Patriot Strike

by Don Pendleton

  Not even ghosts.

  Coetzee spotted a pair of headlights coming from the west and flicked his cigarette away, sliding a hand beneath the Morning News to find the pistol grip of his MP5K. The question now was whether he should chat with Crockett for a little while or just get down to business. Coetzee thought about it and decided he would let the circumstances be his guide.

  An SUV pulled up beside him, Crockett looking sour in the shotgun seat, and a face Coetzee had never seen behind the steering wheel. The driver’s window powered down, and Coetzee spoke across him, saying, “So you brought a friend?”

  “Can’t be too careful these days,” Crockett answered.

  “Sad but true,” Coetzee agreed.

  He climbed out of the BMW X5, no dome light’s glare behind him as he straightened up and sprayed the SUV’s two passengers with half a magazine of Parabellum rounds. It was a messy way to die, but none of it blew back on Coetzee, and he’d spared himself the tedium of small talk going nowhere.

  Cleaning house.

  He looked in both directions, up and down the long, dark highway. When he had satisfied himself that he was still alone—at least among the living—he put the MP5K back under the newspaper and palmed a small incendiary stick. He then opened the gas cap cover on the SUV, removed the cap itself and left it dangling while he primed the stick, then stuffed it down the fuel tank’s filler neck.

  The BMW roared to life a moment later, powered through a U-turn and had cleared a long block eastbound when the gas tank blew. Smiling at his own reflection in the rearview, Coetzee turned on the radio. Caught Billy Joel in the middle of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

  “So true,” he told the night.

  But fire was coming, and he wondered whether anyone in Texas—or the country, for that matter—would emerge unscathed.

  Coleman County

  ONCE HE FOUND the strength to speak again, Luttrell spilled everything. He didn’t know where they could find George Roth, but that small lapse paled by comparison to what he could tell them about Ridgway’s operation and the oil man’s plan for setting up a New Texas Republic. It was a bizarre scheme, bound to fail in Bolan’s estimation, but with a grim potential for disaster.

  Lying in the dirt, clutching his shattered knee, Luttrell explained in fits and starts. “That stuff about the moon is all bullshit. Lamar picked up a shuttle on the cheap and had his people build a bogus booster ride. The real deal is his other rockets.”

  “Other rockets?” Bolan prodded.

  “Smaller ’n what they use to send a shuttle up, but big enough to fly across the country. Maybe hit New York or Washington, maybe L.A. or Frisco. Got his warheads ready, courtesy of Uncle Sam, who don’t keep track so well.”

  “And Ridgway keeps these where?” asked Granger.

  “Lone Star Aerospace. I never got the tour, myself,” Luttrell explained, “but Waylon’s seen ’em. Says they got a setup over there makes Cape Canaveral look like a broke-down movie set.”

  “That’s his muscle for the ultimatum,” Bolan said, thinking out loud.

  “You got that right,” Luttrell agreed. “After he fires that warnin’ shot, nobody’s gonna mess with Texas anymore.”

  “What warning shot?” asked Bolan.

  “Little somethin’ just to wake ’em up in Washington.”

  “When is this warning shot supposed to happen?” Bolan asked the wounded man.

  “Supposed to be next month,” Luttrell replied. “But you-all bumped it up, see? Now it flies tomorrow, while the Big Man’s talkin’ on TV tellin’ the world to kiss his ass.”

  “So what’s the target?” Bolan asked.

  “Dunno.” Luttrell was sounding groggy now. “It’s like a game to him. Play spin the bottle. Throw darts at the map. The lucky winner is...whoever.”

  “When’s this happening tomorrow?” Granger asked.

  “When else? High noon.”

  Granger was looking at her watch. “Nine hours and change,” she said.

  No time to waste then. Lone Star Aerospace was based outside of Houston, 280 miles southeast of Coleman County. Say four hours on the road, if they started with a full tank of gas and held a steady seventy miles per hour all the way.

  Granger had obviously done the calculations for herself. She said, “We need to go. Right now.”

  “Hey, what about that hospital?” Luttrell asked, blinking up at them.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Bolan said.

  “It’ll be daylight by the time we get to Houston,” Granger said, as they were exiting the barn.

  “Can’t help it,” Bolan told her. “We’ll plan something on the way.”

  To pull the plug on Armageddon, right. If they could manage it.

  Climbing into the Toyota, Granger said, “I keep thinking there should be someone we can call.”

  “Maybe there is,” Bolan replied.

  Preston Hollow, Dallas

  “I MUST SAY, Crockett disappoints me.”

  “Past tense,” Simon Coetzee corrected.

  “Of course,” Ridgway agreed. “But still. I thought he had more grit. It all came down to nothing in the end.”

  “What do you want to do about his people?” Coetzee asked.

  “Nothing for now,” Ridgway replied. “After tomorrow they can join us or remain inside their fence until they starve, for all I care.”

  “Big day,” Coetzee observed.

  “The biggest.” Ridgway sipped his Jameson Rarest Vintage Reserve.

