Bolan charged toward the group, angling for a decent shot at Andrei. The Russian grabbed the youngest of the girls, an olive-skinned beauty with thick raven hair, and held her as a shield. Then Bolan saw another of the captives scoop up Vasily’s pistol. This young woman had short frosted hair in blond and brown tones, and her lush figure was packed into a tight sweater and jeans that fit like a second skin. She could have been another victim, but her hard eyes gave her away. Bolan hesitated for a fraction of an instant, waiting to see where she pointed the gun.
When she sighted on the escapee, twenty yards away and still running, Bolan fired twice. The first round caught her center mass; the only effect of the second one—directly between those calculating eyes—was to make her die a little faster. He didn’t think she deserved that small favor.
Andrei got off a shot that missed Bolan but hit one of the girls in the shoulder. They were all screaming now, and beginning to scatter. Their dispersal gave Bolan the opening he needed. He dived to the ground, dodging Andrei’s second shot, and came up in a crouch. He snapped off another shot that caught the Russian in the knee. He spun around and collapsed, releasing his human shield at last. Bolan’s next round blew brains and skull fragments all over the landing strip.
The cargo plane’s pilot was standing on the pedal now, trying to gather enough speed to take off again without having to turn around on the strip. He wouldn’t make it, Bolan knew—instead, he would plow into any of the girls who didn’t get out of the way in time. The Executioner planted his feet shoulder-wide and aimed the Desert Eagle, supporting his gun hand with the other. He sighted carefully but quickly, and fired three times.
The airplane’s windshield shattered and the pilot’s head snapped backward. The plane’s forward progress slowed, then it started to roll in a wide arc before coming to a full stop just beside the RV. Bolan could see just enough of the cockpit ceiling to know the pilot’s blood had painted it red.
* * *
TWO HOURS LATER, having dropped off the RV and its contents at the nearest Imperial Valley sheriff’s-office substation, Bolan made his second call of the day to Stony Man Farm. The sheriff had offered a department helicopter to get Bolan to the San Diego airport, where he could catch a flight home, and Bolan was just waiting for the bird to be fueled and ready to fly. He could use a little of downtime at Stony Man. He was still recovering from the physical trauma of a previous mission.
Hal Brognola answered on the second ring. “We’ve got a team on the way out to that landing strip, Striker. If there’s any evidence on that aircraft that’ll point to where it came from or what its destination was, they’ll find it.”
“They can pick up my rental car, too,” Bolan suggested. “I left it parked a couple of miles away, just off the road. They’ll be able to find it easily enough. And I want to know what they turn up—I’d like to pay a visit to whoever was going to meet those traffickers on the other end.”
There was a pause that Bolan figured was Brognola taking his well-chewed, unlit cigar out of his mouth, and maybe picking off flecks of tobacco. “I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, you had a phone call routed here from someone named Gloria Fulton. Know her?”
At first the name didn’t ring any bells. But Bolan racked his brain and came up with Eddie Fulton, a small-town Nebraska cop he had worked with once. Fulton had stumbled across a plot to blow up a railroad bridge over which nuclear materials were to be transported, and Bolan had gone in to help round up the perpetrators and ensure the train’s safe passage. Fulton had known him under his Matt Cooper alias, but he had proved himself in so many ways that Bolan had eventually given him a phone number that would route to Stony Man in case any other terrorists showed up in the aftermath. He hadn’t heard from the man since. But Bolan had met his wife once, during the case, and remembered a fiery-haired beauty in her early forties, with a ready smile and an infectious laugh.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “Gloria Fulton. Did she leave a number?”
Brognola read it off to him. “Thanks,” Bolan said. He could hear the stutter of the chopper’s blades cutting the air. “I think my ride is about ready. I should be there sometime tonight.”
“You did a lot of good, Striker,” the big Fed said. “Tell you what, if you don’t touch down until after 2300, take the night off. As far as we know, the world won’t end before 0700.”
“You’ve got another mission for me?” Bolan asked with a chuckle.
“Not really,” he replied. “But I figured it might be a good time to come in and have a little more R and R. You got banged up pretty well last time out.”
“I’ll be in the War Room ten minutes after I land—and I’ll expect to see you there. I’ll fill you in on a few matters before I go off the clock.”
He ended the call and glanced toward the helipad. The chopper wasn’t quite ready yet, so he dialed the number Gloria Fulton had left.
Five minutes later his plans had changed.
2
“To tell you the truth, Matt,” Eddie Fulton said, referring to Matt Cooper alias, “I’m kind of embarrassed that Gloria called you. But I’m glad you’re here, just the same.”
“She didn’t tell me much,” Bolan said. “Just enough to get me here. I’m very sorry for your loss. Why don’t you tell me what I can do to help.”
Fulton’s eyes filled, and he looked away. A father’s grief was nothing to be ashamed of, but you couldn’t tell a guy like Eddie Fulton that. He knew it already, but that didn’t mean he was comfortable with showing emotional weakness to others. Especially to a man like Bolan. The fact that Bolan had known sorrow himself didn’t help, either. Fulton was too close to it, on the verge of breakdown. Bolan had seen the signs before.
