The armor-piercing slug sizzled past Bolan’s face

It singed his cheek with its hot tailwind as Bolan threw himself behind the exit housing. Though the metal door and plaster walls concealed him from the sniper, they wouldn’t stop the Barrett’s rounds from finding flesh and bone.

The shooter quickly demonstrated, slamming his next shot right through the structure three feet above roof level, where a crouching man’s head might be found. Bolan was lower, lying prone, but his would-be killer still had six shots left before he’d be forced to reload—virtually guaranteeing at least one stunning hit.

It was time to move—no mistake.

But left or right? It was a gamble, either way, and Bolan knew that he was running out of time.

He hedged his bets, triggered a shot around the right-hand corner—the shooter’s left—then rolled out the other way as two suppressed rounds ripped into the wall that had shielded him. One blew away a fist-size chunk of plaster, while the second came through, dead-on, where Bolan had been a heartbeat earlier.

And by that time, the Executioner was clear, wide-open for the man who meant to kill him, scuttling across the sun-baked roof on stinging hands and knees, seeking a kill-shot of his own.

Enemy Agents

The Executioner®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Staff Sergeant Jared C. Monti

September 20, 1975–June 21, 2006

Gowardesh Valley, Afghanistan

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

—Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929–1968

Some soldiers hate their enemies without understanding them. I hate what my enemies stand for because I understand them.

—Mack Bolan

THE

MACK BOLAN

LEGEND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Epilogue

Prologue

Lake County, California

“I don’t like all these trees,” Jeff Deacon said. “They make me nervous.”

Ed Johnson, one of his protectors, frowned at him and said, “I thought you were some kind of big outdoorsman. Camping, hunting, all of that.”

“I am,” Deacon replied. “But down where I come from, it’s mostly desert. You can see for miles and know if anybody’s watching you.”

“Still worried?” asked Dan Smith, the other bodyguard. “You know we’ve got you covered seven ways from Sunday.”

“Right. The two of you,” Deacon said, making no attempt to cover his disdain for what the Feds deemed adequate protection.

“You’re about to hurt my feelings, Jeff,” Smith said. “And you know that we’ve got reinforcements standing by in Sacramento.”

“Fifty miles away. Does me a lot of good, if something happens,” Deacon groused. “That’s nearly half an hour by air, if you’ve got people suited up and waiting in the chopper when you hit the panic button.”

“You just need to relax,” Johnson, the taller of the two deputy U.S. marshals said. “Nobody followed us up here. We’ve used this place before without a hitch. It’s off the grid.”

But Deacon couldn’t just relax. His spit-and-polish watch-dogs didn’t have a clue to what it meant when you were really off the grid. They’d been to school, learned weapons and karate and a lot of codes for talking on the radio, but what in hell did either of them really know about the threat he faced?

In two days Jeff Deacon was supposed to testify before a federal grand jury in San Francisco, and damn near anything could happen before then.

Was it too late to change his mind? Hell, yes.

At this point it wouldn’t matter if he recanted all his statements to the Feds and crawled back to his former comrades on his hands and knees, begging for mercy. There was no forgiveness in the real world. He’d be lucky if they only shot him, without making an example of him for the rest.

Deacon had witnessed one such lesson, and it still cropped up in nightmares that he couldn’t shake. The thought of dying that way made him want to snatch a pistol from his bodyguards and finish it right then.

And if he lived to testify, even survived the long trial that was sure to follow…then, what? Even with a new name, maybe some plastic surgery, how long could he survive as a “protected” witness?

Deacon knew the score on that game. While they needed you, before a jury voted “guilty” on whichever scumbag they were trying to convict, the Feds were your best friends. But afterward, even when they’d delivered on the promise of a new life, last week’s courtroom VIP was cut adrift, the coverage reduced to spot checks at erratic intervals, or maybe phone calls on his birthday.

Deacon imagined such a call. Hey, Jeff…er, I mean Englebert! That’s it! How’s every little thing out there in Numbnuts, Alabama? Are you loving it?

But Deacon hated it already.

“It’s my turn to barbecue,” Smith said. “You feel like steak or burgers?”

“Burgers,” Deacon answered, like he gave a damn.

“I’m on it,” Smith said, detouring through the A-frame’s kitchen for supplies, then on to the rear deck. “You want to get the door, Ed?”

Smith’s partner put his newspaper aside, got off the couch and ambled to the sliding door. It was a lot of glass for a safe-house. Deacon had asked, first thing, if it was bulletproof, and one of his protectors had advised him not to worry. Maybe it was bulletproof, which wouldn’t help him if the sliding door was open.

And he had to give the snipers credit. Deacon didn’t know how long they had been watching, waiting, but they fired in unison as soon as his two babysitters were exposed. He didn’t hear the shots, but saw their impact. Crimson spouting from the wounds in two slack bodies as they toppled to the hardwood floor.

Shitshitshitshit! was all Deacon could think.

He bolted, knowing that the back of the house was covered and he had no place to hide inside the A-frame. He considered doubling back to grab one of the Glocks his late protectors carried, but that would’ve meant exposure to the riflemen outside.

Which left the front door, with the marshals’ two-year-old Jeep Cherokee standing outside. He didn’t have the keys, of course, so there’d be no escape with gravel spewing out behind him. No high-speed pursuit along that winding mountain road.

All he could do was run, and Deacon knew that it would be a freaking miracle if he made more than twenty paces from the cabin.

But he didn’t even get that far.

Three men were waiting for him when he yanked open the front door. Deacon recognized the tallest of them, and the other two were suddenly irrelevant.

“Hey, Jeff,” his killer said, “we’ve missed you. Aren’t you gonna ask us in?”

1

Apple Valley, California

The motorcycle was a Harley Davidson Nightster, that sinister offspring of the classic Sportster produced in 2007 by designer Rich Christoph, who had said in the press that he wanted people to wonder if the bike was legal. Mission accomplished.

The Nightster’s paint was billed as “vivid black,” from chopped fenders and gas tank to the ventilated chain guard to the matte-finished 1200 cc Evolution engine itself. The bike had black steel-laced wheels, black low-rise handlebars, black front-fork gaiters, and a black seat mounted barely two feet off the pavement. The only hints of chrome showed on the rear springs and the dual slash-cut exhausts.

This night, Mack Bolan had the Nightster up to eighty-something miles per hour on a desert highway going anywhere and nowhere, arrow-straight as far as the headlight could burn through the darkness. He savored the cooling breeze on his face, in his hair, creeping under the worn leather jacket he wore over nondescript T-shirt and jeans.

He sensed that the desert was seething with life—and with death—around him, but it sparked no fear. For the moment, at least, he was the baddest thing in the valley.

He saw the roadhouse up ahead, putting it just two miles outside town. The neon sign out front read Scoots. With no apostrophe, he didn’t know if it had been misspelled or was supposed to be a verb.

Bolan had two-wheeled it from Los Angeles, seventy-odd miles behind him now, to find this rundown dive. It wasn’t the kind of place where he’d normally drop in to sample the brew.

This night was work, not playtime. He had buzzed through L.A. traffic, through its eastern suburbs and into the wasteland of San Bernardino County to locate a target.

The mission, as always, was search and destroy—but he couldn’t be hasty.

This outing required some finesse.

Approaching Scoots, he scanned the parking lot. It had the standard vehicle assortment for a rural juke joint—dusty pickups, desert-bleached sedans—and two new SUVs. The only other bike, an old Japanese model, had been parked around the west side of the roadhouse, chained to a steel hitching post.

Bolan rumbled into the lot, smelling beer on the breeze before he was clear of the two-lane blacktop. Music was playing in the bar, but all he got was base line, like the heartbeat of a drowsy dinosaur. Inside, it would be loud and smoky.

