Bolan barely had time to reach out

In the same motion, he instinctively lashed out with his other hand, striking his attacker with a karate chop to the shoulder.

The blow was slight but still strong enough to throw the youth off balance. He lost his grip on Bolan’s shirt as he flailed his arms, trying to keep himself from reeling backward. His reactions were too slow, however. One second Bolan was staring into the youth’s horror-stricken eyes; the next he was gone.

Thirty yards below, the youth was splayed across the boulders, skull cracked open, his lifeblood spilling over the rocks. Bolan felt a grim weariness come over him. Young men who were supposed to be a part of America’s bright future had chosen to die trying to bring their country down.

“What a waste,” Bolan whispered into the night.

MACK BOLAN®

The Executioner

#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

#329 Hostile Crossing

#330 Dual Action

#331 Assault Force

#332 Slaughter House

#333 Aftershock

#334 Jungle Justice

#335 Blood Vector

#336 Homeland Terror

The Executioner®

Homeland Terror

Don Pendleton

It is easy to be brave behind a castle wall.

—Welsh Proverb

Rich and powerful men manipulate the weak and poor to do their evil bidding. I will make sure that justice is served to those cowards.

—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

Epilogue

Prologue

Sykesville, Maryland

It was Mack Bolan’s second day at the Wildest Dreams Covert Ops Fantasy Camp. So far he’d been impressed by the camp’s regimen, which approximated the Stony Man blacksuit trainee program back at his own base of operations in Virginia. Already he’d undergone rigorous exercise workouts, field drills, martial-arts seminars, and an afternoon devoted to countersurveillance techniques and evasive driving maneuvers.

For the blacksuits, tests of this sort were more of a review, as most were culled from law enforcement or the military and had already proved themselves fit, as well as competent to engage the enemy. In sharp contrast, the two dozen initiates at the fantasy camp were, with few exceptions, unprepared for the physical challenges they’d coughed up nearly four grand apiece to take part in at the former Fort Hadley Army base. Most of Bolan’s bunkmates were a motley crew of Walter Mittys, overweight desk jockeys and delusional Rambo wanna-bes who, by the end of the week, would no doubt welcome a return to the humdrum of their nine-to-five jobs. Not surprisingly, within five minutes of lights-out, everyone in the barracks—including the few campers who’d weathered the day’s challenges without collapsing—had surrendered to exhaustion and was fast asleep.

Everyone, that was, except for Mack Bolan a.k.a. the Executioner.

He lay still a few minutes longer, then quietly slipped out of his sleeping bag and threw on the camou fatigues he’d been issued shortly after arriving at the camp the previous day before under the name Mel Schiraldi. With his dark hair trimmed to a buzz cut and his cobalt-blue eyes cloaked by a pair of brown contact lenses, Bolan bore a passing resemblance to the real Mr. Schiraldi, a Baltimore fitness instructor who’d made his reservations with Wildest Dreams more than three months earlier. Schiraldi had been convinced to let Bolan take his place in exchange for an all-expenses-paid Caribbean cruise and five thousand dollars in spending money, all courtesy of the Sensitive Operation Group’s discretionary fund. A small price to pay, SOG director Hal Brognola had reasoned, to allow Bolan to infiltrate the fantasy camp without drawing the suspicion he would have received as a last-minute walk-in.

Once he’d dressed, Bolan quietly carried his boots past the other bunks. Moonlight shone through the barracks windows, illuminating the wooden floorboards. Bolan took care to step on the joints where the wood was hammered down tight and less inclined to creak under the weight of his hard-toned, two-hundred-plus-pound frame. It was a trick Bolan had picked up through his years of stalking the omnipresent beast he called Animal Man, a beast that at various times had taken the shape of everything from Mafia hit man to al Qaeda terrorist. This night, Bolan was out to stalk yet another manifestation of that beast.

The rear doorway of the barracks opened onto a crushed-gravel path that wound through thickets of overgrown bramble to the latrines. It was late spring, and the small stones were cold against the Executioner’s bare feet. Once he came to a break in the shrubbery, Bolan abandoned the path and headed through tall grass to a knoll canopied by the branches of an ancient magnolia grove. Bolan paused at the base of one of the trees and donned his socks, then pried loose the thick heels of his customized boots.

Each of the heels was hollowed out to form a storage cavity. One heel contained a set of foldaway lock picks and a miniature earbud transceiver. Wedged into the other cavity was the closest thing to a weapon that Bolan had at his immediate disposal: a palm-sized neoprene plastic box that contained a high-powered flashlight, GPS transmitter and a firing tube loaded with a single .22-caliber round. Bolan hoped to complete his mission without being drawn into a firefight, but if it came to that, the minigun would at least be a step up, however small, from taking on the enemy unarmed.

Bolan extended the transceiver’s retractable flex mike and clicked it on before planting it in his ear. Within seconds he was in contact with Stony Man pilot Jack Grimaldi.

“I’m on the prowl,” Bolan whispered.

“Gotcha,” came the tinny reply through his earbud. “GPS signal’s coming in strong.”

“Stand by, then. I’m going in.”

Bolan tapped the earbud, shutting down the transmission. He quickly snapped the heels back into place, then slipped on his boots and made his way to the last of the magnolias.

Downhill from his position was a cinder-block storage building no larger than a one-car garage. Earlier in the day, while driving a BMW Z3 on an obstacle course through the surrounding foothills, Bolan had glimpsed a Ford pickup truck pull up to the shed. The road had quickly led him beyond view of the vehicle, but once he’d finished his road test—deliberately nudging a few pylons so as to not advertise his expertise behind the wheel—Bolan had passed the compound just as two men transferred a heavy crate from the truck to the outbuilding. Judging from the crate’s apparent weight and coffinlike dimensions, the Executioner had felt certain that he’d confirmed that the fantasy camp served as a cache for stolen arms reported missing three days earlier from the U.S. Army’s proving grounds in nearby Aberdeen.

Such thefts were disturbing enough when they involved firearms and conventional ammunition. But in this case, along with an assortment of M-16s and government-issue autopistols, the thieves had gotten their hands on an even more worrisome weapons trove. The implications of the heist were grave enough to earn mention in the daily intelligence brief that had crossed the President’s White House desk the morning after the incident. The President, in turn, had placed a priority call to Stony Man Farm, putting into motion the plan that now saw Mack Bolan roaming the fantasy camp grounds in the guise of fitness guru Mel Schiraldi.

The Executioner lingered a moment at the top of the hill, waiting for the moon to disappear behind an incoming bank of clouds. Drifting on the faint breeze was the smell of barbecued chicken. Bolan shifted his gaze to a two-story clapboard building nestled between the foothills a hundred yards away, near the same mountain road where he and the other campers had earlier tested their driving skills. Smoke trailed up from behind the building, which had once served as the Army base’s administrative headquarters and now housed the Wildest Dreams “faculty.” Bolan assumed there had to be some sort of patio behind the building with an outdoor grill. He also figured the camp staff was likely having a late dinner.

Like him, they’d barely broken a sweat during the day’s activities, and he knew it would be awhile before they all turned in. Their rooms were in the same building, though, and the previous night when Bolan had staked out the quarters, no one had ventured out once the lights had been dimmed. The only other personnel to be concerned about were guards posted out near the main entrance to the complex, but the gate was nearly a quarter mile away, hidden from view behind the bramble and magnolia trees.

The lax security led Bolan to believe that the camp organizers were confident their fantasy enterprise allowed them a means by which to hide in plain sight and pursue their ulterior business without drawing scrutiny. Clearly, the founders of Wildest Dreams—retired Marine Sergeant Jason Cummings and longtime Mercenary Quarterly editor Mitch Brower—were unaware that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had recently linked them to trafficking in black market arms, not only with overseas soldiers-of-fortune, but also a number of U.S.-based militia outfits, including several fringe groups advocating an overthrow of the federal government. Bolan, like his SOG counterparts and the President himself, was concerned that the Aberdeen weapons heist signaled the approach of that day when the militias crossed the line from mere propagandizing to carrying out their threats of armed insurrection.

Once the clouds fully obscured the moon, Bolan broke from the trees and started downhill. Halfway to the storage building, he froze. Behind him, he heard the sound of an approaching car. He was near the camp’s outdoor workout area and quickly took cover behind a stack of old tires used for agility drills. Moments later, the twin beams of the BMW Z3’s headlights swept across the grounds. The sports car was heading down the road that led to the main building. The Executioner ducked still lower as the lights passed over him. Clutching his paltry minigun, Bolan held his breath and listened intently for any sign the car was slowing.

The BMW purred steadily as it drew closer. Bolan was on the driver’s side of the road and, as the Z3 rolled past, maintaining its speed, he peered out and caught a glimpse of the man behind the wheel. It was Mitch Brower, the Mercenary Quarterly editor, a square-jawed, middle-aged man with close-cropped gray hair and sideburns. In the passenger seat was a woman. Bolan’s view was too obstructed for him to get a good look at her other than to note that she had long, straight hair and lean features. She and Brower were talking to each other, clearly unaware they were being watched.

Bolan waited for the car to pass, then crawled to the cover of a chest-high length of concrete sewer pipe half-submerged in a shallow, man-made pond. As part of their training the day before, he and the other campers had been forced to slog into the pond’s icy water and then crawl through the pipe wearing a full backpack. The Executioner had aced the test and then gone back in the water a second time when one of the campers had been overcome with claustrophobia halfway through the pipe.

