The North Koreans were holding Baldero within the building—if the cryptographer was still alive

From his vantage point in a line of cars parked on the street, the Executioner considered the problem. Any attempt to raid the building would cause the North Koreans to either flee or, worse, kill Baldero and cut their losses before they escaped. That could not be permitted. A surgical strike was called for—and the time for action had arrived.

Bolan made sure his weapons were secure in their holsters and that he carried a full complement of spare magazines, drawing from the last of the stores in his war bag. Then he screwed the custom-built suppressor to the threaded barrel of his Beretta 93-R, held the pistol low against his leg and walked up to the front of the curio shop.

Knowing that at any moment, a shotgun blast could chop him in half at the waist, Bolan took a step back and planted a combat-booted foot on the wooden door. It splintered and slammed inward, reverberating off the wall inside.

Bolan dived into the room.

Rescue was coming—and with it, hell.

Crucial Intercept

The Executioner®

Don Pendleton

www.mirabooks.co.uk

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

1844–1900

Terrorism will not be tolerated in the suburban backyards and city streets of America—not on my watch. I will attack from all sides, from every angle, until the enemies inevitably turn their guns on each other.

—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

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

1

Mack Bolan pulled the Crown Victoria sedan into the only free slot among the convenience store’s gas pumps, jockeying for position among the other drivers already fueling up. The man still known to some as the Executioner was just outside Williamsburg, Virginia, having spent the past several hours burning up state highways. The Crown Victoria, an FOUO—for official use only—vehicle on loan from a CIA motor pool, was a “plainclothes” interceptor model. Its big up-rated 250 horsepower V8 engine drove seventeen-inch stamped steel wheels wearing 235/55/17 high-performance rubber, all of it held together by a heavy-duty suspension and frame. The powerful car had served Bolan well, bearing him swiftly from Langley to Charlottesville, then to Lynchburg, and finally to Richmond, where he’d received the call from the Farm that sent him tearing up the road to Williamsburg.

Bolan snapped open his secure satellite phone and dialed the number that would, through a circuitous and redundantly encrypted route, connect him with Stony Man Farm in Virginia. The nerve center for the Sensitive Operations Group, a covert arm of the United States Justice Department, had been the scene of furious activity overnight.

Bolan had gotten no more sleep than had the cyber team at the Farm, for while they traced his location, coordinated with local law enforcement, and fed new destinations to the Executioner, he had pushed the Crown Victoria to reach each and every one of the target zones. Each time, they had been one step behind their quarry. The soldier understood from long experience that sometimes you had to hurry up and wait. There was little he could do but chase down the leads passed on to him by the Farm. Eventually, his path would intercept those of the person or persons he sought, likely with violent results.

He would see to that.

The first urgent contact from the Farm had come just before midnight. Bolan had been staying in a motel near Langley, taking some long-overdue down time to rest after his latest debriefing trip to Wonderland and a meet with Hal Brognola. While he maintained an arm’s length relationship with the United States government’s covert counterterrorism network, Brognola transcended any bureaucratic boundaries or barriers. He liked to keep the big Fed informed of what he learned, each and every time he stepped onto the latest battlefield in his endless war against terror and injustice. The cyber team at the Farm could use the intel to update—or close—files on various threats.

The call alone, when it woke him, would have been enough to leave him instantly alert—but the words of Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, had left no doubt.

“Striker,” Price had said, using the Farm’s code name for the Executioner, “somebody’s shooting up Virginia.”

Bolan had switched on the large color television, after finding the oversized motel remote on top of the set. Predictably, every one of the cable news channels and at least two local Virginia television stations were all over the story. A series of high-profile shootings, committed by groups of men wielding automatic weapons, had torn up several public locations in Charlottesville. The first, in the early evening, had ripped apart an Internet café just off the campus of the University of Virginia, which had sparked fears of another Virginia Tech–style massacre. Nobody had been killed, but significant damage to the facility had been done.

Less than an hour after the computer lab shooting, another one-sided gun battle had shot up a public Laundromat in downtown Charlottesville. Then, an hour and a half after that, a convenience store on the outskirts of the city had taken a broadside from what one witness described as “four Chinese men with Uzis.” This was the worst of the incidents, to that point; a clerk working behind the front counter had been tagged by a bullet. The young man had died on the way to the hospital.

It was the report of “four Chinese men” with automatic weapons that worried the men and women at the Farm, and it was this concern—as well as the shootings occurring in close succession in a major metropolitan area—that had tripped warning flags. There were no current reports of new terrorist threats from Asian fringe groups, Asian gangs, or even from within elements of nominally hostile governments such as China. Bolan’s jaw had tightened, at that. It had not been so long ago that he had found himself dealing with heavily armed and very hostile Chinese sleeper cells on American soil in Hawaii. The Chinese government had dismissed the attacks as the work of rogue elements in their military. A lot of people had died before it was over, and Bolan had no desire to see a repeat performance from yet another highly organized and disciplined gathering of “rogue” operatives trained and equipped in Communist China.

When he had said as much, Price had dismissed it as unlikely. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, Stony Man’s computer expert and the leader of the Farm’s cyber team, had found no indication of a coordinated terror effort. There was no communications traffic or Internet traffic to indicate it, and very little in the way of official government maneuvering. At least, there was nothing to which the Farm’s team could trace the violence. That was enough to satisfy Bolan on that score, at least for now, but it did leave the question of what was happening in Virginia—and he had said as much.

