An instant before the man moved, Bolan anticipated his action

The Executioner instinctively jerked his head to one side as the man’s fist jabbed the air, passing a hair’s width from his face. With the breeze from the missed blow caressing his cheek, Bolan took a quick step forward, driving a handful of stiff fingers into his attacker’s throat. The man coughed and clutched at his neck with both hands, stumbling back a few feet. His legs buckled and he fell to one knee, fighting to suck in air.

Before the man’s partner could react, Bolan unleashed a rapid flurry of short punches to his face. The man attempted to strike back, but he was falling away from the volley, his momentum pulling him in the wrong direction. His return jabs landed harmlessly on Bolan’s muscular forearms.

The warrior stepped back to place a little distance between them. His victim staggered, breathing raggedly. As he spat a thick glob of bloody phlegm toward Bolan, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade. He didn’t know it, but he was about to learn a lesson in arms proliferation—escalation always leads to greater violence.

Defense Breach

The Executioner®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

—Sir Winston Churchill,

1874–1965

The odds might be against me and my enemies outnumber me, but that will never stop me from executing my plan of attack.

—Mack Bolan

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Peter Spring for his contribution to this work.

THE
MACK BOLAN
LEGEND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

1

Mack Bolan pressed the motor’s throttle, and his snowmobile sped over the snow-crusted prairie. Cold air sneaking around the lenses of his goggles caused his eyes to water. He leaned into the sleek machine’s composite frame as frozen terrain raced by inches below his boots.

Sound carried a long way across the open plains of Manitoba where, at this time of year, the crystal clear air was as frigid as arctic ice. But he wasn’t worried about noise from his CIA-developed snowmobile announcing its approach. Canada’s immense wilderness immediately swallowed the barely audible hum produced by the vehicle’s power pack. The energy unit was an engineering marvel—small enough to fit under the snowmobile’s seat while still providing the needed muscle to leap from zero to sixty miles per hour in under ten seconds.

If his presence was discovered ahead of time, Bolan thought it would be via the radar technology Akira Tokaido had briefed him about back at Stony Man Farm. Displaying a determined stealth born in the jungles of SoutheastAsia and tempered on hellfire trails around the world, the man some knew as the Executioner all but flew over the packed snow at breakneck speed, a fleeting blur against a monochrome landscape.

Bolan was dressed entirely in white, from the lined face mask with attached skull cap covering his black hair, to the white Corcoran Jump Boots stitched onto nonskid soles embedded with diamond dust to ensure gripping stability on ice. His formfitting parka and snow pants were fabricated from an extremely thin and pliable synthetic blend. The resulting tight cross weave produced a silky fabric that would keep him comfortable at temperatures down to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Equally important, Bolan’s attire provided warmth without a trace of bulkiness or binding that might restrict life-preserving arm and leg movements. As if to test his clothing’s response, he locked his elbows and straightened his muscular torso, stretching his spine for a few moments before settling back down behind the snowmobile’s white fuselage.

Over the eye cutouts in his face mask, Bolan wore nonreflective polycarbonate goggles set in white frames with large wraparound sides. He knew it was essential to avoid the condition alpine skiers referred to as snow blindness. In his line of work, a case of snow blindness during a mission was as much a fatal condition as inoperable lung cancer.

A quick glance at the dashboard clock’s LED told him he was on schedule to reach his destination before dark in spite of the fact that the winter sun, hurried by the season’s extended nights, had already passed its zenith and continued to march steadily toward the western horizon. As he maintained a course due north, the crouched shadow keeping pace on the snow beside him seemed to grow taller by the minute, serving as a steady reminder of the daylight’s unremitting flight.

Based on the intel provided to him, it was important that Bolan reach the cabin before nightfall. As it was, he knew he might already be too late to stop the transfer of a top secret computer code to a terrorist group in the Middle East. According to Hal Brognola, director of the Justice Department’s Sensitive Operations Group, the code would enable them to successfully attack a United States aircraft carrier, killing thousands of Navy personnel. Determined to prevent that, Bolan pushed on.

When he was approximately one hour south of his objective, he again recalled the conversation with Hal Brognola two days earlier in the shade of the Washington Monument that had brought him three hundred miles into Canada for his reconnaissance mission.

At that meeting, Brognola’s breath had punctuated his words with little white clouds as he spoke. “As commander in chief, the President has a sacred obligation to protect the American soldiers and sailors under his authority,” Brognola said while they walked west along the National Mall with the Capitol Building at their backs. “His words, not mine.”

“What’s the worst-case scenario?” Bolan asked.

Brognola turned up his overcoat’s collar against the icy breeze that was blowing off the Potomac River and exhaled before answering, his breath appearing in a steady plume as thick as cigar smoke. “The Navy’s aircraft carriers are protected with a system called ADAS—Air Defense Alert System—designed and built by Nautech Corporation,” Brognola replied. “Worst-case scenario would be a terrorist group getting access to the computer code that gives ADAS its instructions. If an enemy was able to communicate with the program installed onboard a ship, hidden commands could be inserted into the operating system instructing ADAS to drop its electronic sensors. If that happened, our aircraft carriers would be like fish in a barrel.”

“How does the system work?” the Executioner asked.

The big Fed squinted into the distance for a moment before replying. He was wearing a charcoal gray topcoat that came to his knees, and a black felt fedora whose narrow brim cast the upper half of his face in shadow. A silk scarf printed with a rose-and-maroon paisley pattern filled the space between the topcoat’s wool collar and Brognola’s neck. In spite of the snow, his black wingtips were clean and shiny, his appearance as impeccable as if he had just come from a Fortune 500 boardroom.

Still looking toward a distant horizon, he said, “When the ADAS cabinets are deployed onboard aircraft carriers, twenty-seven monitors that resemble small television screens are also installed and connected to the system. The monitors are mounted in various places—some on the bridge, in the weapons center, one in the captain’s quarters, some in the mess hall. The point is to put them all over the ship to make sure that both the captain and the weapons officer will always be close to one. The system grabs real-time electronic information from the ship’s radar and weapons systems, and displays everything approaching the vessel within thirty nautical miles. ADAS also keeps track of available weapons and missile inventories, automatically matching incoming targets with the appropriate weapons to neutralize them.”

“Like a big video game,” Bolan commented.

“Except that life and death are at stake,” Brognola replied dryly. “Today’s weapons systems are able to assess the environment, make decisions and initiate action within seconds. You don’t have much time to figure out the best course of action when a few warheads are speeding toward your ship at Mach 2. ADAS does it all in split seconds. Recognizes the targets, assigns weapons, tracks, engages, mitigates. The USS Stark taught the Navy what happens when you don’t have an electronic umbrella monitoring your immediate area for incoming threats.”

