expected in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Africa’s Trans Sahara region, interdicting terrorists and drug shipments earmarked for Central Africa.

At last report, Knowlton had been a lifelong Southern Baptist and rock-ribbed conservative who shared his forebears’ trend of voting for Republicans, airing his patriotism in annual addresses to the local chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars while home on leave. No one had ever heard him say a kind word about Islam, much less seek to convert and aid its most radical faction as a terrorist.

So what had happened to him, then?

The file on Knowlton held no clue—unless, perhaps, it was an ambush he had led against a small al Qaeda faction active in Nigeria. Knowlton had personally slain three of the terrorists that day, discovering after the smoke cleared that the eldest of them was sixteen years old, the other two, twelve and thirteen. They were already seasoned killers, but had something in the act of killing them caused doubt to germinate in Knowlton’s mind or heart?

If so, he had concealed it well until he’d followed Major Darby and four others in defecting from the Rangers and declaring war on the United States.

More questions lacking answers. So far, while the dossiers helped Bolan come to know his enemies, at least in part, the service photos staring back at him were blank, stone-faced, inscrutable.

Third up, in order of descending rank, was Captain Walton Tanner Jr., son of a Marine Corps veteran who’d won a Congressional Medal of Honor during the invasion of Grenada, code-named Operation Urgent Fury in November 1983. At age thirty-one, the captain seemed to be almost a carbon copy of his hero father, other than the service he had chosen as his military path. He’d won a Bronze Star Medal in Afghanistan, another in Iraq with an oak leaf cluster to denote additional awards, and claimed a Purple Heart on his third tour of duty in the sand, after he’d taken a sniper’s bullet to one leg. The Medal of Honor still eluded him, but there was every chance he might have earned one, with a fourth foreign deployment in the wings when he had suddenly and unofficially departed from the Rangers, trailing Major Darby and Lieutenant Colonel Knowlton into their small group without a name.

As with the others, Tanner’s file offered no clue to his defection, nothing to suggest he harbored any Muslim sympathies. He had been born and raised Episcopalian, and had earned a bachelor of arts in history from George Washington University in DC, then dropped out of its master’s program to become an Army Ranger. What followed was a virtual replay of the preceding files Bolan had scanned: Afghanistan, Iraq and, for a smidgen of variety, Operation Freedom Eagle in the Philippines, combating the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah Muslim militants. The latter tour had sent him home with a Distinguished Service Cross, Homeland Security Distinguished Service Medal and a Purple Heart for minor shrapnel wounds.

If he had ever mentioned Islam publicly, no record of his comments was preserved in military files. He’d gone to chapel on most Sundays, when his scheduling permitted, and had showed no deviation from his faith or military oath until he went over the wall one night, with Darby and Knowlton. What drove him to that action, as with his companions, still remained a mystery.

One note and worth considering—Tanner had lost his mother and his only sibling, sister Lucie, in a random auto accident some eighteen months before his ultimate decision to defect. The good news: Bolan thought he could gain access to Tanner’s father, the true-blue leatherneck, and maybe get some kind of private insight missing from the dossier. MPs would have been after him first thing, Bolan presumed, but if they’d taken any notes from that interrogation, nothing showed up in Brognola’s file. Bolan would find out what he could, waste no unnecessary time, and then move on.

To number four, Lieutenant Tyrone Moseley, twenty-four, the rogue group’s only African American recruit. He’d been the designated “smart one” at his high school in Newark, New Jersey, taken a fair measure of shit for it, then learned to stand his ground, avoiding gangs and throwing hands effectively against the unaffiliated hallway thieves and bullies. A suspension for fighting prevented him from standing as his class valedictorian, but Moseley had still graduated second in his class of seven hundred. Eventually he’d found his way to Fort Benning and into Ranger school.

From there, his dossier was much the same as the others Bolan had perused, with private twists and turns that made no time for war abroad. Cancer had claimed his mother’s life during Moseley’s first tour in Iraq. His father, grief stricken, was made of weaker stuff than either of his sons, committing suicide with an unregistered firearm while Tyrone served a second tour in Iraq and brother Jesse pursued a bachelor’s degree from the Newark College of Engineering.