Staring past the pipe, Bolan watched Brower pull around to the side of the building and ease into a parking space between a Chevy Suburban and Jason Cummings’s Hummer H2. Also parked in the lot were an open-topped Jeep and a handful of older cars whose crumpled frames were a testimony to their use in demonstrations on how to bypass roadblocks and crash through gates and fences.

The woman let herself out of the car and walked at arm’s length from Brower as they headed toward the front walk. From the way she carried herself, the Executioner sensed that she was younger than Brower, but there was no suggestion of intimacy between them. She was more likely a colleague than Brower’s mistress Bolan figured. He wondered what role, if any, she might have played in the Aberdeen heist. There was no point dwelling on it now, however, he realized.

There was work to be done….

“SO, WHAT’S THE VERDICT?” Joan VanderMeer asked as she and Mitch Brower entered the converted administration building. The quarters were sparsely furnished, and there was little in the paneled front entryway other than a framed movie photograph of George C. Scott portraying General Patton and a bulletin board festooned with business cards and flyers posted by previous participants in the fantasy camp.

“That chicken smells good,” Brower responded evasively as he closed the door behind him. “I hope there’s some left.”

“We just ate, remember?” VanderMeer teased as she swept a strand of reddish hair from her forehead. The woman was in her early thirties, with pale blue eyes and a slowly fading spray of freckles across her upper cheeks. She looked like a genteel elementary schoolteacher, but the tone of authority in her voice suggested she didn’t need to be around children to show that she was in charge. In truth, there were few figures more influential in the militia movement.

“And don’t change the subject,” she added, engaging Brower with a smile that was as direct as it was disarming.

Brower grinned back at the woman. Over dinner down the road at a Sykesville diner, Brower had listened patiently as VanderMeer lobbied him on the merits of starting up a Web site to supplement the editorial content of his soldier-of-fortune magazine. She’d put forth a convincing argument—citing increased revenue from merchandising and a wider advertising base—and had offered to not only personally help set up the site but to also bring in someone who could maintain the site. Brower was old school when it came to favoring the printed page as the best means of getting his message across, but he knew there was a ring of truth to VanderMeer’s sales pitch. Furthermore, a part of him was resigned to the fact that his dwindling subscription base was due largely to the growth of the Internet. If he didn’t change with the times, Brower suspected that he would eventually find himself obsolete, along with the magazine he’d spent more than twenty years running.

“You’re as headstrong as your father used to be, you know that?” Brower told the woman as he led her down a long corridor to the dining room.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” VanderMeer said. “But you’re still not answering my question.”

“All right, all right, I give up!” Brower said with mock exasperation. “My God, woman, you’re more persistent than my athlete’s feet.”

“Just don’t get any ideas about rubbing some kind of ointment on me.” VanderMeer smiled back at him. “Unless I ask first, of course.”

The pair shared a laugh as they entered the dining room. Jason Cummings and the rest of the fantasy staff were finishing their chicken dinners. Cummings was Brower’s age, a bald man with an antiquated handlebar mustache and nearly the same physique he’d had more than thirty years earlier when he’d played nose tackle in the Rose Bowl for Army. His eyesight hadn’t fared quite as well, but he was too vain for glasses; the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes elongated as he looked up from his plate and squinted at Brower and VanderMeer.

“Sounds like you got yourself another convert, there, Joanie,” he said, smirking at the woman. Cummings had succumbed to VanderMeer’s sales pitch more than a year earlier, bringing her in to upgrade the fantasy camp’s Web site.

“Something like that,” Brower conceded.

Cummings was seated at the end of an elongated dining table. The four other men at the table, all in their mid-forties, were all absorbed with attacking the food heaped on their plates. Louie Paxton, a long-haired, potbellied veteran of the NASCAR circuit, oversaw most of the camp’s road tests. The man seated next to him, Xavier Manuel, had served four stints as a Marine drill sergeant, making him the natural choice to lord over the workout area. Similarly, Ed “Charlie” Chang’s years as a stunt double in Japanese kung-fu movies had given him the experience to run campers through a rudimentary course in the martial arts.

Paxton, Manuel and Chang had been hired solely to keep up the pretense that Cummings and Brower ran nothing more than a bona fide fantasy camp. They were well-compensated for their work, and even if they had reason to suspect Wildest Dreams was a front for other activities, their weekly paychecks left them disinclined to ask questions.

The fourth staff member, Marcus Yarborough, was another matter. Hired based on a referral by Joan VanderMeer, Yarborough was in charge of the camp’s shooting range, trading in on his purported experience as a Navy SEAL marksman. Cummings and Brower had been told the man had done some trigger work outside the Armed Forces, as well, and twice over the past three years Yarborough had been contracted to kill fantasy camp participants who’d unwittingly stumbled upon evidence of clandestine activity. In both cases, the murders had been carried out after the victims had been lured from the premises: one wound up dead in a supposed hunting accident while the other’s death went down in the books as a suicide. Yarborough had carried out the hits without being told what evidence his victims had come across. He’d convinced Cummings and Brower that the less he knew about their illegal activities, the better. In return, he demanded the same discretion with regards to his past, about which he was resolutely tight-lipped.

Thin and clean-shaved, the sharpshooter rarely smiled and always seemed preoccupied with some grave matter that took precedence, at least in his mind, over what was going on around him. When introducing him to campers, Brower and Cummings took a good-natured swipe at Yarborough’s brooding nature and invariably referred to him as the Grim Reaper. The campers lapped it up, and the ex-SEAL commando was almost always mentioned whenever people wrote back to say what a good time they’d had at the camp. Yarborough was, after all, the embodiment of the cold, detached assassin they’d seen in countless spy thrillers.

By the time Yarborough finished eating, Cummings and Brower had left the dining room to confer down the hall at the camp’s administrative office. Joan VanderMeer had remained behind and was flirting with Louie Paxton and Eddie Chang, but when she finally caught the sharpshooter’s gaze, she twitched her head slightly, indicating the door that led out to the back patio.

Yarborough nodded faintly, then took care of his dishes and fished through his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarillos. There was no smoking allowed in the building, so Yarborough headed for the patio.

“Got a spare one of those I could try?” Joan called out to him, giving herself a reason to follow Yarborough outside.

“Suit yourself,” the marksman told her.

VanderMeer finished the joke she was telling the other men, then excused herself and followed Yarborough outside. The patio was little more than a small, square slab of concrete crowded with a couple of warped Adirondack chairs and a propane-fueled barbecue. Yarborough offered Joan one of his cigarillos, but she waved him off.

“You know I hate those things,” she told him.

Yarborough shrugged and lit up, then spoke through a cloud of smoke. “You wanted to see me?”

VanderMeer nodded. “You know about the heist at Aberdeen the other night, right?” she said.

“Maybe,” Yarborough replied. “It’s none of my business.”

“You helped unload the crates this afternoon,” VanderMeer said.

“Doesn’t make it my business,” Yarborough countered. A sudden cough rumbled up through his chest. The sharpshooter doubled over, as if trying to force the cough down. It didn’t work. He hacked violently, then spit into the gravel at the base of the barbecue.

VanderMeer couldn’t be certain, but it looked as if he was coughing up blood.

“Jesus, are you okay?” she asked.

Yarborough shrugged. “Down the wrong pipe,” he said. “Don’t sweat it.”

VanderMeer stared at Yarborough, then went on, “Look, there’s something you should know. Not everything from that heist was stashed away in the shed here. There was one piece that—”

The woman was interrupted as the door to the patio swung open and Jason Cummings poked his head out, a 9 mm Uzi submachine gun clutched in his right hand.

“There you are,” he told Yarborough. “Grab a gun, quick!”

“Problem?” Yarborough asked, grinding his cigarillo into the gravel. His coughing jag had passed as quickly as it had overtaken him.

“Somebody tripped an alarm out on the grounds,” Cummings said. “They’ve broken into that storage shed near the pond.”

THE ALARM WAS SILENT, but Bolan spotted the separated sensor pads above the door the moment he entered the storage shed. The entire system was rigged from the inside, and there was no way he could have spotted it prior to picking the lock, but still the Executioner chided himself for the oversight. I should have known, he thought to himself angrily.

Bolan fought off the urge to flee. Instead he tapped his earbud transceiver as he moved deeper into the enclosure, directing the beam of his palm-sized flashlight onto the crates stored against the far wall. There were more of them than he was anticipating—nearly a dozen in all—but only a few bore stenciling that linked them back to the Aberdeen proving grounds. By the time Jack Grimaldi’s voice crackled in his ear, Bolan had honed in on one of the stenciled crates and pried the wooden lid open.

“What’s up?” Grimaldi asked.

“I tripped an alarm,” Bolan reported, even as he was staring down at the cache of missing weapons he’d come to the fantasy camp looking for. “The good news is I found the rocket launchers. All but one, that is.”

Secured within custom-cut, foam-lined compartments inside the crate Bolan had just opened were three Army-issue M-136 AT-4 rocket launchers, each loaded with an 84 mm warhead capable of piercing nearly 400 mm of rolled homogenous armor, a thickness surpassing that found on most tanks and concrete bunkers. There was a conspicuous cavity in the molded foam where a fourth launcher had once rested.

“Forget the damn launchers,” Grimaldi snapped. “I’m coming in. Get your ass out where I can see it!”

“Will do,” Bolan said, “once I find something better than Cowboy’s popgun to defend myself with.”