“That,” Price had replied over the secure line, “we think we do know, at least in part. Bear and his people have been burning up the ether trying to get what surveillance data there was to be had. We’ve managed to extract security camera images from two locations. The first is from the Internet café, and the second is from the convenience store. Using image enhancement technology on the convenience store video footage, we’ve compared it to a fairly clear picture from the Web cameras in the computer lab. There’s a link, which I’m sending to your phone now.”

Bolan had taken his phone from his ear to see the data transfer icon blinking. It did not take long for the image to load on his own small color screen. The picture itself was black-and-white, bearing the unmistakable pixel dithering of an image that has been put through the digital wringer to make it more clear. It was the face of a man with long, dark hair.

“Who’s this?” Bolan asked, putting the phone back to his ear.

“That,” Price said, “is Daniel Baldero. Thirty-years-old. Five-foot-ten, 270 pounds. Paid for college by joining the Air Force. Honorable discharge. Earned a couple of degrees in computer programming before he was finished going to school, in Newport News. Last address of record, according to the Virginia DMV, is Charlottesville, Virginia. Mr. Baldero can be, thanks to the footage we’ve used to identify him, positively placed at the scene of two out of three of those shootings.”

“Doing what?”

“Running for his life, from what we can see,” Price said.

“So he’s not one of the shooters.”

“No,” Price said. “And of course we can’t place him at the laundry shooting because there were no functioning cameras there. But as coincidences go—”

“It’s a pretty big one,” Bolan agreed. “This Baldero is either the unluckiest man in Virginia, or something’s fishy and he’s involved.”

“It gets more interesting,” Price said. “Mr. Baldero is a computer programmer and cryptographer by trade, formerly employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“Formerly,” Bolan repeated.

“As of two weeks ago,” Price reported. “He resigned without explanation.”

“Is he on the run?”

“We checked, and they deny it,” Price had said. “Logically, there’s no reason he should be on the run, at least not from the CIA. They have no reason to chase him down. He’s just a former employee, as far as they’re concerned, and not one with any sort of contract to which they could hold him.”

“But again, as coincidences go,” Bolan said.

“It’s a pretty big one,” Price echoed. “The Man wants us on this, Striker, and Hal’s given us the green light.”

“I’ll leave immediately,” Bolan said. “But I’m going to need transportation. The rental I’m driving hasn’t got the guts for a field operation.”

“We’ve got a car on its way to you by courier,” Price said. “Hal’s made an arrangement with the CIA. You’ll get one from their motor pool.”

“There’s that word again.” Bolan frowned at the phone. “I’m going to need weapons and equipment for an extended field operation.”

“Already in the car and on the way to your door,” Price said. “Cowboy keeps a few specially prepared care packages ready and waiting for little emergencies like these.” John “Cowboy” Kissinger was the Farm’s armorer. He had personally tuned the Beretta 93-R machine pistol in the leather shoulder holster Bolan was strapping on, and he had custom-built the suppressor fitted to the weapon. He had also done an accuracy job on the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle that was Bolan’s other nearly constant companion, which he carried in a Kydex holster in his waistband on his right hip.

“Then I’m not going to waste any more time talking,” Bolan said, watching headlights pan across the curtains of the motel room’s window. “Unless it’s another coincidence, the car is just arriving. Your timing is impeccable.”

“We try,” Price said. “Oh, and be sure to check inside the trunk.” When she spoke again, her tone was warmer, but also more anxious. “Be careful, Striker.”

“Always, Barb.”

“Good hunting.”

“Thanks. Striker out.” He closed the phone.

The courier was at the door just as Bolan opened it—the man said not a word. He was dressed in slacks and a blazer and had about him what Bolan thought of as the “junior G-man” look. He nodded and tossed the keys to Bolan, which were for the Crown Victoria now idling in front of Bolan’s open motel-room door. Then he disappeared around the corner of the building.

Bolan looked at the car, then back to where the courier had been. He shook his head slightly.

There was work to do.

THAT PHONE CALL had been one long, tiring drive ago on only half a night’s sleep, fueled by truck-stop coffee and a fast-food breakfast consumed at highway speed. Since then, the Executioner had tracked the increasingly violent outbreaks of gunfire from site to site in Virginia. The Farm relayed to him the location each time it happened, but Bolan knew as well as Price did that they would not get ahead of the shooters by playing a reactive game. They needed to get in front of the gunners, whoever they were.

He had checked each site, the latest a motel in Williamsburg that had been blown half to hell. Yet again, there was no evidence of the shooters themselves. He had phoned in and reported as much. Price had promised that the follow-up field team, a covert Justice analysis unit protected by blacksuit gunners from Stony Man, would check for evidence he might have missed in his cursory inspection, as they had been doing behind him all night. They would also see if there were any local surveillance sources to be pulled for analysis. That didn’t concern Bolan, at least not immediately. He would be surprised if the tapes showed anything of use except to confirm Baldero’s presence. Intelligence on the shooters would be helpful, but even that wasn’t crucial at the moment. The only thing that mattered was getting out in front of the shooters, and that depended on the pattern analysis Stony Man had been working on.

“Price here.”

“Striker,” Bolan said. “Same story here.”

“You’re still outside Williamsburg?”

“Yes,” he said. “Your crew can move in on the motel. I saw a lot of shell casings but not much else. No sign of our boy, and nothing of use. Barb, you’ve got to get me in front of this. Has Bear run his pattern analysis?”

“Got you right here, Striker.” Aaron Kurtzman’s voice came over the line. “I’m here with Barb. Our instincts have been right all along. We’re plotting the shootings and they make a line, more or less. That puts the next possible cluster of targets in a more or less straight line through Hampton, Newport News and Norfolk, if the pattern holds.”

