The Little Bird began spraying the front of the hangar with its machine gun. Bolan was forced back, clutching his third rocket. Rounds chewed through the hangar roof leading up from the doorway, raising a billowing cloud of dust and spraying fragments of the hangar floor.
Bolan raced toward the rear of the hangar. “Come on!” he said. Delaney fell into step with him, pausing only just long enough to drill a wounded gunner who was pulling himself up from behind one of the fallen crates, aiming an M-9 in their direction. The man’s head snapped back and he fell without a sound.
“Nice shooting,” Bolan said. “Come on, we’ve got to work our way around and out while they’re still confused.”
“That chopper—”
“I know. It’s a problem. Watch yourself. Whoever these people are, they’re playing for keeps.”
The chopper shifted position, angling over the roof of the hangar. Bolan looked up.
“Move!” he shouted. He shoved Delaney forward, forcing her to run. The Loach dipped its nose and began strafing them from above. Machine-gun bullets roiled the air behind them, and Bolan and Delaney ran for their lives.
“Break now!” He shoved Delaney again, this time to the left, and threw himself to the right. The rain of hot lead passed them by as the chopper pilot’s forward momentum carried him beyond their position. They had only seconds. The pilot would wheel around for another run in less time than it would take them to think about doing it.
Rounds continued to rain down, punching holes in the roof of the hangar. Bolan was impressed by the pilot’s ruthlessness. The Loach’s jockey had no way of knowing if any of his comrades were alive and kicking inside, but regardless he was gunning for the intruders with all he had.
It was too bad for him that all he had wasn’t going to be enough.
Bolan deliberately ran for the shattered, half-open main doors of the hangar. “Stay low and back there,” he said, his transceiver carrying his words to Delaney despite the din of the chopper and its machine gun. It was only a matter of time before the chopper pilot realized he was making no headway. When that happened, he would back off to a safe distance and fire his rockets, keeping the Little Bird clear of the blast that was sure to result, especially if some of the munitions in the hangar detonated. Bolan didn’t intend to give him the chance.
The smoking ruins of the two wrecked trucks were billowing flame and clouds of oily black smoke, which was drifting in through the front of the hangar. Bolan saw figures moving amid the smoke. The survivors from the trucks were regrouping and moving in.
The chopper buzzed the ground troops, the pilot hot-dogging to show he had the situation under control. Then he steadied, gained altitude and dipped the nose of the aircraft once more.
This was it.
The Executioner stepped into the middle of the ruined hangar doorway. He dropped the Tavor, brought the LAW to his shoulder, compensated for the angle and pressed the launcher’s firing switch.
In the last moment, the pilot saw his mistake. The nose of the helicopter turned a fraction of an inch. The antitank rocket slammed into the curved snout of the helicopter, detonating after it bored through to the engine compartment.
The Loach blew apart in a spectacular fireball, spraying the men on the ground with flaming pieces of wreckage. One man was impaled by a fragment of the main rotor. He screamed his last with the blade of the rotor jutting from his chest.
Bolan retrieved his rifle, crouched and began firing methodically into the remaining gunmen. The red-dot scope of the Tavor was perfect for the distance and the conditions. He acquired each target in turn, his surgically placed 5.56 mm rounds dropping each man with a head shot here, a throat shot there. The Executioner burned through one magazine, reloaded quickly and fired out half of the next.
He stopped when the enemy stopped moving.
Bolan stood. Delaney was crossing the hangar, MP-5 up and ready, staring at the carnage that had erupted so suddenly, the war zone that had enveloped them so abruptly. He looked at her, and back at the dead men on the tarmac. The tail rotor of the Loach had embedded itself in the paving near the doorway. It was bent and scorched. Not far from that, an M-16 rifle had been discarded or propelled. The plastic stock was shattered.
In the distance, the sirens of emergency responders and, most likely, law-enforcement vehicles wailed in chorus. That, too, was very familiar. Bolan had heard it many times before.
“Holy Mother of… Cooper,” Delaney breathed, standing next to him. “What have we done?”