Brognola adjusted his scarf with an efficient motion that suggested the gentle tugging and tucking might be a habit rather than a necessity. “If a terrorist group got their hands on Nautech’s top secret computer codes running ADAS,” he said, directing his gaze at Bolan, “they could blind our ships to incoming missiles. There are two or three aircraft carriers stationed in the Persian Gulf at any given time. Each one is a floating arsenal, transporting unbelievable weaponry to the modern-day battlefield. Fighter jets, bombers, guns, missiles—these nuclear-powered vessels are true death stars. They also cost close to a billion dollars to build and maintain. Losing even one in combat would be devastating. And not just because of the cost. Aircraft carriers represent the epitome of American military might. It would be a serious blow to both troop morale and our global prestige if we lost a carrier.”

Brognola sighed heavily. “We need a soft probe, Striker. I can’t give you all the details here, but the objective is in Manitoba, about three hundred miles from the North Dakota border. We think a group of engineers from Nautech have hijacked the computer code and are planning to sell it on the black market.”

Bolan finished reading the four-page briefing Homeland Security had given the President earlier that morning and passed it back to Brognola. The edges of the papers ruffled in the breeze as the big Fed folded the report before slipping it into his overcoat’s internal breast pocket and buttoning the flap closed.

Bolan recalled missions he had accomplished in part aboard aircraft carriers, remembering the highly charged atmosphere where a crew of up to five thousand dedicated men and women worked in harmony to bring the enormous might of their vessel to bear. Brognola was right. It would be significant on a number of levels for the United States to lose a national asset like an aircraft carrier.

Soft probe, Bolan thought. How many times had he heard the words “soft,” “cold,” or “unoccupied” used to incorrectly describe one of his drop zones? For Brognola to be requesting his assistance, the situation had to have already progressed to a point where the President no longer trusted his official people to mitigate the threat before it affected policy.

“Okay,” Bolan said suddenly.

“Akira’s ready to brief you,” Brognola responded, referring to the talented hacker who served on Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman’s cybernetics team at Stony Man Farm.

The two men parted without another word, the man from the Justice Department setting off to inform the President that his request had been accepted; the man known to Brognola as “Striker” stepping away and turning up Twelfth Street. By the time the warrior had passed between the EPA and IRS buildings, he had merged with the few pedestrians braving the January cold, vanishing into the cityscape as effectively as a tiger disappeared into the jungle. The rules for survival were, if fact, the same everywhere.

An alarm sounded on the snowmobile’s dashboard. The electronic unit was alerting Bolan that he was entering an area being scanned by the type of radiation used to power long-distance surveillance radars. He brought his snowmobile to a halt and turned off the sensor.

In the stillness, he could hear snowmobiles. They were far away, at least three or four miles, the distance making it impossible to discern whether they were heading his way. Bolan’s experience on battlefields throughout the world had developed in him a phenomenal sense of space and distance. It was no coincidence that ancient cultures often portrayed their legendary warriors with ears resembling those of bats. In hand-to-hand combat, extraordinary fighters sometimes displayed an intimate feel for their surroundings so extreme they appeared to be operating with the assistance of a sixth sonarlike sense. Bolan listened hard for a few seconds before deciding the snowmobiles were moving away from his position.

He switched the sensor back on. The intermittent chirping pattern signified he was at the extreme edge of coverage. On the unit’s LED, the scanning frequency was identified as one residing at the long end of the L-band, verifying Tokaido’s assertion that the engineers from Nautech would probably use energy bands similar to those they worked with at the company. The radiation’s magnitude, however, was of more interest to Bolan than its actual frequency. By measuring the intensity of the beam sweeping across the open plain, Tokaido’s sensor was able to get a lock on the source’s location. According to the display, the cabin was roughly five miles away, which meant Bolan had probably not shown up yet on their screen. Before resuming his approach, he turned on his unit’s cloaking circuit.

“It’s only a snowmobile,” Akira Tokaido had replied to Barbara Price’s compliment after the hacker showed Stony Man Farm’s mission controller that there were methods other than physical design to shield items from radar detection. “It’s not like we’re hiding a battleship or anything.”

Well-known weapons such as the American Stealth bomber and South Korea’s KDX-II destroyer used angles and composite coatings to deflect or absorb radar transmissions. Tokaido, however, knew how to use electronic tweaking, what he referred to as “turning a mirror on the illuminator,” to shield almost anything from conventional radars.

With the unit’s LED emitting a steady green light indicating that an electronic cloak had been wrapped around him and his snowmobile, Bolan resumed his advance. It was growing colder, causing his exhaled breath to immediately form into ice crystals on the outside of his face mask. He pressed on, oblivious to the cold.

Bolan heard the generator a good ten minutes before the cabin came into sight. The sun was slightly less than an hour from setting when he halted his snowmobile and dismounted in one of the waist-deep gullies that pocked the plain. The snow formations in this area resembled shallow riverbeds, the shapes blown into the prairie in much the same way water sculpted a stream’s dirt banks. After performing a quick touch-check on the weapons he wore, Bolan crawled to the edge of the snow brim where he could see the outline of the cabin tucked into the edge of a small stand of spruce bordering a sparse coppice of hardwood and pine.

A bone-chilling wind from the north fueled to life more than a dozen miniature tornadoes of fine dry snow, setting them swirling wildly in front of Bolan’s position. The whirlwinds danced for minutes at a time across his field of vision before each fell abruptly back to earth, only to be instantly replaced by others leaping skyward from the white powder.

Distances were deceiving on a flat terrain where the sun, while low on the horizon, was nevertheless still brilliant. Even coming in at an extreme angle, rays shining onto a pristine white countryside devoid of color often played tricks. Bolan scanned the area before him in long overlapping sweeps, estimating the cabin to be slightly more than a half mile away. The building was cast in late-afternoon shadow by half a dozen spruce trees whose gnarled and misshapen boughs were testimony to the number of years they had stood like sentries, their crooked growth influenced by decade after decade of the wind’s unrelenting push.

Bolan reached into one of the pouches on his white combat belt and withdrew a pair of binoculars whose lenses were composed of the same material he wore in his goggles. The compact binoculars were ruggedized, which meant they could withstand harsh environments, including shock and vibration, without a resultant performance loss. Bolan peered through the eyecups while fingering the focus wheel.

Despite the generator’s noise, the cabin appeared to be deserted, but three snowmobiles pulled into a tight huddle against the building’s east wall belied the initial impression. Bolan switched the binoculars into infrared mode, causing the landscape to shimmer for a few seconds while the internal photocathode sensors adjusted to the IR data stream. Processed from a half mile away, an infrared view’s validity was suspect, but the image coming through the lenses clearly showed that the cabin walls were considerably warmer than its surroundings. The snowmobiles emitted a color profile that indicated none of the engines had been fired up recently. Notwithstanding the apparent inactivity, Bolan would approach the cabin as if the people inside were armed and awaiting his arrival.

He lowered the binoculars and put them back into their pouch. As he pushed himself away from the berm’s shallow lip, he took mental inventory of his weapons.

In a white leather holster riding low on his hip, the soldier wore a .44-caliber Desert Eagle. If called into service, the oversize handgun’s appetite would be fed with the two hundred rounds of Cor-Bon 249-grain ammo he carried in one of the pouches on his white combat belt.