Cruising the lot, he eyed the SUVs, one Hummer H2 and one Ford Explorer, both shiny beneath a patina of dust that no ride in the desert could ever escape. Bolan rolled past them, backed into an unmarked space near a cage filled with squat propane tanks and switched off the motorcycle.

He dismounted, pocketed the Harley’s key, and let his fingers stray for just a second to the black KA-BAR Bowie knife sheathed on his hip. State law in California granted him permission for the fighting knife, as long as it was not concealed. It made a statement, right up front, and if the message didn’t come across, its nine-inch blade could emphasize the point.

Bolan moved to the bar’s stout front door, steel-toed Red Wing 988 motorcycle boots crunching sand and cracked concrete under thick soles. He pulled the door open, stepped into the racket and haze.

Scoots was like any other low-end roadhouse found from coast-to-coast, border-to-border. Same songs on the juke box, same signs advertising basic beers and whiskeys for the drinker who came in without a plan in mind. There was a kitchen in the back that smelled all right, considering. Bolan supposed the burgers would be safe enough, and felt his stomach growl in answer to the thought.

Scoots had a fair crowd for the time of night, still short of nine o’clock. He found an empty booth midway along the south wall, made a beeline for it without meeting anybody’s gaze along the way.

Some of the drinkers checked him out, while others were already drifting on an alcoholic tide toward sweet oblivion. Two bartenders were working, one of them a porky bouncer-type who hadn’t shaved in several days, the other a willowy redhead who seemed a cut or two above the level of her customers. One barmaid for the tables, circulating constantly with no apparent time to rest.

Before he sat, Bolan already had his targets marked.

All he had to do was wait.

“NEW GUY,” LARRY MOSIER said around a bite of porterhouse.

Clay Halsey glanced up from his T-bone, toward the stranger, taking in his chiseled face and rangy build. He looked like another drifter, passing through.

“Nobody,” he replied.

“Can’t have the same old faces every night,” Steve Webb chimed in.

“Some of them never change,” Mosier said.

“’Cept for getting uglier and older,” Tommy Gruber added, reaching out for his Corona longneck.

Including Brian Doolan, they were five in number at a table near the middle of the room. Halsey supposed they were considered regulars, spending at least one night a week at Scoots when they were in the area, but he would never put himself in the same class as those who always seemed to have a bar stool claimed whenever he stopped by. Scoots was a place for Halsey to relax, wash down a steak with beer from time to time, but it would never be a lifestyle.

He felt certain he would always stand apart from, the sweaty laborers and farmhands who had nowhere else to go after they clocked out from another working day. He was their natural superior.

Not that he’d ever say that to their faces.

It was all about equality these days—at least, for people of a certain kind, he thought, a common breed and background. There were no blacks in the bar. No Asians or Hispanics, either. Scoots had no sign on the door forbidding them to enter—which, of course, would violate the law and bring the Feds to crack their whips—but most people knew where they’re welcome.

And where they’re not.

“So, anyway,” Webb said, “about the shipment—”

“I’m still working on it,” Halsey interrupted.

“All I’m saying is, they got the money, and—”

“I know they got the money, Steve. I paid them. And we’ll get the product, one way or another.”

“Okay, then. Because the German—”

“Can I eat my steak in peace? Is that too much to ask?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just relax and change the subject.”

“I’m looking forward to the exercise this weekend,” Doolan said. “Try out that new HK416. The rotary diopter sight’s supposed to make a world of difference.”

“If you can shoot to start with,” Gruber said.

“I’ve got a Franklin says I shade you on the range, when ever.”

“I could use the money,” Gruber told him. “Where and when?”

“You fellas aren’t about to drop your trousers, are you?” Mosier asked. “Because I’m eating, here.”

“Eat me, why don’t you?” Doolan offered.

“Can’t,” Mosier replied. “I’m cutting back on fat.”

That got a laugh around the table, Doolan being just a little on the porky side, compared to his companions. He was working on a comeback, getting nowhere with it, when the front door groaned again and trouble walked into the bar.

“Well, shit,” Gruber said.

Six, no, seven bikers entered, dressed in faded denim bearing one-percenter patches, swastikas and lightning bolts. Two of them were long hairs and all sported some variation of sideburns, mustaches, or beards. Their jewelry mixed gold and stainless steel, running toward heavy rings and chains that dangled from their vests or belts.

They all wore knives.

“Are they—?”

Before Mosier could finish it, one of the bikers half turned to address the others, giving Halsey and his crew a clear view of the rockers on his back.

“Not Comancheros,” Halsey said.

“Okay. So just a friggin’ eyesore,” Gruber said.

“Don’t sweat it,” Halsey ordered. “Assholes have to eat, the same as anybody else.”

“But do they have to eat with us?”

“Don’t borrow trouble,” Mosier said. “We’ve got enough of it, already.”

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Halsey said. “We’ll get what’s coming to us. Everybody will.”

“I like the sound of that,” Doolan said, scooping up another spoonful of three-alarm chili. He chased it with beer, which emptied his bottle. “Who wants a refill?”

“I could use one,” Gruber said.

“Me, too,” Mosier added.

“I’m all right,” Halsey answered.

“Same here,” Webb replied.

“Three it is,” Doolan said. He looked around for the waitress and saw she was serving the guy who’d come in by himself earlier. “Hell, I’ll get ’em myself. Save the tip.”

“That’s the spirit,” Halsey said, and watched Doolin head for the bar.

BOLAN’S HAMBURGER LOOKED GOOD, smelled good and tasted better. He chewed slowly, fleetingly regretting he hadn’t had time to finish before the contingent of bikers had entered.

They wore Diableros colors, which fit with the San Berdoo turf, green patches depicting Loki, the Norse god of mischief. Bolan knew the gang had been investigated by the FBI and ATF, resulting in a series of arrests including counts of robbery, assault, extortion, drug and weapons violations.

Situation normal for the “one-percent” fraternity.

He wondered who they were and where they’d come from, how Brognola or his contacts had collected and prepared them, then delivered them in time to fit his schedule.

Unless…

It crossed his mind that these might be real bikers, after all. Bolan hadn’t made a detailed study of the subject, but he knew that there were “outlaw” motorcycle gangs—OMGs in FBI parlance—scattered worldwide. According to the Feds, they earned at least one billion dollars yearly in the States alone, from various illegal enterprises. Dominated by the “Big Four”—Hells Angels, Outlaws, Bandidos and Pagans—some three hundred gangs claimed turf from coast-to-coast, with others roaming from Canada through Britain and Europe, as far afield as Australia and New Zealand.

The odds of meeting random real-life bikers in a place like Scoots on any given night?

Pretty damned good.

Which could be problematic for Bolan’s plan. If these were faux bikers, cast by Brognola or someone else at Justice to play the part for one night, then Bolan was right on track. Conversely, if it turned out they were members of a real club passing through, his scheme could be derailed.

Bolan used the time to finish his burger and make a good start on the fries, while he watched the maybe-bikers make room at the bar by elbowing other drinkers aside. No one complained, including the burly bartender, who clearly knew a stacked deck when he saw one.

How would it play?

If these were Brognola’s men, they’d been sent to start a fight with Bolan’s targets, giving him a chance to lend a hand and make new friends. He normally preferred a more direct approach, without the playacting and subterfuge, but the Executioner was versatile.

He’d even played the role of a Mafia “black ace” for several months, back in his old life, and had sold it to the toughest critics in the world.

Before he buried them.

This night’s job should be simple by comparison, if he could use that term for any mission where his life was balanced on a razor’s edge. All Bolan had to do was watch and wait.

The bikers would start something with his targets, or they wouldn’t. If they did, he’d have to hope that they were agents, not a group of thugs strung out on meth and alcohol, picking a fight just for the hell of it. Real bikers would be more of a challenge, and they wouldn’t hesitate to stick a knife between his ribs or put a bullet in his head, if Bolan interfered with their idea of fun.

