“Houston?” Bolan repeated. “The drugs are going to Houston?”
“Yes,” Kam Chen said, sounding tired. He rattled off an address. “Hangar. Near main airport. Private owned. Drugs shipped there. End of my involvement.”
“I have to make another call,” Bolan warned Delaney. She aimed her Glock at Kam’s head, taking a step away from the man. She was taking no chances this time.
Bolan dialed the Farm. Price answered his scrambled, multiple-routed call on the first ring.
“Cooper,” Bolan said again. He recited the address Kam had given him. “This address isn’t on the target list. Can you check it for me?”
“Looking,” Price said. He heard her fingers flying over a keyboard, then Kurtzman’s deep voice rumbling in the background. Stony Man’s mission controller and the head of its cyberteam continued to confer for a few minutes before Price came back on the line.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a minor piece of property owned by a holding company that is in turn owned by Trofimov’s network. A private hangar attached to the George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The airfields in Houston comprise the fourth-largest airport system in the country, Striker, and the sixth biggest worldwide. It would be a great place to hide in plain sight. We didn’t flag it before because there was nothing particularly unusual about activity there. There was no indication that Trofimov even uses the site regularly. A man of Trofimov’s wealth typically maintains several locations like that, to give his private jet a place to stage and be serviced.”
“All right,” Bolan said. “Contact Jack, give him the data, tell him to get us ready to fly to Houston. Also, I need you to bury Kam Chen in the system somewhere. Have the locals pick him up and transfer him to federal custody however you see fit, but then make sure he finds his way into one of our black-ops holding facilities pending a prisoner transfer, or something.”
“Can do,” Price said. “But why?”
“Just keeping my end of the bargain,” Bolan said. “Cooper out.”
Delaney was looking at him strangely. She shook her head.
“What?” Bolan asked.
“You’re a complicated man, Cooper,” she said.
CHAPTER NINE
“All right, Sarge.” Grimaldi’s voice came over the intercom from the cockpit. He affected a Texan drawl. “Welcome to Houston, good buddy.” In his normal speaking voice, he said, “I’m taxiing us now. We’re as close as we can get. I’ve arranged for a shuttle from the terminal. It’s just transportation. They don’t know you. They think the both of you are real hot VIPs, in fact. The shuttle van will take you across the airfield and drop you not too far from the private facility you’re targeting.”
“Good work, Jack,” Bolan said. He was once again cleaning and reloading his weapons.
Delaney had spent the flight staring out the window, occasionally looking over at him thoughtfully. “You heard?”
“Of course.” Delaney nodded. She made sure her MP-5 was tucked under her jacket and her spare magazines prepared. “I didn’t realize I was signing on for war when I pressed to be assigned to this Justice operation,” she commented.
“You signed on to get Twain, didn’t you?”
“You know I did.”
“Then you signed on for war. That’s what justice is, Agent Delaney. In this world, in these times, if you seek it, you’re accepting and pursuing total war.”
Delaney had nothing to say to that.
They picked up the shuttle as planned, Bolan carrying the duffel bag containing his Tavor, once again bearing his canvas war bag over his shoulder under his field jacket. As they rode, Bolan produced a pair of earbud transceivers.
“These are communications units,” Bolan said. “Very small, very powerful. Difficult to jam and almost impossible to pick up unless you know exactly what frequency you’re looking for. Put it on and we’ll be able to stay in touch. It’ll pick up a whisper and anything louder, but will cut out automatically above its decibel threshold.”
“So I don’t have to worry about you blasting away in my ear when the shooting starts,” Delaney said.
“Exactly.”
“What do you think we’re walking into here, Cooper?”
“Hard to say, beyond the obvious,” Bolan said. “A meth ring, maybe. Could be we’ve found a portion of the illegal empire behind Trofimov’s legal assets. Maybe that’s why the man has so many facilities that seemingly do nothing, yet generate funds on the books. Could be wide-scale money laundering for a criminal enterprise.”