Bolan’s Beretta 93-R, loaded with a 20-round clip of 9 mm Parabellum ammunition, was housed in a shoulder holster with Velcro flap. In one of the pouches on his combat belt, Bolan carried two hundred additional 9 mm rounds and the pistol’s sound suppressor. This mission did not overtly call for a suppressor, but after spending a good portion of his life in conditions that wavered to the whims of battle uncertainty, Bolan knew there was no such thing as being too prepared or too well-equipped for a job.

A foot-long Sykes-Fairbairn tempered steel knife, honed to a razor’s edge, rested in a white leather sheath strapped to the outside of his right calf. Four MK3A2 concussion grenades hooked to the combat belt’s webbing ensured the availability of additional firepower in the event his planned soft probe took an unexpectedly intense turn.

Bolan climbed back onto his snowmobile, started the motor and circled around to the cabin’s far side. Numerous tracks in the snow close to the building alerted him that there had been recent visitors. Although not as unique as tire tracks, the traces on the ground displayed sufficient variation for Bolan to determine that four separate snowmobiles had arrived from the west, departing in the same direction. He eased his vehicle into the cover of the thin woods behind the cabin, cruising twenty yards among the trees until he found a spot affording acceptable concealment. Once there, he switched off the motor. As he dismounted and drew his Beretta, a crow cried out from its perch in a nearby tree, and the warrior paused to listen to nature’s voice. The very distant drone of the snowmobiles he had registered earlier was the only man-made sound reaching his ears.

On feet as silent as those of a stalking tiger, he swiftly covered the distance between the cabin and woods. Reaching the structure, he pressed himself against the weathered siding close to where a propane gas tank was mounted on a steel frame. There was no sound from within. Before entering, he removed his protective goggles and put them away, exposing blue eyes that darted from one point to another, continuously processing information relative to his surroundings.

Bolan inched closer to the door, raising his Beretta to the ready position. When he reached the doorknob, he halted for a second, steeling himself for whatever he might find inside. Knowing he might come under gunfire as soon as his presence was discovered, he took hold of the doorknob and turned, finding it unlocked. Without further delay, he stepped into the cabin where the nauseating stench of death immediately accosted his nostrils.

With dusk settling over the region, the light inside was dim, coming from a single overhead bulb hanging from an extension cord stapled to the ceiling. The cabin was built with three rooms, the austerity of furnishings bearing testament to its short-term use. An open area contained a beat-up table and half a dozen chairs arranged in the vicinity of a propane stove. A tiny bathroom with a stall shower visible through an open door was situated against the rear wall and a bedroom with an open curtain in place of a door was next to the bathroom. On the floor in the center of the main room, two bullet-ridden bodies lay in grotesque death poses, their blood mingling on the floorboards in an irregular dark stain occupying the space between them. One of the corpses had been shot numerous times—some bullets obviously postmortem, as if the purpose of the additional slugs was to eradicate the victim’s identity. Indeed, identifying the disfigured corpse based on facial evidence alone would be impossible. Why, Bolan wondered, weren’t they both mutilated?

With pistol drawn, he made his way silently to the back bedroom, taking care to avoid stepping in the bloodstains splattered randomly across the floor. There should have been electronic equipment here—at the very least, a radiation source and monitoring device. If the radar Tokaido’s module had detected was not coming from this cabin, where was its origin? There were no other possibilities.

The bedroom was considerably darker than the outer room. Bolan pulled a powerful pen flashlight from one of his pouches and swept the interior with its beam, his eyes scanning the space before him while he listened for signs of life. In the seam where the floorboards met the distant wall, the flashlight’s beam played across a line of bright yellow sawdust, the color alerting him to the fact that the dust had not been there for a full winter during which time the elements would have turned it an oxidized gray.

Recalling the three snowmobiles outside, Bolan stepped into the center of the room and pushed the bed against a wall. The outline of a trapdoor was visible in the floorboards, a rectangle approximately three feet by two. Whoever constructed the door had done a good job placing the hinges on the underside; with only a casual glance under the bed to make sure no one was hiding there, the door would have gone unnoticed.

“Police!” he shouted to alert whomever might be under the floorboards. He had told lies much worse than impersonating an officer of the law. “Come out with your hands up.”

There was no response.

Bolan placed the penlight between his teeth and drew his knife, sliding the blade into the crack forming one of the short sides. Using the weapon as a lever, he discovered there was no locking mechanism on the door. With minimal effort he was able to pry it open a few inches, which then grew wider as he pushed down on the knife’s leather grip. When there was sufficient space between the door and the floor, he grabbed the hatch’s edge with the hand holding his Beretta and threw it back all the way. The door banged open onto the floorboards, sounding unnaturally loud in the still of the bedroom.

“Please! Please don’t kill me,” came from the darkness below. The words were spoken in a voice laced with terror.

Bolan had been exposed to people on the brink of hysteria innumerable times throughout his career, and it was never a situation he preferred. Survival in his line of work was often dependent on controlling more variables than his opponent, and people scared out of their wits were not easy to control. He turned sideways to reduce his profile and held the penlight away from his body as he shone the beam into the void.

A woman was huddled in the far corner, her eyes blinking in rapid response to the light.

“Please,” she said in a vacant voice.

“I won’t hurt you,” Bolan replied, holstering his Beretta upon seeing she was alone and unarmed.

“I thought you were one of them. They’re coming back,” she stated.

The dugout was about four feet deep and tiny, cramped by a single electronics cabinet that hummed evenly next to a small table supporting a computer monitor. A pair of industrial-gauge wires ran from the cabinet to the monitor, on which Bolan could see six incandescent green blips moving in a tight group.

“Does that tell you how far away they are?” he asked.

Her eyes wandered to the screen where they rested for a moment before she shook her head and repeated vacuously, “They’re coming back.”

“Come on,” the Executioner said.

The woman pushed herself away from the wall and grabbed Bolan’s outstretched hand to boost herself out of the dugout and onto the bedroom floor. As Bolan pulled her to her feet, he gave her an appraising look while slipping the penlight back into its pouch.

She was disheveled and dirty, dressed in jeans and an unzipped maroon ski parka over a gray sweatshirt with San Diego Chargers emblazoned in cursive pink across the front. Bolan guessed she was in her late twenties. The earrings she wore, along with the stylish cut of her jet-black hair, told him she was neither a camper nor a survivalist.

“Don’t look,” Bolan said as he led her out of the bedroom toward the cabin’s door.

“I heard.” Her voice caught in her throat and her knees buckled, causing her to lean in to Bolan. He put his arm around her, supporting her weight until they came to the door. “They kept shooting Davey,” she said. “They kept shooting him, but Wes couldn’t give them what they wanted. I was afraid he was going to tell them where I was hiding. They kept asking if there were three of us.”

“What did they want from Wes?” Bolan asked.