“Then I’m headed to—” Bolan began. He stopped.

“Striker?” Price asked in Bolan’s ear. The soldier’s head snapped left, then right. His eyes narrowed.

“I hear gunshots,” Bolan said. He snapped the phone shut and half-vaulted the hood of the Crown Victoria, throwing himself behind the wheel and slamming the door shut. The big tires squealed and the engine roared as he floored the vehicle, tearing out of the convenience store parking lot. Horns honked as he cut off several vehicles. The car whipped onto the highway and he hit the automatic windows, rolling them all the way down on both sides, fore and aft.

He heard it again, then—the unmistakable sound of automatic gunfire in the distance, moving away from him. He pushed the interceptor onward, yanking the wheel hard left, cutting across a side street and taking another.

When he heard the next burst of shots, it was louder. He was getting closer. He scanned the traffic far ahead of him.

Logistically, this was very bad. It was broad daylight. A running gun battle in an American city, especially an American tourist city, was going to pour gasoline on the already raging media fire over the cluster of shootings throughout the night. The Executioner had been listening to news-talk radio throughout his nighttime chase. Every station was bubbling over with sensational reporting on the “terrorist attacks,” with hysterical talking heads manning their desks and filling the airwaves with commentary from “experts.” The incessant speculation and mindless chatter had eventually become so much background noise to Bolan, who understood only too well the reality that the reporters were playing at analyzing.

From a pocket of his blacksuit—the formfitting black combat clothing that could pass for casual street clothes to the untrained eye, especially when worn under a light windbreaker as he was doing—Bolan removed a tiny earbud headset and donned it. He flipped open his secure sat phone and replaced the device in his pocket after hitting the first speed dial. Price’s voice came to him almost instantly, filtered through the earpiece.

“Striker?”

“I’m in pursuit, target or targets unknown.” He consulted the GPS unit on his dashboard and read off the coordinates and heading. As he did so, he heard more gunfire and thought he could make out muzzle flashes in the distance. It was hard to tell in the daylight. “Tracking gunfire specifically. To guess, I’d say our shooters weren’t quite done with Williamsburg.”

“You’re across town from the motel they hit,” Price said, though Bolan was perfectly aware of his position. “If you stay on this heading, you’ll end up hitting Norfolk, more or less.”

“Kudos to Bear, then,” Bolan said. “Barb, I have a theory.”

“Striker?”

“Our boy Baldero. He’s rabbiting. Think about it. If you were suddenly a fugitive, if someone or some group of some-ones was trying to shoot you, where would you go? A computer lab, to try and contact help. Baldero’s a tech geek, right? That’s familiar. That’s where he’d head. Motels, convenience stores, Laundromats…places to go to ground, and places to get food or supplies that are open all night long while you’re on the run.”

“We’ve been considering that in trying to work up a profile on him,” Price said. “There’s not much. Baldero has no criminal record. No known associates in the drug trade or with fringe political groups. No legal records of any kind, apart from a custody battle working its way through the courts. He’s got an estranged wife and a three-year-old daughter, living in Texas.”

“So,” Bolan said, slamming the big car’s accelerator to the floor and rocketing around a slow-moving panel truck as he gained on the gunfire ahead of him, “we’ve got a former CIA cryptographer who’s got himself into something so bad that it’s worth putting holes in half the state to kill him. The question is, what?”

“That’s what has the Man worried, Striker,” Price said. “More than the need to put a stop to these attacks, and the unrest they’re generating, we need to know what’s behind it. It could be much worse. It’s almost certainly much worse.”

“Got it, Barb. I’m closing now. We’ve caught a break, it seems. Have Bear and his team stand by to analyze any intelligence I might—”

The cargo van that cut across Bolan’s path was traveling nearly eighty miles an hour.

Bolan could see the van’s grille bearing down on him as it barreled straight for the driver’s door of his sedan.

The headlights shone very bright.

2

Bolan had a fraction of a second in which to react. He did the only thing he could do—he whipped the steering wheel hard to the left.

The dirty white cargo van blew past him on his passenger side, sheering off the car’s side mirror in a small maelstrom of plastic shards and silvery slivers. The rear end of the big car broke free, losing traction through the violent maneuver. The back of the vehicle came around, and Bolan found himself skidding through a complete 180-degree turn. The smell of burning rubber filled the car as he fought the steering wheel and the brakes, riding out the skid and narrowly missing a passenger car as he crossed the double line and barreled through oncoming traffic. The Crown Victoria finally jerked to a stop on the shoulder of the opposite side of the road, facing back the way Bolan had come.

He wasted no time. Snatching up the canvas war bag that contained his gear from Kissinger, he threw it over his shoulder and was out of the car in a heartbeat. As he moved, he drew the Beretta 93-R pistol from its custom leather shoulder holster. Flipping the selector switch to 3-round-burst mode, he rounded on the van, which had come to a screeching halt half on the sidewalk a dozen yards from his own vehicle.

The side door of the van slammed open. A man shouted furiously at him, his features twisted in rage. In his hands was the futuristic-looking assault rifle. The muzzle of the weapon spit flame.

Bolan hit the pavement painfully, his right hand at full extension before him. The 3-round burst of 9 mm bullets caught the shooter under his chin and folded him back on himself, where he disappeared in the dimly lighted interior of the cargo van. Bolan had time to roll sideways before several streams of what his ear identified as rifle fire converged on the pavement where he’d just been, spraying him with sharp pieces of asphalt.

The soldier recognized his attackers’ language readily enough. He had spent more than a little time operating covertly in cities like Tehran. It was Farsi, also known as Persian, the most commonly spoken of several languages in Iran and Afghanistan.

