He had a pistol tucked under his belt, beneath his Windbreaker, for self-defense. It was a Czech CZ-75, purchased at one of the province’s countless illegal gun markets, along with the AKMS folding-stock rifle concealed in the trunk of his car.
If the army or state police found him, however, the best thing Gorshani could do for himself was to whip out the pistol and fire a 9 mm bullet through his own brain. Spare himself the agony of interrogation that would last days, or even weeks, until the torturers were satisfied that they knew all his smallest secrets.
Or, he could fight to defend the stranger and himself. Try to flee and escape. Depending on the Yankee soldier’s skill, they might just have a chance.
Gorshani saw a subtle glint of sunlight on the nylon parachute, but still had trouble making out its shape against the blue background of sky. No doubt, it was designed that way on purpose, and he hoped that any unseen watchers in the neighborhood would likewise be deceived.
There was no trade route through this portion of the North-West Frontier Province, but some peasants brought their goats and sheep to graze along the hills in spring and summer. None had been in evidence when he made his approach, but still Gorshani watched for them, prepared to warn them off with threats if necessary while his business was accomplished.
Glancing upward, squinting in the sunlight, he supposed the stranger had to be five or six hundred feet above the ground. What would it feel like, falling from the sky like that? he wondered.
Better than plunging from a helicopter during an interrogation, he supposed, a trick the state police had learned from both the CIA and KGB. It was a technique that produced no answers from its chosen subject, but the prisoners who watched one plummet to his death often became quite talkative as a result.
Two hundred feet, Gorshani guessed, and now he could begin to make out details of the stranger: boots, a smudge of face behind goggles, weapons secured by straps and holsters, and he was wearing sand-colored camouflage fatigues.
One man against the State—or two, if Gorshani counted himself.
Of course, he and this stranger weren’t really opposing the government based in Islamabad, simply conducting an end run around its two-faced policy of protecting fugitive terrorists while pretending not to know they existed.
It was a policy that shamed Gorshani’s government, his nation—and, by extension, himself. As a patriot and loyal Muslim, he had determined to work against that policy through any means at his disposal. And if that put him at odds with certain politicians or their lackeys, then, so be it.
He was not the traitor in this case.
Clenching his fists, hearing his pulse pound in his ears, Gorshani stood and watched the stranger, his new ally, fall to Earth.
“THERE, SIR! To the west! I see it!”
Second Lieutenant Tarik Naseer turned in the direction indicated by his havildar—the Pakistan army’s equivalent to a sergeant—and saw a speck descending toward the ground. Naseer raised his field glasses to focus on the falling object.
“Yes!” he said, well pleased. “It is a parachute. One man alone.”
“We’ve lost the plane, sir,” said Havildar Qasim Zohra.
“No matter,” Naseer said. “We’ll have the man himself. Before we’re finished with him, he will tell us where he came from and whatever else we wish to know.”
The second lieutenant turned and shouted to his soldiers—ten of them standing beside their Russian-made BTR-70 armored personnel carrier.
“Forward with me!” he called. “We go to capture an intruder!”
That said, Naseer took his seat in the open Scorpion Jeep. Havildar Zohra took the wheel and put the Jeep in motion, rolling over open ground toward the area where it seemed likely their target would touch down.
Scanning ahead through his binoculars, Naseer saw that a one-man welcoming committee waited for the parachutist, staring up at the descending jumper from the shadow of a dusty old Mahindra Bolero SUV.
The watcher had not seen them yet. Naseer hoped he could close the gap in time to nab the men without a fight, but there was still a river in his path, its only bridge offset a half mile to his right.
Naseer could try to ford the river in his Jeep, trailed by the APC, but either vehicle could easily bog down, perhaps even be swept away if he misjudged the current. He knew that trying to explain that to headquarters would not be good for his career!