Could Bolan, a white stranger, hope to gather anything from Jesse Moseley? He had doubts, but reckoned it was worth a shot—perhaps his only shot at learning any more about the wayward elder son.

None of the Moseleys had professed any religion, least of all Newark’s Black Muslims, aka the Nation of Islam. Tyrone’s maternal grandmother had been a “Shouter Baptist” at a storefront church in Newark, but she seemed to have left no imprint of her faith on her late daughter, son-in-law or grandchildren. In fact, she had been gone so long, a casualty of the 1967 riots, that her only legacy was bitterness against police whose random fire had cut her down in her tiny apartment.

Could latent hatred of authority have colored Moseley’s ultimate decision to defect with Darby, Knowlton and Tanner? It seemed unlikely, given that he’d joined the Army and the Rangers voluntarily, served three tours in the sand, and never said a word to indicate he was dissatisfied.

No, Bolan thought. It must be something else.

But as to what...

Dossier number five revealed the rogue group’s only verified Muslim, Staff Sergeant Afif Rashid. According to a footnote in the file, his given name translated from the Arabic as “chaste,” “pious” or “pure.” That might have indicated a religious zeal, but nothing in his background seemed to lean that way.

Rashid’s parents had come to the United States as refugees from Operation Desert Storm, bringing their only child—then nine years old—in February 1991. With government assistance, they’d acquired a small convenience store in New Rochelle, New York, and died when skinheads robbed the place in June 2000, two weeks after Afif graduated high school and joined the Army, distinguishing himself in Ranger school after boot camp.

Had the double murder of his parents, still unsolved, jaundiced Rashid’s view of America and set a time bomb ticking in his gut, while he acquired the martial skills to look for payback, somewhere down the road? If so, he’d kept it to himself and uttered no complaint about three tours of duty in Afghanistan, plus one deployment to Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras, where Rangers teamed with local forces to train antidrug units and counter transnational threats. On that leg of his journey through the hinterlands, Rashid had earned a Silver Star for aiding wounded fellow Rangers under hostile fire.

And through it all, no hint suggested that Rashid was a jihadist in disguise.

That left two dossiers on Brognola’s DVD, the next one for the Ranger outfit’s low man on the ladder in terms of rank. Sergeant Ernesto Menendez was twenty-four years old, a young man who’d enlisted after trying and rejecting one semester at a junior college in New Mexico. Like all the rest, his record with the Rangers was exemplary until he’d gone AWOL: two tours of duty in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, a Commendation Medal with a bronze “V” device denoting heroism in combat, ranked at a lesser degree than required for awarding a Bronze Star Medal. Specifically, Menendez had covered the withdrawal of medical corpsmen with five wounded Rangers in Kandahar Province, sustaining a flesh wound that added a Purple Heart to his résumé. The file logged thirteen kills to his record that morning, holding his ground till the others withdrew and called in air support.

Raised Catholic, another orphan with no siblings, Sergeant Menendez seemed to have no more in common with Islamists than he did with the Man in the Moon. A note in his file said that he had recently become engaged and his fiancée was a woman named Juanita Alvarado.

What drove him to associate with Darby’s outlaw band remained, as with the rest, a mystery.

Reviewing briefly, Bolan noted that a common theme among the rogue Rangers was lack of living family. Among the six, Captain Tanner had a father still above ground, Lieutenant Moseley had a brother whom, according to the MPs and the FBI, he had not contacted in the past two years, and Menendez had a fiancée. Was isolation part of it, somehow? And if so, how could loss of loved ones drive a polyglot collection of career soldiers into the arms of militant Islam?

Bolan tried to make sense of it, got nowhere, and finally decided that his best hope lay within the final dossier, its icon labeled “Manifesto.”

Whatever he expected from that file, though, Bolan came up short. It read:

Declaration of War in the Name of Allah

Today, we former Rangers of the US Army stand united in a state of war against the Great Satan, America. We dedicate our skills and training to destruction of the country that has waged relentless war against Islam since 1953, with its coup restoring the corrupt Shah of Iran.

