And to a certain extent, Bolan knew that was true. A soldier could never forget that most people weren’t combatants but innocents. Sometimes they were caught in a cross fire, and sometimes circumstances swept them into battle. He had become used to the idea that he would always be a combatant, and that protecting the innocent would always be part of his mission.
Another part of it, though, would remain identifying and eliminating the enemy. It was the only way for the small parts of the world to stay safe. That’s what Bolan had on his mind as he drove through the Midwestern daylight, hitting a brief, sun-drenched shower near Beaverdam.
* * *
CLEVELAND WAS THE home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and an old rock song called “Look Out Cleveland” came into his mind as he neared the city. The song warned of a storm coming, and Bolan knew there was indeed a storm approaching the city. Only, this storm was the Executioner, and no amount of preparation could aid those whom the storm would target.
By afternoon, he had located the address from Fowler’s files.
He drove past it once, taking in as much as he could from behind the wheel. It was a roadside building that could have once been a large restaurant or a supermarket, wood framed and with an old, peeling-shingle roof. The windows had been boarded over and graffiti decorated the boards. The paint had probably been a rich brown once, but it had faded to a dull, dirty gray. The parking area was choked with weeds. Most people would drive right by, thinking it was a vacant building in a strip where there were plenty of them spaced widely apart. At the intersection there was a clutch of fast-food restaurants and gas stations, but after that the businesses appeared to be less profitable—a low-budget furniture store, a junkyard, a carpet warehouse, with lots of empties in between.
But Mack Bolan wasn’t most people.
He saw that the driveway on the east side of the building—to the right of it, from his angle—was worn smoother than the other. The weeds there were shorter, and confined to the center of the path. Where the wheels of vehicles would go, there were tracks that were worn clear of growth, and they led all the way around the building to what was presumably a parking area in back. Behind that was a twelve-foot chain-link fence, with slats woven in so tightly that a person would have to be right up against it to see through. The fence was topped with coils of razor wire.
And he saw more. In the shadows of the eaves, at three points across the span of the building’s front, were dark boxes that he suspected held cameras. A little run-down trailer was parked behind the genuinely vacant business next door. Across the street sat an old Dodge with paint that had oxidized and turned white, with two men sitting quietly inside it.
He took all that in as he cruised past, a few miles per hour below the speed limit but not slow enough, he hoped, to attract attention. There were no nearby blocks, no intersection he could turn down, for more than a mile. Even when he did, there wouldn’t be another parallel road running right past the back of the property.
Instead, Bolan found a motel a couple of blocks away, checked in and parked the truck in back. In the room, he turned on the air-conditioning and his laptop. He called up a satellite view of the area and zoomed in on the structure as closely as he could get. When he pushed way in, the image blurred, so he got in touch with Stony Man. Twenty minutes later, after a nearby satellite had been slightly repurposed, he had a far crisper image—and of the way the building looked right now, not two years earlier.
He had been right about a few things. The parking area behind the building was indeed cleaner and better maintained than the spaces visible from the street. The tall fence surrounded a field, a long shack occupying a corner, with a pickup truck parked beside it. Another pickup truck and a couple of garbage cans were behind the trailer on the property next door.
An empty trailer didn’t need garbage cans.
What had looked like a vacant storefront was in fact being watched from a variety of angles. It was remotely possible that the observers were law enforcement, but Bolan didn’t think so. He was familiar with law enforcement, even with undercover officers, and he didn’t get the impression that the people he had seen in the Dodge were cops.
Instead, he thought he was looking at a carefully planned defensive force. No doubt there were people inside the building who could also provide protection, but he suspected that most people who tried to get into the building without authorization would be stopped well before they reached the front door. There was apparently enough money in the Ivory Wave business to cover a reasonably large payroll.
The light was draining from the day as Bolan walked across the parking lot to a nearby coffee shop. There were stools available at the counter, and booths alongside the window. A waitress in a red uniform with a stained white apron caught his eye as he walked in. “Sit anywhere, honey,” she said. Her hair was coppery, cut just off her shoulder, and her lipstick was as bright red as her dress.
He took one of the booths and pulled a menu from a holder at the end of the table. There was nothing surprising on it. He considered a steak, but decided the burger would be a safer bet. He added a salad and some green vegetables. “And coffee,” he said. “Just bring the pot.”
“Staying up late?” the waitress asked. The name badge on her breast identified her as Rhonda. She was in her mid-thirties, he guessed, and she looked like someone life had thrown a lot of curveballs at. But she had laugh lines at the corners of her mouth and around her eyes, and she moved with a brisk efficiency that Bolan found appealing.
“Only if I have to,” he told her.
“Working tonight?”
“Most nights, it seems like.”
“Doing what?”
“A little of this, a little of that.”
She graced him with a smile that was surprisingly infectious. “A man of mystery,” she said. “I like that.”
“I’ve been called worse,” he said.