See how it goes, he thought, still working on his fries. Either way he’d get the job done. The waitress passed by, asking if he needed anything. A little flirty smile to sell it, and he asked her for a refill on the coffee. As she poured it, raucous laughter echoed from the bar. Her smile became a nervous frown.

“Bad news?” he asked.

“Could be.”

“Are those guys regulars?”

“We get the type a lot,” she said. “Same patches, too. But I don’t recognize them.”

“Thanks,” Bolan said, when she’d finished topping off his mug. “Be careful, eh?”

“I’m always careful, mister.”

Words to live by.

Bolan sipped his coffee, while the bikers downed their first round of beers and called for refills, telling the beefy bartender to run a tab. Again, he didn’t argue.

Could be trouble there, if they refused to pay, but nothing helpful. Bolan wasn’t there to serve Scoots as a cooler or to collect its bar bills. If the might-be outlaws didn’t drag his targets into it, he’d have no play.

Just then, one of the long-haired bikers turned with beer in hand, back to the bar, and scanned the room. He looked a little bleary-eyed, which could’ve been an act or the combined effect of chemicals and desert night-riding. From Bolan’s angle on the sidelines, he was ill-equipped to judge.

But he felt hopeful when the guy nudged one of his companions, pointing toward the table where five men hunched over plates of food, and said, “Well, lookee here. Those pricks are in our seats.”

“AW, SHIT!”

“What is it now?” Clay Halsey asked.

“They’re coming over here,” Doolin replied. “Who is?”

“Those punks. Who do you think?”

“Just chill,” Halsey advised. “We’re in a public place. The rule of law prevails.”

“You think so?” Gruber asked him.

“So they tell me,” Halsey said. “Until it doesn’t, anyway.”

“And when’s that?” Webb asked.

“When I say so.”

Halsey didn’t turn to watch the motorcycle scum advancing on him. He could hear them coming, and a moment later he could smell them. Sweat and motor oil, a mix Halsey sometimes thought of as Eau de White Trash.

Not that he’d ever say as much out loud. Too many good ol’ boys might take offense and look for someone else to stoke their rage.

Halsey ignored the bikers as they ranged themselves behind him, concentrating on his meal. He’d see a sucker punch before it landed, telegraphed by the expressions of his four dinner companions, and the steak knife in his hand could do some wicked damage in a pinch.

But Halsey hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

The very last thing that he needed was another incident involving cops and bad publicity. The media was after him already, snapping at his heels, sniffing around for dirt. As for police—

“You’re in our seats,” one of the bikers said, somewhere behind Halsey and well above him.

“Our seats,” another of them echoed, sounding like an idiot.

Halsey swallowed the bite of steak that he’d been chewing, half turned in his seat, keeping his knife and fork in hand.

“I think there must be some mistake,” he told the long-haired man who appeared to be the leader of this motley pack.

“You made it,” the biker said, grinning through a salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee.

“I mean to say,” Halsey explained, “that we’ve been here for something like an hour and a half. You just walked in.”

“Don’t matter,” the leader said. “They’re reserved.”

“Someone forgot to post it, then,” replied Halsey, feeling heat rise in his face. “You need to take it up with management.”

“We need this table and these friggin’ chairs,” the biker said with a sneer. “And management ain’t sittin’ in ’em.”

“We’ll be pleased to move,” Halsey replied. “As soon as we’re all finished with our dinner. And dessert.”

He knew the afterthought was pushing it, but figured why not?

Sometimes a spot of trouble couldn’t be avoided after all.

“You’re finished now,” the long-haired biker said, then spat a stream of brown tobacco juice directly onto Halsey’s plate.

“Looks done to me,” another biker observed.

Halsey considered stabbing the tobacco-chewer, but he knew the penalty for using deadly force unless his life was clearly threatened. Stifling the killer urge, he said, “That’s inconvenient. Now I’ll have to get another steak and start from scratch.”

“He’s fuckin’ with you, man,” one of the bikers told his chief.

“You think so?” the leader asked.

“Hell, yeah,” another said.

“That’s one stupid-ass mistake,” the leader said. Addressing Halsey, he inquired, “Is that right, boy? You fuckin’ with me?”

“I can’t imagine anything less appetizing,” Halsey said.

“You got a smart mouth, for a citizen.”

While Halsey understood the slang term for a working stiff of square, he found the comeback irresistible.

“So, what are you?” he asked. “Some kind of wetback?”

With a snarl, the long-haired biker lunged for him, surprised Halsey by clutching his right wrist with one hand, twisting, forcing him to drop the knife, while the biker’s right hand grabbed Halsey’s shirt and hoisted him out of his chair, as if he weighed nothing at all.

“Smart mouth,” the biker said. “Dumbass.”

And then Halsey was airborne, tumbling across the table through clattering plates, silverware and bottles of beer, on his way toward impact with the floor.

BOLAN PUSHED HIS PLATE and coffee cup aside. So far, so good.

He’d watched the seven grungy outlaws swagger toward the table where his targets sat and then interrupt their meal. He’d worried for a moment that the bikers might stand back and wait for one of their intended marks to throw the first punch, when the seated diners didn’t seem inclined to do so, but it worked out in the end. The spokesman for the group lipped off just enough to get himself picked up and tossed across the table.

Bolan stayed where he was watching, waiting.

He couldn’t jump in yet. If it turned out that the targets could handle themselves and were giving the bikers a beating, his uninvited help would be superfluous. Suspicious, even. It could blow his only shot at breaking in.

He had to hope his targets lost the fight—or, rather, started losing in a clear, decisive manner. Bolan couldn’t sit and wait to see them punched unconscious or delay until the cops showed up.

The bartender already had a cell phone open in his hand, but Bolan knew response time was an issue. Apple Valley was an incorporated township sprawling over seventy-odd square miles, with law enforcement covered by a police department composed of fifty-five San Bernardino County sheriff’s officers. Of those, four were administrators, five were detectives and eight were patrol supervisors—which left twelve officers per eight-hour shift, less those with days off or vacation time scheduled.

Bolan had learned all that from the internet, within ten minutes of discovering that he’d be meeting his intended marks in Apple Valley. Now, his first trick would be staying out of jail.

Brognola had arranged the setup—if these were, in fact, his bikers—but he hadn’t shared their secret with the locals. Bolan had no reason to believe that any of the Apple Valley cops were tied to Halsey’s crowd in any way, but small towns thrived on gossip. It was a rule of life.

And anywhere you went, the walls had ears.

So, he’d be going for a ride in cuffs if Apple Valley’s finest caught him brawling with a bunch of thugs in Scoots. He could plead self-defense, of course, then post bail and take a hike. But Bolan didn’t want his face in any mug-shot files, his fingerprints in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System—IAFIS—or any other data bank.

He was a dead man, after all.

And planned to stay that way, as long as he was breathing.

The bikers weren’t pulling their punches with Clay Halsey’s men, but the casual diners weren’t punching bags, either. They gave back as good as they got—well, almost—and two of the Diableros were bloodied already, though still on their feet and swinging. One of Halsey’s guys, by contrast, had been punched or booted in the ribs and lay off to one side, hunched in a fetal curl.

Bolan checked his watch—one minute gone and counting. The barkeep was still on his phone, likely giving details to the AVPD dispatcher. Any second, a prowl car would receive instructions, fire up lights and siren, and race through the desert night toward Scoots.

With how many others to follow?

They wouldn’t send one cop to handle a dozen-odd brawlers. More likely, the night shift would roll out en masse, unless some of the shift’s personnel were already scattered on other duties. With approximately seventy-three thousand residents counted in its last census, Apple Valley would have the normal complement of burglaries, car thefts, domestic beefs and nuisance calls distracting officers on any given shift.

Say eight or nine incoming, then, within the next five minutes. As for times on-site, there would be stragglers. Some patrolling at a distance from the roadhouse, others eating fast food with their radios turned on, maybe a bathroom break or two.