Very curious, he had time to think, with the incongruous detachment that often occurred in his mind when his body was engaged in the well-remembered and deeply ingrained mechanics of battle. The Executioner was nothing if not a thinking soldier, and his mind was always active, always analyzing the fluid and unpredictable rhythm of lethal combat.

Rising to a half-crouch, Bolan took a two-hand grip on the 93-R and glided heel-to-toe around the rear corner of the van, using the vehicle as cover. Predictably, shots began punching through the windows of the rear doors, but the angle was awkward and the gunners inside couldn’t get a clear shot.

He heard footsteps and saw feet wearing desert-sand-colored combat boots hit the pavement on the side of the van, as the men within piled out. They were shouting instructions to one another in Farsi. Bolan’s command of the language wasn’t up to interpreting it, certainly not in the rapid, clipped tones they were using, but it didn’t matter; the intent was clear. They were trying to coordinate their efforts to kill him.

Whoever these shooters were, there was no way they weren’t related to whatever had been happening across Virginia—though how a witness could have confused men of Persian descent with Asians, he could not say and would not bother to speculate. The Executioner was painfully aware that whatever vehicle or vehicles these men had been chasing and shooting at, as well as however many more vehicles full of gunners there might be on the road between Bolan and the presumably fleeing Baldero, were now well beyond the range at which he could reacquire and pursue them. There was nothing he could do; he had to deal with the immediate threat, or he wouldn’t be alive to continue with the mission.

It had only been by the blind luck of the battlefield that he had stumbled across the rolling gun battle in which he was now involved. Whoever these shooters were working for, whatever the connection to Baldero, erasing them and removing them from the combat equation was the one possible option.

Bolan threw himself flat again, lined up on the row of feet on the other side of the van and held the 93-R sideways to aim below and across the big vehicle’s undercarriage. Then he triggered several 3-round bursts.

Two of the men dropped, screaming, their ankles shattered. Bolan put a burst into each one of them, ending their misery. Then he was up again, coming around the front of the van.

The driver was still in position, holding a pistol that looked like a SIG-Sauer. Bolan put a single round through the glass and reloaded on the move, swapping the 20-round magazine for a fresh one from his shoulder harness.

There wasn’t much time. The police would be on the scene before long, responding to what would have to be countless phone calls about the war going on in the middle of the street in this mixed commercial district. His Justice credentials would put him above suspicion, at least eventually, and Brognola could always intervene on his behalf if he got embroiled with the locals, but it would cost time, and time was what he didn’t have. He could hear the combat clock ticking in his head.

He heard the second vehicle moving in from behind him; the throaty roar of the heavy cargo van was unmistakable. There were still shooters from the closer van to deal with, so he focused on those, maneuvering to put this threat between him and the newer group.

Risking a glance around the corner of the near van, he sighted down the driver’s side flank. Two men using the engine block for cover returned fire from where they crouched by the van’s grille. Bolan ducked back just in time, as bullets sparked and ricocheted from the metal of the rear corner of the vehicle.

He considered going for foot shots again, but he dared not place himself prone as the other group moved in from the passenger side. Bolan was already outnumbered and was going to be outflanked, if he was not careful.

The soldier reached into the war bag and found the familiar cylinder of a smoke grenade. The metal was cool to the touch. He drew the canister, popped the ring and let the smoke bomb fly into the midst of the enemy gunners.

The cloud of acrid purple smoke that erupted was a tribute to Kissinger’s skill with ordnance of that type. It immediately enveloped the shooters, obscuring their view of Bolan. They began firing blindly through the smoke. The Executioner hurried, moving to circle their position. As he did so, he drew the Desert Eagle from its hip holster and jacked the hammer back.

The first of the shooters burst from the cloud of smoke, assault rifle blazing. Bolan put him down with a single shot to the head from the big .44 Magnum pistol. The next man came, and the next, but they were blinded by the smoke, shooting wildly, their rounds far off the mark. The Executioner stood his ground and, gun in each hand, shot each man as he cleared the cloud of purple haze.

The gunners weren’t stupid or suicidal. As soon as they figured out what was happening, the parade of half-blinded men stopped.

Then a grenade rolled out of the smoke.

Bolan didn’t pause, didn’t deliberate and didn’t question his instincts. He simply kicked the bomb under the closer van and ran.

The explosion rocked the cargo van, pushing the nose up into the air as if the vehicle were rearing back on its hind axle. Thrown onto his stomach on the asphalt, Bolan felt the sudden wave of heat on his back. The breath was forced from his lungs and he lost his grip on his weapons. The spray of glass, plastic and metal fragments pelted his neck with tiny needles. There was no time to check himself for injuries, though he felt blood trickling down the back of his shirt.

Some sixth sense, some combat instinct—or perhaps just his awareness of the nature of battle—warned the Executioner that death was coming for him. He rolled over onto his back in time to see another man stagger through the last wisps of purple smoke. He had no weapon that Bolan could see. Blood trailed from his ears and his face was burned. He had been too close to the explosion, apparently.

Fixing Bolan with a hateful glare, the wounded man came straight for him. Bolan crabbed backward but had no time to regain his feet. The olive-skinned man landed on him, causing pain to shoot through Bolan’s battered ribs and up his lacerated back.

Fingers wrapped around Bolan’s throat. The weight pressing down on his stomach forced from him what little breath he had managed to regain. Suddenly he was fighting simply to draw air, dark clouds swirling around the edges of his vision.