“Thanks,” Fulton managed to reply. He wiped his sleeve over his eyes once, blinked back tears. “Damn it. I told myself I would keep my cool.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Bolan said. “I know it hurts. Angela was a great kid. You miss her.”
Angela was the Fultons’ daughter. Thirteen when Bolan met her. A few weeks ago she had turned seventeen. She would never see eighteen.
When Bolan had reached Gloria on the phone the day before, her voice had been tight. He could tell she was fighting a losing battle for control. “Angela’s...she’s gone,” Gloria said.
“Gone?”
“She’s dead, Matt. A drug overdose of some kind. Eddie’s just...I’ve never seen him so furious. I’m afraid he’s going to kill someone.”
“Sounds like somebody deserves it,” Bolan said.
“I guess you haven’t heard. Last year he took a bullet while stopping a jewelry-store robbery. It’s near his spine. He’s on permanent disability. He walks with a cane, and not well even with that. He’s in a lot of pain, all the time. If he got involved in something like—”
Her voice finally broke and Bolan could hear the sobs, starting small but building fast. “I understand, Gloria. I’m on my way. I don’t know if I can get there tonight, but I’ll see you tomorrow for sure.”
Now he sat in the Fultons’ den in Makin, Nebraska. The window shades were drawn and the house held a deep, forlorn silence. Gloria had greeted him at the door, then retired to the kitchen. Eddie explained that their doctor had given them some heavy-duty tranquilizers and they were both dragging, barely functional. A bitter irony, considering Angela’s cause of death, Bolan thought, but he didn’t say it.
Fulton sat in a big leather chair, with his cane propped against it. He had put on weight, and his hair had gone almost completely gray. New lines around his eyes and mouth spoke to the pain he had been through. He had a cup of coffee on a little table next to the chair, and Bolan thought he could smell the traces of something he had poured in to fortify it. “I hope Gloria didn’t get you here for nothing, Matt,” he said.
“Tell me what happened and I’ll be
the judge of that.”
“Far as I’m concerned, she was murdered.”
“I thought it was an overdose.”
“It was. And I’m sure she took the stuff of her own free will. Since we saw you last, things have been...well, they’ve been tough. Especially on her. After I got shot, Gloria and Angela had the cop’s family pleasure of waiting to see if I would die.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, but you know how it is for guys like us. Sometimes dying would be easier. I get to keep the title, but I’ll never play the game the same. Anyway, Gloria was wrapped up and focused on my rehab. We were so busy that we barely noticed things had changed with Angela. By the time we knew she was into something it was really too late.”
“What did she take?” Bolan asked.
“The stuff’s called Ivory Wave.”
Bolan had heard of it, but didn’t know much about it. “Something like methamphetamines, right? Only they sell it as a salt or something.”
“That’s what they say. Except it gives a stronger, longer-lasting high, and can cause terrible hallucinations. Whatever happened made Angela slit her own throat. We’ll never know why. And the thing is, they say this crap is perfectly legal. And it’s deadly.”
“It’s legal?”
“It’s sold as a bath salt,” Fulton explained. “It’s marked ‘not for human consumption.’ But they don’t sell it in drugstores or bath and body shops—they sell it in head shops. Everybody there knows what it really is. It’s poison.”
“But if she took it voluntarily, knowing what—”
Fulton leaned forward. His face was turning red, anger boosting his blood pressure. “That’s just it, Matt. She didn’t know what the dangers are. There aren’t any warning labels, there’s no literature, no scientific studies. Because they can buy it in a store, kids think it’s not as dangerous as meth. For that reason alone, it’s more dangerous. Somebody cooked it up in a lab somewhere and slapped a label on it that got it around FDA regulations—they can add whatever shit they want. It’s an open secret, but no one is paying it any attention, at any level of government. Kids are dying all over the world, but this...this is worse than anywhere. I’ve talked to cops in narcotics, Matt. This stuff isn’t the same.”
“What do you think is different?”
“I don’t know, but I intend to find out. How can this happen? Right here...”
“In Makin,” Bolan finished.
Fulton’s fists were clenched so tight his knuckles had gone white. “If I had the bastard here who sold it to her, I’d—”
“That’s just what Gloria’s afraid of,” Bolan said. “Not that she wouldn’t support you a hundred percent. She just doesn’t want to see you mixed up in any more violence.”
“I can handle myself fine,” Fulton argued.
“I’m sure you can. But she’s already lost Angela. She doesn’t want to take any chances with you. You’re not going to think clearly on this one—that’s why she called me.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Fulton admitted. He looked furious, but resigned.
Bolan was about to say something else, but Gloria called them for lunch. She had made sandwiches and iced tea, and as they ate, they tried to talk about other things. Every now and then the conversation circled around to Angela, then came to an uncomfortable halt.
After, Bolan left them alone and went to the motel he’d checked into late the night before. Makin was a small town, about an hour west of Lincoln on Interstate 80. He’d flown into Omaha and rented a car, driving through the calm, rural darkness. The town was surrounded by miles of farm fields and looked as flat as a concrete slab, and in town his lodging options were two motel chains. He had picked the one nearer the Fultons’ home. It was no better or worse than the other, was about the same price and if the room had cockroaches, they probably weren’t any bigger than at the other place.