“If that was all it was, would you be involved?”
“No,” Bolan said. He saw no reason to lie. “That’s something any number of government agencies, including yours, could look into. This is more. Trofimov is mixed up in the killing of American soldiers and their mourning families and friends. He’s using the corpses of American soldiers and their families to wage some kind of political war. I want to know exactly what he’s doing and I want to stop him.”
“You want him as bad as I want Twain.”
“Worse.”
Delaney nodded. “I think we understand each other.”
“We do.”
When they were in sight of the target hangar, they stepped off the slow-moving shuttle van while it was still moving. Walking briskly, they covered the distance to the hangar and skirted the side, angling for a secondary entrance. Their luck held; no one saw them or challenged them.
Once in the shadow of the hangar, Bolan pressed himself against the wall on one side of the door, indicating that Delaney should do the same. He tried the door with one hand, but it was locked.
“Figure it’s wired for an alarm?” Delaney asked.
Bolan gave it a casual glance. It was an old, rusted steel door; there were no telltale signs or contacts that he could see. That meant exactly nothing, but it was a risk they would have to take. “Not sure,” Bolan said. “We’re going to find out.” He set the duffel bag on the cracked pavement by the door and removed his pry bar from his war bag. The door’s lock gave easily. The hinges didn’t even squeal as he eased the heavy metal door aside.
The soldier looked inside through the crack in the doorway, conscious of Delaney pressed close behind him.
“Holy shit,” Delaney said from over Bolan’s shoulder.
The hangar boasted two rows of what appeared to be U.S. military Hummers. There were racks of M-16s and stacks of crates, many of which appeared to be munitions. The hangar looked, to Bolan, like a typical staging area for a military operation.
There was nobody in evidence.
“Come on,” Bolan said.
They entered the hangar. Bolan crossed the floor to the first stack of crates and checked it. He found ammunition—and in one crate, disposable M-72 LAW antitank rockets. Delaney rejoined him after checking the perimeter of the hangar. “There’s all kinds of stuff here, Cooper. Weapons, food, spare parts for the vehicles. I found one crate full of uniforms.” She held up a BDU blouse. The digital camouflage was of the most recent Army pattern. As she looked over Bolan’s shoulder her eyes widened. “Are those what I think they are?”
“Yeah.” Bolan nodded.
“What is all this?”
“The hardware, the uniforms…it’s all government issue,” Bolan said. “Come on, let’s keep looking.”
The rear of the hangar was divided into office space. Here, they encountered another locked door, this time with a simple hasp and padlock. Bolan’s pry bar made quick work of it. Inside the otherwise empty room, they found stacked, impact-resistant plastic crates.
“These are designed to withstand being dropped by parachute over a target zone,” Bolan explained. He pried open the seals on the topmost crate.
The container was filled with bags of white powder.
“Check one of those others,” he instructed, handing the pry bar to Delaney.
She followed his instructions and whistled when she looked inside her container. “Cooper, I think this is more crystal meth.”
“And what I’ve got here,” Bolan said, drawing the Boker knife, poking its needle-sharp tip into one of the plastic bags and examining the residue on the blade, “appears to be heroin.”
“I don’t get it,” Delaney said. “Why fill a private hangar with military gear and drugs? Have we stumbled on a covert U.S. operation?”
“Unlikely,” Bolan said. “If it was, my people would know.”
“I envy ‘your people’ their certainty,” Delaney said.
“Come on,” Bolan said. “Let’s get out of here.” He was taking photos with his phone as he moved, catching the various pieces of equipment and staged supplies.
“Right behind you,” Delaney said.
As they neared the side entrance, they heard the truck pulling up outside.
“Back, back,” Bolan said. “Toward the front.”
“No good!” Delaney whispered. The main doors to the hangar were parting; a charter bus was waiting outside to pull in. “We’re caught between them!”
“Then we’ve got only one option left,” Bolan said, pulling the Tavor from the duffel bag and letting the bag fall.