The man on top of the soldier was screaming in what might have been Farsi. It might also have been simple gibberish; he was clearly mad with pain. Bolan could see burned skin peeling from his attacker’s face as the man roared his fury.

The Executioner’s hand fell to the right front pocket of his blacksuit pants. There, clipped inside his pocket, was a tactical folding knife with a wickedly serrated hawkbill blade. Bolan’s hand clenched around the textured plastic handle of the knife and yanked it free. As he did so, his thumb found the hole cut into the blade. He snapped the folding knife open and heard it lock into place.

The attacker’s eyes widened as the blade flashed into his view. Then he screamed. The Executioner brought the serrated blade down and across the man’s arm, working his way around the arm closer to his strong side. As the grip on his neck loosened, Bolan arched his back, ignoring the pain it caused. He threw the shrieking would-be killer off his chest and rolled over with the man, taking the dominant position.

The attacker was struggling to pull a pistol, apparently forgotten until that moment, from his belt. The Executioner’s knife flashed once across the man’s neck. He died, loudly, and Bolan released the knife, snatching the gun from its position in the dead man’s belt.

Bolan rose to a half-kneeling position, checking his immediate field of vision and also risking a quick glance behind him. His trained, experienced gaze missed nothing—a quick look was all he needed to assess the situation. Then he ejected the magazine in the pistol, checked it and slammed it home again. Press-checking the pistol showed him a 9 mm round in the chamber.

The pistol, which Bolan had first thought to be a SIG, was in reality a PC-9. He needed no reference book to call up what he knew of the handgun. Battlefield experience had made him a walking encyclopedia of firearms data. The weapon was an unlicensed, unauthorized copy of the SIG-Sauer P-226—and it was manufactured in Iran.

His own guns were somewhere on the pavement, but there was no time to look for them. Figures were moving through the pall of black smoke cast by the twisted, burning wreckage of the first van. Bolan detected police sirens in the distance. The clock had run out. He was out of time, his targets slipping that much farther out of his reach, and this fight wasn’t over.

Again employing his gliding, half-crouching fighting gait, the Executioner moved through the smoke to the opposite side of the remaining van. A man holding an assault rifle saw him and drew down on him. Bolan put a single 9 mm round between his eyes.

As he closed on the van and on the shooter’s position, Bolan caught movement from the corner of his eye. He turned in time to intercept a rush of men rounding the passenger side of the van’s grille. He fired quickly in a two-handed grip, first one, then another, and another. The first man fell with a bullet through his brain. The second was clawing at his throat where Bolan’s 9 mm bullet had pierced his neck; the light was already fading from his eyes as he fell to his knees, gurgling and trying to scream. The third man took a slug directly through his heart. He was dead before he finished falling over.

There were still shooters beyond the van, the last of the armed resistance. They fired at Bolan, but the angle was wrong. Both the soldier and his enemies were using the van as the only available cover between them, which meant the gunners had to be content with chewing away from the flanks. Asphalt and paint chips filled the air, ripping past with a noise like tearing cloth, while empty brass littered the street and curb. Those were not the sounds that worried Bolan most.

The police sirens were growing louder; the local authorities would be on the scene in moments. The Executioner did not dare let that happen. Deadly experience, always his guide, told him that the first thing the Farsi-speaking shooters would do, if confronted by police cars, would be to turn their automatic weapons on the law-enforcement officers. Though perhaps well-trained and well-equipped, the cops would not be prepared to roll straight into a barrage of automatic gunfire. Even a S.W.A.T. team would have a hard time coping with so sudden a burst of violence, and the new arrivals were likely road patrol responding to numerous calls of shots fired.

The Executioner had cut a bloody swath through the ranks of the criminal underworld and the international terrorism scene during his endless war for justice. Regardless of the side of the law on which he operated—and he’d spent plenty of time exacting a righteous toll on society’s predators on the “wrong” side of law and government, whenever that had been necessary to get the job done—he had done so while always respecting one rule above all else. He would not take innocent life, and he would not take the life of a law-enforcement officer who was simply doing his or her duty.

Given that, Bolan would no sooner allow those law-enforcement officers to stumble blindly into a killing field that was partly of his own making. It would be like herding cattle through the gates of an abattoir.

Bolan scooped up a fallen assault rifle and snatched two magazines from the belt of the dead man who had wielded the weapon.

The weapon was one he knew, but which he had not encountered often. It was a Khaybar KH 2002, a bullpup weapon based internally on the M-16 A-1 that looked like an ungainly cross between a Steyr AUG and a French FAMAS. He checked the rounds in the magazines by simple eye—this rifle fired the same 5.56 mm round as did the rifles that had inspired its design.

The Executioner took only a second to verify that the weapon was chambered and ready. Then, holding the rifle close to his body, he threw himself prone and rolled across the pavement, his head pointing toward the enemy.

The enemy gunners saw him but had been waiting for a target at waist level. Their fire went high and, before they could compensate, Bolan unleashed a series of tightly controlled bursts from the muzzle of the futuristic-looking rifle.

The 5.56 mm rounds tore through the knot of men, splaying them in every direction. One of them screamed; the others died silently. The screamer managed to clench the pistol grip of a small submachine gun as he left this world. The rounds it discharged caused Bolan to flinch from a fresh spray of sharp asphalt shards that drew blood from his cheek.

The gunfire echoed away at last. Bolan got to his feet, the Khaybar stock tight against his shoulder. He moved quickly and cautiously forward and around the vehicle, checking every direction with fast glances side-to-side and behind him. There was no more movement from among the gunmen. He had killed them all.

The first of the police cars reached him, LED light bars strobing, sirens howling. Immediately, officers threw open their doors and leveled their pistols at Bolan, shouting for him to drop his weapon and make no sudden moves.

