“Well, then,” Twain said, “let’s talk like civilized men. What do you want?”
“There’s a…problem,” Heller said.
“Well? Spit it out, man.”
“The, uh, travel plans that I, that is, my office, uh, helped arrange,” Heller said hesitantly. Twain felt a sinking sensation in his gut. He had a sudden, awful premonition of what Heller was about to tell him.
“Dallas,” Twain blurted.
There was a pause. “You knew?” He said it accusingly, as if Twain were conspiring against him.
“I didn’t know,” Twain snapped. “I’m capable of putting two and two to make four! Now tell me what happened and stop wasting time.”
“There’s been some kind of raid on the Houston hangar,” Heller said. “I got wind of it through my Pentagon connections. They’ve initiated several investigations that have to do with stolen military weapons. Houston was mentioned as the recovery point. I…” Heller paused again. When he continued, there was a bit more steel in his voice. “I put two and two together,” he said. “So I checked with my friend at the TSA, the one who arranged for certain activities in Houston to remain unnoticed for as long as possible. He confirmed that there was some sort of big dust-up there earlier today. They’ve locked down parts of the Houston Airport System. The BATF is involved in cooperation with the military. They’ve issued several bulletins about explosive devices. And the DEA is reporting recovery of massive amounts of heroin and meth amphetamine, also related to a raid in Houston.”
“Jumping Jesus,” Twain blurted. “That’s the entire shooting match blown, the way you’ve described it.”
“The body count is impressive,” Heller said. He sounded like a lost little boy. “Twain, I need your guarantee you’ll cover my back on this. If I’m found out, it’s not just me that’s in danger. I’ll have no choice but to cut a deal, tell what I know.”
“Now you listen to me, you gutless wanker,” Twain yelled into the phone. “Do you have any idea how many men I’ve lost? How much time and equipment? Trucks, weapons, personnel…even a goddamned helicopter, more than likely impounded, and do ye have any idea at all how much one of those bleedin’ things costs?” As he shouted, Twain’s brogue asserted itself. He could feel himself losing composure, talking to this spineless weasel of a politician. “Now, you just sit tight, sonny boy, and keep yer bleedin’ mouth shut. They’ll be damage enough to deal with, without yer whinin’ about it all!”
“Twain—”
“Shut up!” The Irishman shouted him down. “We’ll be needing you, no doubt, when Trofimov decides his next move. In the meantime, it’s my job to clean up the mess. You just make sure you funnel any information you can to me, you hear? Whatever you find out, yeah? And don’t call me again. I’ll call you.” He closed the connection and fought the rising impulse to throw the sat phone through the glass of the window.
Mashing the buttons on the face of the desktop intercom, he waited until Toby Jones, his field commander in New Orleans, came on the line. “Yeah, boss?”
“Toby!” Twain shouted. “Get your ass in here. Why do I have to hear about Houston secondhand?”
Jones almost fell over himself hurrying into the office. He was one of Twain’s people from the early days in the IRA, a fellow Irishman who shared Twain’s lack of scruples and love of money. He was one of the few people Twain felt he could truly trust.
“Gareth, we’ve only just—”
“Don’t you ‘Gareth’ me!” Twain stormed. “Why is bleedin’ Congressman Heller the one to tell me Houston’s been shot to hell?”
“We only got word while you were on the plane,” Jones said. “All our men were lost.”
“All?” Twain blinked. “No survivors?”
“Not a one,” Jones said. “If not for the people we have planted at TSA, monitoring the runways and such, we’d never have known.”
“What have you done since you heard?”
“I activated backup in Houston,” Jones said. “They got as close as they dared. I’ve just heard back.”
“And?”
“Total loss.” Jones shook his head. “Weapons, equipment, the chopper, Stilson, all gone.”
“Stilson?”
“Chopper pilot.”
“Ah,” Twain said, nodding absently. “Then Houston is dead to us, and the outbound shipment compromised.”
“The drugs themselves, the processing, the distribution, that’s all still up and running,” Jones offered.
Twain turned from the desk to his laptop, which sat on standby. He opened it and waited for it to come to life, then tapped in a series of passwords. There was data here that wasn’t found on SCAR’s mainframes, data that pertained specifically to the drug-smuggling operations. Nasty business, drugs. Twain understood the purpose was to addict as many U.S. servicemen as possible, thus reducing their efficiency and increasing their suffering. The drugs were a high-liability item, however, and in Twain’s mind, sometimes more trouble than they were worth. He checked on the status of several distribution points, looking up at Jones as he did so.
“Did you confirm with Mak Wei’s people?”
“Aye,” Jones said. “They claim all’s running as it should be in their areas of responsibility, was how they put it.”
“Fair enough,” Twain said. “Contact the backup team. Tell them to get out. Pull them back, reassign them to Trofimov in Orlando.”
“Why there?”
“They’ll be needed sooner or later,” Twain said. “Is Kwok downstairs?”
“He’s in the building somewhere.”
“Put him on the third floor,” Twain said. “And tell him that whoever it was killed his brother is likely on the way here.”
“Are you sure, Gareth?”