She sniffed once before her eyes began spilling tears as if an inner dam had suddenly given way. “The rest of the code!” she said in a hitching voice that shook her entire body. “Wes only had half. After they left I kept trying to call 911 on my cell phone. I couldn’t get through to…” Her voice tapered off.

“Do you work for Nautech?” Bolan asked.

“We all do.”

“What’s your name?”

She swallowed hard and wiped her tear-streaked cheeks with her palms before replying, “Sherry Krautzer.”

“Okay, Sherry. We’re getting out of here.”

Winter darkness fell quickly in Manitoba. When Bolan pushed the cabin door open, he discovered it was as black as midnight outside. He grabbed Sherry’s hand and started pulling her toward the spot in the woods where his equipment was stashed, realizing before they took half a dozen steps that the snowmobiles he had heard earlier were much closer now.

“Hurry,” he said. “You have to hide in the woods until I take care of them. Understand?”

Her teeth were chattering when she replied, “Marlene said no one would get hurt. But they kept shooting Davey to make Wes tell them. Wes doesn’t know who has the other half. None of us do.”

Bolan jerked her arm roughly, realizing she was going into shock.

“Listen,” he said, pulling her to within inches of his face when they reached the tree line. “If they see you, they’ll kill you. Do you understand me? You have to stay hidden.”

She was nodding when he pushed her to the ground under the canopy of a sprawling pine where she wouldn’t be spotted.

“Don’t move until I come to get you. Understand?”

She nodded again, but the way she kept touching her face with fluttering hands and looking about with vacant eyes did little to reassure Bolan, who understood from experience the unpredictability extreme terror caused.

“Sherry. Do not move until I come get you. They’re coming back to kill you,” he said.

“Okay.” She paused, then repeated, “Okay.”

Bolan left her concealed behind the pine boughs and ran to find a position offering sufficient cover from automatic weapons. Before killing Wes, they had apparently made him watch while they mutilated his friend’s corpse. The fact that they had taken a psychological rather than physical approach to torture was telling. They were either thugs receiving specific instructions from a handler who kept them under tight control, or they were well-trained, intelligent operatives with authority to ad lib. Fanatical terrorists blindly following orders were one thing—skilled professional soldiers dedicated to a greater cause were an entirely different matter. When survival was at stake, Bolan preferred going up against the former.

The snowmobiles appeared in his binoculars as six specks of light when they were still miles from the section where trees grew in shallow stands dotting the open prairie. Sherry said that Davey and Wes were able to give their killers only one-half of the code. Bolan thought amateurs might naively believe they were protected when dealing with terrorist elements by not turning over the complete package until they received full payment. But what an inexperienced person might not understand was a terrorist’s willingness to torture and steal rather than part with money that could be better spent on recruitment, weapons and training. They’d kill everyone involved simply to cover their tracks and eliminate all traces of their transactions. Bolan had witnessed the scenario too many times to count. In a transaction pitting rookies against professionals, the pros always won.

As he watched the approaching snowmobile headlights, he pondered the group’s return. Sherry had tried to make a call on her cell phone, not realizing that out here in the wilderness, the probability of being in range of a communications tower was slim. What she had actually done was send out an electronic ping that announced her presence while it searched for a connection. The killers had to have picked up the transmission on a scanner and realized that the third person they suspected could have been with Davey and Wes was, in fact, in the cabin. They were coming back to finish the job.

They were about to get more than they bargained for, the Executioner thought.

From his position at the base of a thick maple, Bolan reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles. He focused the goggles, bringing the six pinpoints of light into sharp relief. Magnified hundreds of times as they passed through the internal photocathode tube, the photons from the approaching headlights shone with the intensity of search beacons. Each snowmobile carried a single rider, and it appeared that one vehicle was pulling a sled holding something that resembled a miniature howitzer. From its profile, Bolan was sure the item was a weapon of some type. Its pertinent characteristics, he knew, would soon become known. He drew his Beretta 93-R from its shoulder holster, reached into the pouch holding the handgun’s suppressor and screwed the extension onto the end of the pistol’s barrel. He knew there was going to be gunfire, and figured he should delay announcing his location until absolutely necessary.

The snowmobiles maintained a steady speed, splitting up when they came close. The vehicle pulling the sled with the unknown weapon halted approximately twenty yards from the cabin, while two veered off toward Bolan and the other three set out to circle the structure and cruise along the adjacent tree line from the opposite direction. The precision of their maneuver reinforced Bolan’s earlier consideration that they might be skilled combatants. He remained silent as the pair coming his way passed in front of his position, taking note of their weapons as they passed.

The men were armed with Uzi submachine guns slung across their chests on canvas slings. The fixed wooden stocks were characteristic of the very early versions of the famous weapon, but Bolan knew enough not to assume that the vintage models were anything less than lethal.

Through his night-vision goggles, Bolan studied the man with the sled weapon as he began preparing the contraption. At first glance it appeared to be a stubby cylinder mounted onto a rectangular metal box, but as Bolan continued to observe, he noted that the tube was not hollow, and thick cables ran the entire length of the protrusion. There was a sighting mechanism close to one end, and dual handles similar to those found on antiaircraft guns. The operator fiddled with what had to have been dials or switches on his side of the box before grasping the dual handles and maneuvering the tube. The comparison to an antiaircraft gun was further reinforced with the cylinder being mounted on a free-floating ball pedestal affording the gunner complete three-axis rotation.

The two men who had passed Bolan continued on their slow route circling the cabin. They were halfway between Bolan and Sherry’s hiding place when she abruptly burst from under the pine, hysterically begging them not to kill her. As they hastily grabbed to pull their Uzis into firing position, Bolan’s silenced 93-R coughed twice in such rapid succession the rounds sounded as if they shared a single retort.

The first 9 mm Parabellum round struck the driver of the snowmobile on Bolan’s right, entering the base of his neck on an upward trajectory. The hot lead tore through his skull, exiting from the center of his forehead and splattering most of his frontal lobes onto the machine’s dashboard controls. The tissue immediately froze upon contact with cold metal that had been exposed to frigid air for hours. The man’s throttle hand froze in a death grip, causing his snowmobile to surge forward, accelerating him directly into the side of the building where the machine crashed and revved angrily while the spinning tread underneath chewed and spit out a thin stream of snow for a few seconds before stalling.

His partner fared no better. Bolan’s second bullet slammed a millisecond after the first into the middle of his back, piercing his heart and shattering his sternum on its way out. The gaping chest wound left in the slug’s wake was immediately filled with a scarlet fountain rushing forth in a torrent of steaming blood that painted a thick swath across the ground. He slumped forward, bounced off the steering wheel and fell sideways into the snow. His vehicle came to an abrupt stop a few feet from the lifeless body.

The mind-numbing chatter of automatic fire filled the air as the three who had circled the cabin from the other direction opened fire on Sherry. The 9 mm steel-jacketed rounds sliced diagonally from her left knee to her right shoulder, causing the young woman to jerk and dance wildly. A burst into her upper torso lifted her off her feet and hammered her backward into the woods, where she landed faceup, unseeing eyes staring into the star-studded sky.