A little breathing room.

But if his marks didn’t start losing soon…

Bolan was ready, waiting, when Halsey charged into the middle of the fight and caught a haymaker dead center in his face. It might not be a nose breaker, but there was force enough behind the punch to send Halsey flying again. He hit the floor hard, no table to break his fall this time, and Bolan worried that the man he needed to impress might be unconscious.

No. Halsey was shaking it off, rolling over and wiping a dark smear of blood from his nostrils with his sleeve. Face flushed with impact and anger, he lurched to his feet, wobbled into a fair fighting crouch and began to advance with fists clenched.

Going back in for more.

It was enough.

Bolan slipped from his booth, feeling the rush of battle in his blood. He reached the battleground in four long, loping strides, grabbed Halsey’s adversary by one arm and spun him, scowling as he drove a fist into the biker’s face.

2

Washington, D.C.

Four days earlier, Bolan had strolled through crowds of tourists on the National Mall, making his casual way toward the pale upraised finger of the Washington Monument. His destination lay adjacent to that obelisk, on 1.9 acres of land allotted by Congress in the 1980s, on Fifteenth Street, renamed Raoul Wallenberg Place.

Bolan knew the name from history. Raoul Wallenberg had been a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest during the German occupation of 1944–45. He had issued protective passports to Hungarian Jews, saving tens of thousands from slaughter—and then, ironically, was jailed when Soviet troops “liberated” the country from Nazi rule. Dying under questionable circumstances at Moscow’s Lubyanka prison in 1947, Wallenberg had been honored worldwide once his story was told.

It was only fitting that his name now marked the street outside of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Bolan entered the museum, collected his free pass from a clerk in the Hall of Witness and proceeded to the first-floor elevator. Self-guided tours were timed, leaving Bolan five minutes to wait in the lobby, and start on the fourth floor, with visitors working their way back down to street level through various halls and exhibits.

Bolan surveyed the first of four permanent exhibitions. This one depicted the Nazi assault on German Jews from 1933 until the 1939 invasion of Poland, including documents, photographs and other relics of the years that included the Reichstag fire and Kristallnacht riots. Lower floors, he knew, presented the rest of a grim history in chronological order: the “Final Solution” on Three, and the nightmare’s “Last Chapter” on Two. Altogether, the museum contained nearly thirteen thousand artifacts, eighty thousand photos, one thousand hours of archival film footage, nine thousand oral histories, and some forty-nine million documents charting the course of brutal genocide.

Tragically, it hadn’t been the last.

Man’s inhumanity to other humans was the world’s oldest story, played out in grim new headlines every day.

Which kept the Executioner busy year-round.

On this bright spring morning, he was killing time indoors, studying bleak reminders of how cruel humankind could be, while waiting for his oldest living friend. Their conversation, subject still unknown to Bolan, would inevitably launch him on another journey to the dark side, where he would find predators aplenty still alive and well, working around the clock to victimize the innocent and not-so-innocent alike.

In short, business as usual.

Scanning the photographs of Adolf Hitler and his inner circle, studying their smug and ghoulish faces, Bolan wondered if someone like himself could have derailed that tragedy, if sent to solve the problem soon enough. Would half a dozen well-placed bullets have changed anything at all?

Or was the tide of history inevitably tinged with blood?

Bolan’s experience had taught him not to second-guess the vagaries of human nature. Every personality contained a blend of traits, defined as “good” or “bad” by different societies. Some cultures valued warlike attitudes, while others favored meekness and pacivity. Some cultivated stoicism and endurance in the face of suffering, while others honored conscientious suicide.

But every nation, race and culture recognized that some people could only be restrained by force. If left at large, to exercise their will, the predators wreaked havoc.

Sometimes, they wound up in charge.

Bolan harbored no illusions about saving the world. He wasn’t a statesman, diplomat or philosopher. He couldn’t sway the masses with a glib turn of phrase and persuade them to trade in their weapons for schoolbooks or farm implements.

Bolan was a soldier, had been since he’d snagged his high-school diploma en route to the Army recruiting depot, breezing through basic training and moving on to Special Forces training at Fort Benning. And there’d been no looking back from there, until his family at home met a fatal snag that pulled him out of uniform and forced him to pursue a different, more personal kind of war.

That phase of Bolan’s life lay far behind him now. In terms of serving with official sanction, he’d been back on track since the creation of Stony Man Farm. In terms of serving fellow human beings, he had never stopped.

Each blow he struck against the predators saved lives that otherwise would have been diverted into dark and deadly avenues. For the enduring benefit of strangers, Bolan walked those alleyways and jungle trails alone.

They felt like home.

As he moved slowly past the Holocaust exhibits, Bolan wondered how it had to feel to be persecuted for a trait you hadn’t chosen and could never change. An accident of birth, say, that determined pigmentation, hair texture, the shape of eyes or nose.

Bolan knew all about the sense of being hunted, but he’d always brought it on himself, by standing in the way of people who would never stop harassing, robbing, killing others until they, themselves, were stopped dead in their tracks. He stopped them, and when their associates came looking for revenge, he buried them.

How long could it go on?

Bolan had no idea and didn’t let the question trouble him.

Turning from blown-up photographs of Nazi signs and posters that he couldn’t read, but which he understood too well, Bolan saw Hal Brognola moving toward him, past a group of children following their teacher through the gallery. Small faces sad and humbled, learning more than they might care to know about their species.

Bolan went to meet his friend.

“NO PROBLEM PARKING?” Brognola asked, as he clutched Bolan’s hand, pumped twice and let it go.

“The walk was nice,” Bolan replied.

“Sorry you had to come in naked,” Brognola went on. “Security’s been tighter since the shooting.”

“Sometimes the hardware weighs me down,” Bolan said.

Back in June 2009, an octogenarian neo-Nazi ex-convict had carried a .22-caliber rifle into the museum, killed a security guard, then fell under fire while trying to shoot other guards. The gunner had survived and was sitting in jail while his case wound its way through the courts at glacial speed. Attorneys at Justice had a pool going, on whether a jury or Father Time would deal with the creep in the cage.

Brognola, for his part, couldn’t care less. As long as the neo-Nazi was off the streets for good, it suited him.

One down. And how many tens of thousands to go?

God only knew.

Strolling past photo displays of the Kristallnacht riots—dazed victims and grinning, moronic attackers—Brognola got to the point. “I assume you keep up with what’s going on in the militia movement?” he asked.

“Yeah, things have really changed since the sixties and the Minutemen,” Bolan replied. “They organized to save America from Red invaders who never showed up, then started robbing banks to stay afloat and ran out of steam when the brass went to prison. Same thing in the nineties, responding to government action at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Last I heard, they’d done a fade around the turn of the millennium. Arrests and memberships way down, since Y2K fell flat.”

“Way down until the last election,” Brognola corrected him. “As it turns out, there’s one thing that riles the far right more than Communists, Jews and the New World Order all thrown together.”

“Should I guess?” Bolan inquired.

“No need,” Brognola answered. “It’s an African-American in the White House, talking peace and universal health care. Turns out ‘Change We Can Believe In’ translates on the fringe to ‘Grab your guns and go to war’?”

“Same old RAHOWA crap?” Bolan asked.

Brognola was painfully familiar with the acronymy. It stood for Racial Holy War, a slogan coined by a white-supremacist “church,” currently used throughout the racist underground by skinheads, brownshirts, Ku Klux Klanners, and some more supposedly “respectable” types who donned Brooks Brothers suits to peddle their message of hatred. Brognola had seen RAHOWA painted on walls, scrawled at crime scenes, and tattooed on flesh—but he still didn’t know how the fantasy sold to anyone with an IQ above room temperature.