Bolan clicked off the earbud and hurriedly inspected the contraband stored in the other crates. By the time the first glimmer of Jason Cummings’s headlights shone through the open doorway of the shed, Bolan had found what he was looking for.

“I KNEW IT WAS A MISTAKE to move that stuff here and sit on it!” Jason Cummings seethed as he gave the Hummer more gas. “We should’ve stashed it all off-site somewhere!”

“Hind-fucking sight doesn’t help us!” Mitch Brower snapped in response. He knew Cummings was right, though, and was furious with himself for having insisted they keep their cache of stolen weapons close by until they’d brokered deals to sell them. There was still a chance this would prove to be a false alarm—something as benign as rats tripping the sensors or one of the campers out snooping around—but in his gut Brower knew better. They were in trouble.

The Hummer’s front tires squealed in protest as the retired sergeant rounded the curve leading to the workout area. The Uzi was cradled in his lap. Brower sat next to him with a slightly larger 9 mm L-34 A-1 Sterling, the mainstay subgun of Britain’s Royal Marines. Glowing in the rearview mirror were the headlights of the Jeep that Marcus Yarborough was driving.

Eddie Chang was riding shotgun alongside Yarborough in the rear vehicle, having ignored Cummings’s orders to stay behind with Joan VanderMeer, Louie Paxton and Xavier Manuel. Having no idea what was at stake, the martial-arts expert was treating the whole affair as a lark. He was unarmed and assumed that Yarborough’s Uzi was loaded with blanks.

“C’mon, admit it,” Chang shouted over the roar of the Jeep’s engine. “This is one of those improv exercises, right? Like that time the sergeant hired those Green Berets to barge in pretending they were armed robbers fleeing a bank job.”

“Zip it!” Yarborough yelled back, eyes fixed on the road ahead. He took the next turn sharply, staying close behind the Hummer. Up ahead, he thought he could see a figure charging out of the storage shed. Yarborough thought back to earlier in the day when he’d grudgingly helped Mitch Brower haul several weapons crates into the shed from the back of a Ford pickup. He wondered if he’d gotten himself caught up in some kind of government sting operation, and as he quickly scanned the surrounding grounds, he half expected to see a SWAT force materialize out of the shadows. What he got instead was the sudden, blinding glare of a flash grenade that had just detonated on the road in front of the Hummer.

“What the hell?” Eddie Chang raised a hand before his face, but the grenade had already left him temporarily blinded.

Yarborough was similarly stricken, and he feared Cummings and Brower had probably been blinded in the Hummer directly ahead of him. He figured Cummings would go for his brakes and did likewise.

The Jeep’s tires screeched, and Yarborough felt the vehicle go into a skid. Any second he expected to slam into the rear of the larger vehicle.

“We’re dead,” he muttered.

BOLAN KNEW the incendiary flash was coming. Before the grenade burst forth with its blinding light, the Executioner turned his back to the explosion and cast his eyes downward, locking them on the 7.62 mm Belgian FN FAL carbine he’d wrested from one of the crates inside the storage shed. He’d already fed a 20-round cartridge into the breech and cleared the weapon for firing. The grenade had tipped the balance in his favor, but only for a moment. Bolan knew he was outnumbered. If he didn’t act fast, any second he would be outgunned, as well.

Once he heard the crunch of colliding metal, Bolan turned back toward the road and drew a bead on the Hummer, which had slewed sideways and skidded halfway off the road. The vehicle was so large it was difficult to even see the Jeep that had rear-ended it. Not that it mattered. Bolan’s focus was on the men in the front seat of the Hummer. He could tell that Brower and Cummings were still half-blinded, but they both had their subguns in view and would likely start firing once they could see their target.

Bolan wasn’t about to let it come to that. Finger on the trigger, he cut loose with the assault rifle, raking the Hummer’s front windshield with a concentrated autoburst. The glass shattered and the men inside the vehicle shuddered as the rounds slammed into them, killing them both before either could get off a shot.

By now the afterglow of the flash grenade had dissipated, leaving the grounds even darker to the eye than before the explosion. Far behind Bolan, past the tree-lined knoll, the Executioner could hear the first cries of the fantasy campers as they rushed from their barracks, drawn by the blast. Bolan suspected guards from the main gate would also be racing to the scene any second, joined perhaps by more men from the main building. No one had yet emerged from the Jeep that had crashed into the rear of the Hummer, but Bolan wasn’t about to waste precious seconds moving forward to engage them. He wasn’t about to stand around waiting on the arrival of Jack Grimaldi, either.

Bolan had taken a second grenade with him when he’d left the storage shed, this one an avacado-sized M-61 fragger. Once he’d stepped several yards to the edge of the man-made pond, he thumbed free the safety pin, then lobbed the projectile back toward the shed. He’d left the door wide open, and the grenade sailed clearly through the opening. Bolan couldn’t recall exactly how much of a delay the grenade was equipped with, but he took advantage of what little time he had, casting aside the carbine and diving into cold, murky depths of the training pond. By the time the grenade detonated, he’d clawed his way inside the half-submerged sewer pipe.

THE INITIAL BLAST of the frag grenade was fierce enough. But when shock waves and incendiary bursts ripped through the weapons carts and triggered secondary explosions, the shed was turned into the equivalent of one large bomb. For a second it looked as if the sun had briefly awakened from a nightmare, as the shed gave off a glow far more baleful than that of the flash grenade.

Off in the distance, the campers who’d rushed from the barracks clutched at the nearby magnolias to keep from being thrown to the ground by the earthquakelike trembling beneath their feet. Downhill, the shock waves were even more intense, rocking the Hummer sideways and sending it tumbling on top of the Jeep, which had already been rendered inoperable after rear-ending the larger vehicle.

Eddie Chang, dazed and still half-blind in the front seat of the Jeep, opened his mouth to scream when the Hummer loomed above him like some pouncing beast. The scream died in his throat, however, as he was crushed by the three-ton juggernaut. Marcus Yarborough was spared a similar fate, as he’d been thrown sideways out of the Jeep during the initial impact. He’d landed hard on one knee, then passed out when his head struck the asphalt.

When he came to moments later, roused by the trembling of the road beneath him, Yarborough’s first impression had been that someone was shaking him awake. Disoriented, a din in his ears and his field of vision swarming with blips of light that zoomed about like errant spaceships, Yarborough groaned and slowly sat up. A shiver of pain radiated from his bruised knee. The Hummer had come to a rest on its side only a few feet away, and he could see Mitch Brower’s bloody corpse dangling halfway out the shattered windshield. The nearby Jeep had been left half-flattened, its tires blown out, Eddie Chang crushed nearly beyond recognition.

By the time Yarborough had fully regained his wits, a handful of fantasy campers were on their way down the slope leading to the workout area. Their eyes were not on the sharpshooter, however, so much as on the fiery crater where the storage shed had once stood. Nothing remained of the structure but a few chunks of foundation and smoldering bits of cinder block lying in the surrounding grass. Recalling the weapons crates he’d helped transfer into the shed earlier in the day, the sharpshooter began to realize what had just happened.

Before the campers could reach him, Yarborough heard the bleat of a car horn. Turning to his right, he saw the BMW Z3 pull up alongside him. Its lights were off, and he couldn’t see who was behind the wheel until Joan VanderMeer leaned over and swung open the passenger door.

“Hurry!” she urged. “Get in!”

Yarborough grabbed hold of the door and stood up, then tumbled into the front seat next to VanderMeer. He barely had time to close the door before the woman had shifted the car back into gear. She drove off the road long enough to circle around the other two vehicles, then returned to the asphalt and accelerated as she headed back toward the camp headquarters and the mountains that loomed behind it. As she switched on the headlights and gave the sports car more gas, VanderMeer told Yarborough, “We’re outta here!”

THE HALF-SUNKEN SEWER PIPE Bolan had crawled inside withstood the concussive force of the blasts that had neutralized the storage shed, but the pond had been showered with debris. When he emerged from the concrete tube and stood, drenched and shivering in the waist-deep pond, the Executioner was surrounded by floating bits of shrapnel, some of it giving off wisps of smoke. He’d lost his earbud somewhere in the pipe and wasn’t about to go back searching for it. Instead, he slogged his way to the steep embankment and pulled himself up to level ground.

Bolan quickly surveyed the aftermath of the mayhem he’d unleashed, then glanced skyward, alerted by the sound of an approaching helicopter. Soon he could see the aircraft sweeping past the magnolia treetops. He wasn’t sure if he was still giving off a GPS signal, so he made a point to wave his arms. If Grimaldi was looking his way, Bolan figured the pilot would be able pick up his silhouette backlit by the still-blazing crater.

One of the campers thought Bolan was signaling to him and waved back, shouting, “I see you, man! What the hell happened?”

“Is this for real?” another of the campers said, eyes fixed on the bodies ensnarled in the overturned Hummer and the half-crushed Jeep. “Hell, those guys look like they’re fucking dead!”

Bolan paid no heed to the questions. He’d shifted his gaze back toward the administration building and the hills behind it. He could see taillights up on the mountain road, and once he checked the parking lot next to the building, he knew that someone was fleeing in the BMW. He also knew that by the time Grimaldi picked him up, it would likely be too late for them to give chase. Just on the other side of the mountain was the main highway, as well as the residential sprawl of Sykesville. Too many escape routes, too many places to hide.

As he waited for Grimaldi to land the chopper, Bolan glanced back at the crater. At least he had the satisfaction of having destroyed the weapons cache before it could be put to use by enemies of the state. Even that realization was tempered somewhat, however, as Bolan couldn’t help wonder what had happened to the one rocket launcher left unaccounted for. It was still out there, he realized, like a proverbial loose cannon.