Realizing they were under attack, the gunmen immediately shifted their fire away from the dead woman and began hosing the woods with a steady stream of lethal lead. Not being sure of Bolan’s position, they swept their weapons in wide overlapping arcs, reducing branches and saplings to a blizzard of matchsticks that rained down onto their intended victim’s head.

With their wild response telling him that his enemies had not yet zeroed in on his position, Bolan remained prone while pulling the Desert Eagle off his hip.

An electronic humming, so low it sounded almost like an earthquake’s rumbling, emanated from the sled weapon. The operator shouted out a warning to his companions seconds before the hum increased in both intensity and pitch. The entire cabin began to vibrate. Thin tendrils of smoke rose from the weathered siding like surface fog rolling across a body of water, then the cabin abruptly burst into flame. An instant later, the propane tank exploded in a fireball reaching two hundred feet into the sky.

Microwave, Bolan thought, immediately elevating the weapon’s operator to the top of his hit list. Unaware that his cohorts on the other side of the cabin were under attack, the gunner leaned forward over a control panel to make an adjustment, exposing the upper half of his body. With the noise from the crackling fire racing through the wooden structure masking his Desert Eagle’s authoritative discharge, Bolan squeezed off a single round while remaining concealed behind the base of the thick maple. The pistol’s hefty .44-caliber slug caught the microwave gunner square in his chest, tossing him airborne for a few seconds. He bounced once upon hitting the frozen ground, landing on his back with arms extended to the sides.

The Executioner directed his fire toward one of the remaining three who was visible beyond the burning cabin. Pulling the trigger as rapidly as he could, he released a stream of bullets, forcing the gunman within his line of sight to dive off his snowmobile and take cover behind the vehicle. Bolan’s rounds sparked and whined as they impacted the snowmobile’s metal fuselage, adding to the visual and auditory chaos of combat.

Displaying a telling level of advanced training, the gunmen fanned out in an attempt to separate sufficiently to establish a triangular focus on Bolan’s position, which was now fully exposed by the Desert Eagle’s prolonged volley. While the two who were still mounted on snowmobiles moved away, the man on the ground covered their progress with his Uzi on full-auto, filling the air around Bolan with deadly shot.

The warrior had seen the maneuver countless times. If he stayed put, his enemies would flank his position and kill him in a cross fire. He remained low while edging away from the tree trunk, waiting for a break when the gunman would be changing magazines. As if his enemy was enacting his mental script, there was a momentary tapering off in the covering fire, and Bolan seized the opportunity to dash in a crouch into the thin woods to the spot ten yards away where he had stashed his snowmobile. As he ran, he ejected the spent magazine in his Desert Eagle, grabbed into his ammo pouch for a fresh one and rammed it home.

Behind him, the cabin groaned once and collapsed on itself with a heavy sigh resembling a man’s final exhale, becoming a fifteen-foot heap of flickering rubble. Without the building’s hungry flames leaping high into the air, visibility was abruptly and dramatically reduced.

Peering through the trees with his night-vision goggles, Bolan could see his adversary in a prone position behind his snowmobile, the stubby muzzle of his Uzi poking around the vehicle’s front end. The man’s partners had moved far enough away to be outside the halo emitted by the burning cabin, apparently playing the odds that their opponent would not be equipped with night vision. Considering what his course of action would be if the tables were turned, Bolan thought his enemies would take cover in one of the little snow gullies before attempting a flanking movement. He jumped onto his snowmobile, revved the powerful motor, and sped straight toward the gunman who had been attempting to pin him down while his partners maneuvered.

In an effort to reduce his profile as much as possible, Bolan hugged his snowmobile’s fuselage as he shot out of the tree line on a direct course for the man lying in a covered position behind his vehicle. Making sure to maintain a straight-on approach to take advantage of the protection his snowmobile’s windshield offered, Bolan fired the Desert Eagle with his left hand, holding the snowmobile’s handlebars steady with his right.

The move obviously surprised his opponent, who hesitated for a fatal second before engaging the fast-approaching warrior with his Uzi, filling the night air with the chilling sound of automatic chatter. The 9 mm lead sprayed wildly across the space separating Bolan from his enemy. Bullets ricocheted off his bulletproof windshield as he charged forward at full throttle, covering the distance between him and his foe in less than thirty seconds. In a move resembling that of a bullfighter, the Executioner swung outward at the last instant in order to avoid a collision, his Desert Eagle roaring death in triple-time tempo. A few rounds sparked upon impact with the gunman’s Uzi a nanosecond before a pair of .44 rounds whizzing through the air in heel-to-toe configuration found the man’s face, exploding his head in a crimson blossom. Bolan pulled hard on the snowmobile’s handlebars while depressing the brake, causing the machine to slide sideways next to the dead man’s vehicle. Throwing himself to the ground, he rolled into a prone position taking advantage of both snowmobiles for cover.

From his new location, he looked out beyond the pile of smoldering rubble of the cabin. One of his two remaining opponents was crawling toward the microwave cannon, while his partner engaged Bolan with a steady stream of lead from the relative safety of a snow gully approximately fifty feet away. Bolan drew his Beretta and fired the silenced weapon with his right hand while simultaneously blazing away with the Desert Eagle in his left, halting the man’s progress toward the cannon and driving him back into the same gully as his teammate. A series of angry curses told him he had hit, albeit not fatally, the gunner trying to reach the microwave weapon.

With his enemies now occupying positions where they could battle him with only their heads exposed above the lip of the gully, the situation was classic trench warfare. Two adversarial forces separated by a no-man’s land one hundred yards wide, with the microwave cannon occupying a position equidistant from both sides. In this situation, the day would belong to the combatant who could flush the other from cover.

Bolan holstered his Beretta, changed out magazines in the Desert Eagle and, while sporadically firing well-aimed shots to prevent his foes from advancing, reached into one of the pouches on his web belt containing a length of thin cord resembling braided dental floss. The three-hundred-foot length of specialty twine was fine enough to fold entirely in the palm of his hand while possessing all the strength of mountaineering rope.

Remaining behind the fuselage of his late adversary’s snowmobile, Bolan reached up and wrapped a section of the cord around the vehicle’s throttle to provide a steady fuel supply. When he turned the ignition key, the engine sprang to life, purring in neutral while he twisted the handlebars to aim the snowmobile toward the gully holding his foes. With the rounds from his Desert Eagle keeping his opponents pinned, Bolan used his free hand to unhook two concussion grenades from his combat belt’s webbing and set the fuses to their maximum thirty seconds. Throwing the shift into gear, he dropped the apple-shaped bombs into the snowmobile’s two cup holders and released the vehicle.

The snowmobile moved on a perfectly straight course from Bolan to the gully, where it toppled into the depression, carrying its lethal load into the trench occupied by the two gunmen. When the grenades detonated with an eardrum-throbbing concussion, they ignited the vehicle’s gas tank, spraying the fuel through the trench in a firestorm reminiscent of a Vietnam napalm attack. The ferocious explosion left no doubt regarding its effectiveness, but Bolan had his Desert Eagle loaded, cocked and held at the ready when he walked to the edge of the snow gully to investigate the damage. His former adversaries were charred beyond recognition, calling to mind the corpse he had discovered inside the cabin.