Additionally, decades of unjustified support for Israel has defied the will of Palestinians and other Muslims who comprise the vast majority of Middle Eastern residents, while bilking US taxpayers to bankroll Tel Aviv, its flagrant theft of native lands from the West Bank and elsewhere, falsely declared the result of “legitimate electoral process.” Without US financing, military support and favoritism in the United Nations, Israeli aggression would long since have ceased to exist, thereby eliminating impetus for freedom fighters waging their guerrilla wars against America, mislabeled “terrorism” by the media.

Accordingly, we hold these truths to be self-evident. The long American crusade against Islam must cease, forthwith. No further action on that front shall be permitted. We, the beneficiaries of elite training, shall use all skills and tools available to bring this resolution into being. As you read this, we have supplied one relatively minor demonstration of our power, to be replicated as required until our plain and common-sense demands are met. America must change its course, and quickly, to avert a holocaust at home beyond the scope of anything authorities at home have thus far faced or can effectively control.

We are the best. Ignore us at your peril from now on.

To victory!

* * *

And that was all. At first, Bolan thought a page had been omitted from the manifesto’s file, but it read smoothly, start to finish, even if it spoke in generalities and uttered only vague demands, impossible to quantify.

Reverse the course of US history connected to the Middle East since 1953, or even farther back, since Israel was created as a Jewish state in 1948? Impossible. Indeed, ridiculous. The juggernaut could not be slowed, much less completely stopped, with strong support for Israeli in the White House, Congress and in nearly every state from coast to coast. Six Rangers couldn’t do it in a hundred lifetimes, and they had to know that.

So...what?

Bolan removed the DVD from his laptop, shut down the computer and retrieved his cell phone from a pocket. He had Jack Grimaldi’s number on speed dial and got an answer on the second ring.

“Big guy. Long time.”

“You heard from Hal?”

“I did.”

“So, how about a little hop?”

Chapter Three

Barclay, Maryland

“Did I read that sign right?” Grimaldi asked. “One hundred twenty people? Can they even call a place that small a town?”

“It’s flexible,” Bolan replied. “I’ve been to smaller ones.”

“I guess this jarhead likes his privacy.”

“He won’t be getting much of it, considering the last couple of days.”

“You think he’d bail on us?”

“The CIA says they’ve got eyes on him, up high. Nothing since the MPs came by, except his normal mornings at a local coffee shop and shopping one time at the Farmer’s Market.”

“Good old country living.”

“If you like that kind of thing.”

“I could get used to it,” Grimaldi said.

Bolan had trouble picturing the flyboy settling down, particularly at the outset of another mission. They were rolling north on Maryland Route 313, from where Grimaldi’s chopper had touched down at a private airstrip outside Goldsboro. The Stony Man pilot was at the wheel of a Ford sedan from Dollar Rent-a-Car, holding the four-door Focus at a solid 80 miles per hour, not a cop in sight. They had the rural home of Walton Tanner Senior spotted on the Ford’s GPS unit, no neighbors nearby and no idea what they’d be walking into when they got there.

Figure it would be a bitter pill for Walton Sr. to ingest, learning his son had left the Rangers to become a terrorist in hiding. He’d have questions that the MPs couldn’t answer on their first pass, and he wouldn’t know anything about the Rangers who’d gone down fighting while his son and five fellow deserters had slipped away to parts unknown. Perhaps he knew more than he’d told the CID first time around, and might be more forthcoming when he saw the Homeland Security ID cards Bolan and Grimaldi had obtained from Stony Man’s documents mill.

Or maybe not. Maybe he didn’t know a thing about his son’s activities or his companions who’d declared war on America.

Still, it was worth a try. In fact, coupled with Tyrone Moseley’s brother in New Jersey and Menendez’s fiancée in Roanoke, it could be the only game in town.

“Looks like the place,” Grimaldi said. “White clapboard siding on your right, Jeep Wrangler in the carport.”

“Got it.” Bolan scanned the verdant countryside surrounding Tanner’s place, looking for watchers, spotting none so far, although it wouldn’t take much to conceal a man or two amid the smooth alders, dogwoods, red mulberry and blackjack oaks.