Delaney nodded, swallowing hard.
They moved into the center of the hangar, among the rows of vehicles and stacks of crates. The bus was disgorging men who wore U.S. Army uniforms like the ones Delaney had found. More uniformed men, carrying OD metal ammunition boxes, were coming in through the side entrance.
“Hey!” someone shouted. “Who the fuck is that?”
“They’re armed!” another voice called.
“Justice Department!” Bolan shouted. “This is a lawful government action! Place all weapons on the floor.”
The first gunshot chipped the concrete near his feet.
“Go!” Bolan shoved Delaney away from him. They couldn’t afford to bunch up; they had to stay mobile, maintain distance between each other.
Delaney’s MP-5 chattered.
A wall of sound and barely perceptible heat closed in around the Executioner.
To be surrounded by people firing automatic weapons was an experience no soldier quickly forgot. The deafening wall of noise, the muzzle blasts, the ejected shells, the smell and the smoke of the discharged rounds… It was an almost overwhelming experience, especially the first time. Mack Bolan was no green recruit. He had been in the midst of battles as fierce as this one many times, but still, it was like walking into hell, and there were no guarantees he would be walking out again.
The enemy closed in, firing M-16s they had been carrying with them, though in a few cases the uniformed enemy grabbed at the staged crates to obtain weapons or ammo. Bolan could only process these fleeting images as he ran from point to point among the staged supplies, using the crates and trucks for cover.
Bolan fired a grenade from the Tavor’s launcher into the far end of the hangar. When it exploded, several men screamed. Blasting away on full-auto, the Executioner worked his way from crate to crate, nearing the one he sought. The enemy fought with no real cohesion, no real plan, and Bolan wondered about that. It was obvious they were not U.S. military personnel; no Army unit would have attacked him like that. They’d have taken him prisoner and demanded to see his credentials if they hadn’t believed him.
There was a darkening suspicion coiling in Bolan’s gut that was increasingly hard to ignore.
When he found himself once more at the crate with the LAW rockets, Bolan broke cover long enough to grab one, open it, heft the weapon and take aim at the bus near the front of the hangar.
“Delaney,” he said, knowing her earbud transceiver would pick up his words.
“Yes?”
“Get down. Brace yourself.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
Bolan pressed the firing switch and the antitank rocket streamed across the space between the Executioner and the bus. When it hit and detonated, the warhead ripped open the large vehicle as if it were made of aluminum foil. The blast was staggering. Several of the armed men nearby were thrown flat, stunned. Shrapnel shredded several more.
The soldier pushed himself up and into the carnage left in the rocket’s wake. He walked quickly among the scattered gunmen. Each time a man recovered enough to point a gun at him, Bolan triggered a burst from the Tavor. He began working his way to the back of the hangar, heading toward Delaney.
“You all right?” Bolan asked.
“I think I’m deaf,” Delaney complained. “But yes, I’m all right.”
“Resistance?”
“Minimal, now,” Delaney said. “I shot a couple who were still trying to get a bead on me.”
“I’m coming to you,” Bolan said.
“I’ll meet you.”
They reached each other perhaps two-thirds of the way back. A stream of 5.56 mm bullets briefly sent them in two directions, as they both triggered return fire. The man who had been lying in wait for them took rounds in the chest and throat. He toppled back behind the fallen stack of crates he had been using for cover.
“We’ve got to check the trucks carefully,” Bolan said.
They approached the line of Hummers, two of which had been damaged in the fighting. The rear of each vehicle was covered with a tarp, which meant anything and anyone could be in the cargo area. Bolan removed two incendiary grenades from his war bag, which he handed to Delaney.
“Start from the far end of the line of vehicles,” he whispered. “Plant these in the first and third truck from the end. I’m going to do the same from the other side. Be prepared to move fast.”
Delaney looked grimly at the bombs but said nothing. She nodded.
Pulling the pins and watching the spoons spring free, Bolan sprinted to first one Hummer, then another from his end of the line. He dropped the incendiaries into the target vehicles.