1

McLean, Virginia

Edgar Byrnes’s breath clouded in the chilled March air as he brushed snow off the woodpile and gathered a few logs for his evening fire. It was dusk. The moon was out, a thin, waxing sliver poised like a scythe above the dark storm clouds rolling in from the Atlantic. A faint breeze stirred through the forest of elms and sycamores surrounding the four-acre farm Byrnes called home. Leaves were budding on the trees despite the late frost, but through the branches Byrnes was still able to glimpse the outline of a monolithic building located a quarter mile away on the other side of the woods. It was the only visible trace of modern civilization, and in another week or two Byrnes knew the trees would fill in, obscuring the structure from view entirely.

We can’t wait much longer, Byrnes thought to himself as he carried the logs past a weathered lean-to shared by three cows, two horses and menagerie of pigs, chickens and sheep. One of the horses, a sturdy roan with a jet-black mane and tail, was out in the corral, snorting as it paced back and forth through the mud.

“Sorry, Jefferson,” Byrnes called out. “Too cold to go riding tonight.”

Once he reached his small one-room cabin, Byrnes freed one hand to let himself in, then kicked the door shut behind him. Last month, shortly after he’d been hired to work the farm, his first job had been to patch cracks in the mortar between the hand-hewn logs that formed the cabin’s four walls. He’d done a good job but such crude insulation could only keep out so much of the cold; inside it was still freezing.

After setting the logs onto a bed of kindling in the large stone fireplace, Byrnes blew on his hands and rubbed them over the lone flame of an oil lamp he’d left burning on a nearby table. Once the feeling came back to his fingers, he plucked a few hay straws off the dirt floor and used the lamp to light them, then crouched before the stacked wood. The straws’ flames crackled as they took hold of the kindling and began to spread. Soon the logs had caught fire as well, sending smoke up the chimney.

Byrnes pulled a wooden rocker close to the hearth and sat down. His workday, which had begun nearly twelve hours ago at the crack of dawn, was finally over. He smiled tiredly, filled with a sense of accomplishment.

It would soon be a full eight weeks that Byrnes, a thirty-two-year-old Gulf War veteran, had been working at the Michael Conlon Farm, a state-owned Colonial homestead painstakingly maintained to reflect what ordinary farm life had been like back in the days of the country’s founding fathers. For Byrnes the experience had been a joyful revelation, so much so that there had been times when, for days on end, he had forgotten the true reason he’d come to work here. He’d learned so much in that time: how to make soap from tallow; how to tan animal hides and use the leather to make shoes and clothes; how to spin wool from sheep; the best way to fetch water from nearby streams and boil it with fresh vegetables from the garden to make a nourishing stew.

The past few weeks in particular, when he’d come to be the sole caretaker living on the premises, had been like heaven. Having the place to himself most days, he exulted in the solitude and isolation, the sense that he had indeed been transported back to a time when America was the home of those who were self-reliant and bound by high ideals—a time before values had eroded in the face of complacency and the government had grown into what Byrnes felt was a festering cancer eating away at the foundation upon which the nation had been built.

Staring into the fire, stroking the thick brown beard he’d grown to cover chemical burns sustained during his time in the Gulf, Byrnes found himself wondering, as he had so many nights before, what it had to have been like to have been a part of that simpler and nobler past. Of one thing he was certain: back then the men who’d put their lives on the line to fight the Revolution had been treated as heroes and looked after once the war had been won. Nothing like today. No being shuttled through some uncaring bureaucratic maze; no denial of hard-earned benefits; no shameless attempts to dismiss claims of illness stemming from exposure to carcinogens and other toxins while in the line of duty. And all those years ago, Byrnes knew there had been no insidious attempts to silence those who might dare to band together to give their grievances a stronger voice. Back then, the notion of a citizens’ militia had been applauded and championed, not spit upon by self-serving federal agents and the brainwashed masses.

Byrnes felt he’d been born in the wrong century. And the penalty for his bad luck? Instead of being honored as a returned warrior, he saw himself viewed as a pariah. An outcast and fringe lunatic. Little wonder it had taken the isolation of the farm for him to find even the faintest glimmer of inner peace. And he knew that peace was as illusory as it was temporary. Soon he would be called upon to carry out his mission, and when that happened, all his memories of the past months would be just that: memories. The realization darkened Byrnes’s mood as surely as nightfall had begun to press its inky blackness on the cabin windows. Byrnes could feel himself tensing in the chair as his rage, like some roused beast, began to once again overtake him.

By now the fire in the hearth was blazing. Agitated, Byrnes began to fumble with the buttons of his coat. The buttons were made of bone, and it was no easy task to work them through the hand-sewn loops. He was struggling with the task when an overheated strip of bark was launched out of the fire at him. Startled, Byrnes let out a cry and recoiled, overturning the rocker in his haste to throw himself to the dirt floor. Panic seized him as he crawled away from the fire and curled into a fetal position, clutching his head protectively. Sweat beaded his face and his heart convulsed inside his chest. He was overwhelmed by a mad rush of flashbacks taking him back to the hell that had been Khamisiyah. The rattle of gunfire, the stench of diesel, men howling in pain, the splash of something hot as molten lava against his face—the sensory overload was as intense as it was sudden. Within seconds the beleaguered veteran gave in to the recurring nightmare and blacked out.

Moments later he came to, cold earth pressing against his bearded face. The ember that had triggered his blackout lay a few inches away, still glowing faintly. Byrnes watched the ember burn itself out with cold detachment, waiting for his mind to clear and for his pulse to return to normal. Finally he was able to struggle to his feet and right the toppled rocker. He sat back down again, drained, trembling, eyes trained on the fire. A racked sob shook through him. He clenched his fingers around the arms of the chair, determined not to give in to his sorrow and feeling of helplessness.

“No more,” he murmured aloud, his voice hoarse. “No more.”

For the next hour, Byrnes remained in the chair, rocking gently, transfixed by the fire, watching it slowly burn itself out. The lamp on the table beside him went out as well, and as the cabin grew dark, several more embers snapped out onto the floor.

Finally, as the last few flames licked at what remained of the charred logs in the fireplace, the evening chill crept back into the darkened cabin. Even colder and darker now, however, was the expression in Byrnes’s eyes. He had the look of a man at the end of his tether, a man who’d reached a point where he saw but one course of action and was steeling himself for the demands that course would entail. Byrnes was through waiting for the call from his superiors. He’d decided it was time to take matters into his own hands, to renounce his inner demons and seize control of his own fate.

Rising from the chair, the veteran relit the oil lamp, then crossed the room and stood on a small wooden bench set in the corner. He reached up and gently worked free two loose boards straddling the rafters that made up the cabin’s ceiling. There was a small cavity between the slats and the roof. Byrnes used the space to store several of his concessions to modern-day technology. He made frequent use of his cell phone and notebook computer, but this night it was a third item—which he’d been given just two days earlier—that commanded his attention. He reached deep into the cavity and carefully pulled out a forty-inch-long M-136 AT-4 rocket launcher.

The fifteen-pound weapon—a high-tech fiberglass-wrapped tube housing an 84 mm warhead—was equipped with a night-vision sight and had an effective firing range of nearly a quarter mile, roughly the same distance between the farm and the building located on the other side of the woods.

Byrnes stepped down from the bench and set aside the stolen launcher long enough to place his cell phone and computer into a backpack, then added a few more items before carrying both the pack and weapon outside. A light snow had begun to fall. The large, almost weightless flakes reminded Byrnes of the ashes that had once rained down on him from the fiery skies of Khamisiyah. He did his best to shrug off the comparison. Now was not the time to give in to the memories. He needed to keep his focus on the present, on the task at hand.

As he passed the lean-to, Byrnes could see lights through the woods, illuminating the outline of the building that would be his target. The wind had died, increasing the chances of his getting off a good shot. He’d fired AT-4s during his tour of duty in the Gulf, and prior to coming here he’d taken a few refresher courses with similar weapons at the American Freedom Movement compound fifty miles away in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was confident he could hit his mark. After that? Byrnes had no set plan, but he knew that this would be his last night at the Michael Conlon Farm.

The roan horse was still out in the corral.

“Change of plans, Jefferson,” Byrnes called out as he hung his backpack on the corral’s gate latch. Clutching the rocket launcher in both hands, he told the horse, “It looks like we’re going to go riding tonight after all.”

2

Washington, D.C.

The Fourteenth Capitol Partners Spring Gun Show, one of the largest such annual gatherings held east of the Mississippi, had ended a little over an hour ago. The three-day event had been a rousing success, with sales running into the tens of millions of dollars, but there was still plenty of stock left over. A handful of larger suppliers had just finished taking down their stalls and were transferring leftover inventory into trucks parked behind the building, a one-time appliance superstore located in an isolated industrial park fourteen blocks from Georgetown University. The parking lot, like the surrounding neighborhood and the handful of other vehicles parked along the street, was lightly dusted with freshly fallen snow.

Inside a nondescript panel truck with tinted windows, Mack Bolan watched the activity taking place around the loading docks. Earlier, the Stony Man warrior had roamed the aisles inside the hall without spotting anything suspicious. Now, hours later, the crowds had dispersed along with most of the vendors, but he was still on the lookout.