  In fact Ridgway had been looking forward to this day all his life, even before he had recognized the final goal. For years he had thought that making money was enough, an end unto itself, but he’d been wrong. When he’d become involved in politics, it had gradually dawned on him that nothing could be changed—not for the better, anyhow—unless he personally took control and forced the change himself. Deciding how that should be done consumed more years, but Ridgway had the answer now. Tomorrow he would share it with the world at large.

  And screw ’em if they didn’t like it.

  “Has a target been selected yet?” asked Coetzee.

  “I’m still workin’ on it,” Ridgway said. “So many cesspools of corruption, so little time.”

  In truth, of course, he’d prospered from corruption—buying politicians, judges, juries, lawmen—and he wouldn’t change that if he could. It was the other kind of decadence that raised his hackles: all the things that leftists talked about as signs of “progress.” Pick a poison from the commie shopping list or lump it altogether as “diversity.” Whatever. With the rank malarkey of political correctness stripped away, it all boiled down to weakening America, the one-time greatest nation in the world.

  For decades Ridgway had believed that he could save America by funding this or that group on the Right. The second decade of the new millennium had changed his thinking on that subject, made him realize America was lost for good. Only a new start, on a smaller scale, could rescue what remained of values passed down from the founding fathers. He, Lamar Ridgway, could make that change.

  Why else had God allowed him to become a billionaire?

  “When are you flying down?” asked Coetzee.

  “We are flying down in just over an hour. If you need to pack, it’s time.”

  “You don’t want me to stay and track the hunt?”

  “Forget it. In a few more hours, if those pesky little shits are still around, they’ll wish they’d run while they could still get out.”

  “Okay. I’ll call ahead and have security in place for our arrival.”

  “Everybody works today,” said Ridgway. “No excuses.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ridgway finished off his whiskey, thought about pouring another shot, then decided that he’d better not.
He wanted to amend his statement to the world, kept thinking of new items he should add. It needed to be exactly right.

  As it turned out, hijacking radio and television broadcast satellites was no big deal, once he’d acquired the best minds in the business and equipped them with the latest gear. A lot of it was gibberish to Ridgway—direct broadcast versus fixed service satellites—but hell, he didn’t have to understand it, as long as the damn system worked on command. They’d done a test run for radio two months earlier and then TV last month. A simple blip in each case, service very briefly fading in and out, but it had been enough to demonstrate the power at his fingertips. Sources in Washington informed him that the FCC had been “concerned” but couldn’t trace the source of interference either time.

  Tomorrow, naturally, there would be some stations that he couldn’t interrupt, and that was fine. Their news departments would report his ultimatum in their own good time. And once he’d fired his warning shot, the whole world would be watching.

  That was power.

  And it rested squarely in his hands.

  Arlington, Virginia

  BROGNOLA FREQUENTLY WORKED LATE, but not this late. The phone that woke him from a pleasant dream of deep-sea fishing was inside a drawer on his nightstand, the drawer in question just below a clock that showed him the ungodly hour. Already wide awake, he reached the phone on its third trilling note and raised it to his ear.

  “Brognola.”

  “Striker,” the familiar voice replied.

  “This can’t be good.”

  “It’s worse than that,” said Bolan. “Are we scrambled?”

  Hal’s thumb found a button in the darkness. “Got it.”

  “Ridgway’s building rockets. Has them built already, I should say. Not ones for shuttle flights but multiple ballistic missiles, armed with warheads.”

  Hal experienced a chill, as if someone had poured ice water down his back. “What range?” he asked.

  “Unknown. My best guess would be intermediate to long.”

  Translation: they could reach most cities in North America.

  “Present location?”

  “I’m working on the premise that it’s Lone Star Aerospace in Houston, but that hasn’t been confirmed,” Bolan said.

  Hal’s mind was racing. “I’m not sure how much I can do. There are some people I can call, but whether they can move or not is problematic.”

  Everybody knew that 9/11 had revised the way America responded to terrorist threats. It had spawned the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, legalized all kinds of domestic surveillance, created secret prisons and “enhanced interrogation” centers—the list went on and on. But there were still some things that wily politicians would not do, and one of those was send a SWAT team after an eccentric billionaire with friends in Congress, on the basis of a vague call in the middle of the night, from an informant whom Brognola couldn’t even name.

  “There’s NEST,” Bolan suggested.

  “Right. I’ll call them first and put them on alert.”

  NEST was the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, a branch of the National Nuclear Security Administration tasked with investigating illegal use of nuclear materials on U.S. soil.

  “Ridgway has a deadline,” Bolan told him. “Noon today.”

  Hal felt his stomach tighten. “That’s a launch time?”

  “If my information is correct,” Bolan replied. “Coordinated with some kind of public ultimatum.”

  “Do you have a target?”

  “Sorry,” Bolan said. “My source wasn’t that high on the food chain.”

  Hal logged the warrior’s use of past tense. He gathered Bolan’s source would not be granting any further interviews.

  “Okay,” Brognola said. “I’ll work with what we have. There’s always Delta in a pinch.”