“It’s that, and then some,” the big Fed told Bolan. “There’s been talk of white-power nuts plotting to kill the President since he was elected to the Senate, but they stepped up during the White House campaign. The Bureau nabbed four crackpots with a carload of guns at the Democratic Convention. Then, a week before election day, ATF busted a couple of nuts in Tennessee who had the Man at the top of their hit list, with eighty-eight victims in all.”

“Eighty-eight,” Bolan said, shaking shook his head.

“Nothing new under the Nazi sun,” Brognola replied.

H was the alphabet’s eighth letter. Eighty-eight, then, stood for HH—or Heil Hitler to fascists.

“I guess it never goes away,” Bolan said.

“Nope. Keeps getting worse,” Brognola told him. “In September of 2009, someone posted a poll on a social network asking Net geeks if the President should be killed. They took it down pronto, when G-men came calling, but the overnight stats might surprise you. Sometimes I think…aw, hell, never mind.”

He’d been about to say, “The country has gone crazy,” but Brognola knew that wasn’t true. If forced to guess, he would’ve said America harbored roughly the same percentage of bigots as ever, but economic hard times and the fear that money troubles spawned had a potential to inflate the ranks of the lunatic fringe.

“So, long story short?” Bolan prodded.

“Long grim story short, the militias are back,” Brognola said. “They’re growing again, feeding off of the tax protest movement, beating the drum over illegal immigration, and playing more race cards than last time around. You’ve likely heard some of it. ‘The President’s a Muslim,’ ‘he’s not a U.S. citizen,’ whatever crap their tiny brains can generate. It says something about the current atmosphere that millions take at least part of the nonsense seriously.”

“Not much I can do about it,” Bolan said. “You’ve got free speech and freedom of the press, implying freedom to believe some idiotic things. Last time I checked, there was still a Flat Earth Society, and people claiming we never set foot on the moon.”

“Agreed. But none of them intend to kill the President of the United States or spark a civil war.”

“You have someone specific in mind,” Bolan said, “or we wouldn’t be here.”

“It’s like you know me,” the big Fed responded with a weary smile.

Bolan matched the smile and said, “I’m getting there.”

“Okay,” Brognola said. “Clay Halsey. He runs an outfit he calls the New Minuteman Militia out of Southern California. I’ve got the details for you on a CD-ROM. Bottom line, he’s running guns to other fringe groups in the States, and he has ties with neo-fascist groups in Europe.”

“They need guns from us?” Bolan sounded skeptical.

“Call it a mutual admiration society,” Brognola replied. “They’ve been playing the Nazi gig longer than our homegrown crazies. During the Great Depression, you may recall they seized a couple of governments. Final solutions ensued.”

“I know it’s cliché,” Bolan said, “but most people would tell you that can’t happen here.”

“Let’s grant that for the sake of argument. Do we sit back and let them try? Can we afford another murdered president? Another Oklahoma City? God forbid, a homegrown 9/11?”

“If you’ve got the evidence—”

“We don’t,” Brognola interrupted Bolan. “I’m told ATF had someone close to Halsey. An informant, not an agent. Anyway, he dropped some juicy hints and then went MIA. Off-roaders found what the coyotes left of him in the Mojave Desert.”

Bolan frowned. “So, if at first you don’t succeed…”

“Again, it’s like you know me.”

“You want something on this guy before we drop the hammer.”

“I need something on him,” Brognola replied. “To justify whatever happens for the guys upstairs.”

“Well, then,” Bolan replied, “I guess I’d better have a look at that CD.”

BOLAN TOOK THE CD to an internet café in Georgetown, found a carrel in a corner where no one could peer over his shoulder and used an earpiece for the sound track. The first file was titled Background. Bolan opened it and found himself embarking on a history lesson about “militia” subversion.

April 19, 1995, had been the wake-up call, with 168 dead and nearly 700 wounded in the blast that destroyed Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and 324 other structures within a 16-block radius. Since then, Bolan learned, various law-enforcement agencies had interrupted or prosecuted at least 75 right-wing terrorist conspiracies across America, from coast to coast and border to border.

The incidents read like a roster of delusional insanity.

Saboteurs calling themselves the Sons of Gestapo derail a train in Arizona, killing one passenger and injuring dozens more. A massive homemade bomb turns up at Reno’s IRS office, defused with minutes to spare. A so-called Aryan Republican Army robs twenty-two banks, then starts killing its own membership. Lone-wolf gunmen strike repeatedly—at schools, churches and synagogues, the Holocaust Museum and a Jewish day-care center in Los Angeles. G-men arrest Klan members on the eve of their attempt to bomb a Texas natural gas refinery, risking the lives of thirty thousand local residents. A “pro-life” terrorist shoots doctors and mails alleged anthrax to dozens of women’s clinics.

The dreadful list went on and on, accompanied by grim-faced mug shots that revealed no hint of common decency, much less remorse. The terrorists who spoke to law enforcement inevitably cast their crimes in terms of patriotic zeal.

We’re taking back our country.

America for real Americans—the ones who look and think and pray like us.

Bolan grew weary of it, closed that file and opened the one titled NMM. As he’d anticipated, it contained a detailed rundown on the New Minuteman Militia, Clay Bertram Halsey commander in chief.

The soldier started with Halsey’s personal dossier, surprised to learn that the man held a doctorate in biochemistry and had taught his subject at a smallish California college until the early nineties, when he’d left the classroom in favor of zany far-right politics. There was no trigger incident on record, nothing to explain the break with academia and sanity. Halsey had drifted through various groups of that era, including a couple with racist leanings, but had reached the twenty-first century without compiling a rap sheet.

As for suspicion, his name had been linked to arms deals, civilian border-watch campaigns in the Southwest, and to a shipment of neo-Nazi pamphlets printed in the States that found their way to Germany, where the recipients were jailed under that nation’s postwar laws proscribing hate speech and denial of the Holocaust. No such statutes existed in the States, so he was free and clear.

Almost.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives—still ATF for short, despite the late addition to its title when it joined the Department of Homeland Security in 2002—had been watching when Halsey founded his New Minuteman Militia in 2008. The group had started small, expanding to an estimated fifteen hundred members concentrated in Southern California, with outposts in Arizona and Nevada.

Headquarters for the NMM was located near Victorville, on the western edge of the same Mojave Desert where the ATF’s informant had been left to feed the wasteland’s scavengers. According to the file Brognola had provided, the militia’s turn-coat had been Joseph Allen Gittes, twenty-six, a marginally employed auto mechanic who’d pulled himself back from the brink of methamphetamine addiction while serving time in state prison, then found Jesus, right-wing politics and the patriot militia movement in no particular order.

It was standard stuff, as Bolan understood extremist groups of both Right and Left. Damaged and disaffected individuals were drawn to militant cliques like iron filings to a magnet trawled through dirt. Some claimed to find new meaning for their lives in radical theory. Others simply tried to exorcise their private demons by attacking others—be the targets ethnic minorities, “traitors,” the System, or “The Man.”

Something, somewhere along the line, apparently had driven Gittes to betray his newfound friends of the NMM. He’d been a walk-in at the ATF’s San Diego field office, where agents initially suspected him of clumsily attempting to spy on them on Halsey’s benefit. In time, though, Gittes had produced leads that resulted in the seizure of two midsize arms shipments, taking a few hundred assault rifles and other hardware off the overloaded streets. Agents had listened more attentively when he began to speak of “something big” in the works.

And then, he’d vanished, lost forever.

The autopsy report on Gittes indicated that his legs were broken, blunt force trauma, leaving him alive to crawl across the vast Mojave, seeking help. The desert sun had baked him, dehydrated him, before a snakebite finished off the job. By that time, it was likely a relief.

Agents had questioned Halsey, who professed dismay and grief in equal measure, claiming that he’d missed Gittes around militia headquarters but had concluded—with regret, of course—that the young man had relapsed into tweaking meth and left the movement for another shot at living on the pipe. A feasible suggestion, but it didn’t track with what the dead man’s handlers had observed.

