"Are you okay?"
"I can't see."
Winterroad raised his weapon to his cheek as he glanced through the trees, wondering if his night vision had been affected enough to make him blind to an approaching enemy. "Are you hit?"
"No."
"Stay where you are while I go take a look."
"I can't cover you like this."
Winterroad eased into a crouching position, ready to fling himself back to the ground if it became necessary. "You just stay put for the moment and take care of yourself. If that was De Luca, he's going to be making tracks out of here instead of hanging around to see who's after him." He began to angle down the side of the hill, maintaining cover as much as he could. He wondered if De Luca normally carried something as lethal as the MAC-10 when he went fishing.
Branches crackled ahead of him and he went down instantly, falling backward and ready to roll as his gun arm draped itself over his knees. Something moved in the darkness, but he could tell from its outline that it was too small to be a man. An old fear of rabid skunks manifested itself in his imagination, and he struggled to keep from reaching for the flashlight in his pocket.
He eased up on the tent as the flare burned itself out with a final sputtering rush. The campfire reached for the remnants of the cardboard hull with greedy fingers. Smoke filled his nose and blocked out all other smells.
Taking a penknife from his pocket, he slashed one of the stake lines and steadied his gun. The tent collapsed with a gentle whoosh. There was nothing man-sized outlined under the drab olive cloth. Whoever had been in the tent was gone.
He stood as he released the drawn breath he'd been holding. The forest on the other side of the creek was dark and forbidding. He forced himself on, making himself remember the anger that had kept him working at the Agency the past handful of years. His feet sank in the soft ground as he neared the edge of the creek. Mud filled his shoes around his socks until he squished every time he took a step. Feeding on the anger, he paused long enough to untie his shoes and slip them off.
He paused to listen. Bullfrogs croaked, crickets sang, an occasional night bird took flight in a flurry of heartbeats. He listened for something that didn't belong, remembering how much easier it had been in Vietnam a quarter of a century ago. He'd been lean, mean and scared shitless, every sense alive to the slightest variance. It was funny how he had gotten older and seemed to wear that fear out. Even at the end of that war, he had used his anger to sustain him and push him back into the jungle.
He moved into the creek under cover of a spreading oak tree, squatting down until his butt was immersed in the cold, slow-moving water. Now that the smoke had cleared away, he could smell the dankness of the creek banks. He waited with his weapon held loosely. Nothing moved. The sounds of the nightlife continued unabated. A bullfrog to his right resumed its calling. He dipped his hand in the cold water and rubbed it across his lower face.
"Winterroad!" Vachs's voice exploded out of the darkness.
Winterroad ignored his partner. De Luca, or whoever the shooter had been, waited out there in the darkness. Before getting a chance at Vachs, Winterroad knew the man would have to cross his field of fire.
"Goddamn it, Winterroad, where the hell are you?"
Winterroad smiled to himself. At times he thought he was too old to play quiet, deadly little games in the dark, but he still maintained the instincts for it. Agents like Vachs would never learn how to be predators.
A shadow separated from a tree thirty yards upstream and made a dash toward the creek. Water spumed up whitely in the moonlight. The figure sloshed across the creek awkwardly, fighting the current rather than moving with it.
Vachs called his name again as Winterroad slipped an extra clip into his empty hand and waited for the running man to reach the middle of the creek. He squinted but couldn't penetrate the darkness enough to see if the man was De Luca.
When the man reached the midpoint of the stream, the water had crept up to his chest and his forward momentum had been almost stalled. Winterroad stood, leveling his gun arm before him as he sighted carefully down the barrel. He emptied the clip as fast as he could, putting all of the rounds over the running man's head. He took his time changing magazines as he moved deeper into the creek, then shoved the empty one into a pocket of the windbreaker.
The man had gone under in the center of the stream. Still gripping the SIG-Sauer tightly, Winterroad bent his knees and dropped into the water until only his head and arm were above the surface.
