Bolan climbed out of his seat and into the rear of the vehicle. He hoped the roof hatch, the electrical system and the hydraulics were working. The truck was still running. The odds were good. Not that Bolan had ever let odds have much say in what he did in life.
“Sarge?” Grimaldi asked. He had his suppressed MAC-10 in his lap. “They’re coming. Should I shoot?”
“Not yet, Jack.”
The enemy Rovers filed into the warehouse. There were half a dozen. Figure four to six men, max, in each truck, Bolan thought. Those weren’t great odds. That meant he was looking at a fighting force of anywhere from twenty-four to thirty-six men. He and Grimaldi were outgunned by at least a dozen to one.
The Land Rovers parked in a semicircle around Bolan’s location. The black SUV was in the center of the empty warehouse space. The place had high ceilings. Some natural light made it in from windows ringing the top of the structure along its perimeter. The entrance of the Rovers had stirred up a massive dust cloud, one that Bolan hadn’t noticed when he and Grimaldi were busy screaming into the place like a wrecking ball. The dust was a good sign. Nobody had used this place in a while, and nobody was going to be needing it anytime soon.
Which meant it was time to go to work.
Bolan crouched in the rear of the Suburban. His hand was on the release lever of the mechanism built into the spot where the truck’s second and third rows of bench seats would have been.
Doors on the Rovers opened and the mercenaries piled out. They sported full tactical gear, including Heckler & Koch rifles and submachine guns, and were decked out in knee pads and face masks with Kevlar helmets. One man stood among the others without a helmet, though. He was tall, his head bald. He held a megaphone. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses, but then, it was relatively dim inside the warehouse.
Walker, Bolan thought.
The mercenary leader triggered his megaphone. “Got to hand it to you, Cooper,” he said. “I never would have thought you could pull off scaling the front of that bank. That was some real action-movie nonsense right there. Almost be a shame to kill you dead.”
“Now, Sarge?”
“Wait for it,” Bolan told him. “He thinks he’s got us. They’ll close first.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I’m right about this.”
Walker signaled his men. The mercenaries began to move in, weapons ready. Walker had stowed his megaphone and now carried a Heckler & Koch 416 assault rifle. To his credit, the man was out in front, leading by example. Of course, it was easy to be confident when you thought your side held all the cards. Bolan was about to teach this Walker, or whatever his real name was, a very important lesson about underestimating his prey.
“Last chance,” Walker shouted, close enough to be audible from inside the truck without his megaphone. “Come out now, Cooper, and we’ll make your deaths quick! Make me drag you out of there, and I’ll make sure Harmon gets his money’s worth!”
“Sarge!”
“Wait for it...” Bolan replied.
“Ready!” Walker shouted to his men.
“Not yet,” the Executioner said.
“Aim!” Walker shouted.
“Fire,” Bolan said softly and popped open the Suburban’s roof hatch.
The six-barreled gun snapped into place on its hydraulic mount. Bolan hit the electric trigger and watched as the man to Walker’s left disappeared in a cloud of bloody flesh.
“Sight’s off,” Bolan commented, his words drowned out by the sound of the incredible electric Gatling gun.
The Executioner worked the Dillon Aero-designed M-134D Gatling gun back and forth, hosing down the enemy mercenaries and their vehicles. The M-134D was an electrically driven defense-suppression weapon chambered in 7.62 mm NATO rounds. It boasted six rounds that, together, were capable of a staggering 3,000 round per minute rate of fire from a hand-operated system. Though fed from a massive 4,400-round magazine built into the truck and weighing in at a remarkable fifty-three pounds or so, it was easy to maneuver, easy to fire, and capable of delivering an absolutely withering fusillade on the targets of the operator’s choice.
Bolan continued to work the Gatling back and forth. He ventilated each of the Land Rovers, bursting their tires, destroying their cabs, blasting apart their engine compartments. The few men who survived the first burst from the mighty gun began crawling over the corpses of their comrades, trying to get away, to escape, to go anywhere that was not within the reach of the six barrels of Bolan’s weapon.
When he stopped firing, the silence was deafening in his ears. The tink-tink-tink of metal on metal was audible now. It was Grimaldi running the windshield wipers to clear a mountain of spent brass from his view.
“Now you know how it feels, Sarge,” Grimaldi said. “Are your ears ringing?”
“Yeah.” Bolan climbed down from the gun and opened the side door of the Suburban. Over his shoulder to the pilot, he said, “How what feels?”
“Well, this is usually the part of the mission where I swoop in with a helicopter gunship and turn an overwhelming force of bad guys into sauce in order to save you.”