Pursuant to their cover, they pulled in and parked. Before they’d cleared the Ford, a slender man with grizzled hair was on the porch to greet them, hands empty, eyes wary as he checked them out.

“More CID?” he asked before they had a chance to speak.

“Homeland Security,” Bolan corrected him, approaching with credentials on display.

“Both of you?” Tanner asked suspiciously.

“Yes, sir,” Grimaldi said, palming his own ID from Stony Man.

“I guess things have ticked up a notch since I had visitors last time.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bolan. “I’m afraid so.”

They’d decided to be candid with him, more or less, running the plan past Brognola while they were airborne and receiving his okay. They would recount the failed arrest attempt, in the hope of jarring something loose from Walton Sr.’s memory this time around. And failing that, if the former Marine had contact with his son he wasn’t copping to, maybe he’d keep the covert channel open, try to talk him backward from the point of no return.

Inside a modest living room, they sat on well-worn furniture, declining Tanner’s offer of coffee or “something stronger,” undefined. Their host went for a double dash of Early Times bourbon and settled on a 1980s vintage couch, saying, “All right. You’d better let me have it straight, then.”

“Six special agents from the CID caught up with him yesterday morning, early,” Bolan answered.

“And the other men he runs with now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where at?”

“North Carolina, on the coast.”

“But they aren’t here to see me now.”

“No, sir. They walked into a trap. They won’t be seeing anyone again.”

“So, it’s murder, then.”

“Murder at least,” Bolan agreed. “And likely treason.”

“Jesus, Lord.”

“It’s bad,” Bolan replied. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, I’ve had naught to do with him since they were out here grilling me,” Tanner replied. “Don’t take my word for it. I gather someone has been covering my phone and watching what I do from time to time.”

“A safe bet,” Bolan said.

“In fact, you ought to know I haven’t seen or spoken to my boy in going on six years.”

“Homeland Security,” Bolan stated, “hopes that something may have slipped your mind.”

“I wish it had,” Tanner replied. “I’m getting on in years and drink a bit. No point denying what’s so obvious. But no, sir. Nothing slips my mind. Not birthdays of the living or the dead, not groceries. Nothing.”

“Okay,” Bolan replied. “We had to ask.”

“Of course you did. And now I’ll ask you one,” Tanner said.

“Feel free. I’ll answer if I can,” Bolan told him.

“Now that you’ve eyeballed me, are you planning on leaving people here to watch me, backing on the taps and drones and whatever your people have eavesdropping on me as it is? Seems like a waste of time. My tax money at work, and all.”

Grimaldi chimed in, saying, “We came alone, sir.”

“Oh?”

“That’s right,” Bolan confirmed, feeling the short hairs bristling on his nape.

“No guys sitting on motorbikes among the trees, black visors on their helmets, covering their faces?”

“No, sir.”

Tanner quaffed his bourbon and reached out for the bottle, asking both of them at once, “So who in hell are those guys parked across the street right now?”

* * *

“Your old man look the same as you remember him?” Tyrone Moseley inquired.

“It’s been five or six years,” Tanner Jr. answered.

“Yeah, but you don’t forget your daddy, though.”

They sat astride a pair of matching Harley-Davidson Street 750s, both fitted with stolen license plates acquired from looting a supply house outside Baltimore. Both bikes were painted black, matching their leathers, helmets and their deeply tinted face shields. Underneath their jackets, they wore sidearms, knives, plus other weapons of offense and defense ready for deployment on a moment’s notice, if they were observed.

“More CID sniffing around, you think?” Moseley inquired.

“You’re full of questions, brother. How in hell would I know?”

“Well, for one thing, they’re coming outside.”

“Shit! We need to haul ass out of here.”

“Won’t be quiet.”

“Screw quiet,” Tanner snarled. “These 750s can outrun that Focus on the best day it ever had.”

“Or we could take ’em out.”

“That, too. Let’s try to lose them first, if we can swing it.”

“Roger that, Captain.”

