The blast rocked the warehouse

The Executioner hung the M-16 over his shoulder, filled his hands with the Blaster and caressed the trigger, sending the first missle streaking downrange with a loud chug.

As the toxic brew showered armed shadows charging for a nearby pocket, banshee shrieks flaying the air, Bolan jacked the handle, rotated another projectile into place and pumped out another hell bomb. No point in pulling punches, he decided, no sense fretting about noise and police swarming the block.

The Executioner was moving in to run and gun. Another batch of drums puked away toxic loads on a roaring ball of fire to douse a few more cannibals in what amounted to the fires of hell on earth.

There went the neighborhood.

MACK BOLAN

The Executioner

#253 Risk Factor

#254 Chill Effect

#255 War Bird

#256 Point of Impact

#257 Precision Play

#258 Target Lock

#259 Nightfire

#260 Dayhunt

#261 Dawnkill

#262 Trigger Point

#263 Skysniper

#264 Iron Fist

#265 Freedom Force

#266 Ultimate Price

#267 Invisible Invader

#268 Shattered Trust

#269 Shifting Shadows

#270 Judgment Day

#271 Cyberhunt

#272 Stealth Striker

#273 UForce

#274 Rogue Target

#275 Crossed Borders

#276 Leviathan

#277 Dirty Mission

#278 Triple Reverse

#279 Fire Wind

#280 Fear Rally

#281 Blood Stone

#282 Jungle Conflict

#283 Ring of Retaliation

#284 Devil’s Army

#285 Final Strike

#286 Armageddon Exit

#287 Rogue Warrior

#288 Arctic Blast

#289 Vendetta Force

#290 Pursued

#291 Blood Trade

#292 Savage Game

#293 Death Merchants

#294 Scorpion Rising

#295 Hostile Alliance

#296 Nuclear Game

#297 Deadly Pursuit

#298 Final Play

#299 Dangerous Encounter

#300 Warrior’s Requiem

#301 Blast Radius

#302 Shadow Search

#303 Sea of Terror

#304 Soviet Specter

#305 Point Position

#306 Mercy Mission

#307 Hard Pursuit

#308 Into the Fire

#309 Flames of Fury

#310 Killing Heat

#311 Night of the Knives

#312 Death Gamble

#313 Lockdown

#314 Lethal Payload

#315 Agent of Peril

#316 Poison Justice

#317 Hour of Judgment

#318 Code of Resistance

#319 Entry Point

#320 Exit Code

#321 Suicide Highway

#322 Time Bomb

#323 Soft Target

#324 Terminal Zone

#325 Edge of Hell

#326 Blood Tide

#327 Serpent’s Lair

#328 Triangle of Terror

The Executioner®

Triangle of Terror

Don Pendleton

Nothing can excuse a general who takes advantage of the knowledge acquired in the service of his country, to deliver up her frontier and her towns to foreigners. This is a crime reprobated by every principle of religion, morality and honor.

—Napoleon I, 1769–1821

Maxims of War

There is no lower form of treachery than to betray your fellow citizens in the name of greed and power. I will not rest while traitors plot their moves. I will be one step ahead of them and will make sure they get their due.

—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

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Epilogue

Prologue

Only the guilty paid for silence. After nearly two decades of searching out, recruiting or buying contacts and informants from the adversarial side, Robert Dutton knew few darker truths existed in the shadowy world of intelligence gathering. Wisdom, though, did little to calm the brewing tempest in his gut. And he suspected a storm—invisible, silent, murderous, and in the flesh—was on the way.

He cursed the static buzz in his ear, fear sweeping away the impulse to fling the cell phone across the study. Whoever was coming—and he had some notion, albeit vague, as to the identity of the opposition—had electronically severed the secured frequency to the American Embassy. The National Security Agency called it hot-wiring, their classified super-tech miniature boxes emitting laser or microwave beams through triangulation, once the source—or target operator—was identified. The interloper, however, had to be in a general proximity of fifty yards to pull off the black magic act, which told Dutton the compound had already been breached. Likewise, he found his computer screen streaked with lightning jags. He felt his guts clench with the bitter awareness that all communications to the outside world had shut down. With no chance to e-mail his wife, warn her of imminent danger, to stay put until he rounded her up.

Damn it!

Knowing there was no hope of any Marine cavalry storming the compound, he chambered a 9 mm Parabellum round into the Beretta M-9 and stowed the weapon in shoulder rigging. No, he told himself, it wasn’t entirely true he was alone. His three-man team was still in the Command and Control Room, all of them armed, all of them sure to be staring at monitors jumping haywire with countertech malfeasance, alert to the sabotage. But, he wondered, was one or all three part of the plot to see he went deaf and blind? That prospect had earlier urged him to keep them in the dark, until he learned more about a possible conspiracy that could topple the administration in Washington.

Raw nerves screamed he needed to get to his wife immediately and whisk her out of Amman, a short chopper ride across the border to the relative safety of Israel where he had Mossad contacts. If he was marked as a CIA operative, he knew it stood to grim reason the opposition had most likely smoked her out as something more than a diplomatic attaché. They might kidnap her as a bargaining chip to buy his allegiance. They were compromised, no question, and that came straight from the shadow who had offered him the brown envelope only hours ago.

Briefly, he recalled the twilight encounter in the desert. He had gone there to rendezvous with an informant inside a cell of rejectionist radical Jordanians aligned with Iraqi militants. A military Humvee sat in the distance, watching the encounter, while the shadow—a Westerner brandishing an M-16—materialized out of the lengthening dusk, putting it to him to go deaf, dumb and blind, or else.

“Forget what you have learned. Take this, await further instructions…or suffer consequences.”

No sale. He didn’t know whether it was a setup. The Company was infamous for playing head games, separating wheat from chaff, lamb from lion, but he was a patriot, loyal to only God, country and family.

With the ultimatum now come to collect, he knew there was no point, nor time to waste shredding documents, gather the latest intel on what he’d learned from informants the past two days on what his team had tagged the “great vanishing act.”

Time to fight or fly.

He marched for the double doors, briefly confounded and angry, wondering how four years of hunting down and flushing out the mystery of the weapons of mass destruction—so close but seeming like light-years away—was swirling in the bowl. The attempted bribery confirmed two critical items in his mind. First, the WMD was real, it was out there. And someone, supposedly on the side of the angels, did not want it found. The latter conclusion begged the obvious question.

Why, indeed?

He hit the door when the lights blinked out. For several moments he crouched at the barrier, heart thundering in his ears, as he silently urged the generator to kick in. Nothing. He freed the Beretta and twisted the door handle, wondering why the others were not scrambling down the hall, barreling into the study. He was out the door, weapon extended, listening to the silence, peering into the darkness in both directions down the hall when the auxiliary generator flashed on the emergency overhead lights. Heart pounding, aware he was exposed in the sudden glow, he flung himself against the wall, Beretta whipping, twelve and six. The corridor was empty, but he sensed a presence, his combat instincts torqued up, warning him the invader was close.

And the faint acrid stink bit his nose.

Ahead, he saw the pneumatic door to the Command and Control Room open. Sliding on, checking the gloomy murk to his rear, the coppery taint clawed deeper into his senses. That the door was open, however, the red light on the keypad blinking, confirmed the identity of the opposition.

Only the five men had access to the Storm Tracking Central.

Taking a deep breath, Dutton threw himself into the doorway, charged three steps in, angling hard left for the deep shadows of the corner, the Beretta sweeping the room. His stomach cramped. Peevy was slumped over his monitor, blood pooling beneath his arms, a dark ragged hole in his temple. Waters and Groome were sprawled on their backs, swivel chairs dumped on the floor. Side arms holstered, they obviously never knew what hit them. But why, he thought, should they expect to be murdered by one of their own?