“Sure as hell,” Twain said. “Make no mistake, Toby. We’re all in for it now. We need to be ready here, and we need to fortify that bleedin’ idiot Trofimov.”
“For what?”
“For when it finally comes down to whoever the bastards are who’re hitting us, and the Russian himself. We’ll need to put as many men in place as we can. Contact the men already in Orlando. Have them stage Mak Wei’s men so they absorb the worst of it. Put our men behind Mak’s. They’re spread among our boys here, and there’s not much we can do about that now. But we can see to it they take the worst of it defending Trofimov. Mak and his men may as well make themselves useful when the worst comes down.”
“What do y’mean, Gareth?”
“Toby, my boy,” Twain said, turning from the computer and nervously fidgeting with the Desert Eagle as he sat behind his desk, “I don’t like how this looks. I don’t like it at all.”
“We’ve faced worse odds,” Jones said hopefully. “The Royals, even those gutless bastards in the IRA wouldn’t do what needed doing. Dodged the government here… Then there was that dictator in South America, wanted payback for us blowing up the ambassador, you remember? We’ve done it all, Gareth. We can handle this.”
“Aye,” Twain said. “But something about this just feels off. I don’t like it. I can feel it in my—”
Twain stopped abruptly. His desk was vibrating. The glass decanters on the liquor cabinet began to rattle in their wooden holders.
“What the bloody hell?”
Then the rumble of the explosions reached them.
“Bloody hell!” Jones said, pulling a 9 mm Beretta from his waistband. “What do you suppose that was, now?”
“It’s here,” Twain said.
“Who’s here?”
“Death,” Twain said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The grenade made a deep, hollow thump as it flew from the launcher mounted under Bolan’s Tavor assault rifle. The double glass doors of the main entrance of Gareth Twain’s SCAR headquarters disintegrated, whipping tiny shards of glass and pieces of metal through the foyer. The blast ripped apart the armed men who had been standing in front of the doors, heavily accessorized M-4 rifles at the ready. They died sudd
enly, their screams cut short by the hail of razor shards, propelled by the concussive force of the 40 mm grenade.
Bolan and Delaney had made a cursory recon of the site, using binoculars and communicating via their earbud transceivers. It had been quickly obvious that men with automatic weapons were crawling all over the building. Bolan had checked the front, while Delaney, from the rear parking lot, had spotted a sentry in the lot and several more armed men visible through windows on upper floors. After calling in to the Farm to verify the address, Bolan had gotten the all clear: the target was indeed SCAR headquarters as determined by the Stony Man cyberteam’s investigation.
Still, Bolan wasn’t one to take chances with innocent lives. He had found a small piece of asphalt in the front parking lot and thrown it at the glass doors. Two SCAR mercenaries had responded; they wore nondescript battle dress utilities with SCAR patches on the shoulders, which Bolan had seen clearly through his binoculars. Apparently, Twain was determined to keep up the appearance of semilegitimacy to the very end. Perhaps the uniforms impressed those local law-enforcement officials who weren’t on what Bolan assumed was likely an extensive bribery payroll.
The mercenaries had taken one look at Bolan, standing there, and raised their weapons. “Take him!” one of them had shouted.
Bolan had whipped the Tavor from the duffel bag at his side, crouching on one knee as he triggered the grenade launcher.
Now the battle was on.
“Cover the rear,” Bolan said into his transceiver. “I don’t want anyone, especially Twain, escaping out the back while I come in the front.”
“You and me both, Cooper,” Delaney’s voice said in his ear. She sounded calm, and before the transceiver screened the worst of it, he heard her MP-5 chatter.
“Delaney?” he asked.
“Under control,” she responded. “They made me. A couple of shooters tried to rush me, but I’ve got them pinned in the doorway.”
“Good,” Bolan said. “Keep it that way. I’ll meet you in a little while.”
“They’ll leave through the front if you cut around,” Delaney said.
“I’m not coming around,” Bolan said. “I’m going up and through.”
“What?”
Bolan ignored that. He loaded and fired another grenade, which exploded to deadly and spectacular effect in what was left of the SCAR headquarters foyer. Spraying out a 30-round magazine, Bolan followed the weapon in. These were tried and true tactics for the Executioner. In the earliest days of his war against society’s predators, this had been known to friends and enemies alike as the Bolan Blitz. Overwhelm the enemy, take the initiative and never let it go. Never let your foe recover; never give him time to regroup. Keep him on the defensive, always. These were the watchwords by which Mack Samuel Bolan lived and fought.
He stalked through the ruined foyer, his combat boots crunching on pieces of broken glass and splintered wooden furniture. Shedding his field jacket, the Executioner had ready access both to his slung canvas war bag and to the weapons he wore on his body and that he carried in the pockets and pouches of his combat blacksuit.
There was an elevator facing him, and the fire door of a stairway to the right. Stepping back a few paces, Bolan put a 40 mm grenade through the doors of the elevator, ducking back before the shock wave and debris blew over him. When the dust cleared, the elevator doors and the shaft beyond were a twisted, smoking ruin. Somewhere deep in the building, a fire alarm rang, the incessant ringing muted by intervening floors. Bolan looked up and spotted a bell on the wall nearby, bent out of shape and obviously rendered inoperable by the explosions in the foyer. He was a little surprised that the building had no sprinkler system; the blasts he had triggered would doubtless have set off such a system.