A head popped up almost twelve feet from where it had disappeared. The man threw himself across the remaining distance to the creek bank and fell at once into a prone position. The MAC-10 stuttered to life and the muzzle-flashes marked the man's position.
Bullets whizzed by Winterroad but none of them close to his new stand. Then the death chatter rattled to a halt as the bolt blew back dry.
Winterroad saw the shadow throw the machine pistol onto the ground as it charged into the forest. He lowered the hammer of the SIG-Sauer and followed, gaining the creek bank only seconds after his quarry and regretting his decision to take his shoes off at once.
The terrain was just as rocky and broken on this side of the creek as it had been on the other side. Winterroad used his free hand to pull himself up over an incline that the other man had chosen to run around. Locking his fingers around a gnarly tree root that stuck out of the sheer side of the incline, he shoved himself forward and up as sandy loam splashed across his face. He spit out a mouthful of dirt as his gun arm cleared the top of the incline, then used it to lever the rest of his body up.
Dodging trees as he sprinted down the other side, he glanced to his left and saw that he was gaining on the running man. His breath wheezed in his ears and pain stitched his side, but he refused to give in to it.
The fleeing man cut back under him, never seeing him skylined against the incline. Winterroad leaped to the top of a boulder the size of a compact car, then threw himself into the air. His lungs threatened to collapse from the bone-rattling impact. Then they were locked in a rolling sprawl that ended with Winterroad's back smashed into a tree. He knew he was still holding his pistol because he could see it in his hand, but he couldn't feel it. He lifted it anyway, centering it on his opponent's face as he pulled back the hammer. "Don't move," he gasped. Feeling returned to his back and limbs in an almost blinding jolt. The gun barrel trembled.
His quarry fell backward in exhaustion, arms spread well away from his sides and above his shoulders. Winterroad winced with the effort of sitting up. He searched his wind-breaker pocket and found the flashlight unbroken. He gulped in air as he switched it on.
Eric De Luca blinked back at him. "Is that really you, John?"
Winterroad moved the light out of the man's eyes. "Hell, yes," he said in disgust. "You got any more guns?"
"No." De Luca's face was scratched and bleeding, and stained by muddy clumps. "Did the Agency send you to bring me in?"
"Yes." Winterroad dropped the SIG-Sauer into his lap and eased the hammer back down.
"If I'd known for sure that it was you, I wouldn't have pulled the trigger."
Winterroad didn't say anything.
"Can I sit up?"
"Yes." Winterroad gave him a hand, and they sat facing each other, breathing hard from the exertion. "You've never been on the wrong side of the Agency before, Eric. Why am I chasing you?"
"Because I flew in the team who blew up the Japanese publishing offices in L.A."
"How did you get involved in a deal like that?"
De Luca hesitated. He touched a finger to one of the scratches and studied the blood that came away on it. "Ross Tuley contacted me."
"Tuley?" The name went back a few years.
De Luca nodded. "Right. Your old partner, Ross Tuley."
"He was mustered out of the Agency over three years ago for personal problems."
"You mean Langley caught wind of the fact that he was doing unauthorized sanctions of people he considered to be
enemies of the United States." De Luca's eyes were filled with sad humor. "Remember, John, I've palled around with the CIA for a good many years, too. I know where more than one body is buried."
Winterroad waved it away. "Why the hell would you follow someone as unstable as Ross Tuley?"
"I don't remember you saying anything about Tuley being unstable when the Agency came down on him. The way I remember it, you were in his corner all the way. According to you, Tuley was given the big green wienie by the Agency."
"Times change, Eric."
"Do they?" Vachs's voice rang out in the distance, and De Luca cocked an eyebrow.
"My latest partner."
"Real professional."
Winterroad nodded. "He thinks he's 007."
"He'll die soon with that kind of attitude."
"Yeah, but he'll die happy."
De Luca paused. "We aren't heroes out here," he said quietly. "None of us. Despite the propaganda Langley feeds you when you manage to come back off an assignment with your head and ass intact."