They kicked their Harley-Davidsons to life as one, plowed through a screen of trees that should have hidden them but obviously hadn’t managed it, accelerating with a double roar like dirty thunder as they hit the pavement, rolling south on 313 and angling for the cutoff that would take them into Centreville. More traffic there, with forty-three hundred inhabitants plus summer visitors, and they could break from there to Grasonville or Chestertown, even split up if necessary to make sure that one of them escaped.

Tanner’s rearview mirror showed him the Focus with two passengers in close pursuit, gaining a bit before he cranked up his 750 and Moseley did likewise. His preference was evasion without contact, but he’d do whatever he considered necessary to escape, even if that included collateral damage among stray civilians.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, before their small team reached its goal.

A quarter mile from Centreville, they started running into traffic, dodging in and out among old farm trucks and minivans that had seen better days. Tanner eased back, let Moseley pull ahead of him to pass a vintage Dodge Ram pickup, while he retrieved an M-33 fragmentation grenade from under his leathers, dropped its pin into his bike’s slipstream and tossed the metal egg into the Dodge’s open bed before he powered out of there, leaving the startled sixty-something driver in his wake.

Tanner was grinning as he counted down the six-second delay fuse, waiting for the storm to break.

* * *

“Grenade!” Grimaldi snapped, already easing back his pressure on the Ford’s accelerator.

“Saw it,” Bolan said, bracing himself for the explosion that was sure to come in four...three...two...

The blast’s impact was physical, even inside their car. It must have scared a good year off the pickup driver’s life, then he was back to business, swerving left, then right, trying to get his ride under control while smoke poured from its open bed, the sides bowed out over its rear fenders, its tailgate flapping in the breeze. Something had happened to the rear axle, as well, but Bolan thought the real danger was fire now, with the pickup’s gas tank likely holed by shrapnel and inviting any spark to set its fumes alight.

“And there it goes,” Grimaldi said.

The Dodge Ram’s driver gave it up, swerved toward the highway’s grassy shoulder on his right, and bailed as soon as he slowed down enough to make it practical.

“Pretty spry for an old guy,” the Stony Man pilot commented.

“Concentrate on the youngsters,” Bolan replied.

“Bikers. Ten-four.”

The Dodge Ram detonated when they were a half block past it, following the Harley-Davidsons toward Centreville. The bikes were making tracks, topping the 90 mph mark without missing a beat. Bolan reached underneath his jacket, drew the black Berretta M-9 pistol from its shoulder rig, and thumbed its ambidextrous external safety lever from the Safe to Fire position with a red dot showing on each side.

“You want to take them off the road?” Grimaldi asked.

“Find out if we can catch them, first.”

“Good point,” the pilot granted as he trod the Ford’s accelerator to the floor.

* * *

“Still coming,” Moseley called to Tanner. “They’re not stopping for collaterals.”

“Not yet,” Tanner replied. “Maybe they need some more.”

“Say where and when, Captain.”

“We’re coming to the city limits now. I want to split up, left and right, when we’re in town, and make them choose.”

“Whichever one of us they pick should stand and fight?”

“Avoid that if possible,” Tanner replied. “Clutter the streets with more collateral, then regroup on the north side and head back to meet the others. There’s a seafood place they call the Bay Shore Steam Pot on East Water Street. Whoever gets there first, wait ten minutes, no longer, then get out and warn the rest.”

“Sounds good,” Moseley said. “You just tell me when and where to turn.”

“Block and a half, up on your right. I’ll take the left, same time. And don’t be shy about the locals.”

“Never have been, never will, Captain.”

The cross streets, each with different names, came rushing at them and they swerved apart without a backward glance.

* * *

“And there they go,” Grimaldi said. “Which one you want to chase?”

“I doubt it matters,” Bolan answered. “Left’s as good as anything.”

“Easier turn, at least,” Grimaldi said, putting a crooked smile on Bolan’s face by signaling his turn. Catching the look, the flyboy said, “Hey, I obey the law. Mostly.”