She took his order to the kitchen and came back with his pot of coffee, fresh and steaming. She poured the first cup, tossed him another smile, then went to the cash register to check out another customer. She and a single cook appeared to be running the place alone.
Just the same, it was quiet enough that she stopped by his table often, to check on him or just to chat. Most of the people in the restaurant were travelers: a family with two tired kids, three truckers who obviously had known one another long enough to be comfortable sitting in near silence, sipping coffee or sodas and chewing their food thoughtfully.
When Rhonda wasn’t visiting, Bolan was running through approach scenarios in his mind. He could surveil the building for long enough to find out when the shifts changed. Chances were, the various watchers would interact, nodding or even speaking to those they had been standing guard with, and those replacing them. In that way, he could get a sense of their capabilities, even their ordnance.
But he had no idea what kind of schedule they were on, so it might take a solid twenty-four hours of watching the watchers to learn their time line. And he would have to remain unobserved the whole time. He could get some intel from the satellite, but that wouldn’t help with the close-up part. It wouldn’t let him make his own judgments about how the men handled themselves. The way a man walked to his car and got in could tell a trained observer a lot. The way he drove the car. The way he got out of it and walked into a building. The way a man moved said a lot about whether he could handle himself, and Bolan knew that if he was going to go that route, he would want to watch the men for himself, get to know them.
There was another option, though. More direct. Possibly more risky.
That didn’t particularly bother him.
15
Bolan made a couple of educated guesses about what was going on inside the seemingly empty building that housed the Ivory Wave manufacturing facility, even though he had never been inside. The first was tha
t they would be busy this night. They were panicked—they had lost a major distributor of their product. Maybe more significantly, they had lost all the product already stored at the Devilweed warehouse. He had only a single file detailing the most recent couple of transactions, so the paperwork hadn’t made clear how much of the product had been paid for. If Devilweed was like most distribution companies, they held off paying as long as they could, so that they had money coming in from the retailers before they had to compensate the suppliers.
They would be putting in extra hours, trying to manufacture enough “bath salts” to maintain their cash flow.
The other thing he knew was that they wouldn’t be at their best, mentally or physically. Even people who typically worked nights experienced a stretch in the middle of the night when their circadian rhythms protested the hour, usually around three in the morning. If, as he believed, the destruction of the Devilweed warehouse had these people putting in extra shifts, then some of those working wouldn’t be accustomed to the hours. Besides the workers simply not performing at full capacity, the place would be more crowded than usual, and some of the sleepy ones would be getting in the way of the rest. It was, Bolan believed, possibly a less productive night than it would have been if they had just run a regular shift. But panic pushed people into making some bad decisions.
He was hoping to have his own impact on their productivity.
Dressed in his blacksuit, wearing his favorite weapons and with additional ordnance in the zippered bag open on the seat next to him, Bolan drove the tractor back to the IW building. As he approached, he noticed that there was still a car parked across the street with two men in it, but not the Dodge he had seen before. He suspected the other security precautions he had seen remained in place. He had considered, and rejected, various ways to circumvent them.
And he had settled on the most direct approach.
He tugged on a Kevlar balaclava and situated it for maximum visibility. As he neared the building, he pressed down on the accelerator and worked the gears. Maintaining speed and making the turn would require a tricky balance, especially in a tractor in which he hadn’t tried anything quite so complicated. At the last moment he braked and cranked the wheel. The tractor responded, slower to make the turn than he had hoped, but he corrected and steered toward the ramshackle wooden building. When he was confident of his course, he braked again, slowing only slightly, and braced for impact.
The tractor’s nose plowed into the building’s facade with a tremendous crash, splintering wood and crunching steel. As the windshield spiderwebbed and shattered, Bolan saw a wooden beam snap and copper pipes torn loose from their moorings. Glass and shredded wood hit him, snagging against his Kevlar vest and headgear, but he protected his face with his arms and avoided the worst of it.
Inside was chaos.
The tractor came to rest, water and oil dripping from its undercarriage, in a laboratory-like space. If the place had been as clean as a commercial lab before, which Bolan doubted, it wasn’t after most of the front wall had been pushed into it. The staff was mostly male, though there were a few women, maybe thirty people in all. They were standing in horror or crouched or seeking refuge from the snorting steel monster that had appeared in their midst. Some were screaming, others silent.
Interior walls had been torn down, so the operation largely took place in one big room. The owners probably didn’t trust their workers and wanted everyone to be able to keep an eye on everyone else. The place looked like a cross between a high school chemistry lab and a small-time candy factory. It had workbenches for combining products stored in large bins, equipment for processing the mixtures, for packing it into envelopes or capsules, and for packaging those into the little cartons Bolan had first seen at Flat Water Smokes-n-Stuff. Against one wall was a row of doors, most of them closed, with curtained windows. Offices, he guessed. All of it was lit by banks of overhead fluorescents hanging from the ceiling, but one bank had gone out entirely, and the lights of another were flickering.