The Executioner walked slowly back to his snowmobile, started the engine and drove to the microwave weapon. With a remaining section of the cord, he was able to securely attach the sled to his vehicle before setting off toward the North Dakota border approximately seven hours distant. When he got close to the States, he’d come into range of a telephone tower enabling him to make an encrypted call to Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller. She would take care of the necessary cleanup and the retrieval of remains to be delivered to the families of the Nautech engineers.

The hunting horn had been sounded. There were miles to go before the Executioner would find rest.

2

Ali Ansari Hasseim squinted against the water’s glare as he gazed southwest from the outskirts of Bandar-e Abbas, a biblical town on Iran’s Persian coast across the channel from Qeshm Island. Below him sat the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which twenty percent of the world’s oil supply passed. The busy waterway was bordered by Iran, Oman’s Musandam Peninsula and the United Arab Emirates. Were it not for the region’s constant political unrest, the Iranian shoreline’s rugged beauty and perfect climate would have the potential to make the locale one of the world’s top vacation destinations. As it was, however, there were no vacationers in the vicinity. Most of those who ventured along the scenic trails traversed by Hasseim and his ilk were heavily armed with the intent to kill.

For centuries, the coastal strip on which Hasseim and his four companions stood had been recognized as a strategic key to controlling the entire Persian Gulf. Blocking the landlocked waterway’s sole egress at the point where it emptied into the Indian Ocean’s Gulf of Oman was a tactic used at a time when the only power available for ships came from either the wind or human rowers. In contemporary times, closing the Strait of Hormuz would create a logjam, snarling military and commercial traffic alike. In such a situation, American warships patrolling the Gulf would be sitting ducks.

Wind gusts hugging the shoreline whipped a combination of sea salt and desert dust into thin clouds that raced across the land break. Hasseim avoided breathing the gritty mixture by pulling a corner of his black checkered kaffiyeh over his nose and mouth, covering the jagged scar that ran from his left earlobe to the edge of his lower lip, tugging his mouth into a perpetual frown.

In the distance, silhouetted against the horizon out beyond the islands of Hormoz and Larak, Hasseim could see the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the United States Navy’s nuclear aircraft carriers. At the sight of the occupying force, Hassein’s heartbeat quickened in anger. Bitter bile found its way into his mouth, causing him to turn from his companions while he lifted the corner of his kaffiyeh and spit the rancid liquid onto the ground where it was immediately absorbed into the dust.

His network of spies kept Hasseim informed as to the location of the other CVN-class ship in the region, enabling him to redirect missile deployments when necessary. The militia commander was fully aware that when the time arrived to punish the infidels for invading and occupying sacred soil, the window of opportunity would be short-lived. For a missile attack on multiple targets to be successfully coordinated, prior placement of troops and equipment was absolutely critical.

As he waited for his captives to be delivered, Hasseim mentally inventoried his militia’s missile stocks. In the area around Bandar-e Lengeh at the mouth of the strait, trusted fighters possessed more than four hundred American-made FIM-92A Stinger missiles. The shoulder-launched weapons had been among tens of thousands provided by the CIA in 1979 to mujahideen guerrillas engaged in their nine-year war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Two decades later, when Western forces responding to the 9/11 attacks toppled the country’s Taliban government, they attempted to round up and confiscate an estimated thirty thousand residual Stingers. But in a swiftly deteriorating country where there were more pressing priorities for the NATO troops than disarming regional warlords, a hastily conducted campaign yielded less than six thousand missiles. The remainder were quickly reallocated throughout the Middle East to Islamic militias such as Hasseim’s. With the ability to deliver a 2.2-pound high-explosive warhead at supersonic Mach 2 speed from a range of up to five miles, the thirty-five-pound highly portable Stingers were major assets for any militant organization.

In addition to the Stingers, Hasseim also had access to six hundred Soviet SA-7 Grail missiles that had been sold indiscriminately to anyone willing to meet the asking price when the Communist empire collapsed. Although Grails were considerably less accurate than the heat-seeking Stingers, they possessed a range of almost four miles and, in quantity, could overcome their accuracy deficiency and contribute significantly to overall success.

All told, Hasseim held the means to attack the two United States aircraft carriers patrolling the channel’s narrow passageway at Hormuz with more than one thousand missiles. Troops to the southeast in Sirik would join fighters positioned in Bandar-e Lengeh at the mouth of the strait and across the waterway in Al Khasab to completely surround backlogged targets. Hundreds of missiles guided by infrared seekers would come raining down from all sides onto the enemy’s warships, delivering a stunning statement about the technological capabilities possessed by local Islamic militias. While certainly not on par with the glorious 9/11 attacks conducted on the barbarians’ own soil, Hasseim believed his offensive could be a decisive blow toward ending American occupation of the region. The only hurdle remaining was a computer system onboard American carriers that automatically shielded the vessels while engaging incoming targets. Hasseim now possessed one-half of a program that could disarm the protective system. If all went according to plan, he’d have the other half very soon.

At the moment, his activities were intended to misdirect the Americans. Hasseim didn’t know if his plans would be discovered prior to launching an attack, but if they were, he wanted to make sure the Americans were searching in the wrong direction until he had the time he needed.

The four men accompanying their field commander were dressed in dark pants and brown shirts with long sleeves. On their feet they wore canvas combat boots, and each carried P-90 submachine guns.

The men also wore black checkered head scarves, identical to the kaffiyeh worn by their leader. Hasseim’s army was one hundred percent Shiite, and in addition to their primary objective of driving the occupying infidels from their holy land, each member had also taken a solemn oath to eradicate the Sunni population responsible for polluting Islam.

A sudden movement in the distance caught Hasseim’s eye. A battered white panel truck was speeding their way, trailing in its wake a yellow dust cloud reaching ten feet into the air. Hasseim nodded to his companions, who walked away from their SUV in order to put a buffer of safe distance between themselves. As they moved, they brought their P-90s to the ready position.

The truck bounced over the dusty coastal trail at breakneck speed, coming to a skidding halt ten feet from where Hasseim stood. The front doors flew open, and two men jumped out and hustled to the commander.

“Allah be praised,” the first said breathlessly, “your servants have been blessed with success.”

“You have them all?” Hasseim asked in a flat voice.

“Yes,” the driver replied as he and his companion began moving toward the back of the truck. Hasseim followed a few steps behind, his P-90 loaded and cocked. His right index finger itched with anticipation as it rested on the weapon’s trigger.

When they reached the vehicle’s rear, the driver unlocked the back door and threw it open. On the floor inside, five men lay with their feet tied and their hands bound behind their backs with heavy nylon wrist wraps. Burlap bags covered their heads, loosely cinched at the throat with black shoelaces. Three were wearing United States Army uniforms, the unit patch on their left shoulders bearing the numeral one embroidered in red thread. They were members of The Big Red One—the Army’s First Infantry Division.