Dutton shoved down his rising anger over this brutal act of treachery. He vowed to the dead they would be avenged. Danger, he knew, was part and parcel of intelligence work, but they were essentially intel brokers—Storm Trackers, tagged so because they gleaned, bought, bartered or stole information on terror operations. In short, they mapped the future of operations on both sides, predicted strike patterns, stamped flashpoints well in advance of critical mass, often war-gaming terror and counterterror scenarios on computers for Langley. They were not gunslingers, steely-eyed black ops who combed the world’s hellzones for the most wanted militants, though Dutton had fired a shot in anger more than once in his day.

Retracing his path to the door, he sensed the invisible killer was nearby and closing the gap. Dead ahead, the north corridor would take him to a stairwell, which led to the subterranean garage. Trouble was, that hall bisected another corridor that circled back to his study, leaving him to wonder if the killer was laying in wait, no doubt armed with a sound-suppressed weapon.

Poised to start blasting, Dutton bolted and glimpsed the silhouette at the end of the southern hall. He saw the dark object in the killer’s hand, the assassin darting for cover at the corridor’s edge, then he tapped the Beretta’s trigger twice on the fly. A double crack sounded, the whine of bullets ricocheting off stone in the distance, and Dutton launched himself into a full-bore sprint, the tall snake-lean figure of the killer forcing the man’s name to mind like a curse word. It suddenly occurred to Dutton there could be more than one assassin under the roof, but he reached the stone door before the fear of this realization sank in. Turning the iron handle, he hauled open the massive block to the stairwell. Shooting one last look over his shoulder, he descended the narrow passageway, weapon out and ready to take down any threat as he wound his way around the first of two corners.

He hit the concrete deck running, palmed his remote box and beeped open the door locks to his GMC vehicle. Nothing unusual about the garage, as he scanned the shadows around the stone pillars, the vehicles of his dead comrades fanned out beside his ride, but there was another entrance to this underground lot, and he was sure the assassin knew of its existence. Certain he heard the faint scuffle of feet over stone toward the north exit, he flung open the door, jumped behind the wheel, scanning the garage. Determined he would shoot or bulldoze his exit out of there, he was keying the ignition when he spotted the inert figure on the shotgun seat in the corner of his eye. He was cursing himself for what might prove a fatal oversight, gun up and tracking, when he turned and faced the unmoving shape.

And felt his blood freeze.

“Oh, God, oh, God, no…”

He heard his cry trail off, feeble and distant, as he felt his heart jackhammer, believing for a moment fear and adrenaline had warped his senses, rendering the world an hallucination, spinning in his eyes, off its axis. The sound volumed into a pure bellow of animal rage, as he reached over, ready to shake her, call her name. But he had seen dead bodies, before and the blank stare and dark hole in her temple confirmed the murderous deed.

The impulse dropped over him like a wall of stone, his hand reaching for the door, ready now to fight or die, if only in the name of vengeance. But Dutton discovered he was grabbing air. The head butt shot out of nowhere. He felt his nose mashed into his face, caught his howl of agony vanishing somewhere in the blast furnace of scalding knives tearing through his brain, then number two hammer slammed him off the eyebrow. As blood stung his eyes, blinding him, he was vaguely aware of hands clawing into his shoulders like talons.

Suddenly, he was aware his own hands were empty, bell rung, reflexes for anything resembling a counterattack nearly frozen by pain. He was airborne next, wrenched from the seat, swiping at the blood in his eyes when the bastard teed off with a kick to his groin. Another grenade of white-hot pain exploded, scalp to toes, dropping him to his knees. Paralyzed, he tasted bile and blood on his lips, and strained to make out the assassin through the burning mist in his eyes.

“All you had to do was take the money and follow a few simple directions. It could have been so easy. But here we are. Me, disappointed in my fellow man. You, sucking on a final few moments of rage and grief and disillusionment.”

Dutton coughed, sucked wind, determined then not to give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing him begging for his life. Yes, he thought, here we are. He found it all so incredible; it struck him as the deluded fantasy of psychopaths. Or was there more to it? What? Greed? Power? Delusions of grandeur? He stared up at the assassin who took a step back, the Beretta held low by his side.

“What in God’s name have you done, Locklin?” Dutton asked plainly.

“Beyond luring your wife out of the embassy under the pretense of an emergency—the emergency being you—I haven’t done anything in God’s name.”

Dutton spit blood, surprised how the powerful hatred he felt toward the killer dulled the edge of physical torment. “You rotten bastard…she didn’t know anything.”

“She’s CIA, Dutton. She would have figured it out on her own, or you would have told her one night over some pillow talk.”

“What you’re doing…it will never happen.”

“Wrong, friend, it’s already happening, but what you think you found out is just a small part of the big picture. And, by the way, maybe you’re thinking the Company station chief here in Jordan will make this up to you, stabilize the situation already in play, sound the alarm from Langley to the Pentagon? Who do you think put me in charge of security at the embassy and to monitor you and your Storm Trackers? The official paper trail that put my seal of approval in your face is so back-channeled and convoluted it would take an act of God to trace it to the original source. Besides, the good CSC has already gone the way of your wife.”

Dutton felt adrenaline drive away the sludge in his limbs, fisted some of the blood out of his eyes, glanced to the open door and spotted his weapon on the seat. He didn’t think he’d make the four-foot lunge, but he had to try. If he kept the traitor talking while the cobwebs cleared, he might be able to pull off a lightning retaliatory strike.

“Okay, I give up. You sound like you’re in a talking mood, Locklin, so why not tell me why you’ve become a dirty rat bastard selling out to the enemy?”

Locklin laughed. “There is no enemy, Dutton—other than the people you think you pledge allegiance to.”

“I work for the United States government, Locklin.”

“So do I. Listen up, here’s a lesson on the facts of life. I’m sure you’ve heard how the victors in any war write history, how the winners determine who the bad guys are, how those on the winning side can tell future generations how they wore the armor of righteousness and made the world a better place.”

“That’s what this is about? Winning? Writing history?”

“Not writing it—creating it, making the future happen. You’re a Storm Tracker, Dutton. You know something about predicting the future, how to look into the eyes of tomorrow’s incubating conflicts and figure out how it will turn out, more or less. All the future is, well, it’s just an extension of the past. Men making the same mistakes. I’m just an instrument of the future and the people you so naively pledged allegiance to—the CIA, your informants, hell, maybe even the President of the United States—they’re not going to be a part of the coming future.”

The more his vision cleared, the more sickened Dutton felt at the face of pure evil looming over him. He knew he would never leave the garage breathing, the veil of darkness shadowing Locklin’s face warning him the killer’s blustering stance was over. The Beretta was rising.

It was over.

Dutton launched himself off the ground, hand streaking out for his weapon. He braced himself for the bullets to start tearing into him. It was either a miracle of speed and brazenness on his part or Locklin simply toying with him, but he had the Beretta in hand, heart pumping with lethal intent. Dutton wheeled, instinct shouting he wouldn’t make it. But a distant faint voice in his head told him that someone, somewhere would stand up to this monstrous evil before it unleashed its abomination on the world. At near point-blank range, he felt the cracking thunder lance his eardrums, a nanosecond before the 9 mm hammer drilled his forehead and doused the lights.

1

The blinding light usually broke them before he came in to close the game. Of course, he thought, there was prep work before the hardball questions were fired off, something extra for Task Force Talon’s time and trouble having to hunt some of them down in the first place. Plus, getting it straight up front, their will would be little more than wet dung to be molded in his hands. For instance, the detainee—or, in the private parlance of interrogators, the chum or the contaminants—seemed to always come to him requiring warm up where it hurt most—on the mug. A shot or two to the nose, squelching beak to crimson mash potatoes while pinballing those firewheels through the brain, was a decent jump start to poke a chink in defiant armor. It let them know right off whatever they’d heard about the Geneva Convention was simply the whiny nonsense of Western journalists who couldn’t fathom the real world. Naturally, before the festivities started, they were stripped naked, strapped to the cold steel chair, humiliation hard at work right away to rob the chum of any pride. He let them stew for, say, anywhere from thirty-six to forty-eight hours like that, no food or water, no sleep.