Which left the ATF nowhere. Ditto the FBI, the state police, San Bernardino County’s sheriff, and the other agencies that had examined scattered pieces of the new militia puzzle. Brognola and Stony Man Farm were poised to move against the NMM, but first they needed something to substantiate the “something big” that Halsey was supposed to be preparing.

Taking back our country.

Which meant taking it away from the majority of rational Americans, turning it into…what?

It struck Bolan as a bad idea.

AND SO THE EXECUTIONER prepared for war. He wasn’t rushing into anything, though time was of the essence. That was true whenever Brognola approached him with a new assignment, always an emergency, but rushing blindly into battle wasn’t Bolan’s style.

For starters, he had to cross the continent, and that meant traveling by land unless he planned to make the trip unarmed. Some twenty-two hundred miles of highway lay between D.C. and San Bernardino. Amtrak needed fifty-eight hours to deliver him by train, leaving Bolan afoot at his destination. The alternative was driving: thirty-five hours to cover the distance at a steady sixty-five miles per hour, plus allowances for stops to fill his stomach and the car’s gas tank, maybe a break to sleep somewhere along the way.

In Bolan’s book, the road still beat the rails.

He could be unobtrusive when he wanted to, flying—or driving—underneath the radar. Bolan had perfected the art of “role camouflage,” wherein the average human eye saw what it was trained to expect, rarely looking past a standard-issue uniform or attitude.

In this case, he would be Joe Tourist, passing through en route to somewhere else. If asked, which was unlikely, he’d adjust his destination based on his location at the time, forever moving westward.

Bolan’s current ride was borrowed from a drug dealer in Maryland who had no use for a car these days. The pusher’s forwarding address was the Potomac River, but he’d carelessly forgotten to inform his friends and colleagues of the move. The car was a gray, two-year-old Lexus LS 10 sedan, nothing ostentatious about it unless you peered at the company logo and knew that the L in a circle had doubled the price for a midsize four-door. After Bolan had switched out the plates, he was ready to roll.

He kept in touch with Brognola from the road, adjusting his ETA based on weather, fatigue, construction delays and the car’s peak performance at twenty-odd miles on a gallon of fuel. In fact, it took Bolan forty hours and change to cross the continent, improving Amtrak’s time by three-quarters of a day.

His first stop was a chain motel, where Bolan slept six hours straight, dined twice in the coffee shop and left feeling fit for step one of the campaign he’d mapped out in his head on the long, lonely drive from D.C.

He was supposed to infiltrate Clay Halsey’s private army, prove that it was blitz-worthy before he brought the house down, and Bolan knew the militia chief would be doubly cautious with new recruits after finding an informer in his ranks. Bolan reckoned he couldn’t just show up and volunteer his services. He needed a foot—or a fist—in the door.

To that end, he’d contrived a plan with Brognola to make himself presentable, by fringe extremist standards. First, Stony Man Farm would prep a military file on Bolan—or, rather, on Major Matt Cooper, whose sterling combat record and assorted decorations hadn’t saved him from early retirement after he publicly challenged the fitness and patriotism of his commander in chief.

While that legend was polished and set into place, “classified” but still accessible to determined hackers, Brognola would prepare the scene for Bolan’s introduction to the NMM. Brognola, through the ATF, already knew the name and location of Halsey’s favorite watering hole. All he needed was a group of agents who could hold their own against the target and his vigilante inner circle, until Bolan intervened and it was time for them to take a dive.

Simple.

But simple plans, in Bolan’s world, had a disturbing tendency to go awry. A man living on borrowed time should take nothing for granted.

Assuming Brognola could find the proper cast—which seemed a certainty, given his pull at Justice and the wide array of undercover agents he could call upon—the set itself would still be fraught with danger. And if it fell apart, Bolan’s best shot at penetrating Halsey’s group would go to hell just as quickly.

Anything could happen once the players picked a fight. Halsey’s people could be armed, might even start shooting and hope for the best on a self-defense plea. Local jurors would be impressed by their grooming and righteous demeanor, opposing a band of shaggy barbarians.

But it would never go to trial, if Halsey or his men pulled guns. In that case, Bolan would be forced to intervene, and no one could predict how it would end, with undercover Feds and innocent civilians in the cross fire.

Best-case scenario: Bolan saved the day and was welcomed into the milia’s fold.

Worst-case scenario: a massacre.

Bolan could only keep his fingers crossed, as he prepared for his debut as Major Cooper. He had used the name before, sans rank, but nowhere that it would’ve reached Halsey’s ears. Meanwhile, the personality he’d picked for this Matt Cooper was entirely different.

After his rest, with hours left to kill, Bolan went shopping in Berdoo. He bought clothes suited to a former military man who’d fallen on hard times. Not living hand-to-mouth, but spending too much time alone and on the road from place to place.

He’d found the Harley Nightster at a used-bike shop, spent some of the money from the dealer back in Maryland to make the buy, and he was good to go.

Whatever happened next, Bolan had done his best to be prepared. If Fate stepped in to lend a hand—or strike him down—the Executioner would take it as he always had.

Facing the enemy and fighting back.

3

The guy could take a punch, no doubt about it. Bolan hit him squarely in the face—no swing-and-miss stunt from the movies, pulling it just enough to keep from breaking anything—and felt the shock reverberate along his arm, into his shoulder socket.

Anyone on the receiving end should have gone down, but not the biker-Fed. He staggered back a step, then shook it off and flashed a set of teeth resembling something from a Sasquatch horror film.

“You wanna play?” he asked. “Awright!”

The giant fired a roundhouse right toward Bolan’s head, immediately followed by a looping left that grazed his scalp while Bolan was backpedaling to give himself some combat stretch. The agents were supposed to lose this fight, but he guessed that they’d been told to make it realistic.

Or the big guy might just be pissed off.

In either case, Bolan had a fight on his hands.

He flicked a glance toward Halsey, saw his target standing once again, looking confused as he watched Bolan with the pseudo-biker, doubtless wondering who Bolan was and what did he think he was doing.

They were still light-years away from gratitude, which wouldn’t come unless they won the fight in any case.

So Bolan buckled down to win it, let his shoulder block a heavy right that nearly numbed his arm and darted in below the swing to beat a tattoo on his adversary’s ribs. Right-left, right-left and out again.

He wasn’t Rocky, working out on sides of beef, but Bolan put enough behind his blows to tell his sparring partner it was time to wrap the show. The big ox grunted, clutched one side for all of half-a-dozen seconds, then came back for more.

Bolan obliged him, opening one hand to slash its knife edge down across the hulk’s collarbone. He couldn’t hear it snap, with all the uproar that surrounded him, but Bolan saw the giant dip to one side while his arm went limp.

To follow up on that advantage, Bolan gave one knee a light kick and dropped the biker into prime position for his own roundhouse, using an elbow rather than his achy fist. Before his adversary hit the floor, Bolan was looking for another fight.

No shortage there.

The six remaining Diableros were taking their time, working over a couple of Halsey’s civilian commandos. Two of the others were already down—one puking on all fours, the other struggling to rise from a pool of spilt beer and gravy—while Halsey rushed to help his friends.

One of the two-wheel terrors saw or heard him, caught him with an elbow coming in and put him down. Not good, if the milita man was out and missing the charade, but Bolan had no time to check on him.

The Fed who’d just dropped Halsey turned back to the limp rag doll his shaggy fellow Fed was using as a punching bag. One arm came back, fist clenched—then froze as he released it for a crushing blow, stopped dead in Bolan’s grasp.

The agent spun toward Bolan, twisting in a vain attempt to break his grip, then firing off a hard left toward the Executioner’s head. Bolan ducked, still clutching enemy’s arm, slamming a kick to the weak spot behind the tall Diablero’s right knee. Bolan put the guy on his back in two heartbeats, and kept him there with a rabbit punch between the eyes that bounced his thick skull off the floor.