Another possibility was to remain on this side of the river and attempt to kill their targets without questioning the men. The BTR-70 had a 7.62 mm machine gun mounted atop its main cabin, and his soldiers carried AK-107 assault rifles. Their concentrated fire should drop both targets, or at least disable the Mahindra SUV, but Naseer would be held responsible if anything went wrong.
And if he simply shot the two men without first interrogating them, how would he then identify the parachutist, much less learn what brought him to the North-West Frontier Province?
No.
If possible, he needed to procure both men alive. Failing in that, at least the jumper had to be captured and interrogated.
That decided, Naseer made his choice.
“The bridge,” he told Zohra. “As fast as you can reach it!”
“Yes, sir!”
Zohra never disputed orders, though he might suggest alternatives if he believed Naseer—twelve years his junior, and with only eight months as an officer—had made the wrong decision. In this case, however, it was clear they only had one way to cross the river and approach their targets.
Which, unfortunately, gave the enemy more time to spot them and escape.
But first, the watcher had to meet his comrade, who was still at least two hundred feet from contact with the ground.
Naseer picked up the compact two-way radio that lay between the driver’s seat and his, half-swiveled in his seat as he thumbed down the button to transmit, and called out to the APC behind him.
“Lance Naik Shirazi!”
“Yes, sir!” the APC’s gunner replied.
“Prepare to fire, at my command. Take no action without direct orders.”
“Yes, sir!”
Behind Naseer’s Jeep, the young crewman—ranked on par with a lance corporal—rose through a hatch atop the APC’s cabin and readied the vehicle’s machine gun, clearing its belt, jacking a round into its chamber.
Naseer still hoped he would not have to kill the strangers, but he would disable their SUV if they tried to escape. Short bursts aimed at the tires, perhaps, or at the fuel tank.
Though the risk of blowing up the vehicle existed, bullets rarely started gasoline fires in such cases. It happened much more frequently in films than in real life.
Naseer clenched his fists as Zohra swung the Jeep away from their targets, accelerating toward the bridge that now seemed more distant than before. Each yard they traveled in the opposite direction felt like a concession to the enemy, as if they were retreating, rather than advancing by the only route available.
He mouthed a silent prayer—Don’t let them see us—but would Allah hear him and respond? He couldn’t help but wonder if such a trivial request, offered in haste, would even concern Him.
Naseer tried again: for Your great glory and the safety of our nation, let us stop them!
Better, but he could not let the matter shift his focus any further from the mission set before him.
It had been a bland, routine patrol in search of rebels, finding none, until Naseer had heard the distant droning of an aircraft far above their heads. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, all at once, like the infuriating whine of a mosquito buzzing past his ear, while he lay hoping merely for a good night’s sleep.
Even with his binoculars, the plane proved difficult to locate, flying at an altitude of two miles, maybe higher. When the parachutist separated from it, Naseer barely glimpsed him, and the jumper’s terminal velocity—around three feet per second, if Naseer recalled his jump-school training accurately—made the falling object difficult t
o track through field glasses.
The sky-blue parachute, clearly, had also been selected to fool watchers on the ground. More evidence that Naseer needed to interrogate the jumper.
But he had to catch him, first.
“Faster!” he told Zohra.
“Yes, sir!”
The Jeep surged forward, pressing Naseer back into his seat.
He watched the SUV and hoped its driver would not notice them.
Hoped that they would not be too late.
BOLAN TOUCHED DOWN within fifty feet of the waiting vehicle, flexing his knees without pitching a full shoulder roll. Before his contact had covered half the intervening distance, the Executioner was stripping off the chute’s harness, hauling on the suspension lines and reeling in the nylon canopy.
“I’ll help you,” the Pakistani said, fumbling for a set of lines, snaring them on his second try.
“We ought to bury it,” Bolan replied—then glanced across the river toward a pair of speeding military vehicles and added, “But I guess we won’t have time.”
His contact turned to stare in the direction Bolan faced, and blurted out what sounded like a curse.