Alone, seething, shamed and frightened, pinned by the light.

The problem was, the white light could break a man down to a gibbering idiot. No longer, then, did he leave them with eyelids forced open by clamps. He needed hard intel from lucid tongues, not raving lunatics fit only for a straitjacket. Consider the murdering rabble he had to deal with and break, though, he figured it was forgiveable if they lost one or two along the way, learning from their own mistakes how far to push it as they went.

The rock music and the air conditioner mounted on the white wall were the newest additions, both of them personal touches. Piped in at jumbojet decibels, the guard monitoring the 8x10 cell—the Conversion Room it was called—had the discretion to decide how long to blast the detainee with screeching guitar riffs and primal drumbeats. He could grant the prisoner whatever period of blessed silence he chose before blaring back the same godawful song. With the transfer complete, the worst of the worst militants from Guantanamo Bay found themselves in a remote jungle hellhole. Smack on the Brazil-Paraguay-Argentina border, few human beings knew it existed and even fewer wanted to know.

It was his show.

Zipping up the bomber jacket, he pulled the door shut behind him, then slipped on the leather gloves. Even with the black sunglasses he squinted, taking a few moments to adjust to the white glare. Two steps across the polyethylene tarp, the plastic crinkling beneath rubber-soled combat boots, and he saw the detainee flinch at the sound. Good, he thought, no permanent ear damage. If possible, he liked to keep his style of interrogation more low key, direct, friendly even, unlike the shouting and barking his two comrades enjoyed.

He took a moment to inspect the damage his starter and middle relief had inflicted earlier, stepping into the halo, shielding the battered face with his shadow. The swollen eyelids fluttered open as best they could, then cracked to slits, the detainee groaning, shivering so hard in the restraints around his arms and legs it made him wonder if the bolts would hold down the chair. They’d done quite the hit parade on the ribs, he saw, both sides a quilt work pattern, layered in black and purple. And the strained wheezing told him every breath the Iraqi drew was like taking a hot knife through the torso.

He fired up a cigarette, inhaled a healthy lungful through it and blew the cloud in the prisoner’s face, meshing smoke with pluming breath. Though he had his closing mentally scripted he still wondered where to start. Whether Kharballah al-Tikriti was the bastard son of the Burrowed Bearded Rat—as rumor indicated—was of minor importance, as long as that knowledge remained a secret shared only by those closest to him.

“I am Colonel James Braden, commander of Task Force Talon,” he began, the detainee gagging and wincing as he shrouded him with another wave of smoke. “I am what is called a closer, but from where you sit, Kharballah, I am the alpha and the omega, I am the only friend in the world you have at this moment. I stand between you and death.”

He thought he spotted the residue of defiant life still in the eyes, maybe a spark of hatred. Sliding to the side, blowing smoke, he watched al-Tikriti shut his eyes, then the Iraqi cut loose a stream of profanity mixing Arabic with English. Braden was more amazed than angry. None of the others had made it this far, but al-Tikriti was still going strong.

“That is the only answer you will get from me,” the prisoner said finally.

“Have it your way, by all means.” Braden freed the pliers from his coat pocket, clamped them on the Iraqi’s smashed nose, twisted. “Maybe I didn’t tell you, but I understand Arabic, Kharballah,” he growled in the prisoner’s native tongue, as al-Tikriti howled and fresh blood burst from the pulped beak.

“Let’s try this again,” the American said, switching to English, releasing the pincers and stepping back as blood spattered on plastic. Braden began his slow shark circle around the prisoner. “What I’m looking for, Kharballah, is the golden tip that will lead me to the Holy Grail—the rest of what you and the others were smuggling into Turkey when you were picked up. How about it? Where’s the rest of it?”

“What you took was all I know of.”

Braden snapped the pliers. The lie he read in al-Tikriti’s eyes was swept away by fear. “That’s not what your fellow holy warriors told me. Yeah, Kharballah, they talked.”

“Then what do you need me for?” the prisoner responded.

“Before I get into all that, let me explain the facts of life as I know them. I am in personal possession of satellite imagery that details a lot of truck traffic. Hell, for a while there we tracked whole convoys of eighteen-wheelers all over the map. We’ve got Damascus, through Kirkuk, Tikrit to Damascus, they’re coming from Tehran even, all these eighteen-wheelers, SUVs, transport trucks heading straight for the Turk border. I’m thinking maybe we Americans ought to just build a few superfreeways while we’re putting your country back on its feet.” It was an exaggeration, but al-Tikriti didn’t know what Braden knew.

“Trouble is, satellites have a tough time seeing things through the clouds. We know you had contacts in the Kurd-controlled far east of Turkey, but we doubt you were doing business with a people the former regime wanted to gas to extinction. So, I’m thinking you found a spot to stash all or a large chunk of it, but you had help from militant Turks. How do I know they’re Turks, you ask? I can’t be positive, but you people often forget we have ways to intercept conversations over what you believe are secured lines. Then there’s e-mail, faxes, Internet chat rooms. We get hold of your computers. You think you’ve deleted your files, but we have guys who can bring up these things called ghosts on the hard drive.”

“I know what you can do.”

Braden smiled. “The wonders of technology. Maybe you see where I’m headed with this.”

“How can I tell you what I do not know? I was simply what you might call a foot soldier.”

Braden put an edge to his voice. “That’s not the way Abdullah and Dajul told it.”

“Then they lied to you.”

“I cut them a deal, Kharballah, the same one you can have. Hell, you put me on the scent, I might even give you back some of that five hundred thousand I relieved you of. Now, I need to know whatever rendezvous points you had in Turkey. I need to know the approximate numbers—a rough guess will do—and specifically what the ordnance is. And I need to know where it’s all squirreled away. Real simple equation here. Names, numbers and how to get hold of who you were off-loading the ordnance to. Talk and you walk to fight another day.”

“I know nothing,” al-Tikriti said.

Braden lit another smoke off his dying butt and bobbed his head at the detainee. Time to hit him in the pride, he decided. “Doesn’t it bother you, Kharballah?”

“Does what bother me?”

“How you gave up without a fight, left the dying to your brothers in jihad.” Braden saw he’d scored, figured the prisoner was still steaming at the memory of hacking on tear gas, stumbling around in the smoke, hurling his weapon away, hands up.

“We had you figured for a lion sure to go out with a roar. Instead you whimpered, not one shot fired. Hell, I thought you were going to start crying like some old hag, the way I recall it. Threw away your AK so fast—”

“You surprised me. You gassed us.”

“That’s what separates the men from the boys and the bullies in a fight, Kharballah. Being able to adjust, take a few on the chin, but dig in and charge back, swinging. That’s the way of the warrior, Kharballah. He fights, even when the odds are stacked against him. He goes all the way, even if he’s looking at Goliath.” Braden smothered the scowl with a smoke cloud.

“That’s right, honey, I’m calling you a coward. You scumbags run around, trying to make everybody think you’re mean as the day is long, that you’re willing to die for your twisted holy war. But the first sign somebody’s ready to fight back and wax your ass you cut and run. A few car bombs, killing unarmed women and children, sweetheart, hardly proves you have the biggest pair on the block.” Braden paused to let al-Tikriti eat his shame.

“I want to know about Khirbul, and don’t tell me it’s a Kurd stronghold the Iranians run heroin through. Well, sweetheart, I’m waiting.”

“And so you shall keep waiting. You can leave me here for a week, a month like this, I will tell you nothing.”

Braden’s gut told him that was the only truth he would get out of al-Tikriti. He tossed the pliers, dropped the cigarette and ground it out on the plastic, then unzipped his jacket, displaying the shouldered Beretta. There were still other warm bodies to work with. “That your final answer?”

The Iraqi chuckled. “What? You beat me, now you’re going to shoot me?”

“You don’t believe I will?”

“You’re an American. I am a prisoner of war. There’s such a thing, I believe, called the rights of prisoners as established by the Geneva Convention,” al-Tikriti stated.