The Executioner held the rifle up over his head in both hands. The shouting continued.

“I am an agent of the United States Justice Department,” he said very deliberately, emphasizing each syllable so they could hear him over their sirens. “I have engaged these men to—”

“Shut up!” one of the officers ordered. Two more came up on either side, all of them keeping a prudent distance from the soldier. “Place your weapon very slowly on the pavement!”

Bolan did so. “I am an agent of the United States Justice Department,” he repeated patiently. This was nothing he had not endured before. “I have credentials and identification on my person.”

“Hands behind your head!” the officer shouted again. “Interlace your fingers! Do it now!”

Bolan did as instructed. He was seized, cuffed none too gently and then patted down. The frisk was halted abruptly when the officer realized just how many pouches and pockets the blacksuit had, and how many of these had something lethal in them. His war bag, still slung over his shoulder, was brimming with things that would give an ATF agent apoplexy. Bolan could only imagine how the police would react when they got to that.

“Holy shit,” one of the cops muttered. “This guy is loaded.” He called for the other two officers, the ones who had braced Bolan. The soldier was half pulled, half dragged upright and escorted to a police cruiser. There, his war bag was placed heavily on the trunk as the officer resumed the frisk. The two backup men held their weapons on Bolan the entire time.

The sat phone Bolan carried, which was now on the trunk in a growing pile of his personal weapons and accessories, began to vibrate, skittering across the trunk a few inches as it did so.

That was probably the Farm. Once he spoke to them, word would get passed to Hal Brognola that he would need to intercede, yet again, on Bolan’s behalf. The big Fed had logged far too many hours of his life calming anxious representatives of local law enforcement who did not take kindly to Bolan’s wars waged through their bailiwicks.

Brognola was probably in the middle of having breakfast. Bolan imagined this would ruin his appetite.

3

Bolan sat in the open side doorway of the one intact cargo van, turning the small submachine gun over in one hand. He had his sat phone open and against his ear. Barbara Price’s voice, as sexy as ever to him despite her all-business tone, came clearly across the scrambled link to Stony Man Farm.

“Cowboy verified it based on the photos you snapped and transmitted to us,” Price said. “The weapon is an MPT9K—an Iranian copy of the Heckler & Koch MP-5 K. That makes it a clean sweep, Striker. He says your identifications of the rifle and the pistol you picked up were dead-on.”

The Executioner was not surprised. After a tense half hour during which he had been allowed, on the strength of his Justice credentials, to contact Brognola, who then placed an immediate call back to the police department and local FBI offices, Bolan had been released. The grudging attitude of the officer who had cuffed him hadn’t prevented the man from doing his job in an efficient manner, especially after his own superiors had contacted him and doubly confirmed what Bolan had tried to tell him.

The soldier’s weapons and personal effects had been returned to him, at which point Bolan asserted Justice’s jurisdiction, at least at the outset. The officers had stood back while he used the digital camera in his sat phone to snap pictures of the dead men, their equipment, and the scene of the destruction Bolan had wrought on the street. He had transmitted them to the Farm for analysis.

A crime-scene team had since taken over, scouring the area and tagging and bagging anything that wasn’t nailed down. Once he had his photographs, Bolan had no further need to take charge of the aftermath of the fight. He was content to let the Farm run diplomatic interference behind the scenes. A great deal of covering up of the true nature of the shooters would likely have to be done, if reports of further terrorist shootings were to be averted. Already, several media crews were being kept at bay by uniformed officers wielding collapsible roadblocks and what appeared to be several miles of yellow caution tape.

“I’m done here,” Bolan informed Price.

“We’ll transmit directions to your phone’s GPS application, as usual,” Price said. “I assume you’re headed toward Norfolk.”

“Yes, since that’s the direction our boy was heading when I stumbled into this. You can get the field team moving there, if you haven’t already.”

“They’re well on their way,” Price confirmed. “They’ll beat you there and will act as our advance eyes and ears. Maybe we can yet get you ahead of the Iranians.”

“Iranians?” Bolan asked. “We have confirmation?” While all the weapons the shooters had used were Iranian, and rare enough in the United States, he would not assume the gunmen had been from Iran without some sort of verification. It was one of the oldest “plausible deniability” tricks in the book to equip a team with weapons not traceable to the nation fielding that team, or traceable to a completely different nation, in order to misdirect the enemy and confuse the issue should members of the team be captured or killed.

“That’s affirmative, Striker,” Price said. “We have identities back on half a dozen of your dead men, the ones who have Interpol records. All are Iranian black bag operators. Three were officially dead long before they ever met you. We’ve made some discreet inquiries through the usual channels, but of course the Iranians wouldn’t give us the time of day or a straight answer about this even if we were on good terms with them. It’s pretty obvious that you’re facing an Iranian-sponsored hit team, though what they could want with Baldero is still a mystery.”

“Something’s bothering me, Barb,” Bolan said.

“What is it?”

“It’s no small thing to sneak a small army of commandos into the country. Logic dictates that if you did, you’d equip them locally. Weapons are readily enough come by here, after all, and even illegally obtained automatic weapons would be more easily purchased through stateside contacts than smuggled into the U.S., wouldn’t they?”

“It would depend, Striker,” Price said. “If the Iranians were in a big hurry, they’d equip their team domestically and send them in as quickly as possible, the consequences be damned. It’s not as if we enjoy a good relationship with them.”

“True,” Bolan said. “But if that’s the case, how did they get in? This many men, carrying weapons and explosives? There’s a huge hole in our border somewhere, Barb.”