“Leave it,” Bolan ordered. “We need to go right now.”
They dropped the tangled lines, leaving the parachute a plaything of the breeze, and ran back toward the SUV. Bolan was faster, got there first, ignored the shotgun seat and climbed into the rear.
The Pakistani threw himself into the driver’s seat and reached for the ignition key as Bolan asked him, “Do you have a weapon?”
Reaching for his hip, where Bolan had observed a pistol’s bulge beneath the Windbreaker, the man reconsidered. “Underneath the hatch in back,” he said. “A rifle.”
Bolan found it, recognized an older model of the AKSM he was carrying and passed it forward. His companion dropped it on the empty shotgun seat and put the SUV in motion, fat tires churning dirt and gravel in their wake as he accelerated from a standing start.
How long before the soldiers reached the bridge, then doubled back along the route to overtake them? Bolan made the calculation in his head and guessed that they had five minutes to put more ground between themselves and their pursuers now, before the race turned into life or death.
Five minutes wasn’t much.
He doubted it would be enough.
“Where are we going?” Bolan asked his driver.
“North, eventually. If we are not killed or captured.”
“Let’s avoid that, all right?”
“I will do my best.”
And Bolan wondered whether that was good enough.
His plans hadn’t included taking on the Pakistan army—which, with some 700,000 personnel and another half million in reserve, outnumbered that of the United States. However, since the rulers in Islamabad permitted terrorists to hide in Pakistan and operate with virtual impunity from Pakistani soil, he had anticipated opposition from the military.
And he’d come prepared.
Bolan’s AKMS assault rifle came equipped with a stubby GP-25 40 mm under-the-barrel grenade launcher, and he carried a variety of munitions to feed it. His 75-round drum magazine gave him extended firepower for the Kalashnikov, backed up for closer work by a Belgian FN Five-seveN semiauto pistol, chambered for the high-powered 5.7 mm cartridge tailored for long range and superior penetration, with a 20-round box magazine and no external safety. His hand grenades were Russian RGD-5s, with 110 grams of TNT and liners scored to fling 350 lethal fragments over a killing radius of sixty feet.
With that gear, and his companion’s AKMS rifle, Bolan was up against a light machine gun with a range around 860 yards, and ten or twelve Kalashnikov assault weapons, likely firing 5.56 mm NATO rounds, with an effective range of 650 yards. Put all that hardware together, and his pursuers could lay down a blistering screen of some eleven thousand rounds per minute.
In theory.
In fact, however, none of the APC’s soldiers could fire while their vehicle was rolling in hot pursuit. That left the APC’s machine gunner and the Jeep’s shotgun rider, for a maximum of two weapons engaged, and the APC’s weapon had a 210-yard advantage over anything the Jeep’s rider was carrying.
Say five hundred rounds per minute for the 7.62 mm MG, and allowing for spoilage of aim, as the eight-wheeled, 11.5-ton BTR-70 pitched and rumbled on its way at top speed, and they might be all right.
Might be.
The safer plan was to remain outside the machine gunner’s 860-yard effective range, thus rendering his task that much more difficult, but that was down to Bolan’s driver—whom he’d never seen in action previously, and whose vintage SUV was subject to the same foibles as any other man-made vehicle.
Call it a race for life, then.
He was barely on the ground in Pakistan, and Bolan’s mission already hung in the balance.
They should be able to outrun the APC, with its factory-standard top speed of fifty miles per hour, but bullets were faster, and that still left the Jeep on their tail.
No matter how well his driver managed to perform, Bolan would have to derail the soldiers in the Jeep—and hope they hadn’t radioed ahead for reinforcements to establish roadblocks on the highway leading northward.
One thing at a time, Bolan thought, as he focused on the military vehicles behind him. The Jeep had just crossed the river bridge and was accelerating after them, its shotgun rider hanging on for dear life as his driver put the pedal to the floor. Another moment and the APC was after them, its turret gunner rocking helplessly behind his MG, still too far away to sight and fire.