Braden unleathered the Beretta, drew a bead between al-Tikriti’s widening eyes and showed him just what he thought about the Geneva Convention.

2

John Brolinsky was worried about his job and reputation, wondering if he was being set up for public scandal and ridicule. Stranger—and worse—duplicity had happened over the years at the NSA. Those sharks on the man-eating end of the food chain were always looking for fresh guilty meat. If a man wasn’t as clean as a newborn, the conventional wisdom held he was ripe for blackmail—a definite liability when it came to guarding secrets or protecting national security.

Without question, a gentleman’s club—the gentleman part the grossest of misnomers from where he sat—was the most unlikely and unprofessional of places to rendezvous with one of the most powerful men in the White House. But here he was, nursing a club soda that was dropped off without his ordering the drink. He claimed the deep back booth the man had told him would be empty. Just wait, the man had told him, relax, enjoy the ambience.

As if I could, even if I was so inclined, the NSA man thought.

Given what he’d learned and suspected was at stake, he decided he had no choice but to ride out this tawdry scenario, take his chances and hope the walls of his own world wouldn’t crash down.

There had been directions into Washington, then down into the underground parking garage, Brolinsky wondering the whole drive in from Fort Meade if he was being followed. Rush hour waning to bring on the dinner crowd, he’d noticed the garage bowels were nearly empty. The attendant presented him a pass, no money up front. The same deal transpired at the club, he recalled. The bartender indicated his booth on the way in, waitresses and dancers steering clear of the table, as if they were on standing orders not to disturb.

Simply put, it felt wrong.

No black op warring against the shadows of evil in the world, he was grateful nonetheless he’d brought the Beretta 92-F from his think tank, shouldered now beneath his suit jacket.

He glanced around, avoiding anything other than a passing scan at the collective object of desire onstage. It was a mixed pack of hyenas, blue and white collar, probably a few crack hoodlums on the prowl. No one made eye contact with him, and that was the only plus he could find. Problem was, if the bartender had a clue as to his identity…

He was a church-going family man with a wife and two teenaged daughters. He would be forced into retirement, disgraced, even divorce could be in the cards if the situation took a bad turn.

He spotted the man in glasses and a dark cashmere coat descending the short flight of steps, recognizable enough after two recent stints on the Sunday morning talking head circuit. Sizing him up, Brolinsky found it hard to believe the man had the President’s ear, one of three “invisibles” who had personally engineered the unofficial Special Countermeasure Task Force. An aide to two former officials so high up the chain at the NSA, and now part of the President’s inner circle—rumor had it their word on worldwide intelligence operations could have been carved in stone—and Michael Rubin struck him as nondescript. He had a bald shiny pate, thick eyewear and a face so scrubbed it glistened for a moment as he passed through the stage lights. Brolinsky suddenly thought of him as the Pink Man.

“You look distressed. You don’t like my choice of meeting places?” Rubin said in greeting.

Brolinsky watched as the Pink Man claimed a seat, slid closer to him in the booth. There was something in the small dark eyes he didn’t trust, but couldn’t decide what exactly. Arrogance? Deceit and treachery forged on the anvil of jealous guarding of national secrets? Or was he reaching to find a dark side, gather up his own ammo to use against the man’s character in the event his own might be assassinated?

“There’s a lot to be distressed about these days,” he told the Pink Man.

“So it seems.”

“You come here often?” he asked, thinking Rubin looked more the type to get his voyeur kicks off the Internet.

The Pink Man smiled. “Is this where I’m supposed to check you for a wire? Not that it would matter, since we both know our people can make a minimike or recorder look like a simple quarter or belt buckle.”

“You want to frisk me like some common criminal? Makes me wonder what’s to hide,” Brolinsky said.

“Your tone and look tell me you seem to think there is. The tipoff, however, was your three attempted calls to reach someone besides a flunky in the National Security Council the past few hours—as in an urgent message for the national security adviser. You should have contacted our people at the White House first, that would have been the prudent course of action in these ‘times of distress.’”

“By your people, you mean Durham or Griswald.”

“That would have been the more professional route.”

“I’m not one of you.”

Rubin ignored the remark, said, “The Man just ripped everyone within earshot a new one. Intelligence operatives are being burned by this country’s worst enemies, as I’m sure you know, the belief being these leaks are coming straight from key upper-echelon White House staff.”

“They are,” Brolinsky stated flatly.

“Do tell. Then my assumption about you was correct. Very well. Whatever it is you’re trying to tell me—and I think I know where you’re headed—I wouldn’t make too much noise about what’s happened overseas. I’m sure you can understand the delicate political nature such recent mishaps could create.”

“You want to keep it from the press.”

“The President wants to, no, he needs to keep it under the White House roof. There’s a larger situation at stake.”

“Really?” Brolinsky scanned the crowd, finding it hard to believe they were ready to launch full-bore into a chat about national security in such a public dump, then figured between the grinding rock and roll and the howling banshees anything short of a shouting match might be safe.

“We have complete privacy, I assure you,” Rubin stated. “Feel free to lay out this urgency of yours.”

“There are occasions I am required to report directly, in person, to either the President or the national security adviser.”

“I’m aware of that. As I’m aware you’re aware of who I am.”

“Then I assume you’ve heard about Amman.”

“The CIA Storm Tracking Station. Four operators and the team leader’s wife found shot dead. Lured from the embassy over what appears to have been a fabricated emergency regarding her husband.”

“Bad news travels fast.”

The Pink Man sighed. “Your point?”

“We’re looking at dead bodies of American intelligence operatives turning up all over the map—two incidents—or mishaps, as you put it—happening in less than a week.”

“You’re referring to Turkey.”

Brolinsky grunted. “Throw in two NSA and a CIA operative gunned down, same MO in Istanbul and Ankara, apparently—though nothing about him seems verifiable—the same military attaché who headed embassy security in Turkey vanishing off the face of the earth after both incidents. Well, it doesn’t take much to see a pattern emerging.”

Rubin chuckled. “So, you’re running around, armed with conspiracy theories, itching to tell senior White House officials, or the President himself, the sky is falling.”

“It’s beginning to shake out as more than a theory. He calls himself Locklin, but no one seems to know who he works for. You know the type, buried so deep off-the-books the man doesn’t even have a Social Security number. A freelancer owned and armed by various intelligence agencies to do the really dirty work. The ultimate deniable expendable. A little digging, a fact here, an educated guess there, a few matters are becoming clearer to me by the hour.”

Rubin laid on a patronizing tone. “Please, don’t waste my time with rumor and speculation. Please, tell me you have real hard intelligence to back you up—or I walk.”

“Contacts in and beyond the normal channels. Plus, maybe you’ve heard, we’re in the great new age of sharing information, mutual cooperation and so forth between various alphabet soup agencies. The gist of it, I’m being told the same ghost story where this Locklin is concerned.”

“Perhaps whatever you heard is just a story.”

“I suspect someone with major league clout, real close to the President, managed to land what amounts to little more than an assassin in the laps of both embassies to smoke out these operatives.”

“To what purpose?” Rubin asked.

Brolinsky paused, wondering how much he should tell this former NSA official. He decided to forge ahead. If he got the Pink Man talking, agitated, boxed him in a corner there was a chance to catch him a lie. And if that happened it would put him one step closer to confirming the bombshell of a dark nagging suspicion.

“Kill the messengers about to hurl open Pandora’s box. Some or all of whom either knew or were on the scent of that banned ordnance with delivery systems that left the country in question right before the Shock and Awe began,” he told Rubin. “A lot of nasty stuff, which, had it been buried in the sand or dumped in the Tigris or Euphrates, we would have known about it by now, since the general consensus among the science community is an ecological and environmental Bhopal meets Chernobyl would have swept the country in question, an invisible firestorm that might have struck down or driven out the Coalition forces.”

Rubin shook his head. “I’m not tracking how you equate this supposed Houdini act with recent events.” He glanced at his watch. “Kindly and quickly enlighten me.”

