“Yeah, Sarge?” Grimaldi answered on the first ring.
“Have the Farm arrange for a local courier to make a pickup,” Bolan said. “I’ve got something they need to analyze.”
“Will do,” Grimaldi said. “Any fireworks?”
“None so far,” Bolan said. “It looks like we got here after the party was over.”
“It happens, Sarge,” Grimaldi said. He closed the connection.
“So far,” Delaney said, looking up at the soldier, “this hasn’t been the hot date I was expecting.”
“Don’t worry,” Bolan told her. “We’re just getting warmed up.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Delaney drove the rental truck—a GMC, this time—that had been waiting for them at Little Rock National Airport, also known as Adams Field. They were headed to the central business district, a little more than two miles from the airport. Grimaldi had wished them luck after spending most of the relatively short flight from Kansas flirting with Delaney. The legendary womanizer had made little headway, but Bolan suspected he hadn’t really been trying. It wasn’t that the pilot’s most wolfish days were behind him; it was simply that he was too polite to push it with a government agent assigned as liaison or observer to Mack Bolan’s mission.
Bolan had placed a call to the Farm the moment the Gulfstream V’s landing gear had cleared the tarmac in Kansas. Price had filled him in without preamble.
“We traced the phone number you got from the Patriotism Riders,” Price had told him. “Bear had to guide his people through some pretty tricky maneuvers, but eventually we pinned down the real source. The call was electronically routed and disguised, but we ran it down to an executive training facility in Little Rock, Arkansas.”
“Executive training,” Bolan repeated.
“Supposedly,” Price said, “it’s the sort of place corporate managers, CEOs and other executives go to learn leadership skills, play teamwork games and take seminars on the latest management theories.”
“All right,” Bolan said. “Can it be traced to Trofimov?”
“Not so far,” Price told him, “but I would recommend penciling it in on your schedule anyway. We’ve traced the real owners of the facility. The virtual money trail leads back to Security Consultants and Researchers, your trigger-happy security outfit. Once we had the in, Bear started cavity-searching their networks. This SCAR’s employment rolls reads like a who’s who of soldiers of fortune.”
“Mercenaries training business executives?” Bolan asked.
“There’s more,” Price said. “We’ve established a link between disbursements made through SCAR to its management, and payments wired to accounts held by Gareth Twain.”
“So Twain runs SCAR, and SCAR is…what, cover for Twain’s mercenaries in the United States?”
“Looks that way,” Price said.
“If they’re with Twain, and Twain is working for Trofimov, I’m going to stir them up in a big way with each new hit. They’re going to keep coming at me,” Bolan said. “Can Hal move on them from Washington, maybe have their assets seized and their people rounded up?”
“He’s trying.” Price sounded frustrated. “But it’s slow going. It’s going to take some time to get official buy-in at a level high enough to permit us to roust that many individuals on American soil, preemptively and without legally obtained proof.”
“I understand,” Bolan said. “Let me know if that changes. You received the contact information I transmitted, for this environmental consulting firm?”
“We’re following that up now,” Price confirmed. “I’ll get an analysis of the sample you forwarded as soon as possible.”
“There’s no chance we were wrong about that site?”
“No,” Price said. “It was definitely a Trofimov holding.”
“Then we’ve got serious trouble there,” Bolan said. “Whatever they were working on, they’ve already done it, and we need to know what and why. What about this ‘massacre,’ any news on that yet?”
“Still nothing, Striker.” Price sounded almost apologetic. “At least three different government agencies are working on enhancing the tape, to no effect yet. No one has turned themselves in within the military. The call has gone out to find the people responsible, but so far they’re ghosts.”
“Which makes me wonder,” Bolan said.
“You and me both,” Price agreed. “Trofimov’s news network has gone to an overdrive cycle, playing highlights from the video every twenty minutes during its regular news clip recaps. Protests have broken out in several countries, and two different American allies have come under halfhearted attack. No casualties there, and in both cases the attackers were repelled, but it’s a disturbing trend. Basically, Striker, there’s nothing we can do about that right now.”