“What we had to do,” Bolan said, looking at her. “And there’ll be more. Count on it.”
Delaney could only stare at him.
CHAPTER TEN
“You don’t want to know,” Hal Brognola said over the secured, scrambled satellite phone transmission, “just how many people have tried to take a bite out of me in the past few hours.”
“You always say that,” Bolan said evenly, standing in the wreckage of the hangar, watching the locals and a small army of Feds crawl over the scene. They had been cooling their heels at the scene here for at least four hours, while emergency crews put out fires and bodies were tagged, bagged and hauled away. Delaney was answering another batch of questions, speaking to several different uniformed and plainclothes law-enforcement officers. The group included several representatives of the Transportation Security Administration, as well as the DEA. The TSA officials, in particular, weren’t pleased. Delaney’s FBI credentials were getting a real workout, just as Bolan’s Justice ID had. When word had come down that someone in Wonderland was pulling strings hard on behalf of one “Matthew Cooper,” the scrutiny directed at Bolan had cooled somewhat. The soldier had seen this sort of thing play out before. Government power rolled downhill, and nobody involved wanted to get in the way of an avalanche.
“You’re good at what you do,” Bolan said. “You always manage to calm them down or fend them off.”
“Maybe, Striker,” Brognola said, “but I’m starting to wonder if I’m getting too old for this.” Bolan pictured him looking out his office window in Washington, D.C. “As usual, and thanks to the authority I do have, I’ve managed to keep the TSA from throwing you in the deepest, darkest hole they’ve got and throwing away the key,” the big Fed went on. “I had to involve the Man, Striker, and he’s none too happy. A full-scale war in proximity to one of the nation’s largest airfield complexes? The TSA guys are beside themselves, and I can’t say I blame them.”
“You know we take what comes, Hal,” Bolan said. “We walked into this. And you know as well as I do that he—” the soldier paused, knowing Brognola would understand Bolan spoke of the President “—wants these people, too.”
“I know.” Brognola sighed. “And the sheer scope of it… If I had time to be horrified, I would be.”
“About that,” Bolan said. “I’m assuming you didn’t call just to complain about the burden of leadership.” Brognola, as head of the Sensitive Operations Group, had irons in a lot of different fires in Washington and beyond. He had been chewing antacid tablets and the ends of unlighted cigars for as long as Bolan had known him, at least in his capacity as leader of the nation’s most covert anti-terrorist security forces. That was a lot of weight on one man, even with the excellent team at the Farm to support him. Bolan never forgot that. He was very grateful for Hal Brognola and what the man did for the Farm, for the Executioner and for the United States of America.
“No,” Brognola said. “In a moment I’m going to transfer you to Barb at the Farm. She’s got information for you, including some vital data dug up based on your firefight there.” Bolan had snapped digital pictures of as many of the dead as he could, sending them to the Farm for analysis. They’d had good luck so far in identifying Bolan’s enemies using worldwide facial-recognition databases cross-referenced with the usual law enforcement sources, including Interpol.
“All right,” Bolan said.
“Before I do,” Brognola put in, “I have something you need to kn
ow. Aaron’s computer taps picked it up when it hit the TSA’s no-fly list, but I got direct word from Homeland Security maybe twenty minutes before, based on my previous inquiries on your behalf. For some months now, Homeland has been tracking aliases believed to cross-check to known terrorists. The alias database they’ve built is painstakingly compiled using an algorithm I don’t pretend to understand. It compiles points of compatibility and overlap based on everything from credit-card use to traffic-camera sightings, compares these to reports of the target fugitive’s whereabouts and speculation on his or her travel patterns.” Bolan could almost see Brognola waving his hand dismissively. “The details aren’t important. Aaron has expressed an interest in getting his hands on it, in fact, to take it apart and see if it does anything better than his own programs.”
“Okay,” Bolan said. “And?”