“Colonel James Braden, United States Special Forces, ran a black ops unit in Afghanistan. Fact—he lost five ops in an ambush by Taliban and al Qaeda fighters near the Afghan-Pakistani border. Nonconventional weapons were used in the fight, specifically VX. The way I heard it, he was one step behind netting the twenty-five-foot Saudi shark. Rumor—he liked the hands-on approach when interrogating prisoners. A few people in the loop privately confirmed his tactical techniques for Q and A, then later changed their story, all of whom shortly after disappeared. Instead of getting court-martialed and landing in prison for life the man damn near received a presidential citation. He was put in charge of Task Force Talon. Handpicked his own troops.”

He paused as the dancer finished her number to lukewarm applause, scanned faces for a sign of special interest aimed his way.

“I’m listening,” Rubin said, clearly getting impatient.

“Locklin’s description matches an operative, believed seen with Braden in Kurd-controlled Turkey right before a convoy suspected of hauling the last of the wicked stuff was hit by Braden, his Task Force Talon and Turk Special Forces. Rumor—Locklin was Braden’s inside eyes and ears to the mystery of the vanished ordnance. Suspicion—the Iraqis had help from our side smuggling the nasty stuff out of the country. Why? If I could raise the Storm Trackers from the dead I might find out. The word I get is that whatever they were smuggling into Turkey was there at the time of the hit, but is now nowhere to be found. Which leads me to Camp Triangle. I’m sure you’ve heard of it?”

“You would be wise to keep all of this to yourself,” Rubin said.

“Is that a threat?”

“Merely a suggestion.”

“In that case, stick your advice.” The scowl told him he’d struck a nerve, sure now the Pink Man had something to hide. He decided to torque up the heat and attitude.

“I know a chosen group of the worst of militants detained at Guantanamo Bay were rounded up in the dead of night and whisked off in a C-130 to this corner of Brazil that meets Paraguay and Argentina. It was a secret pact arranged by the White House in collusion with Brazil to let Camp Triangle come to life in this neck of jungle. I’m thinking to keep the natives with the big guns and the power down there quiet and cooperative, Congress passes a massive foreign aid package to Brazil, ostensibly to help the Brazilians combat crime, corruption, poverty—but I think both of us suspect into whose coffers all those billions will disappear.

“Now, I think the President was convinced by your buddies in the Special Countermeasure Task Force that the Triangle—a haven for drug and arms smugglers, international crime cartels, Hamas, al Qaeda and other Arab terror groups paying for safe refuge while planning operations—is a treasure trove of invaluable intelligence. That much truth they spoke. Word is, however, the Man was further swayed by reasons laid out to him about the basic necessity to spread the growing problem of housing captured fanatics in another but classified direction. Seems Task Force Talon was rounding up militants quicker than there was space at Gitmo to hold them. My sources inform me that some of the detainees removed from Gitmo—calling themselves the Warrior Sons of Islam—claim direct blood lines to some of the world’s most wanted terrorists, including a couple of household names.

“Now, a young Marine, rotated out of your classified detainee base, was en route to tell a very interesting story to the Justice Department about what’s going on down there in Camp Triangle, only he turned up dead in his vehicle, the victim of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.”

Rubin didn’t blink. “And all of this related to White House leaks, how and why?”

“There’s more, unless you’re in a big rush to race out of here.”

Rubin gestured with his hand for Brolinsky to continue.

“Wolfe-Binder.”

“Never heard of it.”

He suspected Rubin was lying, but Brolinsky didn’t miss a beat. He pressed on. “There are twenty-seven industrial chemical plants in the continental United States. Seven which manufacture defensive biochem weapons—a definite misnomer—but this is what we tell the Russians to make it look like we’re honoring the treaty to ban biochem weapons. Number eight plant, Wolfe-Binder, just popped up on the radar screen. This classified plant in New Orleans is purported to be an armed camp, guys in HAZMAT suits, clandestine flights leaving in the middle of the night, loaded down with more, I suspect, than just agricultural pesticide, though that’s the claim as to what they’re processing. I’m sure you know insecticide is a main precursor for nerve gas.”

“Among nonflammable retardants and other precursors, but I don’t have the recipe at my fingertips,” Rubin said, sounding bored.

Brolinsky ignored the brush-off. “How do I know all this about Wolfe-Binder, you ask? The plant’s assistant manager became suspicious when men in black fatigues wouldn’t allow a manifest or any record of these midnight runs to be recorded. So he does his civic duty, puts in a call to the FBI. FBI and Justice Department agents go down there to take a look, but the whistle-blower has disappeared. The story they get is the man was a drunk, had a habit of disappearing for days, or calling in sick. Utter bullshit, since anyone with common sense would have fired him in the first place.” Brolinsky paused, saw the Pink Man’s dark eyes flicker.

“Never mind I think the guy was dumped in the bayou as gator bait, the plant was a one-eighty picture of what the FBI was told. No armed guards. No spacesuits. Every drum and vat that was tested turned out to be pesticide and other industrial chemicals. Spotless as a saint. However, most of the manifests indicated the bulk of the pesticide was being flown to Brasilia. When questioned, the manager claimed it had something to do with the recent foreign aid package to Brazil that Congress passed.”

“Once more…”

“Your Special Countermeasure Task Force is an off-the-record supersecret service for the President. Which puts them, in my opinion, too close to the President, with too much power and authority in the White House,” Brolinsky said.

“They—we—are more than that.”

“Right. You plan foreign itineraries, map out logistics for overseas jaunts, specifically Mideast countries, you handle threats to the President directly. You handle foreign agendas for the VP, diplomats, cabinet members, supposedly plugging up security holes against assassinations, suicide bombers and such.” Brolinsky smiled, shook his head.

“How did you do it? How did you manage to get the President to approve of what is essentially an unofficial secret government enforcement, maybe even a black ops arm right inside the White House? I can only imagine the bitter rivalries it’s created. The Secret Service for one thing, taking a back seat, step and fetch it for you people. I can only picture the scandal that would threaten to topple the administration if news of this reached the public.”

“Not your concern. What is your point with all this conspiracy conjecture?”

Brolinsky looked Rubin dead in the eye. “I can’t prove it, not yet, but I suspect the leaks came from someone in the SCTF.”

There was a pause, then Rubin said, “Are you done?”

“You have the floor.”

“We know where the leaks were coming from. If I tell you—”

“You’ll have to shoot me?”

“Nothing quite so melodramatic.”

Why wasn’t he so sure about that? Brolinsky wondered. He tensed as Rubin’s hand disappeared beneath the table. The Pink Man dug into his coat pocket, then flipped three one-hundred-dollar bills on the table. Tribute for the bartender’s accommodation confirmed, Brolinsky figured the parking garage attendant was treated to the same favor. What the hell was going on?

Rubin slid out of the booth. “Let’s finish this talk in your vehicle. Unless you don’t think you can handle the truth. In that case, stay and enjoy the show.”

Brolinsky hesitated, watching as Rubin walked away, then rose to follow. He fixed his stare on Rubin’s back, warning bells clanging in his head as he climbed the steps. Suddenly the Pink Man didn’t want to talk in public? In his profession, paranoia did not destroy, he thought, as he cut the gap, out the door, falling in lockstep beside the Pink Man as they navigated their course through the sparse sidewalk crowd. He was tempted to look over his shoulder, check every passing face for any sign of a threat, but didn’t want to tip Rubin he was on edge, ready to go for broke.

“Perhaps I state the obvious, but we live in very strange, dangerous and volatile times, my friend,” Rubin said, rounding the corner, picking up his march a notch as they closed on the garage.