Hasseim’s lips curled into a cruel smile when he saw his quarry.

“The others?” he asked, indicating the two in civilian dress with the barrel of his P-90 submachine gun.

“Munjian,” the driver responded, referring to a secondary Sunni militia operating along the Iraqi border.

Hasseim signaled to the men who had come with him, and they trotted to his side. He motioned toward the captives with his chin, and two bent into the truck, grabbed a soldier by the uniform and dragged him to the floor’s edge. Upon being moved, the trussed man began jerking against his restraints, repeatedly arching his back until Hasseim took a step forward and gave the burlap bag covering the man’s head a sharp rap with the butt of his submachine gun. The soldier stiffened at the blow and stopped squirming.

Once the bound prisoner was still, one of Hasseim’s men gripped him under the armpits while another grabbed him around his knees. Grunting under the effort, they lifted the trussed American and hefted him clear of the truck’s cargo hold, making space for their two teammates to duplicate their action with a second soldier. The truck’s driver and his companion followed suit when the second team moved away, pulling the final soldier from the back of the truck. Staggering slightly, they followed the others, carrying their soldier from the vehicle toward a spot designated by Hasseim roughly twenty yards away. There the soldiers were thrown onto the ground to await their fate. Although they remained motionless, their raspy breathing could be heard through the burlap sacks covering their heads, as rapid and shallow as a trapped rabbit’s.

“Move them apart,” Hasseim ordered as he slung his P-90 over his shoulder. While his men obeyed his order, he walked to the panel truck’s open passenger door, reached into the leg space in front of the seat and came out holding an Uru Model II submachine gun. The stockless 9 mm Brazilian assault rifle had a well-earned reputation for fouling when exposed to the slightest amount of moisture or dust in the chamber. Despite its notorious unreliability, the inexpensive weapon with its 30-round magazines was a favorite among Third World militias. The Sunni Munjian was known to have outfitted their members with Urus.

Hasseim rammed the rifle’s slide to the rear and let it fly forward, chambering the first of the thirty slugs waiting inside the clip. After scanning the area with dispassionate eyes to make sure his men were clear, he pulled the weapon into his shoulder and, leaning forward slightly, opened fire on the trussed soldiers laying on the ground.

The Uru spit death on full-auto, filling the air with mind-panicking chatter. Hasseim swept the gun from left to right and back again, hosing the men from head to toe with lethal lead. The 9 mm slugs tore the corpses to pieces, slamming through flesh and bone before exiting through gaping holes the size of tennis balls. The Uru’s firing pin finally clicked onto an open chamber, and the weapon fell silent.

Hasseim’s eyes were glassy, his face flushed. He placed the Uru on the ground at his feet and turned to the truck’s passenger seat. This time, he brought an American M-16 from the front leg well.

The two Sunni militiamen were chanting death prayers when they were pulled from the back of the truck to a spot thirty yards from the soldiers’ corpses. There they were unceremoniously dumped onto the ground, and Hasseim reenacted his prior murderous action, spraying the captives with M-16 rounds.

When the magazine was exhausted, he lowered the rifle, his ears ringing from the auditory assault of the M-16’s automatic barrage. His rapid breathing irritated the inside of his nostrils with the stench of death and cordite that now hung heavy in the late afternoon humidity. As his men rushed forward to cut the bonds from the dead men, he took a few steps back, handing the empty M-16 to one of his assistants. When Hasseim’s men finished arranging the bodies, it would appear all had died in a firefight. Skirmishes between independent militia and NATO forces were an everyday occurrence in this region; there would be no reason for anyone to doubt the evidence.

“Abbas,” Hasseim called out, bringing a thin young man with alert brown eyes to his side. “Give this to one of them,” he said softly, holding out an eight-gigabyte memory stick wrapped tightly in a plastic sandwich bag.

Abbas took the memory stick and hustled to the side of the Sunni on the left as Hasseim began walking to his SUV. Only he and his driver would take the trip back, the others would remain to arrange the scene.

“The Americans will be alerted?” Hasseim asked the driver, although his tone conveyed the question was more a statement than an inquiry.

“Within hours. We’ll give them GPS coordinates. They’ll be here tonight,” the driver replied.

Hasseim took a final look toward the water when they reached their vehicle. The sun was low, reflecting off the Gulf’s rippled surface. In his mind, he pictured the narrow channel jammed with American warships. From the highlands above the strait, militiamen equipped with hundreds of missiles would find the unprotected vessels easy targets. Allah be willing, the remainder of the code would be delivered to his servants and the infidels would be destroyed.

Running a dry tongue over his chapped lips, Hasseim climbed into his SUV. For the first time since morning, he thought of his most recent partners in Las Vegas, the city that in Hasseim’s mind, said all there was to say about Western civilization.

3

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Hal Brognola was sitting at the conference table, engaged in quiet conversation with Carmen Delahunt and Akira Tokaido, two-thirds of what Aaron Kurtzman considered to be the best cybernetics team anywhere. They stopped talking and looked up when Mack Bolan stepped into the room.

“Striker,” Hal Brognola greeted the warrior.

Bolan pulled a chair away from the conference table and slid in next to Delahunt.

“Something I didn’t ask,” he said, looking at Brognola as if they were in the middle of a conversation, “was how they came to our attention in the first place.”

“Homeland Security phone monitoring,” Brognola replied. “Key words and patterns flagged them for follow-up investigation. Akira started looking into their actions three weeks ago.”

The hacker snapped his bubble gum a few times in rapid succession before saying, “Rookies. Lame attempts to cover their tracks. E-mail, phone and bank records are all over the place. They’re definitely selling a code they say will disable ADAS.”

From his seat a good six feet away, Bolan could hear a tinny percussive sound coming from Tokaido’s high-fidelity earbuds. As he often did, he wondered how the young man could hear and carry on normal conversations while rock music was coursing at ear-splitting volume into his auditory canals.

“If we know who they are and what they’re trying to do, why don’t we just go get them?” Bolan asked.

The others looked directly at Brognola, who said, “Let’s wait until everyone gets here. Carmen has to be brought up to date, too.”

The wait was not long. Bolan poured himself a cup of coffee from the insulated carafe placed next to the cups. The coffee was a high-quality blend, not Kurtzman’s horrid brew. He had barely taken his first sip when the door to the War Room opened.

Barbara Price entered first, followed by Huntington Wethers, then Kurtzman pushing his wheelchair forward with both hands, a cup of his infamously strong coffee in a holder mounted to the chair’s left arm.

The three found places at the conference table, Price sitting directly across from Bolan, whom she greeted with a slight smile as she eased herself onto the upholstered cushion and pulled her seat closer to the table. Kurtzman moved to the open spot at the head as nonchalantly as if a chair had never occupied the space there.

“Who’s up?” he asked while taking his brimming coffee cup from its holder and tasting a small mouthful of the steaming drink before putting it onto the conference table’s highly polished surface.