As if on cue, an ancient Chevy station wagon blew up on the right-hand side road, trailing smoke, expelling four towheaded children from its tailgate, while their parents leaped for daylight up front. The biker who had fed them a grenade soon vanished in a pall of smoke, with Bolan leaning into Jack Grimaldi’s sharp, tire-squealing turn.

It couldn’t be too long before their chase started attracting lawmen, most particularly if their quarry kept scattering grenades in their wake. Another one went off just then, under the front end of a newish Kia SUV just pulling out from its curb space outside a burger joint. Both airbags inflated instantly, obscuring Bolan’s vision of the driver, while another frag grenade took out a family sedan just signaling its turn into the parking lot of a dry cleaner’s.

“Damn!” Grimaldi swore. “How many of those eggs you think he’s carrying?”

“Too many for a confrontation in the heart of town,” Bolan replied. “Smart money also says he’ll have at least one gun, either a decent pistol or an automatic subgun.”

“You want to call it, then?”

Bolan hated to pull the plug, but he didn’t intend to spark a further bloodbath in the streets of Centreville. On top of that, he heard a siren’s distant wail, either the local cops—with twelve men on the force full-time, as he recalled—or a Queen Anne’s County deputy out on routine highway patrol. He didn’t want the law drawn into this with no idea of what they’d wind up facing, so he made the only call that suited him.

“I’m calling it,” he told Grimaldi. “Let’s get out of here before SWAT hears a rumble and starts gearing up.”

“At least we didn’t pick up any shrapnel,” the pilot said.

“Small favors,” Bolan replied as Grimaldi swung down an alley and began reversing their direction back toward 313.

“I’m thinking Hal won’t like it.”

“Not one little bit,” Bolan agreed.

“You think he’ll pull us off?”

“Doubt it,” Bolan replied after considering. “Right now, we’re all he’s got.”

“I wish that didn’t carry so much weight.”

“Comes with the big bucks.”

“Yeah. I’m still waiting for those,” Grimaldi said with a grin.

“You and me both.”

When they’d cleared Centreville and started back toward Goldsboro, where the chopper waited for them on the ground, Bolan began rehearsing what he’d say to Brognola. He’d never polished up bad news before, and wouldn’t start today, but at least he still had other leads, besides the father who had not seen Walton Tanner Junior in so long most people would consider them estranged.

Another of the AWOL Rangers, Tyrone Moseley, had a brother in Newark, New Jersey, chasing a bachelor’s degree in engineering. Moseley’s file had sketched sufficient background on the kid to mark him as a “normal” student, but he was an African American whose hackles might rise at confrontation with two white government agents looking for his brother, handing back their cards without revealing much of anything.

Life in a city of a quarter million people, some still brooding over riots forty years ago and nursing grudges that might never heal. Some would be militants, the bulk of them just ordinary people conscious of the fact that they’d been wronged repeatedly for years on end, while no one in authority extended an apology, much less making them whole for loved ones killed or maimed along the way.

That wasn’t Bolan’s problem, and he couldn’t solve it if it was. His more immediate concern was to find out if one young man bent on making a new life for himself had been in contact with his elder brother. And what—if anything—had passed between them when they’d spoken, and whether Tyron had been crass enough to drag the kid into his mess.

Bolan hoped not, but as he’d learned to his private sorrow, families were complicated, nursing secrets rarely spoken to outsiders, if at all. He would reach out, learn what Jesse Moseley had to say, if anything, and hope for any clue that put him on the AWOL Rangers’ trail.

Failing that, he’d have to play the rest of it by ear.

Nothing unique in that approach for Bolan, since he’d struck out on his own against the Mafia so long ago, and carried on from there into a world gone mad with terror, tyrants and the endless clash of hostile creeds. He soldiered on, because that’s what a soldier did, until the Universe allowed no choice but to lay down his or her weapons and surrender in the end.

He and Grimaldi had a job to do, and there could be no turning back.

Chapter Four

Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building

Washington, DC

Hal Brognola heard his cell phone buzzing, vibrating atop his desk. He picked it up and read the message on its screen. Detective Orley Pratt was calling from Newark PD Homicide.

It didn’t take a mastermind to know the news wouldn’t be good.