“The worst, however, is on the horizon. And my task force knows this for a fact. We have garnered the complete trust of the President because we have delivered intelligence that has saved untold innocent lives, even prevented a third world war. Like the late Storm Trackers, we search out and predict the future, know what the opposition is going to do before they do. For example, take Pakistan. Say militants or sympathizers in the military take—or seize—control of the country, armed thus with the keys and access codes to their nuclear arsenal. Meaning they have the ultimate suicide bomber in charge. Could it happen? Well, my friend, we brought intelligence to the Oval Office that had already thwarted just such a palace coup, but who is to say there won’t be another attempt? So, you see, certain, uh, extreme measures were necessary in order to insure that the President stays breathing and the world remains safe from nuclear blackmail.

“The Man, for your information, sees us as his personal intelligence gurus, what some tabloid press hound, were one to catch a whiff, might call necromancers, seers. Bottom line, we deliver the goods. The Man took note of our astonishing successes where others could not perform. It took some long hours, brainstorming about the creation of SCTF, but he gave the nod.”

Brolinsky saw the attendant was gone as they hit the mouth of the garage. The gate was down on both sides. Rubin crouched and slipped to the other side. Brolinsky did the same, the Pink Man informing him the pass he received earlier would let him out.

In silence, Brolinsky strained his ears for any sound that might alert him to a waiting presence, as he descended beside Rubin into the gloomy bowels. Feeling the hackles rise on the back of his neck, he spotted his SUV, parked against the far wall, no other vehicles in sight.

“His name was Jason Lind,” Rubin suddenly said. “His official title was chief deputy of counter intelligence. CIA. He was always present at the President’s daily national security briefs. Turns out he had a nasty little hobby involving Internet porn, creating his own lurid Websites—I’ll skip the particulars. Anyway, he was found in his home about an hour ago. Self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, a suicide note stating he was behind the leaks. It’s been verified.”

How convenient, Brolinsky thought, there seemed to be an epidemic of suicide lately by those who counted the most, taking any dark truths with them to the beyond.

“There you have it,” Rubin said.

Sensing a presence lurking in the garage, thinking he spotted a shadow darting behind a pillar to his nine, Brolinsky began scouring his flanks, then glimpsed Rubin tug on a pair of black gloves. His heart was racing to meteoric levels.

And then it happened.

The Glock .45 looked almost comical in the Pink Man’s hand, but the dark eyes, alive with murderous intent, froze Brolinsky. In the next instant he recognized the bittersweet quasi-gasoline stink swarming his nose, but the arm was locked around his neck, the rag smothering his face before he could react. It was strange, he thought, the fumes swelling his brain, the lights fading. The Marine, the plant whistle-blower and Jason Lind flashed through his mind. He found himself wishing he could tell the Pink Man somehow, some way the last bitter laugh would land on his head. He had contacted a former mission controller at the NSA and clued her in to his suspicions. That hopeful thought trailed to a fading anger and sorrow that he would never again see his family as he succumbed to warm swaddling blackness.

3

Major Alan Hawke, United States Special Forces, had heard the rumors, but seeing was, indeed, believing. What was inside the hovel, under medical examination, added a new and nervous wrinkle to the mission. It was just the kind of horror—and hassle—he didn’t need. This wasn’t Task Force Talon of Afghanistan infamy, where he had served under Colonel Braden, and soldiers turned a blind eye, or else. Out here, there were new grunts on the block who might go over his head, flap tongues to starred brass who would land his neck on a chopping block. At that moment, he wrestled with any number of conflicting loyalties as to whom to report to, aware his next move could well lead to a court-martial. But he knew what had to be done.

And he knew he would do it, if he wanted to survive, if he didn’t want his own atrocities brought to light.

Listening to the whapping blades of his Apache helicopter, the two Hueys framing the stone hovel in a white halo from a hundred yards south over his shoulder, feeling the swirling grit sting his neck, he silently urged Task Force Iron Hawk’s medic to emerge with a final report. Feeling the ghosts of fifteen dead Iraqis, he scoured the black walls of the wadi, M-16/M-203 combo ready to cut loose at any rebel who might have fled the firefight some eight hours earlier.

It had been a fluke, stumbling across the building while roving the skies in search of armed runners. Going through the door, ready to shoot, they found the two victims, stricken and stretched out on prayer rugs from God only knew what, though he had his suspicions. A man and a woman, husband and wife, it turned out. His interpreter, donning a HAZMAT suit, had pried from them a very unnerving tale.

And confirmed what he’d been hearing during the briefs the past several months.

He told himself he really had no business this far north, edged up against the Turk border, this neck of rugged mountain country. Kurd-controlled, there was enough ethnic hatred wandering around to mow down any resistance rabble who escaped their steel talons. But his orders didn’t always come direct from Central Command.

The problem was how to avoid reporting what he’d found.

He saw the spacesuit emerge through the doorway, Captain Medley removing his helmet. With no way to read the grim expression, Hawke waited until the man was on top of him.

Medley appeared to gather his thoughts on how to proceed. “The good news is it doesn’t appear to be a bio agent, but I’d like to draw blood, take tissue samples for further examination,” he said.

“No.”

Medley looked aghast. “But, sir—”

“What’s killing them?” Hawke asked.

“Killed.”

Hawke groaned to himself, more an act than anything else, hoping Medley read the noise as disappointment at the lack of information. In this case ignorance was bliss.

Medley continued. “The spasms, the manner in which their limbs locked up, asphyxiation, all classic symptoms of exposure to a nerve agent.”

“Sergeant Ellis informed me they had just returned from across the Turk border, delivering some cargo they could or would not specify.”

“My guess is they handled the agent, a seal broke on a drum, or whatever they were shipping it in. They must have been exposed to high doses given their symptoms.”

“Are you telling me this wasn’t their first trip?”

“That, running the nerve agent in faulty containers, or there’s a good chance they overturned the vehicle, dumped the cargo, got splashed in the process. For a nerve agent, inhalation or direct skin contact will do the deed.”

“If your scenario is correct, they should have dropped right then, across the border.”

“Not necessarily. It would depend on how much of the agent they were exposed to. Either way, they’re long past any atropine injection now.”

Hawke looked his medic dead in the eye. “You are to forget what you saw here. Do you copy, Captain?” He could see Medley didn’t like it, was poised to argue, but seemed to think better of it.

“Yes, sir,” the medic said with reluctance.

“Hop on board then,” he told Medley, then whistled at the four shadows hunkered in the wadi, rotating his raised fist.

So it was true, he thought, holding his ground, waiting while his troops hustled past him to board the Hueys. Whatever had begun in Afghanistan, all the talk he’d heard from CIA spooks dancing with the devil, Braden…

Marching for his grounded Hueys, forging into the whirlwind, Hawke raised his Apache crew and ordered, “Give me one right down Broadway, mister.”

The order copied, he gathered speed. The Hellfire missile flamed away from its pod. As the thunder pealed behind, and suspecting how the sins of the past were about to create hell on earth, he thought, God help us. God help us all.

4

“Calm down.”

“That’s a Presidential Directive, in case you’ve never seen one, Colonel. And in case you haven’t guessed yet, we’ve got an official human shitstorm headed this way. I, for one, can say I don’t much care for the tone from the Oval Office. It damn near hints at treason.”

Examining the faxed letter with the presidential seal in the Humvee’s headlights, Colonel Braden glanced at General Compton, bared his teeth at the beefy tub in jungle fatigues, then returned to reading their orders.

“Someone talked, Colonel, maybe even someone we thought we could trust. Which, if true, means they know what you’ve been doing down here!”

The more Compton whined, worried, no doubt, about saving his own fatass, the more Braden felt the blood pressure pulsing in his eardrums. He imagined he heard the HK-33 assault rifle slung over his shoulder calling the general’s name. From behind him he heard the splash, witnessed the sight of al-Tikriti’s body, wrapped in a plastic shroud, being dumped in the river by two of Task Force Talon’s finest. It interrupted the man’s bleating for all of two seconds.

“Maybe you want to tell me how we’re going to account for two murdered detainees. Maybe you’ve got a makeup kit I don’t know about that we can use to patch up and mask four more who look like they’ve gone a few rounds with—”

“Calm down!” Braden shouted.