The surveillance mission was a consequence of Bolan’s visit to the Wildest Dreams fantasy camp. As Bolan had feared, those who’d fled the camp in the BMW had eluded capture, and neither Louie Paxton nor Xavier Manuel had claimed to know who had been driving the vehicle. Since Marcus Yarborough was missing, along with the woman Bolan had seen with Mitch Brower, he suspected they’d ridden off together in the sports car.

Bolan had been on the lookout for Yarborough inside the exhibition hall, but he’d been even more intent on finding the missing AT-4 rocket launcher. According to evidence found in the fantasy camp’s administrative office, the launcher had been sold to a Viriginia-based militia called the American Freedom Movement. The AFM was already under investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and one of BATF’s informants had confirmed the launcher transaction. He’d also claimed the militia outfit had been dragging its feet on a deal to purchase the remaining weapons Jason Cummings and Mitch Brower had stored at their Sykesville facility. According to the informant, if Brower and Cummings didn’t drop their asking price, the AFM had already concocted a backup plan: to bolster its arsenal instead by stealing wares from the Capitol Partners Gun Show. The militia had already been linked to several similar thefts over the past two years. While casing the exhibit booths, Bolan had seen enough collective firepower to sustain a small army. He wanted to make sure the AFM didn’t wind up being that army.

Bolan wasn’t alone inside the panel truck. His longtime colleague Jack Grimaldi sat up front behind the steering wheel, his ball cap pushed back on his head. True, the wiry-haired pilot was more at home in an aircraft cockpit, but when the occasion demanded it, Grimaldi had proved he could handle ground vehicles with as much finesse as the most seasoned wheelman.

Crouched beside Bolan in the rear of the truck was John “Cowboy” Kissinger, a master weaponsmith familiar with nearly every handgun and rifle that had been on display at the exhibition. Kissinger had designed a few handguns of his own, including the multifunction palm gun Bolan had concealed in his boot during his short-lived assignment at the fantasy camp.

“My money says they’ll try a hijack instead of bringing their own truck,” Kissinger speculated aloud, blowing on his hands to keep them warm. The men had been on stakeout for nearly three hours, during which time the sun had gone down and the temperature outside the truck had dropped more than twenty degrees. Although Bolan seemed unfazed by the extended wait, Kissinger’s anticipation was almost palpable. He was like a coiled spring.

“No bet,” Grimaldi responded, cracking his knuckles to pass the time. “They pull a heist, they get what they’re looking for without having to waste time moving stuff from one truck to another. And judging from the intel we’ve got on these guys, their MO is ‘hit and run’ all the way.”

“We’re all on the same page, then,” Bolan said. He had out his Beretta 92-FS, safety thumbed off, firing selector set for 3-round bursts. Kissinger and Grimaldi were armed with standard-issue Colt Government Model 1911A automatic pistols. Also in the truck was a pair of M-16 A-2 assault rifles, one equipped with an M-203 grenade launcher. The hope was they could nab the would-be hijackers without having to resort to heavy artillery.

The Stony Man crew watched as two trucks—one a converted postal carrier, the other a twenty-foot bed rental—groaned their way out of the parking lot through the light snow and headed down the access road leading to MacArthur Boulevard and the Georgetown Reservoir. That left two semis, both backed up to the loading dock at the rear of the exhibition hall. Four uniformed rent-a-cops stood by watching as vendors wheeled dollies stacked with crated weapons to the dock. There, co-workers helped move the stock into the trucks. The whole operation had a look of practiced efficiency. Nothing seemed amiss.

“Could be we’re on a wild-goose chase,” Grimaldi ventured. “I mean, all we’re going on is a tip from some scumbag informant. Who’s to say he didn’t pull this whole thing out of a hat—”

“Hold it,” Bolan interrupted, signaling Grimaldi to be quiet. He cracked open the window closest to him, letting a cold draft whisper into the truck. Soon Grimaldi and Kissinger could hear it, too: the faint, high-pitched drone of single-cylinder engines. There were at least two of them, approaching from different directions.

“A little cold to be out on a motorcycle,” Kissinger murmured, reaching for the Colt tucked in his web holster.

“Not to mention the snow,” Grimaldi said.

The Stony Man trio wasn’t alone in suspecting the heist was about to go down. A walkie-talkie on the seat next to Grimaldi suddenly squawked to life. It was Mort Kiley, point man for a BATF field team positioned just around the corner inside an unmarked utility van. Kiley had originally intended to have his crew take the point position, but Bolan had pulled rank, using doctored credentials identifying him and his colleagues as special agents with the Justice Department. Kiley and his four-man BATF crew were playing backup.

“Got ourselves a party crasher,” Kiley’s voice crackled over the two-way’s minispeaker. “Guy on a dirt bike approaching at…Wait, he’s slowing down.”

As Bolan and the others listened, they suddenly heard—both over the walkie-talkie and out on the street behind them—the sounds of gunshots and breaking glass. Kiley shouted something unintelligible before being silenced by yet another round of gunfire.

“Not good.” Grimaldi cranked the panel truck’s engine to life.

“Go check it out,” Bolan told him as he threw open his door. “We’ll handle things here.”

The Executioner slipped out of the truck and hit the asphalt running. He’d exchanged the boots he’d worn at the fantasy camp for lightweight hiking shoes. The crepe soles muffled his steps. Kissinger was right behind him, the Colt pistol freed from his holster and held out before him, ready to fire.

Grimaldi, meanwhile, swung the truck around and fishtailed past the men, raising a fantail of road slush in his wake. By then, Bolan and Kissinger had crossed the street. The Executioner took cover behind a mailbox anchored to the sidewalk near a row of parked cars. Kissinger split off and raced toward a large sign propped on stanchions rising up through a planter box situated near the parking lot entrance.

From his position, Bolan could see most of the lot, as well as the road. In the distance a thick stand of elm trees separated the industrial park from a nearby housing development. It sounded to him as if one of the motorcycles was approaching from the direction of the trees. Those gathered behind the exhibition hall had heard the commotion, as well. The rent-a-cops and several of the vendors had drawn their guns and were looking out into the night, tracking the sound. Bolan and Kissinger both did their best to conceal themselves, not wanting to be mistaken for hijackers.

Moments later, a mud-encrusted Husqvarna 250 Motocross emerged from between the elm trees, lights off, knobbed tires churning up snow and dirt as it raced up a footpath leading to the street. The rider was dressed head-to-toe in black leather, wearing goggles and a stocking cap, but no helmet. He had both hands on the handlebar controls, but visible in a shoulder holster was an Uzi Eagle autopistol. Once he reached the street, he cut across both lanes, clearly bound for the parking lot.

Before Bolan could fix him in his sights, however, the biker suddenly veered to his right and yanked on his handlebars. Goosing the bike’s throttle, he brought up the front wheel and bounded cleanly over the curb. Bolan tracked the biker and was about to cut loose with his Beretta when someone fired at him from behind, creasing the mailbox just inches from his face.

Holding his fire, the Executioner instinctively dropped to the snow-covered sidewalk.

“Sniper on the roof!” Kissinger called out.

Bolan barely heard the warning; he was too busy scrambling clear of the mailbox. He took cover behind a pickup truck parked on the street. From his new position, he could see the biker clear the sidewalk and power through the sparse shrubbery that ringed the parking lot. By the time Bolan got off a shot, the biker had entered the lot and was speeding toward the loading dock.

When one of the vendors raised his gun, the biker slammed on his brakes, throwing the Husky into a sidelong skid. Once he’d laid the bike down, the rider jumped clear, avoiding the gunshot fired his way. The motorcycle’s momentum, meanwhile, sent it clattering across the asphalt.

The vendor let out a howl as the bike knocked his legs out from under him. His gun flew from his hand as he fell, sprawling, to one side. Before the vendor could react, the biker bounded to his feet, unleathered his Uzi and fired into the vendor’s face.

Kissinger caught only a glimpse of the execution; his view was obstructed by the signposts and shrubs in the planter. By the time he changed positions, the leather-clad intruder had already disappeared between the two semis. Worse yet, Kissinger had placed himself in view of the rooftop sniper. When a 7.62 mm rifle round tore through the shrubs, the Stony Man weaponsmith quickly drew back and dropped behind the planter. More gunfire soon came chattering his way, not from the roof but rather from the rear of the exhibition hall.

“You’ve got the wrong guy!” Kissinger shouted.

His warning went unheeded. More rounds hammered at the planter and the sign stanchions, seeking him out.

Bolan, meanwhile, switched to firing single rounds, hoping to conserve ammo as he traded shots with the rooftop sniper. He plinked a shot off the condenser unit his foe was crouched behind, then ducked when a return round shattered the pickup’s windshield. Bolan scrambled to the rear of the truck and dropped the Beretta’s foregrip so he could grasp it with both hands and improve his aim. Up on the roof, the sniper swung around and was ready to fire when Bolan beat him to the trigger. Nailed in the chest, the sniper dropped his rifle and staggered clear of the condenser unit, then teetered lifelessly over the edge of the roof.

The Executioner tracked the man’s fall, then shifted his focus to the activity around the loading dock. Given all the gunfire, Bolan assumed the biker had been cornered and was making a last stand. It quickly became clear, however, that he’d gotten it wrong. Instead of going after the biker, the rental cops—all four of them—had turned their guns on the surviving vendors. Taken by surprise, the vendors were easy targets and fell quickly.

“Inside job,” Bolan murmured, incredulous. Raising his voice, he cried out to Kissinger, “The guards are in on it!”