Two down, and five to go.

But one of them was faster than anticipated, charging like a rhino to collide with Bolan from behind, clutching his belt and jacket, lifting him, propelling him in the direction of a booth packed with teenagers. One of the young women screamed as the soldier went airborne, launched toward her table like an old-time human canonball.

Bolan didn’t know if the heavy who’d tossed him intended great bodily harm, or if he was simply swatting a large, pesky fly. The Executioner’s skull missed the edge of the table by inches, head and shoulders plowing through plates, spilling food and drink into four heaving laps. The young girl screamed again as he rolled, faced the ceiling, then slithered back to a firm fighting stance.

They were making him work for it, right—and making him wonder how well they’d been briefed, going in. He guessed that none of them had heard from Washington or Stony Man Farm directly. Brognola would have left the briefing to a local supervisor—one who might resent his undercover agents being used as pawns in Bolan’s game, while crucial details were withheld from him.

Maybe he’d told them to get in a few licks while they could, or something similar. It wouldn’t be the first time soldiers of the same side came to blows. Fair enough.

Bolan had hoped for a realistic fight, and now he had one. Putting on a grin that would have scared a hungry shark, he waded back into the brawl.

CLAY HALSEY, STUNNED and struggling to his feet, wasted no time trying to analyze how dinner with the boys had gone to hell so quickly. Shit happened, as he had good reason to know, and survivors dealt with it as best they were able.

Anger put Halsey on his feet for the second time in less than two minutes. He saw bikers hammering Mosier and Doolan, while Webb puked his guts up and Gruber tried to get back in the game. Halsey was lurching to join them, get his piece of the action, when a total stranger came off the sidelines and took down one of the thugs who was working on Doolan.

Halsey recognized this man as the stranger who had come in solo, minutes ahead of the one-percenters. He didn’t know why the lone wolf chose to mix in someone else’s trouble, but damn, he could fight!

Halsey blinked as the newcomer clotheslined one of the bikers, took him down and booted his ribs before stooping to finish the job with his fists. It was pay-per-view cool, but Halsey wasn’t interested in spectator sports at the moment.

He rushed the other Diablero, a two-hundred-pounder who held Doolan’s left arm extended and twisted, some kind of weird come-along grip, while he stomped on the shoulder and growled like an animal. Focused on what he was doing, the man missed Halsey’s approach, his first warning a punch to the side of his head from behind.

Halsey regretted the punch, grimaced over the pain in his knuckles and wrist, but it had the desired effect. Doolan’s snarling assailant let go of his arm, spun to face the new threat and was still turning as Halsey let fly with a right to his gut.

And cracked his other fist against a saucer-size belt buckle made out of brass, Harley-Davidson’s logo impressed on his flesh. Cursing bitterly, Halsey lashed out with a kick, but the biker was faster, grabbing his ankle and lifting, twisting, exposing his groin to a swift counterkick.

Before the steel-toed motorcycle boot could find its mark, a fist sailed past Halsey’s face and into the biker’s. It glanced off one mutton-chopped cheek, failed to score a knockdown, but encouraged the punk to release Halsey’s foot. The militia leader hopped clear and found his proper footing as the Diablero and the stranger started trading blows.

It wasn’t like a prizefight on the tube, no Marquess of Queensberry rules to protect either slugger. The grungy goon lunged at Halsey’s unexpected ally, reaching for his throat, while the stranger ducked and hooked a fist into the biker’s abdomen. He missed the buckle, found the solar plexus more or less and emptied out the shaggy snarler’s lungs.

That made it easier but dropping him still took a flurry of blows that were almost too fast for Halsey to follow. Ribs, neck, ribs, jaw and then the Diablero took a dive, collapsing to the littered floor.

The stranger turned toward Halsey, seemed to give a little shrug before another of the bikers rushed him from his blind side. Halsey cried, “Look out!” and saw him turn to face the looming threat before another Diablero tackled Halsey, swept him off his feet and rode him down.

The impact stunned him. Fireworks flared behind Halsey’s eyelids as his skull bounced off the floor. He felt consciousness slipping away, as callused fingers found his throat and tried to finish him. A few more seconds, if the biker put his weight behind it, and—

Halsey bucked and flopped like a fish out of water, pushing with elbows and heels. He nearly threw the biker off, succeeding in loosening his grip enough to draw a rattling breath before the fingers tightened once again. Inspired by panic, Halsey brought up his hands, clapping them over the Diablero’s ears in unison, driving a lance of pain through his attacker’s eardrums.

As the biker howled and fell away from him, Clay Halsey rolled in the other direction, pushed up to his hands and knees, then into a crouch. The biker was tough, already recovering, spewing profanity with no regard for coherent insults.

From his crouch, Halsey launched himself into a wild looping swing, saw his fist strike the biker’s large nose, felt the cartilage snap on impact. Another howl of pain and rage erupted from his opponent, as Halsey pounded the guy’s blotched, bloody face.

He could have kept punching all night, would’ve loved it, but Halsey regained his composure in time to stop short of manslaughter. Around him, the fight was still raging, onlookers still hooting and cheering.

I might as well give them a show, Halsey thought, as he rose to his feet and went back to the fray.

BOLAN PUNCHED HIS THIRD opponent in the gut, then drove a knee into his face as the Diablero folded, riding the pain. The biker’s hairy face felt spongy, but his beard and mustache weren’t effective bumpers. Impact flipped him over like a turtle on its back, sprawling.

Three down.

The soldier turned in time to see another Diablero boot one of Halsey’s friends in the face. He wondered for a second if the undercover Feds enjoyed the opportunity to cut loose on an adversary, virtually without rules and then dismissed the notion as irrelevant.

Bolan was here to win a fight, not act as referee. And if he lost, his shot at joining Halsey’s crew would vanish.

So he rushed the hairy figure who was kicking Halsey’s friend around the floor with evident delight, came at the brawler from his blind side with an elbow shot that caught his target just behind one ear. It could’ve been a knockout blow, but Bolan pulled it, spared the guy from a concussion.

Big mistake.

The phony biker rounded on him, growling like a junkyard dog, and swung a big, ring-studded fist toward Bolan’s face. The soldier dodged most of it, felt something tear his cheek. He gripped the hurtling arm and twisted it, cranking the elbow to an angle that evoked a squeal and let him spin the Diablero like an awkward dancing partner.

When he hit the Fed a second time—same ear, same elbow—Bolan put his weight behind it, making sure he got the job done.

There was no time for self-congratulation, as the last three Diableros rushed him, coming on as one. Bolan had time to wonder if their briefing had included orders not to cripple him, then he was lashing out to slam a kneecap with his steel-toed boot, rewarded by a stream of high-octane profanity.

He followed with a stiffened knife hand to the hopping biker’s abdomen, an inch or so below the sternum. Not a killing blow, although it could have been, but but Bolan’s target might believe that he was dying for a few tense moments, while his lungs remembered how to work.

He was turning toward the last two Diableros when they hit him, slamming Bolan with a fist, a knee, maybe a forehead, as they drove him back against the nearest wall with stunning force. The pair of them, together, weighed at least four hundred pounds, and the soldier’s ribs felt every ounce of that on impact, registering pain even before the bikers started pounding him.

No pulling punches here. These two had seen their friends laid out, and they were getting in their licks, regardless of their marching orders.

Payback was a bitch.

Bolan fought back with everything he had—fists, elbows, knees, a head butt for the biker on his left—but they ducked some of it, absorbed the rest and hammered him with a determination that was almost gleeful in its sheer ferocity.

If this was what they called taking a dive, Bolan was glad he didn’t have to fight the pair of them for real.

Or, then again, maybe he was.