Back in the room, he used his laptop to go online and search for Ivory Wave. The more he read, the angrier he became. People became addicted to Ivory Wave. It caused hallucinations, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, and drove up people’s heart rates to dangerous levels. The rates of suicide in the region had increased sharply recently. Several law-enforcement officers around the country had been attacked, some even killed, by people under its influence. And as Eddie Fulton had said, it wasn’t regulated because of the loophole that allowed it to be sold as long as it was marked Not for Human Consumption.
He ate dinner in the little coffee shop next to the motel, then went back to his room. Thoughts of Fulton’s young daughter plagued his mind, but eventually he slept.
When he woke in the morning, before the sun, he was still angry. He took that as a sign. Something had to be done.
3
During breakfast, Bolan studied the contents of an envelope he had been given at the Fulton home. It contained photos of Angela, an annotated list of her friends and a couple of articles from local newspapers about her death. Looking over the material gave Bolan even more conviction than the night before.
He was no stranger to death. He had dealt it out many, many times, and had been touched by it in his own life. But he believed that it ought to mean something. Angela had been a good kid, an A student, interested in the world around her. She had planned to go to college, her folks said, and wanted to study microbiology, with hopes one day of helping to make headway against cancer. The past six months or so, she’d gone off track somewhere, but lots of kids did. Most of them had a chance to find their way again.
Not Angela.
When he had rescued them from human traffickers in California, Bolan had given more than a dozen young women a second chance at life. That felt good, but it didn’t balance out the loss of the young woman he had known, someone whose parents he liked and respected. He was realist enough to know that taking out one drug dealer wouldn’t make a difference to the world, but it would make a hell of a difference to Eddie and Gloria.
Eddie Fulton had told him that Angela wasn’t the kind of girl who would ever set foot in a head shop. But that was where Ivory Wave could be found locally, so that was where Bolan would start. Already checking online he found that there was only one outlet in Makin itself, and the next closest was all the way in Lincoln. Since Makin’s shopping district was small and mostly centered around River Road, he drove there and cruised until he spotted a place with peace signs and tie-dye and marijuana posters in the window. It was a small shop, tucked between a dry cleaner and a Chinese restaurant that didn’t open until 11:30 a.m. The sign overhead said Flat Water Smokes-n-Stuff.
Inside, the place reeked of incense, and the woody smoke, combined with the black lights and grow lights and buzzing overhead fluorescents, stung Bolan’s eyes. Almost every surface was crowded with merchandise or literature. The carpeting was mildew-stained and threadbare. A thin, goateed, thirtysomething white guy with light brown dreadlocks was standing behind a glass counter, on which he had what looked like an alternative newspaper spread out. He wore a tie-dye shirt that had probably come out of his own inventory, and through the glass case, filled with pipes and bongs, Bolan could see that his jeans had holes big enough to expose his hairy thighs. Two teenage girls were giggling as they approached him, one with a package in her hands. They were wearing clean clothes, and they looked like middle-class kids. Not unlike Angela, in other words. A bell tied to the door jingled, and they all looked Bolan’s way, their eyes going wide.
He knew what they saw—a guy who was six-three, a couple hundred pounds of tightly coiled muscle, with short black hair and blue eyes that, he guessed, were blazing with urgency, striding in as if he owned the joint. He was wearing a navy blue windbreaker, a plain black T-shirt and blue jeans. He couldn’t have looked more out of place.
Then he saw that the package the girl held was labeled Ivory Wave. He couldn’t have said what changed on h
is face—maybe his mouth had turned down in a scowl or his eyes had visibly narrowed. But the girl, giggling just moments before, blanched and her knees started to quaver.
“You don’t want that crap,” Bolan said. He took two steps forward and lifted the package from her hands. “Forget you ever heard of it. And forget you ever heard of this hole, too.”
Bolan crushed the package in his fist, then shook off the white powder that had gotten on it. The girls rushed out of the shop, and the proprietor blinked at Bolan, his mouth dropping open.
“You sell that poison to a lot of little girls?” the soldier asked.
“Dude,” the guy said when he could compose himself, “you can’t come in here and chase my customers away.”
“I can’t? I just did. If you missed it, I can do it again.”
“What I mean is—”
Bolan didn’t much care what he meant. “I asked you a question.”
“I sell legal goods to people who are legally entitled to buy it.”
Bolan showed him a recent picture of Angela Fulton. “How about her?”
The guy studied it. “She doesn’t look familiar, but I can’t say for sure.”
“There anybody else who works here?”
The guy swallowed and glanced toward a doorway covered by a beaded curtain. “Jovan!” he called.
A moment later a second man pushed through the beads and joined the first behind the counter. Jovan was older than the goateed guy, and bigger. He was, in fact, a couple of inches taller than Bolan, and bright red curls added another inch or so to that. He was also a good hundred pounds heavier, much of it carried in a gut that preceded him into the room. But he looked solid, and he glowered at Bolan through a full orange beard.
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