  Delta Force—the U.S. Army’s First Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta—was the go-to group for emergency counter-terrorist action, sometimes operating in conjunction with its counterparts, the U.S. Navy’s Naval Special Warfare Development Group and the Twenty-Fourth Special Tactics Squadron of the U.S. Air Force. Among those units, Hal was confident that he could find someone to tackle a nest of rogue missiles. The question wasn’t if, but rather when.

  Right now Mack Bolan was his best—his only—hope.

  “You’re on it then,” Hal said, not asking.

  “On my way,” Bolan confirmed.

  “I’ll see what I can do at this end,” Hal assured him.

  “Right,” the grim voice answered.

  And the line went dead.

  Chapter 12

  Interstate 45, Southbound

  Interstate 45 is a peculiarity in that it, despite its name, crosses no state lines. It runs from Dallas to Houston, then continues briefly to the Gulf of Mexico over the Galveston Causeway.

  Today it served the Executioner.

  Texas lawmakers had done him an unintentional favor in 2012, boosting the speed limit on I-45 to seventy-five miles per hour. Bolan pushed it up to eighty, trusting lax highway patrolmen and Adlene Granger’s badge to keep him out of trouble on the run to Houston, shaving half an hour off his estimated travel time.

  It would have been a quicker trip if they were flying, but he’d estimated that the time it took to find a charter service, prep a plane and reach the nearest airport would have eaten up the difference. So they were driving, starting with a full tank in the RAV4, rolling through what some reporters called the Texas Killing Fields.

  No one would know it watching the landscape pass, but the highway was notorious for a series of unsolved murders. Since construction was finished in 1971, the bodies of at least thirty girls and women had been found about a mile off the interstate. It was easy to believe that more undiscovered graves still remained throughout the countryside.

  “I worked this case, you know,” said Granger. “Cases, I should say.”

  “And still no break?”

  “One guy went down for five, around the time I joined the Rangers. Media called him the Tourniquet Killer, after the way he strangled his victims. He’s on death row currently, but the rest are still cold cases. It feels weird now, thinking that none of that may mean a hill of beans, if Ridgway flips a switch.”

  “He won’t,” Bolan asserted. “We’ll stop him.”

  “Any thoughts on how?” she asked.

  “We need to verify our information from Luttrell before we move.”

  “Sounds like another snatch job,” Granger said.

  “Maybe with a twist. Lone Star should be well-staffed with security.”

  “Which helps us...how, again?”

  “I’ll have to check their setup, but smart money says they’ll have I.D. and a communications system.”

  “So?”

  “If we can penetrate it,” Bolan said, “we’ve got our way inside.”

  “You have a plan for doing that?”

  “I’m working on it. First thing we need to do, once we’re in Houston, is rent a van.”

  “Because?”

  “It’s more convenient than an SUV for what I have in mind,” said Bolan. “Larger doors for better access, not to mention privacy.”

  “Okay. You’re sounding like a psycho-killer now.”

  I’ve been called worse, he thought, but kept it to himself. She wouldn’t understand the reference, and there was no point opening that door to Bolan’s buried past.

  “It’s strategy,” he said. “That’s all.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Granger replied. “I’m in. I’d like to know the plan before the shooting starts, is all I’m saying.”

  Bolan sketched it for her, laying out what he’d devised so far, reminding her that its success depended on security de
ployment when they got to Lone Star Aerospace. His preparations might turn out to be a waste of time, in which case they would have to try a more direct approach.

  “Oh, more direct,” she answered, smiling ruefully. “Like kamikaze-style?”

  “Let’s leave that for a last resort,” he said.

  “I normally don’t go for hara-kiri on a first date,” Granger said.

  “Point taken,” he replied. “I wouldn’t want to spoil your record.”

  “But it still might come to that.”

  “Don’t focus on worst-case scenarios right now.”

  “I get it. Still, needs of the many. I’m just saying.”

  And the Executioner had been there, sure. So far he’d always walked away.

  So far.

  George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Houston, Texas

  THE FLIGHT FROM Dallas to Houston took thirty-five minutes in Ridgway’s Learjet 60, powered by twin Pratt & Whitney Canada PW300 engines. He flew in luxury, as always, with a twentysomething flight attendant seeing to his every need almost before the thought occurred to him. Besides Ridgway, the jet’s passengers included Malcolm Barnhart, Simon Coetzee and six of Coetzee’s handpicked security men. Another half-dozen soldiers were waiting for Ridgway on the airport’s tarmac, with three black Humvees that would carry his party to the Lone Star Aerospace plant west of town.

  The flight was uneventful, just the way he liked it. No one wanted any kind of incident when they were cruising eight miles high, much less when they were focused on a looming date with destiny. Ridgway thought Barnhart looked uneasy, but he’d never had a spine of steel.

  In fact his malleability was a critical attribute for a puppet. He had agreed without demur to Ridgway’s guidance in their planning for the New Texas Republic, interested chiefly in attaining a preeminent position and the wealth that went along with it. Barnhart understood what was expected of him and would soon hold honors as one of the world’s best-paid yes-men.