A right hand to his forehead dimmed the lights for just a second, left him vulnerable, but before his two opponents had a chance to take advantage of it, someone grabbed the guy on Bolan’s left and dragged him backward, fingers tangled in his salt-and-pepper ponytail. Squinting through his pain, Bolan saw Halsey throwing hard right hands into the reeling biker’s face, then it was time to deal with number two.

A knee slashed toward his groin, but Bolan blocked it with his thigh, taking the hit, rebounding with a straight-arm shot into his adversary’s throat. Again, Bolan pulled the killing blow and left his opposition gagging, trying to remember how he’d breathed for all the years before this night.

While he was working on it, Bolan hooked a fist into the man’s ribs—once, twice—and thought he felt one give. It was time to wrap this up and get the hell away from Scoots before the next wave hit, with badges, clubs and guns.

Halsey was moving toward him through a crimson haze. Bolan wiped blood out of his eye and braced himself, fists clenched.

“Hey, I’m not one of them,” Halsey said, raising open hands. “You jumped in on my side, remember?”

“Yeah,” Bolan replied. “Okay.”

“You want to tell me why you did that, stranger?”

“I didn’t like the odds,” Bolan said. “Looking back, it didn’t seem like such a great idea.”

“I owe you, anyway,” Halsey said. “How about a drink, somewhere without the riffraff.”

Bolan used a precious second, feigning doubt, then nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

“Okay.” Surveying his companions, Halsey added, “All I have to do is get these guys back on their feet.”

“We’d better hurry up,” Bolan replied, “before the riot squad gets here.”

THEY MADE IT TO THE parking lot with sirens wailing in the middle distance, drawing closer by the second. Bolan helped the bruised and bloodied into their vehicles, reflecting that it would be simple enough to let a pistol do his talking for him, leave them where they sat for the police to find.

Another desert mystery.

But Brognola needed evidence that Halsey and his men were up to “something big,” not simply one more group of weekend warriors with an ax to grind against big government, vague threats of socialism, or a black person in the Oval Office.

For his own sake, Bolan needed proof, as well. He hadn’t signed with Brognola and Stony Man to be a troubleshooter for the thought police. In fact, he’d fought and killed halfway around the world from home to guarantee that all Americans retained the right to curse their government in a variety of languages, for any reason they could think of.

That was freedom.

But when dissent turned into terrorism, it was time to draw a line. And when the local, state, or federal authorities were faced with clear and present dangers that defied all rules and regulations in the book, then Bolan was prepared to try a more aggressive strategy.

Illegal? Absolutely. And if there were consequences for his actions, either here or on the other side, he’d face them as they came.

On this night, the Executioner had work to do.

“Your bike?” Halsey asked, as he gunned the Hummer’s engine, shifting it into reverse.

“It gets me where I need to go,” Bolan replied.

“We’re heading east, a ways,” Halsey informed him. “Keep up if you can.”

“I’ll do my best.”

They passed the first police car moments later, racing in from somewhere in the vast, dark desert that surrounded Apple Valley. If the driver noticed them, he gave no sign of it.

Bolan felt wobbly on two wheels for a half mile or so, then got it back and kept up with the SUVs, not crowding them, but keeping pace. Some kinds of desert wildlife liked the blacktop after dark, claiming the day’s leftover heat, and Bolan didn’t want to hit a tortoise, maybe drop the Nightster in the middle of the highway—maybe finish what the biker-Feds had started back at Scoots.

He also didn’t want to tailgate Halsey’s two-car motorcade in case his target had some kind of treachery in mind. It seemed unlikely, but he hadn’t stayed alive this long by taking stupid risks.

Only the calculated kind. When there was time to calculate.

Scoots was ten miles or so behind them when the Hummer signaled a left turn and swung onto a northbound access road. The Ford Explorer followed, Bolan bringing up the rear. Another mile and change brought them to a tin-roofed structure built from cinder blocks, painted some kind of beige that almost matched the desert soil.

Bolan pulled in and parked beside the Hummer, switched off the Nightster and waited for Halsey to exit his vehicle. The militia chief was favoring his left leg just a little, watching while the others dragged themselves out of their seats, some grimacing with pain.

“I didn’t get your name back there in the excitement,” Halsey said.

“Matt Cooper.”

Halsey’s grip on Bolan’s hand was firm, but not a bone crusher. Maybe he’d seen enough to let the schoolyard challenge slide.

“This is our home away from home,” Halsey explained, jangling a ring of keys as he approached the building’s plain front door. “I guarantee we won’t be interrupted here by any kind of trash.”

Inside, the place was sparsely decorated, with a table in the center of its main room, half-a-dozen metal folding chairs lined up along each side and more stacked against one wall. No signs or posters on the wall to give it any character. A line of plain black filing cabinets stood along the room’s south wall. Two other doors faced Bolan from a wall directly opposite the entrance. Both were closed, blocking his view of any other rooms beyond.

“About that drink,” Halsey said, moving toward the filing cabinets and opening one of the drawers. “Is single malt all right?”

“Perfect,” Bolan replied.

Halsey produced a bottle, while another of his men ducked into one of the backrooms, returning with three glasses in each hand.

“Matt Cooper, meet the boys you helped to rescue from humiliation. Bryan Doolan, Steve Webb, Larry Mosier, Tommy Gruber.”

Bolan matched the names to faces and shook their hands, refraining from displays of camaraderie that might ring false. While Halsey poured the single malt, he asked, “So, did you know those clowns back there? Some kind of feud?”

“If only life made that much sense,” Halsey replied. “You may have noticed that we’re in a world of shit these days. With crime and the economy, the War on Terror bogged down in a sandpit on the wrong side of the world, resources drying up. These are trying times.”

“Not just a bunch of drunks?”

“A symptom of society’s decline.”

Bolan sipped his whiskey, found it smooth and strong.

“You need some first aid on that cheek,” Halsey observed.

“I’ll deal with it when I get back to the motel,” Bolan replied.

“Where are you staying?” Mosier asked.

“Place outside Apple Valley with a neon palm tree on the sign.”

“The Desert Palms,” Doolan said. “Cheap, but clean.”

“Cheap suits me well enough these days,” Bolan informed him.

“Out on a limb here,” Halsey interjected, “but I count myself a decent judge of people. And I’d say you have a solid military background.”

“Emphasis on back,” Bolan said.

“Army?”

“Special Forces. Fifteen years.”

“You don’t move like a soldier who’s been pensioned off for disability,” Halsey said.

“Let’s just say the brass and I agreed to disagree.”

“On what?”

“Whatever. It’s all ancient history.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Halsey suggested, cutting glances toward the other men around the table. All of them were watching Bolan closely, though Gruber had to do it through one eye, the other being swollen nearly shut.

“Can’t say I follow you,” Bolan replied.

“We,” Halsey said, spreading his hands to indicate the other four, “are patriots with serious concerns about the nation’s health. Make that survival. Every day, we see America diminished, basic values slipping through our fingers. Precepts of the Constitution used for toilet paper by a clique of radical extremists who’ve decided that America should be a melting pot for every cult and culture on the planet.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard that phrase before,” Bolan said, playing hard to get. “From my history teacher in junior-high school.”

“Right!” Halsey snapped, leaning forward on his elbows. “But the melting pot we read about in school absorbed the other creeds and cultures, turning all of them into Americans. You can’t believe that’s happening today, with street signs in a dozen languages and ballots that look like foreign VCR owners’ manuals. Not when criminals who botch looting the country get their money back with interest from the taxpayers. Not when our border’s leaking like a sieve and terrorist alerts from Washington are stuck on orange forever.”

“Well…”

“Look, here’s the deal,” Halsey said. “We’re a group of men who care about America. The real America. The way it used to be before too many tails started wagging the dog. We have some friends who feel the same, with numbers growing every day. I’m thinking we could use a man like you.”

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