"They give you the same story, do they?"
"They don't bother learning any new ones, John. That's why I got tied up with Tuley after all these years. My head said no, but that goddamn red-white-and-blue streak that got pumped into my ass over in Vietnam told me yes, and yes it was. It wasn't until later, until I was reading about the explosion in the papers and saw it on television, that I realized those people killed in that building didn't even know they were in a war zone." De Luca's voice broke at the end.
Winterroad listened. He shifted his mind into neutral and refused to deal with the mixture of emotions writhing in the pit of his stomach. He'd seen the bomb site in L.A. himself — had found a woman's hand in the rubble that the cleanup crews had missed. He also knew that the man sitting across from him was a good and brave friend when the chips were down.
"It wasn't Tuley who decided me," De Luca said. "It was Sacker."
Winterroad felt the impact of the name. Sacker went back even farther than Tuley, as far back as his earliest memories of the CIA. "I thought he was dead."
De Luca shook his head. He spoke in a hoarse whisper. "The man's still alive. I've seen him, talked to him."
"Where?"
"We met in Peru. Tuley set it up."
Winterroad's thoughts rambled as he tried to fit it all together. The heavy weight of the SIG-Sauer kept him tied to the intensity of the present situation.
"His face is different," De Luca went on, "but, hell, guy, you can take one look at those eyes and know instantly that it's him. Do you remember the first time you met him?"
"Yeah. I was in Vietnam. I volunteered for the Phoenix Program in its early development." Sacker's eyes, centered in the long, hard face, peered at him from his memory, daring him to live up to their standards.
"I saw him my first time in Laos when I joined up with the Ravens in the Steve Canyon operation. I've never met a man who's impressed me more. You could tell by looking at him that he lived his whole life walking that thin line between patriotism and insanity."
"I know." Winterroad was surprised to find his throat dry at the memories.
"The publishing offices was Sacker's idea from the beginning," De Luca said. "He's got this plan to push the Japanese out of America."
"What?"
De Luca turned his palms up. "Look, John, I know it sounds crazy coming from me, but you should have heard it from Sacker. Sitting across one of those white tables with an umbrella keeping the sun off of you, holding a cold glass with one of those fruity tropical drinks with the little parasol in it, and looking into Sacker's eyes, you could believe the line of shit he was selling you." He shook his head. "Even now I'm not sure if it was shit. I only know I can't operate the way he's having his guys work. I mean, Jesus, blowing up buildings with innocent people in them." He looked at Winterroad. "It's different in wartime, you know? At least I always told myself that it was. Sacker said this was war, though, said the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., had their hands so deep in foreign investors' pockets they didn't even care that they were selling our country out. He laid out the whole thing for me, gave me a presentation like he used to do in the old days. Pictures, graphs and a sense of duty. He told me I was the kind of man he was looking for, and that he had been waiting for the right moment to catch me away from my CIA connections."
"Why is he after the Japanese? Why not go after the Arabs and Jews, too?"
"Sacker said the Japanese were the real enemy now, only we didn't know it. He said the next war was going to be an economic one, not fought on any battlefield like we ever saw. The Arabs, Jews, everybody else, they only have money, and money's only worth what you read in the paper. Sacker said the Japanese were beating us at technology, taking away the only edge we have left. They've found ways around trade agreements for the past few years, the same way they did with the car industry. He told me everyone here needed to be woken up to the fact that we're being quietly invaded."
Vachs bellowed Winterroad's name again, sounding more frantic.
"Your partner's getting antsy," De Luca said.
"He'll keep." Winterroad put the SIG-Sauer into a pocket of the windbreaker. "You don't have any idea where Sacker is?"
"No. Like I said, Tuley set up the meet, and Sacker had his face changed. Hell, John, I never knew the man's real name to begin with."
"Neither did I."
"Guy must be sixty, seventy years old now, but when I saw him he looked as spry as ever. He might have gained five pounds. His hair was white that day, but it could have been colored. It was gray the first time I met him."