How long could Bolan’s driver hold that slim advantage? Were his tires in decent shape? Had he maintained his engine? Was the gas tank full?
Too many questions.
Bolan crawled over the SUV’s backseat, onto the rear deck in the hatchback section. He would play tail gunner when the enemy closed in behind them.
And with any luck, he just might live to fight another day.
2
Shenandoah National Park, Virginia: Two days earlier
Skyline Drive was aptly named. It ran along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains for 105 miles, from Front Royal at the northern terminus to Rockfish Gap at the southern end. Because its full length was within a national park, visitors paid an entry fee of fifteen dollars per car or ten dollars per motorcycle, thus obtaining a seven-day pass.
Mack Bolan could have saved his money by displaying an ID card he’d received from Hal Brognola through a drop box, which identified the bearer—“Michael Belasko,” with a nonexistent address and a photo that could pass for Bolan’s likeness—as an employee of the National Park Service, but he’d figured why bother?
He didn’t need to see the ranger in the ticket booth look worried, wondering if he’d done something wrong, or if something critical was happening inside the park and he had missed the memo.
Anyway, the fifteen bucks made Bolan feel that he was giving something back.
Built between 1931 and 1939, at the nadir of the Great Depression, Skyline Drive was convoluted and tortuous. Scenes of epic beauty dazzled drivers all the way, but caution was required on the winding turns where bicycles and black bears shared the relatively narrow highway. Park police enforced a strict 35 mph speed limit, and Bolan didn’t want to risk a speeding rap.
Rolling through Mary Rock Tunnel, 670 feet of pitch darkness, with his headlights on high beams, Bolan wondered where Brognola planned to send him this time. There had been no warning on the telephone—there never was—and Bolan had been left, as usual, to speculate in vain.
One thing he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt—it wouldn’t be a social call.
Somewhere, somehow, someone had stepped across a line, and Bolan would be sent to reel them back or punch their ticket for one long, last ride.
He could refuse the job, of course. That flexibility was built in from the start. But in reality, he’d only turned thumbs-down on a few assignments in the time he’d worked with Brognola a
nd the assembled team at Stony Man Farm.
The Farm was named for Stony Man Mountain, the fourth highest in the park at 4,010 feet, but it wasn’t actually on the mountain. It did not appear on any map available for public scrutiny, and while it was a working farm—in more ways than one—its crops were not marketed under the Stony Man name.
Trespassing was rigorously—sometimes fatally—discouraged.
Roughly half the time, when Bolan visited the Farm, he flew in and out. Stony Man had its own airstrip and helipads, complete with stinger missiles and hidden batteries of antiaircraft guns to deal with any drop-ins who ignored the radio commands to steer clear of restricted airspace.
It had only happened once, to Bolan’s knowledge, with a careless pilot running short of fuel halfway between Pittsburgh and Winston-Salem. In that case, the guns and rockets hadn’t fired, but several days of house arrest and chemically induced amnesia left the interloper scrambling to explain how he had missed his scheduled wedding.
The groom did not live happily ever after with his bride…but at least he lived.
Some others who had trespassed at the Farm with sinister intent were not so fortunate.
Bolan cleared the tunnel and killed his headlights, braking just beyond the next curve for a line of deer crossing the road. A nine-point buck was last across, pausing to stare at Bolan for a moment through the tinted windshield of his rental car.
Bolan wondered if the deer spent their whole lives inside the park’s 306 square miles, or if they sometimes strayed outside. With hunting season on the way, he wished them luck.
So many predators, so little time.
BOLAN DIDN’T try to spot the guards staked out along his route of travel from the gate to the farmhouse that served as Stony Man’s HQ. He was expected, so went unchallenged by the Farm’s team of “blacksuits.”
At any given time, Stony Man’s security staff included active-duty members of the U.S. military who dressed as farmhands but were armed.
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