He paused at the fire door to the stairwell. There were doubtless quite a few mercenaries in the building, all of them armed and more than willing to respond with deadly force. Whatever had held them back until recently was no longer in effect; the troops at the Houston hangar had shown SCAR’s willingness to kill, and to do so without regard to civil and legal consequences. If Twain and SCAR were backing Trofimov’s plan, and Trofimov was becoming increasingly bold in sponsoring and coordinating his hits on military personnel and their funerals, it meant that everything Trofimov, Twain and those helping them hoped to accomplish was ramping up, hurtling toward a conclusion. The Afghanistan massacre video played into it, too, and had to be more than just a coincidence. But everything he’d managed to learn about Trofimov thus far felt like a prelude to some bigger endgame. If that was the case, and he truly believed it was, it made sense that Trofimov and all those around him were willing to go for broke and opt for open, naked, bloody violence.
Bolan could understand that, and in fact preferred it. He would take a stand-up fight any day to a lot of subterfuge and confused rules of engagement.
But it meant he had no idea how many guns waited on the other side of that fire door, and there was every chance that there were many.
He pressed himself against the wall to the side of the fire door, reached out with one hand and opened the door halfway.
Gunfire ricocheted off the inner surface of the door. Bolan let it go, narrowly avoiding a few bouncing pieces of hot lead. He removed a phosphorous canister grenade from his war bag, pulled the pin with his thumb and let the handle pop free. Then he ripped the fire door open again and threw the grenade into the stairwell.
The almost immediate blast of the phosphorous grenade bursting cast long shadows through the opening in the doorway. Screams erupted inside the stairwell. Pulling the Tavor in close against his body, bracing it so he could fire it one-handed, Bolan threw himself through the doorway and immediately triggered a blast into first one, then a second writhing mercenary, putting them out of their misery as they danced in the agony of the phosphorous flames.
Changing magazines on the run, Bolan took the stairs two at a time. At the next landing, which was marked with a large 2, he paused to set a miniature Claymore mine connected to an electronic proximity fuse. The small explosive device was one of John “Cowboy” Kissinger’s passive denial specials. The Farm’s armorer had supplied Bolan with several of these, which would now come in handy in guarding his backtrail. He might or might not be able to contain all of the building’s occupants, but taking down each individual mercenary in Twain’s employ was not his concern. He wanted Twain—perhaps not as badly as Delaney did, but the Irishman was his best inroad to Trofimov and the Russian’s apparently extensive domestic and foreign terrorist operations.
He entered the second floor, the Tavor leading. The level was divided by inexpensive cloth partitions. The cubicles held desks and computers; this was some sort of administrative or training area. There were no personal effects in the cubicles, which was consistent with temporary, recycled workspace.
Movement from the back of the level caught Bolan’s eye. He heard men speaking urgently in Chinese. Then the unmistakable hollow, metallic chatter of Kalashnikov assault rifles cut loose, and bullets began to rake the air just above Bolan’s head.
The Executioner dropped to one knee, leveled the Tavor and held back the trigger, firing on full-auto through the flimsy fabric of the cubicle walls, his bullets streaming just above the level of the desks. The enemy wailed as they were hit. There was no way to know just how many of the shooters Bolan had tagged, so he kept moving, triggering several bursts from the Israeli weapon as he moved around the perimeter of the cubicle divisions.
There were three Asian men, all wearing SCAR uniforms, all of them holding AK-47 variants. Two appeared to be down for the count, but the third caught sight of Bolan and dived for cover, firing his weapon. Bright red tracer fire took Bolan by surprise as the man hosed the air between them, narrowly missing the soldier; Bolan reversed course and began half crouching, half running to cut him off.
It worked as the soldier thought it would. He met the Asian gunner on the opposite end of the cubicle corridor and put a single 5.56 mm
bullet between the man’s eyes.
He checked the floor for more enemies, but found none. There was very little time, but he snapped a couple of photos of the dead men with his secure phone, transmitting the shots to the Farm.
As he moved toward the stairwell door, the miniature Claymore he’d set detonated.
Each mine carried a payload of small ball bearings, about the size of the ammunition for a BB gun. When it exploded, the mine would send a directed spray of those ball bearings in a tight cone that would devastate anyone within two yards of that kill zone. He checked the fire door and then opened it cautiously. The results of the explosion weren’t pretty. The dead man was another Asian. Bolan took his picture, too.
The Executioner removed another Claymore and set the proximity timer, moving out of the way before the device could arm itself.
He encountered no resistance as he moved to the third floor. The fire door stood ajar. Beyond, he saw movement. This level of the building was one large, open space, with a projection screen on one wall. It was obviously some kind of briefing room. Three men dressed in civilian clothing were on their knees in the center of the room. Standing off to one side of them were half a dozen men, all holding Kalashnikovs on the apparent civilians.
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