“Let’s get a summary,” Brognola answered. “Striker asked how we initially latched on to them, and Carmen has been out of the loop. Akira?”

“Robbie Maxwell’s group,” Tokaido said, referring to the team’s contact at Homeland Security, “picked up keywords and phrases. Not sure if it was random. Home Security monitors employees at companies like Nautech more than ordinary citizens. After the initial alert, Maxwell put one of his guys into Nautech’s facility in San Diego while we investigated four engineers whose names he gave us. Like I just said to Striker, they tried covering their tracks, but it was easy to trace phone calls and money deposits into numbered accounts in the Caymans. Each account received a deposit of five million dollars.

“Bank records led us to the four engineers,” Tokaido continued, ticking off each name with his fingers. “Sherry Krautzer, David Thompson, Wesley Maple and Marlene Piaseczna. Maxwell’s group was all set to arrest them when the four suddenly vanished.”

“Security leak?” Wethers asked, displaying the methodological approach that Kurtzman had known would be a perfect complement to Delahunt’s intuition skills.

“We thought so at first,” Brognola jumped in to answer the question. “But Maxwell’s guy was very discreet. These four were not tipped-off. They were just lucky.”

“Not too lucky,” Bolan said in a flat voice, remembering the names spoken by the young woman at the cabin who had identified herself as Sherry Krautzer. “Three of them are dead. Marlene Piaseczna is the only one who wasn’t in Manitoba.”

“We believe she’s the ringleader,” Brognola replied, “but Maxwell also thought there could be a fifth conspirator. Akira’s money trail gives support to that idea. Twenty-one million withdrawn from the source banks, but only twenty million redeposited into the four accounts in the Caymans.”

“I can see young engineers going on a wild spending spree,” Delahunt said. “Fast cars, electronic gadgets, designer clothes and jewelry—a kid with money for the first time could go through a quarter mil in nothing flat.”

“But they didn’t,” Brognola said. “We’ve been into their apartments. There’s some evidence they were planning to leave the country, but they didn’t go out and buy a bunch of stuff. That missing million bothers me.”

“Did the Piaseczna woman betray her comrades?” Price asked.

“I don’t think so,” Bolan answered. “If there were separate accounts in the Caymans for each name individually—” he glanced at Tokaido, who gave him a confirming nod “—she wouldn’t be able to get at her co-conspirators’ money, so greed wasn’t a motive. The killers in Manitoba tried to strong-arm the remaining code from the engineers there. They didn’t have it. Piaseczna must be holding the second half the buyers wanted, and she was savvy enough to make sure everything would never be in one location.”

“Striker’s right,” Brognola said. “Homeland Security couldn’t put names to the killers’ corpses you left at the cabin in Manitoba, but they’re sure they were from the Middle East.”

“Amateurs!” Kurtzman exploded from the end of the table. “Stupid engineers! Thinking they could hold back half the code and leverage it into providing protection for themselves. Didn’t they realize their customers were cold-blooded murderers?”

“Never mind their customers,” Brognola said. “What about their new partners?”

Turning to Bolan, he added, “You’ll love this. Maxwell put some of his people on the money trail. It also leads to the McCarthy Family in Las Vegas.

“It seems,” the man from Justice continued, “that our engineers hired McCarthy to be a go-between for the final piece. According to Maxwell’s Las Vegas source, the remaining segment of code is apparently planned for delivery to one of McCarthy’s men. McCarthy is passing it on to the terrorists, whoever they are.”

“Slick move,” Price said. “The engineers must have been terrified of their buyers. They thought delivering half the code would keep them safe until they got all their money. But they knew once their customers had the complete product there would be no reason not to kill them. So they hired the Mob to make the final delivery. Slick but stupid. Out of the frying pan. How reliable are Maxwell’s sources, Hal?”

“They’re good. After 9/11, Homeland Security realized the crime families might be tempted at some point to link up with a terrorist element. They have some deep plants in McCarthy’s organization.”

“How would young engineers in San Diego go about hiring the Mob? How would they get the initial contact?” Price asked.

“Too many possibilities,” Wethers answered. “A friend of a friend’s friend, an in-law connection, it could be anything. Pursuing that question is probably not worthwhile. More than that, I’d want to know how they linked up with the terrorists.”

“Internet,” Brognola said confidently. “Employees at defense firms, especially young engineers, are prime targets for subversive groups. If these engineers went looking, they’d easily find a buyer.”

“But we don’t know who that buyer is,” Wethers interjected.

Brognola finger-combed his hair while shaking his head. “No, we don’t.”

Delahunt said, “It doesn’t matter. The important fact is that someone has to get to McCarthy, find out where Piaseczna is planning to make the final drop-off and stop her from doing it.”

“I agree,” Price said. Looking across the table at Bolan. “I guess you’re going to Sin City.”

“What about the microwave weapon?” Kurtzman asked of the contraption now stored in one of the outbuildings on the compound.

“Marketing,” Tokaido answered. “It’s years behind microwave research, not state-of-the-art at all. I think they built it at their cabin to show they were real engineers. When Piaseczna contacted potential buyers, what did she have for credentials? Something like that gives a rogue engineer credibility.”

“Then it served its purpose,” Bolan stated. “And it led us to where we are.”

He stared into the distance as if he could see through the walls to where the woman named Marlene Piaseczna was hiding.

“Rogue engineer, indeed,” Kurtzman said softly. “Stop the sale, Striker. You have to make sure—” He was interrupted by the buzzing of his PDA, which he pulled from a pouch on the side of his wheelchair.

His face transformed into a frown as he held the module at arm’s length and read the display.

“There was a firefight early this morning across the Iraqi border in Iran,” he told the Stony Man Farm team. “A few United States soldiers and two Sunni were killed. One of them was carrying a piece of ADAS code.”

“I think,” Wethers said into the sudden silence, “we may have stumbled upon the buyers.”

4

Bolan pushed through the bodies pressing against him on all sides. The sound of helicopter blades cut the night air, appearing to be coming from every direction. The mere sound of choppers swooping down from a black sky like prehistoric birds of prey was often enough to bring the fainthearted to the very brink of panic. As Bolan moved forward, the airships’ ear-thumping reverberations stirred vestiges indelibly ingrained in his combat psyche, sending a rush of adrenaline to his brain. His eyes darted back and forth, constantly assessing and reassessing his environment as he made his way forward.

A silver beam shot to earth from one of the choppers, sweeping across the ground below as if searching for an escapee, pausing from time to time to randomly illuminate individuals who were pushed and pulled at the whim of the pulsating crowd. Off to Bolan’s left, a series of underwater explosions sent steaming geysers swirling two hundred feet into the sky. Seconds later, the acrid smell of burning cordite reached his nostrils as yellow flames burst from the windows of concrete buildings erected behind the dock where a fully rigged pirate ship bobbed on the moat’s gentle ripples. The leaping flames illuminated the stage in a flickering light.

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