“All right. What about the ‘transmitter’ components in Cedar Rapids?”
“Analyzing now,” Price said.
“The locals bend Hal’s ear for him?”
“The usual amount,” Price said. “They weren’t happy to have bodies and burning vehicles show up on their doorstep, but Hal handled it. As for the data you recovered and the components you sent to us, Aaron says he’s onto something but wants to confirm it first. We’ll let you know as soon as he’s ready. He does have some good news for you, though.”
“I could do with some.”
“Once we knew to target them,” Price explained, “it was apparently very easy for Aaron to compromise SCAR’s computer network. We’ve got you a gold ticket through the front doors. They’ll be expecting you.”
“You’re certain?”
“Absolutely. Walk right in the front.”
“That hasn’t gone so well in recent memory.” Bolan’s grin was not visible through the phone, but he imagined Price could hear it in his voice. “All right, Barb,” Bolan had told her. “I’ll stay on it.”
“We’ll do the same.”
“Striker out.”
Now Bolan and Delaney were headed downtown to the location of this training facility, which was apparently far more than it seemed. Delaney had been quiet on the flight to Arkansas, apart from her conversation with Jack Grimaldi. Bolan didn’t pry. Her thoughts were her own, and he imagined he knew what she might be thinking. No doubt she was thinking about finally getting revenge on Twain. Justice for a dead FBI agent, and personal revenge for Jennifer Delaney, were one and the same, in this instance. Bolan understood the twin drive for revenge and justice only too well. And, after Twain was down or dead, what then?
There were no easy answers to such questions, beyond the very obvious. Good men and women often became obsessed with bringing violent criminals to justice. All those men and women could do, once justice was done, was live with the actions taken to that point— and go on with own their lives as best they could.
“This is it,” Delaney announced. She pulled the SUV into the entrance to the training center’s parking lot. There was a metal gate bar across the entrance, next to a small guard hut. The bored guard within looked at them.
Delaney rolled the window down. Bolan leaned over her and said through the open window, “Cooper.”
The guard checked his list and, without a word, pressed a button to raise the gate bar. Delaney drove through to the parking garage below the building.
“I can’t believe that worked,” she said.
“It hasn’t worked yet.”
They were already wearing their weapons concealed. Bolan left the Tavor in its duffel, safely stowed in the rear of the vehicle. He had his 93-R and Desert Eagle under his field jacket, of course. They had rigged a shoulder harness from which Delaney had slung the MP-5 K, ready to go under her right arm. It was covered by her jacket, but only barely.
The two of them crossed the parking garage. There was an elevator with only one button on its control panel. Pressing it brought them to the lobby of the training center. A man in a uniform emblazoned with the SCAR logo sat behind a raised reception area. His right hand wasn’t visible
under the desk.
“Can I help you?” he asked. His tone was cordial, but his eyes were hard. Bolan pictured him curling his fingers around the grip of a handgun, or perhaps a submachine gun, mounted somehow behind or under the desk.
“Cooper,” Bolan said. “I believe you’re expecting me.”
The guard visibly relaxed. “Yes, Mr. Cooper,” he said, double-checking his computer terminal. “We have you in Room 1C. It’s just down that hall to your right.” He pointed. The lobby opened up into corridors leading left and right. The floors were polished, but not made of expensive stone. The decor itself was reasonably contemporary, but nothing ostentatious. This place, like the assembly plant in Cedar Rapids, looked from the outside to be just what it was. Bolan, however, wasn’t fooled.
They passed several rooms that were obviously set up for training classes. In one, a human-shaped dummy sat in a room whose floor was padded with vinyl mats. It would have been a fairly typical physical training setup except that the dummy was dressed in a cop’s uniform. Posters on the wall were emblazoned with slogans. These ranged from the benign— Murphy’s Laws of Combat—to the disturbing, such as a list of misleading statements to give police in the event one was caught in the commission of a violent crime.