“That’s not really news, Striker,” Price said, “but I take your meaning. I’ll see if Bear and his people can come up with something. We’ll start prodding other agencies, especially DHS, Coast Guard and Border Patrol to see if we can come up with something.”

“All right,” Bolan said. “I’ve lost enough time already. Time to get moving.”

“Good hunting, Striker.”

“Out,” Bolan said. He closed the phone.

The officer who had first cuffed Bolan, named Sheddon, had been watching the Executioner from out of earshot, giving him time to finish his phone call. When the soldier closed the phone, the cop walked up to him and tried to smile. The result was genuine, if a bit sheepish. Officer Sheddon held up a plastic evidence bag in which Bolan’s bloody folding knife was sealed.

“Agent Cooper?” Sheddon asked, gesturing with the bag. The Justice Department identification that Bolan had flashed liberally to the officers on scene said that his name was “Matt Cooper.” He had worn many aliases in his fight against society’s predators. The exploits of Agent Matt Cooper would be somewhat legendary by themselves, if somebody had the time and the security clearance to start tallying them up.

“Yes, Officer?” Bolan said.

“They’ve cleared me to return your weapons to you, sir,” Sheddon said. He pointed to one of the cruisers. “See Officer Ames, the one with the blond hair, there. He’s got them locked in his trunk, sir. You sure you don’t want medical attention?”

“Thank you, no.” Bolan said. “I assume you have no more questions for me?”

“None that they’ll let me ask, sir,” Sheddon said. He looked irritated and a bit rueful, but he was a good cop and didn’t appear to be holding any serious grudges. “I’m afraid they want the knife, though, sir. Evidence.”

Bolan raised an eyebrow. “Then why not the guns?”

“Plenty of shell casings and bullets to be had.” Sheddon shrugged. “You know how it goes. They don’t want this—” he gestured with the evidence bag again “—walking off if it was used in one of the, er…deaths.”

“I understand. You’re doing your job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep at it.” Bolan nodded to him, stood and offered his hand. Sheddon shook it; his grip was firm.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Officer?” Bolan asked, looking back over his shoulder.

“Good luck with…whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Thank you, Officer.”

It took Bolan only a few minutes to gather up his gear, check the Crown Victoria for damage and get on the road toward Newport News. Once in motion, he pressed the gas pedal as close to the floor as he dared, weaving through traffic with skill and determination. He was already far behind the curve, but there was no point in delaying further. Until he knew otherwise, his quarry was more likely than anywhere else to be in Newport News, Hampton, Norfolk, or beyond it. That meant he needed to be there, too, and soon.

He set the cruise control and, though he knew it was dangerous, spared a glance at his phone. He scrolled through the data the Farm was transmitting to him, calling up each image as it downloaded. There were brief personal biographies of the men for whom identities had been dredged up, and complete dossiers on two men not pictured. Bolan read in fits and starts as he switched his attention from the small screen to the road and back again. These were the Farm’s best guess at the likely leaders of such an Iranian strike group. It was a guess based on past Iranian intelligence ops and what Stony Man’s almost prescient computer team could tell him of known Iranian terror operatives—those operating with the nominal sanction of their frequently rogue state’s government.

The two dossiers were for men named Hassan Ayman, likely the senior member of an Iranian field team assigned to stir up trouble in the United States, and a Marzieh Shirazi, whose name Bolan remembered from several different terror bulletins in Europe. Each man had a file as long as Bolan’s arm. Shirazi was linked to several bombings of targets in Israel, where he had a close working relationship with the PLO and, more recently, with the Palestinian government that incorporated many high-ranking PLO figures, each man among them a murderous terrorist in his own right. Shirazi was small and squat, with a prominent brow, and dark, beady eyes pressed into a face that looked like it had stopped a brick at some point in Shirazi’s teenage years.

Ayman concerned Bolan more. He had no definitive terror incidents or murders assigned to him but, according to the file, he had long been rumored to be an extremely high-ranking official in Iranian intelligence. He was implicated in scores of deaths of civilians and nominally military targets alike, both in Israel and during the Iran-Iraq war. This last started in 1987. Apparently Ayman was believed, by the Farm’s team and as independently theorized by CIA analysts, to have been instrumental in several high-profile atrocities during the tailend of Iran’s “imposed war” with Iraq. If either Ayman or Shirazi was on scene, or if both of them were active in the here and present, on the streets of the urban United States, things would only get more bloody.

The big question remained: what did Iranian black-ops assassins want with a single former CIA cryptographer, a young man who had never, according to his file, worked as a field agent or on anything resembling a project related to Iran? This much was included in the data the Farm had sent on Baldero. It was a puzzle, and Bolan did not like puzzles. They pointed to incomplete information, and incomplete information, though a common problem in the field, was the most frequent cause of lost engagements. To gain and keep the initiative in combat required that he surprise his enemies. He did not intend to be on the other end of the exchange.

He was burning up the road, having passed Hampton and Newport News without incident, debating whether to cycle back and forth between them and Norfolk when his phone began to vibrate. The Farm would know he had reached the next city, of course; they were tracking him through the SAASM-compatible GPS tracking module in his phone. The Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module technology was the U.S. Military’s answer to GPS positioning. It ensured that, while his phone could be tracked by the team at Stony Man Farm, giving Price and her people up-to-date location data as Bolan traveled the country, no enemy could do the same, nor could false position data be transmitted to the Farm to misinform Kurtzman’s cyber team.

“Striker,” he answered.