“Detective Pratt. Brognola here.”

“I thought I’d better catch you early. Your department has a flag on Jesse Moseley, a junior at the Newark College of Engineering?”

“Right. I take it, since you’re calling...”

“He’s downtown right now. The city morgue.”

“Not accidental, I presume.”

“You got that right. Kid goes up on the roof of his apartment house last night to catch a smoke break. Somebody comes up behind him, hits him with a double tap up close, 9 mil, and then collects the brass.”

“Professional,” Brognola said.

“I’d say so,” Pratt replied. “Of course, the street dicks call it gang-related, drug-related, some kind of related. Nothing in his file suggests involvement, but it is Brick City, sometimes called Manhattan’s Sixth Borough. We’ve got Crips and Bloods, your Latin Kings and Trinitarios or ‘3ni,’ Dominicans expanding out from New York City. All of them are moving shit as fast as they can handle it. Beat cops call it an SCO—self-cleaning oven.”

“Nice.”

Pratt let that go, saying, “So the bottom line is, we’ve got nothing on your boy, either. Not even a street interrogation card, which makes—or made—him a rare bird for that preserve.”

“Any contact with next of kin so far?” Brognola asked.

“Sole living relative’s supposed to be an older brother in the Army, but we’re getting squat as far as any feedback from the Pentagon. I guess you wouldn’t have anything to share on that?”

“Sorry,” the big Fed said. “It’s strictly need to know.”

“And lowly cops don’t need. I get it. Same old story.”

“If I could pass anything along...”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, let me pass this on to you. We haven’t publicized the hit yet, but it’s likely going to the media today, maybe tomorrow. If anybody comes around to claim the body, I’ll try to let you know in time for interception. Whether it helps or not, I guess I’ll never know. If nobody shows up, the city carries out cremation after ninety days and bills the taxpayers. The ashes go to Woodland Cemetery, with a plastic label that’s supposed to last five years or something.”

“Not the best sendoff,” Brognola said.

“It’s all you get when no one gives a damn. Be talking to you later,” Pratt told him. “Or maybe not.”

“Thanks for the heads-up, anyway.”

“I’d say it was a pleasure but...you know.” The line went dead and Brognola shut off the link.

Professional. A double tap...collect the brass, Brognola thought. That fit the Ranger style, far as it went, but why would Darby’s AWOL team take out Lieutenant Moseley’s brother if he had no part in their subversion? And why would he, with what appeared to be a spotless record and his future goals apparently laid down?

Brotherly love?

The big Fed hoped it couldn’t be that simple, but you never knew. And if Jesse had been connected to his brother’s group somehow, they’d lost another chance to crack the case before it all revved up and went to hell.

The setback Bolan and Grimaldi had reported out of Maryland was bad enough. One innocent civilian dead, two others critical, and all they could report as “good news” was that they’d avoided contact with police. Shit happened, and Striker was a human being, sure, albeit head and shoulders taller than the rest Brognola had been privileged to know. Still not infallible, of course, and he was hustling to play catch-up after someone slapped the first ball from his hands.

Two watchers on the home of Walton Tanner Sr., and the way they had reacted to exposure meant the members of the AWOL Ranger team were keeping tabs on family. Had they come gunning for the ex-Marine and been cut off, compelled to flee? If so, had it provoked the hit on Jesse Moseley in Newark—and had the whole unit, including Jesse’s brother, signed off on the execution?

If they hadn’t...well, it just might be a crack susceptible to leverage, but that meant getting close enough for piling pressure on. And how would they accomplish that?

Frowning, Brognola grabbed his cell again, secure as any phone could be these days, and hit speed dial.

Gaithersburg, Maryland

Six former US Army Rangers sat around a dining table in a drab, low-rent apartment two blocks south of Frederick Avenue, the main drag running generally north-south through the middle of the state’s fourth largest city, linking Gaithersburg to Frederick, Rockville and Washington, DC. Secure in anonymity for now, they had already scanned the place for bugs and had an audio jammer running just in case, generating random masking sounds that would desensitize microphones they might have missed, rendering them useless for recording.

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