AS SOON AS Jack Grimaldi steered his panel truck around the corner, he saw that he was too late to come to the aid of Mort Kiley or his BATF cohorts.

Another biker, astride a second Husqvarna, had just put a bullet into the head of a federal agent lying on the road next to the ambushed BATF utility van. Kiley had never made it out of the vehicle; he was slumped on the back floor, his left forearm dangling from the half-opened side door. The driver was slumped behind the steering wheel at an unnatural angle, his blood streaking the window beside him, clearly another victim of the biker’s surprise attack.

“Bastard!” Grimaldi growled, flooring the accelerator. He flashed on his high beams and bore down on the biker, gambling that the other man was out of ammunition.

The gamble paid off.

The biker, helmetless and dressed like his counterpart in black leather, instinctively raised his gun at the approaching truck. He had a clear shot at Grimaldi but pulled the trigger on an empty chamber. He cast the useless gun aside and put his bike in gear.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” Grimaldi seethed, focusing on the biker’s hands as he drew closer. When he saw the gunman turn his handlebars to the right, Grimaldi countered, jerking his steering wheel to the left. The biker lurched forward, hoping to veer around the oncoming truck. Grimaldi anticipated the maneuver and swerved into the assailant’s path. His fender clipped the bike’s front wheel squarely and sent the rider vaulting headfirst over the handlebars. The assailant caromed off the truck’s grillework and fell limply to the ground.

Grimaldi slammed on his brakes. The truck brodied across the snow-slicked street and came to a stop mere inches from the slain BATF agent lying on the road. Yanking his Colt from his web holster, the Stony Man operative bounded out into the street and took aim at the biker, who was slowly struggling to his feet.

“Freeze!” he ordered.

The biker was crouched over, his back turned to Grimaldi. He stayed put, but Grimaldi could see his right hand drifting toward the loose vest he wore over his leather jacket.

“Hands out where I can see them!” Grimaldi barked.

The biker stretched his left arm outward and began to slowly turn. He let his right arm drop for a moment, then suddenly reached inside his vest. He was pulling a backup pistol from the waistband of his riding pants when Grimaldi fired.

The biker let out a cry and staggered backward, but managed to stay on his feet despite having taken a close-range shot to the chest. When he turned to Grimaldi, gun raised, the Stony Man pilot figured the guy was wearing body armor, so he aimed higher, putting his next shot through the assailant’s forehead. The biker dropped his gun and sagged to his knees, then collapsed.

Grimaldi slowly moved closer, Colt trained on the biker. The other man was in his early thirties, clean-shaved, with short blond hair. The killshot hadn’t completely disfigured him, and when Grimaldi took off the man’s visor he recognized him from a series of mug shots he and his colleagues had been shown a few hours ago back at BATF’s Georgetown field office. The guy’s name was Byrnes. Grimaldi couldn’t remember his first name, but he knew the guy had two other brothers, linked, like him, to the American Freedom Movement.

Grimaldi glanced back at the BATF surveillance vehicle, then once again eyed the slain biker. The man was beyond being interrogated, but Grimaldi still found himself asking the foremost question on his mind in the wake of the ambush.

“No way you just stumbled across them,” he thought aloud. “You knew they were on stakeout. Who tipped you off?”

WALLACE “DUBBY” BYRNES, youngest of the three brothers who had followed their late father’s footsteps into the ranks of the American Freedom Movement, had banged up his knee when he’d skid-dropped his Husqvarna in the parking lot, but he ignored the pain as he clambered into the cab of the nearest of the two semis backed up to the loading dock. The keys were in the ignition, and he let out a joyous whoop as he started the engine.

“Hot damn!” he hollered triumphantly.

He’d done it! He’d helped steal a semi filled with enough guns and ammunition to handle a year’s worth of AFM recruits. Not only that—he’d been the one who’d taken it upon himself a few weeks ago to start dating a BATF dispatcher, figuring it would help determine the extent to which the Feds were on their trail. His brother Harlan and all the others back at the compound had thought he was nuts and mocked him for coming up with such a hare-brained scheme. This afternoon, though, that scheme had paid off when the dispatcher—who had no idea Dubby was with the AFM—had mentioned something about a pending militia bust in Georgetown. Dubby had convinced his brother they should hop on their bikes and rush over to check on things. Now here they were, riding to the rescue, and they’d done it!

Dubby couldn’t wait to see the look on his brothers’ faces when he told them the news. There’d be no more calling him Squirt. Not after this. From now on, they’d call him Dubby like everyone else.

The twenty-three-year-old biker’s euphoria was a bit premature. He may have taken over the wheel of the Mack truck, but there was still the matter of escaping from the parking lot and making it all the way back to the AFM’s mountain compound without getting caught. Dubby got his first reality check when the driver’s-side window shattered while he wrestled with the truck’s gearshift. The bullet whizzed past his face and lodged in the cab ceiling, but not before he’d been struck by a few shards of glass. Blood began to seep from gashes in his neck and cheek.

Neither wound was severe enough to take Dubby out of the fight, and he swore as he grabbed for the Uzi Eagle he’d used earlier to gun down the truck’s owner. He knocked loose the remaining glass in the window frame with the Eagle’s squat polymer butt, then shouted out into the night, “All right, who’s asking for it?”

JOHN KISSINGER COULD SEE that he’d missed the biker attempting to steal the Mack truck. The biker was leaning out of the line of fire, and Cowboy didn’t want to waste any more ammunition, so he turned his attention to the other truck. Bolan had neutralized the first guard trying to get inside the vehicle, but a second guard had yanked the body aside and climbed behind the wheel. Now the semi was pulling away from the loading dock, headed Kissinger’s way.

Kissinger propped his gun hand on the planter to steady his aim as he squinted past the glare of the headlights, keeping the driver in his sights. Once the truck had reached the exit, Kissinger pulled the trigger.

The windshield spiderwebbed as the round punched through the glass, striking the driver in the upper chest. The dead man’s foot slid off the accelerator, and the truck slowed to a stop halfway into the street, blocking the only exit from the lot.

“Whaddya know, something went right for a change,” Kissinger muttered.

The disabled truck blocked his view of the gunfight taking place between Bolan and the other guards, so Kissinger backtracked along the planter to his original position, hoping the biker would realized he’d been hemmed in and bail from the other truck. Before he could confirm whether or not the ploy had worked, Kissinger was distracted by the metallic plink of something bounding off the asphalt on the other side of the planter. Kissinger had been in enough firefights to know the sound.

Grenade.

Kissinger had no time to react before the projectile detonated. Half the planter disintegrated, as did a good portion of the stanchions holding up the massive sign he had taken cover beneath. With a cracking sound nearly as loud as that made by the grenade, the weakened posts collapsed under the weight of the sign.

Kissinger tried to roll clear as the marquee plummeted toward him, but the bottom edge caught him on the right arm and shoulder, knocking the gun from his hand. The next thing he knew, the Stony Man armorer was pinned to the ground. The air had been knocked from his lungs and a stabbing pain coursed through him. A blur of light crowded his field of vision, then Kissinger’s world was plunged into sudden darkness.

WHEN HE SAW that his colleague was in trouble, Bolan broke from cover and started toward the fallen sign, only to be driven back by gunfire from the two rogue guards still prowling the loading dock area. The Executioner crouched behind a late-model Lexus illuminated by a nearby streetlight. Bolan shot the light out, emptying the last round in his Beretta. He fished a spare 10-round clip from his pocket and quickly swapped magazines, then peered over the hood of the Lexus. He fired at one of the guards and sent him sprawling across the body of a vendor who already lay dead on the loading dock next to an overturned crateful of MAT 40 subguns.

The remaining guard had fled to the rear of the second semi, which was trying to squeeze past the first truck, stalled at the parking lot exit. The engine rumbled as Byrnes drove forward, and seconds later Bolan heard a screech of metal on metal as Byrnes brushed against the other truck. Undeterred, the militiaman drove on, taking out another section of the planter as he forged a new path to the street. From where he was standing, Bolan couldn’t see if Kissinger had been in the truck’s path.

Dubby Byrnes turned sharply once he reached the street, then gave the semi more gas. When he spotted Bolan, he veered the truck toward the Lexus. Bolan had no time to fire. He dived headlong to his right, landing hard on the sidewalk just as Byrnes’s semi clipped the front end of the Lexus and sent it caroming backward into the Volkswagen Passat parked behind it. Bolan’s instincts had just saved him from being crushed between the two vehicles. Still, he’d scraped his right elbow landing on the sidewalk, and the entire arm throbbed as he scrambled back to his feet.

Much as he wanted to check on Kissinger, Bolan knew that trying to stop the truck was his top priority. Dropping the Beretta’s foregrip, he clutched the pistol with both hands and circled the crumpled Lexus. He was immediately spotted by the security guard who’d climbed up into the back of the fleeing truck. The guard fished through the shipping crate nearest to him and came up with an M-68 frag grenade similar to the one that had taken Kissinger out of the battle earlier. He slipped his thumb through the release pin and was about to heave the projectile when Bolan stitched him across the chest with a 3-round volley of 9 mm Parabellum bullets. The guard dropped the grenade and keeled over backward, his heart shredded. Bolan wasn’t sure if the pin had been pulled on the grenade, but he once again went with his instincts and dived back behind the Lexus.