“Striker, we have a mission-critical update,” Price said without preamble. “We are transmitting new coordinates to you as we speak. The advance field team has been combing likely spots for Baldero to go to ground, including local motels and gas stations. They have a pickup truck parked behind a Dumpster at a motel on the North Military Highway. They say it’s full of bullet holes.”

“Registration?”

“The truck was reported stolen in Charlottesville yesterday,” Price said, “and now it’s wearing a set of stolen license plates swapped from a similar Chevy S-10, also in Charlottesville.”

“Coincidence?”

“There’s that word again,” Price echoed.

“I’m on it,” Bolan said. “Out.”

It took him another fifteen minutes to reach the address, guided by the GPS directions in his phone. When he was close to the location, he stowed the phone and slowed, doing his best to stay inconspicuous. He found the motel and reconnoitered as quietly as he could, cruising around and hoping his interceptor and its missing side mirror wouldn’t scream “law enforcement presence” to Baldero if the man were watching and had reason to fear legal interference. Bolan was not a police officer, of course—he was a soldier. Baldero would not know that, though. To the fugitive Baldero, Bolan would represent the law, and any man running from so many shooters would either welcome rescue or fear capture. The situation would be very tense until the Executioner knew which way Baldero would break.

There was no sign of the advance field team. They would have pulled out to some discreet distance once word got out that a Stony Man operative was on the way. The team’s job was not combat and its mission was to remain undetected, to go unnoticed as long as possible. Getting drawn into a firefight was not its purpose; the unnamed, faceless analysts who had sent so much after-action intelligence Bolan’s way thus far could only continue to do so if they stayed out of the way. That was fine with the Executioner. He preferred to work alone, whenever possible, and if there was a firefight to be had, he was content to bring it to the enemy.

He found the truck right where he had been told to expect it, hidden in the lee of a pair of industrial-sized trash containers behind the motel. He parked behind it, blocking it in, nose-out in case he needed to put the Crown Victoria into action quickly.

The truck’s engine was still ticking. It had not been parked for long and was still shedding excess heat from what had to have been a breakneck drive. Bolan could smell burning brakes and hot rubber, the unmistakable odors of a vehicle that had been pushed to its limits.

He had his canvas war bag slung over his shoulder. Before he moved on the motel, he paused to open the bag’s large cover flap. Inside was the mini-Uzi he had first noted when making a cursory inspection of the care package from Kissinger. He withdrew the weapon, loaded one of the 30-round box magazines from the bag and placed the weapon on the hood of his vehicle.

He recounted the other explosives and lethal surprises in the bag, as well as taking stock of the loaded magazines for the Uzi. Kissinger had thoughtfully provided several 20-round box magazines for the Beretta 93-R, its 9 mm ammo compatible with the Uzi. There were a handful of loaded mags for the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, too, and a few boxes of ammunition for both weapons.

Finally, he withdrew a small item he had at first overlooked. It was a rosewood-handled boot dagger in a leather sheath with a metal spring clip. He withdrew it, examined the four-inch, double-edged blade and resheathed the knife with a mental nod. Then he clipped the sheath inside his waistband in the appendix position, where he could draw it with either hand readily enough. His windbreaker covered it, barely, as it concealed his other hardware in their holsters.

As he went to pick up the mini-Uzi from the hood, a slip of paper fluttered from his sleeve, where it had been caught following his reach into the bag. Bolan scooped it up quickly, checking to make sure he was still unobserved from his vantage behind the garbage containers. Then he unfolded the paper.

Wear them in good health, it read in handwritten print. Stay alive. It was signed, simply, “Cowboy.”

Bolan shoved the slip of paper deep into his pocket. He picked up the Uzi and, holding the weapon low against his leg, moved in on the motel. Once he was in the shadow of the building itself, he took out his phone and texted a message to the Farm’s quick-contact number, which would display on a readout in the Computer Room, asking for room number intel.

Almost immediately, the responding text message came back, probably typed by Price herself: “Bear says man matching Baldero’s description checked in room 112. Grnd floor, East.”

That would mean the Farm, or someone on the advance team reporting to the Farm, had checked with the front desk. Whether overtly using government authority, or covertly using some ruse, the Farm had determined that a man who looked like Baldero had checked into room 112, which Price was informing him was located on the ground floor of the east wing of the double-winged building.

He made his way there, watching the doors and room numbers tick past in descending order as he went by. He was doing his best to ignore the gun held against his thigh. It was an old trick of role camouflage; if the gun wasn’t anything he noticed, a bystander might not notice it either. While there were always exceptions, Bolan knew from experience that most people simply didn’t look at the individuals around them. The majority of people walked through life in what one late, famous self-defense expert had called “condition white,” a state of blissful unawareness of their surroundings. Bolan was counting on that. It wouldn’t do for some particularly aware citizen to notice his weapon and call the police, perhaps tipping off Baldero that he had been located.

He found room 112 and pressed himself against the wall next to the door. Reaching out with one hand, he rapped on the door quietly, using the back of his left fist.

“Yeah?” came a voice from inside.

“Housekeeping,” Bolan said. “You want fresh towels?”

There was no reply from inside. Bolan could hear the occupant, presumably Baldero, shuffling around within. If it wasn’t his man, no harm would be done. If it was, however, he needed to take control of the situation right now. If he could get Baldero to open the door without causing a scene, he could quietly remove the man from the premises and take him into custody. Getting Baldero under wraps was the first step in stopping the shootings that were causing so much trouble, and in unraveling the mystery regarding why the shootings were happening.

“Sir?” Bolan asked again. “If you’ll just open the door—”

Just then a shotgun slug tore a hole the size of a quarter through the heavy motel door.

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