“And a man identifying himself by an alias thought to correspond to Gareth Twain boarded a commercial flight to New Orleans only hours ago,” Brognola said. “Homeland alerted me, and I overrode the TSA alert. Twain will have reached his destination before you do.”
“I’m going to New Orleans?” Bolan asked.
“Barb has the details. We wanted to make sure Twain got where he was going to avoid tipping him off. Chances are he’s already on edge. This is a good break for us, Striker.”
“If Twain surfaces,” Bolan agreed, “and if I can bring him in, he could provide direct intel on Trofimov’s operation, from the inside.”
“You think he’ll talk?”
“There’s no reason he wouldn’t,” Bolan said. “You’ve read the same profile I have. The man has no loyalty to anything or anyone. If I make him an offer, promise him some deal, he’ll roll over.”
“I’ve got a lot of pull,” Brognola said, “but Twain’s wanted by multiple foreign and domestic agencies, or he will be. Once word gets out that he’s in the bag, they’ll be coming out of the woodwork to lay claim and try to extradite. I don’t know what offer you can make him that I’ll be able to back up.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bolan said. “He’ll agree knowing it isn’t likely we’ll be able to do much. Once he’s caught he’ll have no better option. His type will cut whatever bargain can be had, on the hope of breaking custody later. He’s tough, and he’s slippery. He won’t fall to pieces out of fear even once he’s in custody.”
“You may not be able to bring him in,” Brognola pointed out.
“I know,” Bolan said. “And you know I do. If it was that easy, you wouldn’t need me.”
“True,” Brognola said. “But if Twain dies, you lose your in to Trofimov.”
“There are other inroads to Trofimov,” Bolan said. “I’ll take one of those. If I can get to the bottom of what he’s doing that much sooner, fine. If I can’t, we’ll keep shaking the tree until he falls out of it. Either way, Twain will be out of the picture, and that’s a worthy goal. Once I’m finished with him, I intend to give Delaney first call on his disposition, if we do take him alive.”
“That will make the Bureau happy,” Brognola admitted, “as that was why they bought into this in the first place.”
“‘You pays your money,’” Bolan quoted.
“‘And you takes your chances,’” Brognola finished. “All right, Striker, I’m transferring you to Barb.”
“Got it.”
Price came on the line a moment later. “Striker,” she said. “Still in one piece?”
“Yes,” Bolan said, looking around at what was left of the hangar, “but not for lack of trying. Hal’s had a rough time of it, I gather.”
“I think we can shed some light on this,” Price said. “We’ve identified several of the dead men. All are employees of SCAR, this Security Consultants and Researchers company we’ve managed to trace back to Twain. All of them have histories as soldiers for hire, too. They’re a pretty rough bunch. I’ll transmit the various rap sheets to you if you’d like some light reading for Jack’s plane.”
“Probably unnecessary,” Bolan said. “I’ll take the highlights.”
“It was the VIN numbers on the trucks that gave us our lead,” Price said. “Each of those trucks, including the Humvees, is registered to, of all things, an outfit in Dallas that provides prop guns and heavy equipment to the movie industry. They have offices in Nevada and on the East Coast, but their main headquarters is in Dallas. The owner is a local boy and a military buff. Fellow named Ed O’Donnell. I talked to him this morning.”
“What did you learn?”
“I e-mailed him some of the photos,” Price said, “and he was able to pick out a pair of them who paid for the trucks and arranged for their delivery in Houston. He said they told him it was for a huge military picture, an epic that was to film overseas in Tunisia. He said they ordered all kinds of military gear.”
“The M-16s they were firing weren’t props,” Bolan said.
“No,” Price said, “we’ve traced those to a shipment stolen from a military armory in New York last June. They’ve apparently been circulating ever since. The volume you’ve recovered accounts for almost the entire shipment, so that’s something.”
“Yeah.”
“The other equipment comes from a variety of sources. We’re still working on tracing the heavy weapons, like the LAW rockets you found. I won’t be surprised when we find out they’re stolen, too, or maybe imported from a foreign export target.”