Once the grenade detonated, shrapnel ripped through the truck’s cargo much the same way Bolan’s M-61 had stirred things up back at the storage shed in Sykesville. The chain-reaction blasts were equally devastating. The truck’s walls turned into razor-sharp shards, and flaming chunks flew out in all directions, pelting everything within a fifty-yard radius. A flash fire quickly consumed the crated weapons and ammunition, triggering still more explosions. The Lexus Bolan was crouched behind rocked in place for a moment, then came to a rest. By the time he rose to his feet to survey the damage, the truck had been turned into a rolling inferno.

DUBBY BYRNES WAS THROWN forward by the first blasts, breaking ribs on the steering wheel before he smashed into the windshield, cracking the glass along with his skull. By the time he’d rebounded back into the driver’s seat, shrapnel had ripped through the backrest and pierced his leather jacket, nicking his spine and puncturing his right lung. Miraculously, he was still conscious, but the spinal trauma had left him paralyzed from the waist down, and when flames surged through the cab, he was unable to escape. His shrill scream was abruptly silenced when the fire roared up into the engine compartment and made contact with the fuel line. A final explosion—every bit as loud and powerful as that made by the grenade—obliterated the cab, putting Byrnes out of his misery.

THE STREET HAD FALLEN SILENT, but the din from the chain-reaction blasts still reverberated through Bolan’s skull. Half-deaf, he cautiously approached the ravaged truck. Flames still licked at the charred shell, sending thick clouds of smoke up into the night. An eerie haze filled the street, almost like a fog, mingling with the light snowfall. Bolan knew the driver could not have survived the explosion.

As the Executioner turned to make his way back to Kissinger, another vehicle slowly rolled into view through the haze, passing the ruined semi. Bolan raised his pistol but held his fire. It was Grimaldi in the panel truck.

Bolan slowly slid his gun back into his web holster and waved to get Grimaldi’s attention. The panel truck picked up speed, then slowed to a stop alongside him.

“The grenade launcher’s still in back here,” the Stony Man pilot called out to Bolan as he leaned across the front seat and threw open the passenger door. “How the hell did you turn that truck into toast?”

“I had their help,” Bolan conceded. He had to raise his voice, as the night had come alive with the screaming of sirens. He got in the truck and explained what had happened, then told Grimaldi, “Let’s get back to the hall. Cowboy’s down.”

Once they were within view of the fallen sign, Grimaldi pulled to a stop in front of the stalled semi. He and Bolan scrambled to the planter and carefully lifted the toppled marquee, then shoved it to one side so they could get to Kissinger. The armorer wasn’t moving, but he had a pulse and was breathing, however faintly. Bolan and Grimaldi both saw a thin crimson rivulet seeping from the corner of the man’s mouth.

“Internal bleeding,” Grimaldi murmured.

Bolan nodded. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the flashing rooflights of several approaching vehicles.

“Let’s hope one of those is an ambulance,” he said, turning his attention back to Kissinger. “He’s hanging on by a thread.”

3

McLean, Virginia

Three hundred yards from the lean-to rooftop where Edgar Byrnes lay peering through the night-vision scope of his M-136 AT-4 rocket launcher, Roberta Williamson was finishing another routine workday on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters. Yes, she’d put in overtime, but that was the norm for her these days. She’d only been at the Langley facility ten months, and she still felt the need to do extra work to prove herself worthy of the promotion she’d received after five years of field work with the Agency’s Paris bureau. She was now an intercept analyst for the Company’s counterterrorism division, part of a thirteen-person team charged with ferreting out communication links between al Qaeda sleeper cells in the States and their overseas contacts. It was demanding work, but Williamson loved the challenge.

For Williamson, the biggest downside to her job was its sedentary nature. She’d put on twelve pounds since reporting to Langley, and long hours at the desk had given her lower-back problems, as well. She knew more exercise would help on both fronts and she tried, whenever possible, to leave time at the end of the day to do some stretches and then jog around some portion of the facility’s 130-acre grounds. This night it was snowing outside, so Williamson figured she had an easy excuse to skip the workout. When her phone rang, however, she suspected her boss had other ideas. She smiled ruefully as she picked up the receiver. “Williamson here.”

“Hey, Robbi. It’s your conscience.”

“I figured as much,” Williamson replied.

“So, whaddya say? Up for a jog?”

She chuckled, “Do I have a choice?”

“Be right there.”

“Bastard,” Williamson teased before hanging up the phone. She was still smiling as she pushed away from her desk and kicked off her pumps.

Her “conscience” was former Army Colonel Felix Garber, the fifty-seven-year-old California native who’d recommended her for the job with counterterrorism and had served as her mentor these past ten months. Before joining the Company, Garber had put in twenty years with the XVIII Airborne Corps, concluding his service as the officer in charge of demolition operations in Khamisiyah following the Gulf War. He was now deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism division, and Williamson suspected it was only a matter of time before he took over the top position. She and Garber had worked alongside each other several times when the colonel had come to Paris on assignment, and they’d struck up a friendship based on their mutual passion for country music, haute cuisine and the Los Angeles Lakers. Working in adjacent offices now, they’d drawn even closer the past few months, and another incentive Williamson had for losing weight was her anticipation of the day when their relationship led to the bedroom and Garber would have his first look at her without her clothes on.

She had changed into her jogging sweats and was tying her running shoes when Garber appeared in her doorway, wearing rubberized biker shorts and a sleeveless ski vest. He was in good shape and had a better physique than most men half his age.

“You want to go running dressed like that?” Williamson said. “You’ll freeze!”

“Wimp,” Garber said with a grin. “It’s not cold out—it’s brisk.”

“Yeah, right.” She laughed.

As they left the office and headed down the hall, Garber floated the idea of having dinner together after their run. He mentioned a new sports bar that had just opened up across the river in D.C. They’d have the Lakers game on, he told her, and their crab cakes had just gotten a good write-up in the Post.

“Can’t say no to a good crab cake,” Williamson said.

They were waiting for the elevator when Garber snapped his fingers.

“Damn!” he groaned. “I forgot to update Tangiers on that cable intercept we just cracked.”

“Go ahead and fax them,” Williamson told him. “I’ll hold the elevator and get in a few stretches.”

“Be right back,” Garber said.

Williamson watched Garber head back down the hallway, admiring his legs. And that ass, she thought to herself, smiling.

The colonel had unlocked his office door and was heading into his office when a sudden explosion shook the building. The floor beneath Williamson’s feet shuddered with so much force she lost her balance and bounced off the elevator doors, then fell as if struck by an invisible force. By the time she’d landed, the floor had stabilized, but a deafening alarm had gone off in the hallway and the ceiling-mounted safety sprinklers had been activated. Water showered down on Williamson as she slowly sat up, mind racing, trying to make sense of what had just happened.

Like Garber, Williamson was a California native and her first thought was that there’d been an earthquake. But then she smelled smoke and heard the unmistakable crackling sound of racing flames. Alarmed, she glanced down the hallway leading back to her office.

“No!” she gasped.

The inner walls of her office, as well as Garber’s and the office next to hers, had all but disintegrated, and a portion of the ceiling had collapsed into the flames engulfing the corridor. A woman’s body hung eerily out over the edge of the overhead cavity, then tumbled down to the hallway floor, joining three other corpses strewed about like discarded dolls. The fire had begun to devour the victims, and Williamson’s stomach clenched at her first whiff of burning flesh.

“Felix!” she called out, staggering to her feet.

She cried out Garber’s name again as she tore off her sweatshirt and soaked it beneath the ceiling sprinklers. Pressing the makeshift mask to her face, she headed down the hall. Smoke stung her eyes as she leaned over the first body she came to—Roger Olsen, a colleague she’d shared coffee with in the cafeteria just a few hours ago. The man’s clothes were torn, and he was bleeding from deep cuts sustained when he’d crashed through the office wall that now lay smoldering in broken chunks on the floor around him. His jaw had been dislocated and his mouth hung open, slack and off-center. His eyes were open but there was no life in them.

“No,” Williamson repeated, her voice reduced to a hoarse whisper.

The next two bodies she passed were in even worse condition, but neither they nor Olsen’s corpse adequately prepared her for the horror that awaited her when she came upon the remains of her mentor.

Felix Garber’s office had taken the brunt of the 84 mm warhead fired from Edgar Byrnes’s AT-4 rocket launcher. When he’d returned to his office to send his fax, Garber had walked directly into the spalling effect achieved after the rocket had penetrated the outer wall of the building. Garber had been killed instantly and then cast back out into the hallway by an incendiary barrage of projectile fragments that had left his body charred and mutilated. His right arm was missing along with half his left leg, and his torso had been rent open and seared beyond recognition. His nearly severed head hung twisted from his shoulders in such a way that even though he lay on his back his face was turned to the floor.

Williamson’s legs weakened and she dropped to her knees, unable to take her eyes off the grisly remains. She lowered the dampened sweatshirt and opened her mouth as if to scream, but all that came forth was a strained mewling. She became oblivious to the rank stench of burning flesh and the ominous approach of flames consuming those areas in the hall where the safety sprinklers had been rendered inoperable.

Someone appeared at the far end of the hallway and called out to Williamson, but she remained transfixed, overwhelmed by the horror around her. Two co-workers—men who’d rushed up to the sixth floor after feeling the explosion—scrambled down the corridor and pulled Williamson to her feet. She numbly allowed them to lead her beyond range of the flames. It was only when they’d reached the elevators that she found her voice. When she spoke, however, it seemed to her as her words were coming from somewhere far away, being mouthed by someone else.

“Who?” she moaned. “Who did this?”