Braden’s hands shook with simmering rage. He scanned the next two lines, but Compton was nearly barking in his ear.

“You listening to me? We are looking at a fat whopping mess that no amount of sterilizing will sanitize unless we burn the whole damn camp down and build it back from scratch. I have cargo back at camp with no manifests, no serial numbers. I have the Brazilian making noise to return to Brasilia and blow the whistle unless he sees—”

“Calm the fuck down! Let me think here!” Braden was seething.

Whether it was the feral look he turned on Compton or that they both knew he was actually the one on the hot seat with blood on his hands, the General shut his mouth. Braden turned his back to Compton, took a moment to survey the walls of lush vegetation flanking the dirt trail, and composed his thoughts. It was one of the last stretches of jungle in this remote outpost, a few miles east of Camp Triangle, where they could dispose of their mistakes. There was a time, he believed, when caimans and ferocious little fish with razor-teeth would have devoured decomposing flesh.

The problem was the new massive hydroelectric generating plant. He hoped the bodies didn’t bob to the surface if they made it to the dam’s wall. That would prove another, perhaps fatal mistake, since it appeared Washington thought it smelled the putrefaction. Listening to the caw and screech of wild birds in the distant veil of black, feeling his nerves soothed by the chitter of insects, he bobbed his head and turned to face Compton.

Braden wadded up the Presidential Directive and tossed it into the brush. “Okay, General, here’s what we do before we greet with open arms and winning smiles this asshole colonel from Washington—”

5

Dead men could talk by the manner in which they died.

He might be thinking in cop terms, more or less, violent death hardly something new in his profession, but Mack Bolan couldn’t help but feel the ghosts of slain American intelligence operatives—a young Marine and a missing civilian who had sounded an SOS to the FBI. The Executioner surveyed the industrial chemical plant from a wooded knoll, his surveillance post roughly forty yards due north of Gate One.

What, exactly, the dead had to do with Wolfe-Binder Chemicals along the Mississippi River he didn’t know. But eight bodies, that he knew of, were already attached to what he believed were several mysteries. He had never talked to the victims before they were murdered—or allegedly committed suicide—but the pieces of a sordid puzzle had been coming together for close to a week. And the mystery darkened with each passing hour.

Several situations begging large nasty questions had been brought to Bolan’s attention by Hal Brognola. His longtime friend was a high-ranking official at the Justice Department, but that was just the public face. In the shadow world of covert ops, Brognola oversaw Stony Man Farm, the high-tech lair in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that housed cyber supersleuths and the warriors who did the dirty bloody work in the field. Off the record, Brognola was liaison to the President of the United States who green-lighted missions for Bolan and the other warriors at the Farm.

This time was no exception.

Soon, Bolan was going to head south, armed with presidential carte blanche to find out if what the dead Marine had claimed about a classified base housing Arab fundamentalists was true.

But first, he had to unravel the mystery of a purported chemical weapons processing plant.

After six hours of watching and assessing, the soldier suspected it wasn’t as virginal as Justice Department and FBI agents had found it a few days earlier. At last count, Bolan had tallied four men in black fatigues armed with HK MP-5s with fixed laser sights and commando flashlights, and military-issue Beretta M-9s for side arms.

The mystery hardforce hovered near what he believed was the main plant, dead center of the compound, as if awaiting orders. On the surface the compound was what it advertised itself to be, but Bolan knew all about classified bases where what the public saw was cosmetic. There was a spider web of pipelines fanning out from processing central, a main generator, and a shack flanked by panels with valves and gauges. Add four two-story storage tanks, a football field stretch of concrete warehouses with forklifts, and all of it painted Wolfe-Binder as innocuous.

The stage job pretty much ended there.

It was the runway, a long asphalt strip to the west, that garnered most Bolan’s attention. The grounded black turboprop was a scaled-down, custom version of a C-130, the kind of bird he’d seen used by spooks who sometimes, in his grim experience, straddled both sides of the fence. Meaning they often pledged allegiance to something other than national security and patriotic duty.

Two armed shadows were at the lowered ramp, one of them on a radio, mouthing what Bolan assumed were orders. Unless he’d missed his guess, they were ready to load the cargo.

Suddenly, he saw two GMCs break from the west gate. They began a slow roll toward the cargo plane. A third matching ride remaining parked roughly midway down warehouse row. Other than hardforce activity, Bolan hadn’t spotted any telltale signs—civilian vehicles for instance—that would betray the presence of a graveyard shift. If and when the shooting starting the absence of an unarmed workforce would make his task that much easier. And, with no guards posted at any of the four gates, the compound had an eerie, dying feel to it.

It seemed everyone was bailing what he suspected was a sinking ship.

Either the federal tour had put nerves on edge, or, Bolan thought, whoever the hardforce swore allegiance to had decided the job was done and it was time to pull up stakes. He decided to hold out a little longer before he made his move, his thoughts weighty with the few facts about this mission as he had them.

Dead intel ops overseas and at home aside, there was the matter of White House leaks. And Brognola had recently discovered the President—at the risk of perhaps his job and legacy—had pulled executive rank and created a group called the Special Countermeasure Task Force. Their function ostensibly being logisticians, intel wizards, super bodyguards. That was merely riddle number one, but for Bolan’s money it would branch out into other darker areas.

Then—perhaps the kicker—there was the former colleague of the Farm’s mission controller, Barbara Price. On the flight down in the Gulfstream to New Orleans, Bolan had received yet more disturbing news from Brognola. Two more suicides had dropped on the big Fed’s radar screen. One of them, a high-ranking CIA official, was believed to be the source of leaks that had, directly or indirectly, caused the executions of operatives overseas—unless, of course the Company man was a sacrificial lamb. But it was the dead man from the NSA who had contacted Price with a mixed bag of fact and rumor—about missing weapons of mass destruction and his suspicions about the SCTF—that knotted Bolan’s gut he was set to stumble into a deep serpent’s hole. Too much coincidence and convenient dead bodies were stacking up, and it reeked to Bolan of conspiracy.

One suicide he could buy, but three smacked of staging, given the grim mystery surrounding murders that were connected, he was sure, to some lurking hydra. Bodies were turning up in a timely fashion when it appeared truth was one songbird away. A suicide note and an alleged sordid lifestyle had been uncovered to smear a dead CIA deputy chief’s reputation, which, up to then, had been sterling.

A young Marine, decorated in the second Gulf war, with a wife and children, was assigned to Gitmo. He’d been transferred to the recently established and classified Camp Triangle. Returning home, armed with a nasty story about the torture and murder of detainees, he’d turned up in his vehicle—apparently on the way to the Justice Department—one 9 mm round through the head, gun in hand, a typed suicide note by the body.

The dead, for damn sure, Bolan thought, were talking to him. No witnesses, no clues, no rhyme or reason, other than someone wanted the truth silenced.

The fact the Man in the Oval Office wanted answers from outside the normal channels signaled to Bolan that perhaps he didn’t trust his new and vaunted miniorg of intel geniuses all of a sudden. And if they had a reach all the way down into Brazil, as Price’s former colleague had alluded…

However it all shook out, the Executioner had come to start the mission west of the Big Easy and easing out near Plantation Country with a bang.

He cradled the M-16/M-203 squad blaster, watching as four hardmen fell out of the GMCs. With an extended 40-round clip locked and loaded in the assault rifle, Bolan figured he’d hold back loading the M-203. He’d be able to choose from a bevy of 40 mm projectiles on his webbing—from fragmentation, buckshot, incendiary and armor-piercing high-explosive rounds—depending on numbers or if it looked like he needed to pack extra punch for a steel door or perhaps set off the cargo in a shock attack. He’d make the call on the spot.

For quiet kills the Beretta 93-R was snug in shoulder rigging, its muzzle extended with a sound suppressor. A commando dagger was sheathed on his right shin for the bloodier option of a slashed throat or a blade through the ribs, into the heart. On his right hip rode the big stainless-steel .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, butt aimed at twelve o’clock for a left-handed draw, just in case he needed to go double-fisted with both side arms in a pinch.