Another room they passed held tables with what appeared to be bomb-making materials. An easel near the front of that room contained detailed instructions for assembling a pipe bomb.
“Cooper,” Delaney whispered, “this is a full-on terror camp!”
“Possibly,” Bolan said. “But remember, if this SCAR outfit is owned by Twain, it’s both more and less than that. More, because of the scale of the viciousness that’s likely to come out of this, with Twain heading it. Less, because Twain has no political affiliation and thus no cause to support. These aren’t terrorists. They’re mercenaries in the truest sense of the word. Well, mercenaries in training, from the look of this place.”
“It’s like a finishing school, then,” Delaney said. “Put the final polish on the worst human beings money can buy.”
“Something like that, yes.”
They walked down the hallway, taking in another couple of classrooms bearing obvious course work in mayhem, until they found Room 1C.
“Delaney,” Bolan said quietly, “it’s about to get hot. Hit the deck when the shooting starts.”
“Like hell,” she swore.
As they entered Room 1C, Bolan was only too aware of the eyes on them. At least two dozen men, all of them looking like experienced hardcases, lounged, sat or stood around the room, which held a whiteboard, a desk at the front of the room and several rolls of folding metal chairs.
The men in the room were all wearing SCAR uniforms.
Bolan ran his experienced eye over the trainees. They didn’t all appear to be ex-military, but many of them had the look—though, of course, that was no real test. He’d certainly seen plenty of exceptions within the armed forces. Still, it was obvious he and Delaney had just walked into a room full of sharks. He looked down on the desk. Someone had printed an agenda for the class, if that’s what this was. Bolan picked it up and looked at it.
M. Cooper, it said. Guest lecturer, Understanding Counterterrorist Tactics.
So. Kurtzman had a sense of humor, after all.
There was a chance these men weren’t hired murderers. There wasn’t much of one, but it was possible. Mack Bolan wouldn’t take an innocent life, nor even the life of a not-so-innocent man if that man wasn’t a combatant. He crumpled the paper and tossed it into a nearby wastebasket. Then he looked out at the crowd of hardcases watching him intently. More than a few eyes were on Delaney, of course; she would turn heads among any crowd of men, much less these.
“Good afternoon,” Bolan said. “I have a confession to make. I’m not really here to lecture on counterterror tactics.”
The trainees didn’t stir. No doubt they thought this a clever opening to a lecture on that very topic. Bolan reached into his jacket and withdrew the Beretta 93-R, flipping the selector switch to 3-round burst as he did so. “This is a machine pistol. I’m a government agent, and all of you are under arrest.”
Delaney, without prompting, pulled her jacket back and brought the MP-5 up and on target. She slapped the weapon’s cocking knob for emphasis.
“What the hell?” one of the trainees muttered. “That ain’t cool, pointing guns at us.”
“Isn’t it?” Bolan asked. “I imagine a few of you have pointed guns at others before. Now, I want to know everything you lot know about Gareth Twain. I also want to know what you can tell me about Yuri Trofimov. And I’d like to know exactly what goes on in this facility. Once we’ve got that all squared away, you can list for me the various crimes for which many of you are sure to be wanted. Now, who wants to start?”
“Up yours!” one of the men shouted. “Kill ’em both!” As he dragged a revolver out from under his shirt, from the waistband of his pants, Bolan triggered a 3-round burst that sent him toppling in his folding metal chair.
Chaos erupted.
Bolan broke left, Delaney right. The men in the chairs in front of them started going for concealed weapons of their own. Bolan charged their ranks, putting himself into the thick of the action, to Delaney’s consternation. She leveled her MP-5 but couldn’t take a shot, as Bolan waded into the enemy.
A bullet seared the air in front of her face. She ducked behind the desk, slamming her shoulder into it hard, rolling it over.