“EASY, BOY,” Edgar Byrnes called out as he slipped on his backpack and opened the corral gate at Conlon Farm. “Easy, Jefferson.”

The roan horse had been spooked by the rocket launcher and neighed loudly as it clomped in circles around the corral. Other animals were making a racket inside the lean-to, and several chickens had squawked their way outside and were scurrying in all directions. Byrnes strode toward Jefferson, holding his arms out before him. In one hand he held a salt lick, in the other a carrot.

“Come on, Jefferson,” he pleaded. “We don’t have time for this.”

The horse charged blindly past. Byrnes turned and jogged counterclockwise in hopes he could intercept Jefferson during the horse’s next lap around the corral. He continued to call out, trying to calm the beast. Finally Jefferson slowed to a trot and then came to a stop in front of Byrnes, choosing the carrot.

“Good boy.”

As he waited for Jefferson to consume the snack, Byrnes glanced through the woods. It had stopped snowing, and he could clearly see flames spewing from the sixth floor of CIA headquarters. A trio of helicopters hovered above the carnage, searchlights raking the surrounding grounds. Byrnes knew it would only be a matter of time before the search widened to include the farm.

“Okay, boy,” Byrnes said once Jefferson had finished the carrot. “It’s time.”

Byrnes had already saddled the horse and strapped on the reins. He slid one foot into the nearest stirrup and hoisted himself up onto Jefferson’s back, then slapped the beast’s flank with the flat of his palm.

“Let’s go!”

Jefferson bolted from the corral and carried Byrnes deep into the woods leading away from the CIA facilities. Byrnes had ridden this stretch countless times over the past few weeks, including the previous night, when he’d gone to pick up the weapon from his AFM contacts. The route was ingrained in Jefferson’s mind and the horse retraced it at full gallop, threading between trees with relative ease. The woods were dark, but the horse forged on unerringly.

Once they reached the cloverleaf ramp leading under the George Washington Expressway to Turkey Run Park, Byrnes slowed Jefferson to a trot. There were a few other riders out, as well. The militiaman composed himself, then joined them, expressing puzzlement.

“I heard some kind of crash,” he told the others.

“Something going down at Langley,” one of the other riders explained, pointing out the helicopters in the distance.

“Sounded like a bomb,” another rider said with a trace of anxiety. “I hope it’s not terrorists.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Byrnes reassured the other man. “That place is like a fortress. No way is anybody going to be able to attack it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Me, too,” Byrnes said. “Hell, if somebody can attack CIA in their own backyard, nobody’s safe.”

4

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Senator Gregory Walden had just nodded off to sleep when the phone rang on the nightstand beside him. The vice chairman of the Joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee groaned and opened one eye, inspecting the luminous readout on the digital clock next to the phone. It was nearly midnight.

“What now?” Walden groaned. The senator had already been interrupted twice tonight, once by a Post reporter looking for the inside scoop on confirmation hearings for the President’s latest Homeland Security nominee, the other time by an aide who was having trouble transcribing some notes Walden had barked into his Dictaphone before leaving the office. He reached for the phone as it continued to ring. Beside him, Nikki, his wife for the past seven years, stirred beneath the sheets.

“Gregory, would you please get that already, for crying out—”

“I just did!” Walden snapped at her. He sat up in bed and vented further into the phone, yelling, “This better be goddamn important!”

There was a pause on the line, then a woman replied to him in a soft voice void of emotion. It was Joan VanderMeer. “Greg, it’s me. I know it’s late, but—”

“I’ll call you right back,” Walden interrupted. He hung up the phone and swung his feet to the floor and rubbed his fists against his temples.

Nikki turned to him, her peroxide hair matted flat on the side she’d been sleeping on. The covers clung as tightly to her silicone breasts as the skin did to her cheeks after her most recent facelift.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The world’s coming to an end,” Walden deadpanned as he stabbed his feet into his bedroom slippers. “Go back to sleep.”

“Always with the sarcasm,” Nikki complained.

“I love you, too, honeybunch,” Walden said flatly. He grabbed his robe from the overstuffed chair next to the bed and put it on as he headed out of the room. The November elections were eight long months away. Walden wondered how the hell he was going to keep the divorce on hold that long. He’d come to hate his wife with a passion, but he knew this year’s campaign would be a tight one, and he couldn’t afford to lose votes by presenting himself as anything other than happily married.

The Waldens lived on the eighth floor of an upscale high-rise located just off the river between Drexel University and the train station the senator had made heavy use of years ago when he was new to Capitol Hill and needed a cheap way to commute between Philadelphia and his office in Washington. Nowadays he could afford a chauffeur. He could also afford the two million dollars’ worth of professional redecoration the apartment had just undergone. The completed results would be featured in the November issue of Architectural Digest, just in time for the election. The photo shoot had already taken place, and Nikki, who’d made most of the decorating choices, had made sure to worm her way into a few of the shots, another reason Walden felt the need to keep up pretenses. Of course, since the photo shoot, Nikki had changed her mind about a few things and had brought the decorators back in for a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of “tweaking.” And she wasn’t done yet. The interior decorator was due back in the morning with swatches for the dining room’s third paint job in as many months.

As he dialed a number on one of his never-ending supply of prepaid cell phones, Walden stared at an obscure Jackson Pollock painting that hung over the den fireplace. Walden hated the piece; to him it looked like something a second-grader had painted. Nikki, of course, thought it was a masterpiece. Which was good for her, Walden thought, because it was probably the most valuable thing she’d be taking away from the marriage when he threw her out after the election.

“Okay, which is it?” Walden said once VanderMeer had picked up. “The Feds are on to you or there was a problem with the gun heist.”

“The gun show,” VanderMeer told him. “They got hold of both semis but ran into a buzz saw trying to get away.”

“You want to translate that for me?” Walden said. He could already feel his blood pressure rising. First that business at the fantasy camp in Sykesville, and now this. This bungling not only jeopardized his master plan, but it also increased the chance that his cover would be blown. If that happened, he would be as good as dead.

“I don’t have all the details yet,” VanderMeer confessed, “but apparently BATF showed up along with some other Feds. Our people were stopped cold, and from what I’ve heard, it was pretty ugly. One of the trucks was blown up, so the place is crawling with media and lookie-loos.”

“Shit,” Walden murmured. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was one of the few investigatory agencies he hadn’t yet managed to infiltrate with his own people.

“Who were these other Feds?” Walden said as he made his way to the wet bar and poured himself a drink.

“I think they were from Justice,” VanderMeer said. “Special agents.”

“Figures.”

Walden had used his connections to try to find out who’d blown up the weapons cache at the Wildest Dreams Fantasy Camp but had run into a dead end once the trail led to the Justice Department. It turned out that there were some levels of confidentiality even he could not bypass. And now it looked as if the same operative who’d brought down Jason Cummings and Mitch Brower had played a hand in thwarting the AFM’s attempt to replace the arms that had gone up in smoke back in Sykesville. Not knowing who he was up against left Walden feeling vulnerable. But, as with the incident at Wildest Dreams, his foremost concern was that he remain above suspicion.

“Did they take anyone into custody?” the senator asked.

“I don’t think so,” VanderMeer reported. “I think everyone was killed.”

Walden drained his drink and quickly poured another as he assessed the situation. He’d been lucky in the case of Sykesville, since neither Louie Paxton nor Xavier Manuel had known anything about the weapons stolen from Aberdeen, much less Walden’s role in enabling the theft. Both men had protected VanderMeer’s identity, as well, but he knew there was a chance their tongues could be loosened in the interrogation room. In Georgetown, at least, it appeared there were no survivors capable of ratting him out. Some consolation, he thought to himself.

“There’d better not be a trail leading back to us,” he warned.

“We should be okay,” VanderMeer assured him. “I’m on my way to the compound as we speak. I’ll make sure our tracks are covered.”

“Good. Once that’s settled, we need to come up with a way to spin this whole mess in our favor,” Walden advised. Already his mind was sorting through options. Making snap decisions while under duress was a skill he’d mastered over the years; it had helped him immeasurably in his rise through the ranks on Capitol Hill.

“Greg, listen to me,” VanderMeer said. “Bad as the news from Georgetown is, I’m afraid that’s not the worst of it. It’s not the reason I called.”

“What?” Walden was taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

There was a pause on the line, then Joan VanderMeer dropped the bombshell.

“It has to do with Edgar Byrnes,” she said. “You remember him. He’s the older brother of Wallace and Harlan—”

“I know who he is,” Walden interrupted. “We’ve got him planted at that goddamn farm next to Langley with that rocket launcher from Aberdeen. Once we get all our pieces in place, he’ll—”

“He’s not at the farm anymore,” VanderMeer interrupted. “Apparently he snapped tonight.”

“Snapped? What do you mean? He offed himself?”

“Worse,” she said. “He went ahead with the plan. On his own.”

Walden let out a deep breath and sank into chair behind him. This couldn’t be happening. “He fired at Langley?”

“Afraid so. Last I heard, there are eight confirmed dead. They’re still fighting the fire.”

Walden finished his drink, then hurled the shot glass across the room, shattering it against the flagstone hearth. He already had his hands full trying to figure out a way to put a spin on Sykesville and the gun-show fiasco in Georgetown. Now this.

“Please tell me he put a bullet through his head afterward,” he muttered into the cell phone. “Please tell me he’s in no position to talk.”

Once again, there was a moment’s silence on the line. Then VanderMeer warily confirmed Walden’s worst fears.

“I’m sorry, Greg, but he’s still out there somewhere.”

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