Whatever else he’d need—weapons, gear and sat link—was stowed on the waiting Gulfstream being sat on by two of three Farm blacksuits. The odd commando out was in the vicinity, ready to ride in with the SUV rental once the soldiers put in a call on the radio.

He was all set to go through the front door, but for what? he wondered.

Watching the north, east and west ends of the plant, Bolan felt more satisfied the longer he waited that once he breached the razor-topped chain link fence he would have clear sailing on the grounds. Six halogen lights topped around the fencing weren’t much in terms of illuminating the perimeter. Warpaint over exposed skin to match combat blacksuit, Bolan, a master of stealth and using the night and the shadows to full lethal advantage, would be as near invisible going in as he would get. Whomever the opposition was, they were either overconfident, abandoning the plant or both.

Only one way to find out, the Executioner told himself, and broke cover to go hunting.

HARPER FEARED the ghosts would haunt him wherever he ran, or tried to hide from the truth of the past, present and future. Brazil, his own island in the South Pacific, hell, perched on the top of Mount Everest, there would still be no washing the innocent blood off his hands, or erasing from memory the killings of ordinary folks who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Beyond his personal involvement in carrying out orders, there was the insidious knowledge that he was part of something so monstrous, so diabolical yet so insane it could rip apart an entire nation with ferocious anarchy.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to get out, he considered, to take care of number one. He had no familial strings, some money from the operation already in a numbered account. He might make it in a far-off land, a new identity, start over. How badly did he really need to be part of the coming national, perhaps even global nightmare? How much blood did he need on his head? After all, he wasn’t entirely without conscience. He was still wondering, even vaguely troubled by how many friends and relatives his recent victims had left behind—who might know something and talk—aware, then, that if official powers shone light on his activities he would find himself pleading his case before a military tribunal, tried for murder and treason.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d executed American civilians who wanted to squeal after they had sworn an oath and signed a blood contract to go deaf, dumb and blind on a black project. There were those two aerospace engineers in Nevada, one who had gone “missing” an hour before he was to appear on a cable documentary about UFOs and reverse engineering. And there was that microbiologist, his wife and their teenaged son in Sacramento….

Yet three more civilians here in Louisiana. Two of them had been paid a midnight call, pals of the assistant manager who had sounded the alarm to the FBI. More food for the bayou, he thought, if he wanted to be callous about it, smart if he wanted to congratulate his foresight on getting their home and cell phones tapped, bugs planted under their roofs, which had betrayed loose tongues. If the others wanted to flap their gums—the science crew included—they would turn up victims of any number of creative accidents.

Snowing the G-men from Washington wasn’t that difficult, he reflected, pleased with himself for giving an award-worthy performance as the plant’s manager, all the bogus credentials and manufactured background checks holding up to their intense scrutiny. After all, Wolfe-Binder had been a legitimate industrial chemical plant. The paperwork he showed them was in perfect order when they trooped in, armed with suspicions and warrants. Before their arrival it had been a little tense, he granted, a few frenzied hours of sanitizing, loading up the eighteen-wheeler with contaminated tubes, vats, the disassembled decon chamber, HAZMAT suits, weapons and so forth.

The job here was finished, at any rate, he thought as he gave a last look around.

He stepped through the front door of the main plant, leaving it unlocked. The shop was barren except for a few stainless-steel tables. The documents that could tie him to their people in Brazil and Washington had been shredded. Computers and sat links were already on board their winged ride. Nothing was left now but to roll the last fifty-five-gallon drums into the bird and set off for Brazil.

Marching past the steel facades of the giant storage tanks, he heard engines grinding to life around the corner of the first warehouse. Forklifts geared up to haul the pallets—shipped back in by tractor trailer after the Feds had cleared out—and then they’d be done.

Then what?

He shuddered at the thought of what lay ahead. Knowledge alone damn near told him he should hijack the transport bird, fly for parts unknown. His orders were to return to Washington. The big event was down to a few days, which meant his every breath would be counted by the men in the shadows. What madness did the future hold? How did they intend to actually pull it off?

He was envisioning every doomsday scenario—personal and otherwise—when he thought he glimpsed a darting shadow, east, in the latticework of pipelines. Heart racing, he feared the Feds had decided on a surprise return. Submachine gun in hand, he set off on a course between two tanks, thinking if it was an intruder he could intercept him. If it was a small army of Feds, there would be no choice but to start gunning them down—a murderous fighting evac, all hands blazing away while attempting to load the bird.

He eased into the no-man’s land between the massive bins, then began rolling hard. Weapon extended, thinking he should raise his crew, gathering more speed as he reached the corner, he was crouching, going left, when the sky crashed down with a light show that exploded in his eyes. Something that felt like a sledgehammer, but what he knew was a fist, had dropped him on his back. The world threatened to black out next, as he felt himself being dragged along the ground by the shoulder.

The voice of doom helped sweep away the mist in his sight. Looking up, he stared into the bluest eyes he’d ever seen, two chips of ice more like it, he thought, framed in combat cosmetics.

A NO-SHIT DEAL.

The armament, for one thing, told him the hitter was no G-man. Then there were those damn eyes, pinning him with judgment day, like he was a bug about to be dissected by righteous anger alone. Vaguely he was aware he had been dragged into the cubbyhole near the readout shack. Out of ear- and eyeshot of the others, no doubt. The sound suppressor threaded on the end of the big Beretta and aimed square between his eyes warned him his life hung in the balance. He glanced to the assault rifle with the attached grenade launcher in the hitter’s other hand. No, the man wasn’t any Fed.

“I don’t like repeating myself,” he heard the man’s voice state. “How many, including yourself?”

“Eleven,” he answered. “Thirteen, if you count the pilot and copilot.”

“What’s the cargo—and don’t tell me it’s pesticide.”

Why not answer the man? Whomever he really was, Harper had seen enough black ops to know the invader had come to close down shop, more than likely with a body count as icing. In some strange way, he felt relieved, absolved of his sins, free to talk. His gut told him he wouldn’t be led away in cuffs. He was no defeatist, but for some time now he’d been wondering when someone, somewhere from some No Name Agency would smell them out. In reality, there was no such thing as a secret if more than one individual knew. He was glad it was over—unless the big guy had come alone. If that was the case, he was either crazy or suicidal to tackle that many professionals, all of whom had nothing to lose and everything to gain if they stayed in the game.

Harper chuckled. “You’re not going to believe me, pal, but it is, in fact, pesticide.”

“You’re right, I don’t believe you.”

“You want to go uncap one of those drums they’re moving and take a deep whiff, be my guest. It’s a superhybrid DDT, in gel solution. One sniff upclose and you’re choking on your own vomit. If you’re what I’m thinking you are, then maybe you have some idea of what that means.”

“You’re telling me you’re cutting out a couple of steps for a nerve-gas recipe.”

“Give the man a first-class round-trip ticket to Hawaii.”

“Where’s it headed?”

“Brazil.”

Harper felt his heart lurch as something angry danced through those eyes.

“Who do you work for?”

“Uncle Sam,” Harper said, and immediately regretted the answer as the muzzle dropped an inch or so closer to his face. “We’re a black ops arm of the NSA.”

He was poised for the next question, but the man in black was a blur, hurling himself to the side, wheeling toward the pipeline. Harper glimpsed the red beam knife through the shadows in the space the invader had vacated, heard the brief stutter of the gun. The bullets were tearing into his chest, piercing him before his mind registered what was happening. He caught his cry of pain, clinging to anger at whoever had gone for broke, missed and nailed him instead. As the life leaked out of him and the sickening wheeze of a ruptured lung swarmed his ears, he heard a howl of agony and grabbed a final look at the shadow toppling beyond the pipeline. Fading into warm blackness, aware the big hitter had chopped his friendly killer off at the ankles, he then began sinking deeper into the dark abyss, to the evanescent roar of the invader’s M-16.

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