“Hooray for the international arms market,” Bolan said. “The gift that keeps on giving.”
Price didn’t comment on that. “We did in-depth background checks on both men who talked to O’Donnell,” she said. “We managed to turn up a common-law wife for one of them, a woman living outside of Chalmette, Louisiana. The Bureau lent us a local tactical team and I had them pay her a visit. They knocked on her door an hour ago.”
“Casualties?”
“None,” Price said, “but she came apart easily when they made it clear she was staring down federal conspiracy charges. Rolled right over on her man, who apparently was pretty free with the pillow talk before he had the misfortune of meeting you today.”
“Go on.”
“She was a little hysterical,” Price said, “but reading through the report just flashed to me by the head of the tac team, it looks like this sizable contingent of SCAR mercenaries was headed to Afghanistan.”
“Disguised as Army troops?”
“Yes,” Price said. “Striker, it’s… Well, it’s hard to believe. According to the woman, the plan was to impersonate a military unit and perpetrate a series of atrocities in Afghanistan. They were planning on going over and sowing discord. It’s a common enough tactic. You recall the incidents of terrorists dressed as Iraqi police, hitting Iraqi civilians and law enforcement from within and using the disguises to confuse their motives.”
“Yeah,” Bolan said grimly. “I remember.” To attack an enemy from within, disguised as one of him, was also nothing new to the Executioner, who had used the method more than once in righteous strikes against enemies both foreign and domestic. That didn’t make this any easier to accept, however.
“So Twain’s people were going to show up on foreign soil pretending to be U.S. troops, and further bloody the U.S. military’s image,” he said, his jaw clenching. “With Trofimov’s news network pushing that video, they’d have a damned easy time of making it stick, too. But how can a rogue military force operate in-country? Wouldn’t they be stopped before they got there, or discovered once they were there? We have a sizable force over there, but it’s not that big. There’s no way the charade could work long enough for them to do what they’re trying to do. Is there?”
“There might be,” Price said. “We’re examining the logistics. Aaron has been pulling his hair out. The long and the short of it is that they would have to have orders. Forged orders, or orders procured under illegitimate circumstances. We’re looking into that now, but we don’t have anything yet. It doesn’t seem likely that a blatant forgery would hold up for l
ong, especially not as word was passed up the chain of command.”
“Who could procure the orders behind the scenes?”
“Officially, it’s a relatively limited number of people,” Price said. “Realistically, any government or military official with the right connections could manage it.”
“Which means…” Bolan began.
“Which means,” Price stated, “our list of possible traitors runs the gamut from senators to congressmen to anyone with an office at the Pentagon, and then some.”
“Wonderful,” Bolan said. “Whoever’s in on it is also party to smuggling large quantities of illegal drugs. The DEA estimates the street value of the meth and heroin stockpiled here to be in the millions, for whatever that estimate is worth.”
“That’s if they intend to sell it on the other end of the pipeline,” Price said.
“I’m guessing a good chunk of it will find its way to markets that serve our troops,” Bolan said. “No doubt a lot of it is a profit center used to finance Trofimov and SCAR’s operations, but given what we’ve seen of him so far, I’m willing to bet he’s looking to addict as many of our people as he can. More harm, more death and more problems for the military. This is a serious operation, Barb, just the drugs by themselves. It’s got to be coming from somewhere. I’d like to find it and plug the hole, if I can. If Bear’s team can sleuth out anything that will help me, I’d appreciate it.”
“We’ll stay on it,” Price promised. “Let me know if you uncover anything else. You’re good to go for now, at any rate. We’ve got Jack staged on the closest available runway.”
“I can probably hitch a ride to him with one of the locals,” Bolan said, surveying the various law-enforcement officers moving around him. “There are enough cruisers and blacked-out sport utility vehicles here to ferry an army. Hal says I should feel strongly motivated to head to New Orleans to intercept Twain.”
“Yes,” Price said. “It’s not publicized, given SCAR’s only semilegitimate status, but we’ve found what we believe is Twain’s main office.”
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