“Holy shit, grenade!” someone in the second vehicle shouted.
Then the bombs blew.
The initial flash bursts of the grenades were followed by an orange-red glow as the Hummers became sudden infernos. A pair of burning, screaming men leaped from the rear of the nearest vehicle. Bolan put a mercy round into each one, sighting carefully with the Tavor’s red-dot scope. Farther away, Delaney blasted a shooter who charged out of the Hummer with his clothes on fire and his M-16 spitting rounds.
“Back off, back off!” Bolan called. He wanted to put some distance between them and the flaming trucks. “Take no chances. Shoot anything that moves. We’ve broken them, but there’s no telling how many could be hiding.”
Delaney said something that Bolan took to be assent. He circled around, coming up on the opposite side of the hangar. Moving quietly, the sound of his footfalls easily masked by the crackling of flames and the distraction of the billowing smoke filling the hangar, he wasn’t surprised when he almost stumbled on one of the gunmen. The man had a cell phone to his ear.
“I said we’re under attack!” he was saying. “Is Stilson in the air? Good, send him in hot! Dammit, now! It’s a goddamned army! Come in now! If it’s moving, it’s probably not one of us, so blow it away! Did you hear me? I said come in now!”
“Put it down,” Bolan ordered as he approached the man, who was sitting on the floor of the hangar with his back to the stack of bullet-pocked crates.
The gunner, who Bolan could now see had a piece of shrapnel in his leg, looked up at him.
“You’re too late, you son of a bitch.” He grinned through his bloody teeth. His lip was badly split; he’d apparently taken some shrapnel to the face, too.
“Who is Stilson?” Bolan asked.
“You’re about to find out.”
“What is this operation?” Bolan said. “You’re not with the military.”
“Figure that out on your own, did you?” The man smiled. His hand moved behind his back.
“Don’t,” Bolan said.
The Beretta M-9 came up in the man’s hand. Bolan pressed the Tavor’s trigger and put a single 5.56 mm round in the man’s brain.
“Delaney!
” he said. “I found one, apparently in contact with the outside. We’re about to have company, nature unknown.”
“It’s here!” she said. “I’m at the front. You’d better come see this!”
The soldier left the dead man behind and ran for the main doors of the hangar. They were intact and even now sliding apart on automatic, motorized pulleys.
“Can we stop the doors?” Bolan said.
“I don’t see any controls on this side,” Delaney said.
Bolan assessed the situation and then brought the Tavor to his shoulder. Sighting carefully, he put a burst into each of the pulleys connected to the doors. They stopped with a six-foot gap between them. Through this gap, Bolan could see the tarmac outside.
“You weren’t kidding,” he said simply.
A pair of heavy canvas-covered troop trucks, painted in Army camouflage rumbled toward them from across the tarmac. In the sky above, the trucks were being paralleled by an OH-6 Little Bird helicopter. The nimble little Loach, as it was often known, sported a pair of rocket pods and what appeared to be a light machine gun on one landing skid.
“Grab me two more of those rockets,” he said simply. “No, make that three.” Delaney hurried to obey.
If the drivers of the trucks realized they were hurtling toward their doom, they didn’t show it. Bolan calmly opened another LAW when Delaney handed it to him.
“Watch my back,” he said. “There’s no telling how many of them are still circulating inside here, holding back or playing possum.”
“Understood.” Bolan looked at her carefully. She was shaken, but holding together. That was good. He’d had no doubts about her mettle.
The Executioner shouldered the LAW, aimed and pressed the firing switch.
The first rocket impacted the center of the lead truck’s grille. Parts of the engine and cab flew in every direction. Bolan threw down the spent launcher and picked up a second LAW, popping it open and firing as quickly as he could shoulder the weapon and acquire the target. At the last moment, the driver of the second truck swerved, and the rocket hit the tarmac close by. The explosion rocked the vehicle onto its side, where it squealed and groaned to a halt in a shower of sparks.
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