Bolan wrenched open the driver’s door and slid from his seat with his ordnance bag in hand. Mixed in among the lab workers was a handful of armed men, present no doubt to keep the help honest as much as to deal with any potential intruders. One of them lifted a shotgun to his shoulder and sighted on the truck. Bolan squeezed off a triple burst from his M-16 and tore three holes in the man’s throat and skull, spraying the wall behind him with blood. A second gunner had been trapped against a wall by a workbench that had fallen over when Bolan crashed in, but he managed to get a submachine gun pointed. The Executioner turned the M-16 on him, blowing the back of his head off.
Someone got off a shot that pinged against the truck’s grille. Bolan ducked behind some wreckage as the next shot came closer. This time, he was able to isolate the source: a young man, barely out of his teens, with long hair and a bushy mustache. He had a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol, but he was firing it single-shot, and he projected an air of confidence. He was lining up his next shot when Bolan emerged from cover and squeezed off three shots that hit him in the center of the chest, carrying him back a couple of feet before dropping him on the ground.
One of the employees—he looked like a lab worker, in a white coat that was stained and dirty—charged Bolan with a long, wicked shard of glass in his hand. The soldier spun the M-16 and slammed the stock into his attacker’s gut. The man huffed and doubled over, his fist instinctively squeezing the glass. Then he screamed as it bit into his hand. Bolan smashed a big fist into the man’s face and he went down.
The rest of the people surrounding the soldier appeared to be lab workers. None made a move toward him. The air was still full of dust and smoke, and the sounds of people shuffling around, sobbing and crying out in pain almost masked the noise of others approaching—the guards who had been posted outside the building.
Bolan moved deeper into the structure. Workers parted for him, or ran as he approached. At this point he had little worry about them attacking him, but the outside guards would want to make up for their inability to prevent his entry.
He ducked behind a workbench in one of the darker sections of the room. He didn’t doubt that someone would point out his location, but at least the solid wooden bench would help shield him. There were several now between him and the toppled section of wall. Men were shouting, some demanding to know where the attacker was, others simply giving the kinds of adrenaline-jacking yells common to males with their blood up.
To enhance the general confusion, Bolan reached into his bag and pulled out three smoke grenades. He yanked the pins and threw the bombs in different directions, clouding the air with mustard-colored smoke. Somebody shot in his direction, but he hadn’t shown himself above the workbench, and the slugs went wide of their mark.
The next grenade Bolan pulled wasn’t a smoker. He had identified the part of the lab where the raw materials were stored, boxes upon boxes of them. He tugged the pin free and hurled the grenade in that direction. He heard it clunk against the wall, then the floor. Somebody screeched in terror, then the bomb blew with a boom that echoed off the remaining walls.
More gunfire. They were getting his location by watching where the grenades were coming from.
He would have done the same thing in their position.
The thing was, he was narrowing down their locations, too.
One of them was using the tractor’s door for cover. Bolan thought there was a second one close to him, maybe standing behind the vehicle and coming out only to fire. He armed and tossed a grenade in that direction. It bounced off the ruined hood. He could hear someone scrambling on the slippery tile floor, trying to pick it up. But then it blew and the man’s cry was cut off by the explosion. Bolan tucked himself into a tight ball, his mouth open and his hands clamped over his ears. An instant later, the truck’s gas tank blew. The soldier could feel the wave of heat spreading through the building, accompanied by th
e thick smell of burning fuel and renewed screams from the employees who hadn’t yet scattered.
When Bolan looked again, he saw the vehicle engulfed in flames. Because it had come to a halt enmeshed in the debris from the wooden wall, the wood had already caught, and fire rushed toward the ceiling. The building had an automatic sprinkler system installed, but it hadn’t come on. Either he had disrupted it by driving through the wall, or it had been disconnected sometime in the past. Maybe it had been installed by whatever business had preceded the drug lab in the space, and then left up for show.
He saw a couple more guys coming in through a back door, guns blazing wildly into the smoke. He didn’t wait for them to get their bearings, but raised the M-16 and unleashed a couple of tribursts, cutting them down there they stood.
Bolan made a quick visual sweep of the room. He couldn’t see any more combatants. Those who had been inside when he crashed through had left in ones and twos, and now the rest were heading for the exits, both those that had existed before and the new one he had made—though anyone leaving that way had to pass uncomfortably close to what was becoming a conflagration.
He grabbed a guy who came within reach. “Who’s in charge of this place?” he demanded.
The guy shot him a blank look. Panic had wiped his mind. Bolan shook him. “Where’s your boss?” Finally understanding dawned, and the guy pointed toward the row of offices.
Looking at them again, Bolan saw an uneven glow behind the curtains in one window. He released the man, snatched up his bag and raced in that direction, ignoring those who rushed past him. They were just people doing what they had to in order to make it from one paycheck to the next. Killing them would serve no purpose.
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