Bolan had no intention of seeking cover. He pulled the Desert Eagle left-handed and fired both guns into the crowd of mercenary trainees.
Moving among the men like the grim reaper, he played them off one another, throwing brutal kicks into knees and stomping ankles when one of the enemy got too close. As he turned and moved among the writhing crowd, he put bullets where they were the most lethal. First one, then another, then another man went down with a slug in his brain, as the Executioner danced a deadly dance among the armed killers.
Delaney could only wait from cover as her partner took apart the killers.
Bolan used the crowd’s numbers to line up the enemy, instinctively putting himself at the “corners” of the engagement. It was a tactic as old as time, a method of warfare Sun Tzu had written about centuries before. By stacking his enemies on top of one another, the ones in the back had to fight their way through the ones in the front, or their weapons were ineffective. Bolan, firing into the stack of enemy from without, had no such problem. He dropped man after screaming man. The enemy gunfire never once came close to him; the shooters simply never got that organized. Delaney, using the desk for cover, actually was in greater danger, as the shooting from the knot of confused gunmen threw hot lead in random directions. Her desk caught a few rounds before the gunfire finally died down.
She came up from behind the shelter of the desk, weapon ready. Bolan was standing over the dead men, a gun in each hand.
An alarm began to sound from speakers set within the walls.
The door burst open to reveal a man firing a shotgun on the run, the same man who’d been at the front desk. Bolan, without even ducking, tracked the man with the Beretta and pumped a 3-round burst into the center of his chest. The gunman was dead before he finished falling.
“Holy shit, Cooper,” Delaney said, looking at him.
Bolan shot her a look. “Come on,” he said. “They’ll be on the move. Let’s see what’s beyond this classroom.” He headed for the exit in the far wall.
No sooner had he thrown open the door than a blast of automatic gunfire sent him diving back into the room.
“They’re in the corridor beyond,” Bolan said.
“Now what?”
“Pretty basic tactic, really,” Bolan said. He retrieved a pair of flash-bang grenades from his war bag and pulled the pins. “Open the door for me.”
Delaney pulled the door open, dodging another blast of gunfire. While it was open, Bolan chucked the flash-bang grenades down the hallway. He could hear them boun
ce against the walls and down the carpeted corridor.
“Close your eyes, open your mouth and cover your ears!” he ordered. He had just enough time to see Delaney obey before he squeezed his own eyes shut. The actinic blasts of the flash-bangs came a moment later.
“Go, go, go!” Bolan ordered. Then he was up and into the hallway, tongues of flame discharging from the barrels of both guns as he marched down the corridor and brought death to the mercenaries opposing him. Delaney followed, covering him as best she could.
First one, then a second man in a SCAR uniform broke cover from around the corner of the next leg of their journey. Bolan shot the first man in the face. The second was craftier and dropped low to the floor. He triggered several shots from a Glock before Delaney put a .40-caliber bullet from her own handgun into the man’s forehead.
“Good shooting,” Bolan had time to say. Bullets chewed up the carpet to either side as they were forced back again.
“We can’t be far from the exit,” Bolan said, calculating their travel through the building based on their point of entry and the distance covered. “They’re fighting awfully hard.”
“Because we’ve seen what goes on in here!”
“Maybe,” Bolan said. He waited for a break in the shooting, then threw himself into the hallway beyond. Both arms extended, he fired in two directions, catching the mercenaries off guard and sending them to their final rewards. He landed on the floor with a bone-jarring thud, rolled out of it and came up on his feet once more, pistols practically smoking.
The corridor terminated in direct access to the parking garage’s upper level.
“Come on!” Bolan said. “This must be what they were protecting.”
On the other side, the air stank of diesel. Bolan took in the cargo van parked to one side of the doorway. He reloaded and holstered the Desert Eagle, then reloaded the Beretta, using it to lead the way as he checked the van.
“Clear!” he said after checking the driver’s door.
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