"Where's Tuley?"
"After the demo job in L.A., I flew him into Tokyo. He'd ramrodded a Lear jet from somewhere and had cover IDs for all of us."
"All of us?"
"He had eight guys with him, but I got the impression he was going to be meeting more. I assumed it was a take-out operation from the talent he had with him. I knew most of the guys. Not their real names, you know, but the kind of work they did."
Winterroad nodded. "You didn't hear any names of the targets?"
"No. This is still a Sacker operation, and you can tell it from the git-go. Everybody knows his part and that's it."
A bad feeling concerning Alan Tucker sent chills down Winterroad's back. "How did you end up here?"
De Luca shrugged. "My job was to drop Tuley in Tokyo and await further instructions. Instead, I took a few hours in London, still working under the cover Tuley had given me, and got my head together. I decided I wanted out by the time I set back down in L.A. Then I found out the Agency was looking for me in connection with the demo job. I grabbed all the ready cash I could get my hands on and split."
Vachs called out again, sounding nearer. Winterroad pushed himself to his feet, reached down and helped De Luca to his feet.
"You want to put handcuffs on me," De Luca asked, "or will you trust me if I say I'll go with you?"
Winterroad clapped the pilot on the shoulder. The flight jacket smacked wetly. He grinned. "Actually this is your lucky night — you got away."
"Langley will have your ass if they find out," De Luca said.
"Are you going to tell them?"
"Hell, no."
"I'm getting old and slow," Winterroad said with a bitter smile. "Haven't you heard? It seems to be all the new guys talk about. This is my way of saying thanks for that time back in Singapore in 1983."
De Luca put out his hand and Winterroad took it. "I'm not going to waste my breath trying to talk you out of this."
Vachs splashed through the creek on the other side of the hill.
"I'd better go identify myself before he shoots me," Winterroad said. "I'm going to have 007 help me beat the bushes out here for a while, so if you need anything from the camp, give me a few minutes, then go get it."
De Luca said his thanks, then melted into the night.
Winterroad trudged back up the hill with his mind filled by troubling thoughts. Sacker had turned
up again after how many years? He wasn't sure. The man had almost become a myth around Langley, except to people who had worked with him. He was back and apparently declaring war on Japanese business interests in the United States. The real enemy, Sacker had said.
He paused at the top of the hill and called out to Vachs, aware the thing troubling him most was that part of him agreed with Sacker's line of thinking.
* * *
"Will you require the services of a hostess, sir?" the doorman at the Club Morena asked.
"Not right away," Bolan replied as he paid the cover charge. He glanced at the patrons, relieved at the number of Americans who were in the bar. Most of them were dressed in business attire and appeared to be with their Japanese counterparts. Dressed in a black blazer, black slacks and a blue turtleneck, he fitted in with most of them. The Taurus was a comforting weight at his back with the three filled magazines in his left coat pocket. He stopped at the mirrored bar to purchase a screwdriver before moving back into the crowd.
The decor was expensive, burnished brass and red carpet, with dozens of real plants in hanging baskets, huge and ornate pots, and low, tiled walls that separated a number of tables to give the illusion of privacy. Flowered plants were kept at a minimum so that it appeared as if a forest had invaded the club. Smoke wreathed the low-hung lights above the tables, and hostesses stayed in constant motion to keep the drinks flowing while others sat beside the businessmen.
Bolan paused and took a sip of his drink. A slender woman wearing a punkish aquamarine skirt and matching light jacket approached him from the bar. Her hair was long, falling past her shoulders, and for a moment he thought she was the woman ninja. Then she stepped into the circle of light from overhead that he had carefully avoided. She smiled at him. The effect was as put-on as the heavy mascara.
" You a big man," she cooed appreciatively as she trailed her palms across the breadth of his shoulders. "Shanna like big man." She clasped his hands in both of hers. "You need hostess, big man? Shanna very good girl. Take care of your every need. Many American come here. Many ask for Shanna to be hostess."
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