“I thought something seemed really familiar about this,” Bolan said. “It feels pretty good.”
“Yeah,” Grimaldi agreed. “It sure does.”
“Come on, Jack. Let’s survey the damage.”
Bolan, his 93-R at the ready, led the pair as they emerged onto the warehouse floor. The soldier had his handheld flashlight out, a powerful little LED model with a thumb switch and a knurled aluminum casing. Grimaldi had a more conventional military angle-head light that he clipped to his belt. The pair moved from body to body in the dim space, stepping over corpses.
The smells were a riot of conflicting odors. Hot metal, oil and gas from the Rovers, and the unmistakable coppery tang of human blood. There was also the cordite from so many firearms being discharged in a covered space, even one as large as the warehouse. And there was the unmistakable smell of fear.
“Sarge,” Grimaldi called. “Got a live one over here.”
“Here, too,” Bolan said. “Is yours going to make it?”
“No, Sarge. He’s bleeding out. It’s bad. Not more than a few seconds...” Grimaldi sighed. “He’s gone.”
“You bastard,” said the man at Bolan’s feet. “You’ll pay for finishing that man off. I’ll kill you myself.”
“I didn’t touch him,” Grimaldi said, walking over. He stopped short when his flashlight beam played over Bolan’s prisoner.
It was Walker.
“You find anybody else?” Bolan asked.
“No. I’m surprised numb-nuts there made it out. You figure he was hiding under one of the bodies? He strikes me as that sort of coward.”
Walker made as if to get to his feet. “I’ll punch your teeth down your—”
“Settle down,” Bolan told him.
Grimaldi took up a position to guard the Executioner while Bolan guided Walker by the shoulder back to the SUV. Once they were clear of the ring of dead and broken bodies, some of Walker’s arrogance started to come back.
“I bet you and your friend here are pretty pleased with yourselves, Cooper,” Walker said. “I’m going to have you up on charges so damned fast. This is all going down as a murder. I’m going to testify that you murdered Franklin Stillwater at the bank. Stillwater and his bodyguards. And then when my men gave chase, you ambushed us here with a...with a weapon of mass destruction! We’ve got powerful lawyers. My company has connections that go so deep and run so high...you won’t have any idea what hit you.”
Bolan punched him.
Walker hit the floor. Bolan pressed his combat boot against Walker’s throat—hard.
“You talk like a man who thinks he’s going to have anybody to testify to,” Bolan said. “But you won’t get
a chance to work your legal magic, Walker. Is that your real name, by the way?”
Walker couldn’t manage to reply through the pain.
Bolan took a set of zip-tie cuffs from his war bag and secured Walker’s hands behind him at the wrists. Then he dragged the gasping man to his feet.
“Doesn’t seem too broken up about all his friends getting killed,” Grimaldi observed. “Must be one of those guys who keeps things bottled up inside.”
They strapped the mercenary into the passenger seat of the Suburban. Bolan took the crash seat for the minigun. With some coaxing, Grimaldi got the horribly loud Suburban moving again. He went the long way around the bodies to avoid having to drive through them. The Land Rovers continued to smoke and leak.
Bolan took out his sat phone and called the Farm. When Price answered, he said, “Barb, I’m sending you a photograph. Walker, turn around and look at me or I’ll shoot you through the back of the seat.”
Walker turned, if reluctantly. Bolan shot his picture and hit the icon to send a scrambled copy to the Farm.
“You got one of those social media accounts, Cooper?” Grimaldi asked from the driver’s seat, using the Cooper alias as he didn’t want to use a name that might in some remote way identify Bolan. He was working his way through the adrenaline dump of what they’d just seen. Joking was his way of coping with the fight-or-flight urge.
Ignoring Grimaldi for the moment, Bolan said into the phone, “I need an ID on this guy. He’s going to have to go someplace dark and unpleasant. I don’t much care what happens to him once he’s in custody of the appropriate authorities. And send a cleanup crew to the warehouse location. We’ve got a lot of bodies and several vehicles that will need removal. Send a fire crew, too, just in case. We’re going to owe the property owner compensation for the damages to the building. Can you see to it?”
“I can handle that, Striker,” Price replied. “How bad is the damage?”
“A broken fence, a smashed door and a few thousand bullet holes. We’ve got real fallout, Barb,” Bolan went on. “I need you to update Hal on that. Harmon is working with the Corinos again. He set a trap for me—a trap he specifically wanted me to know he was responsible for. We have to assume he, and these mercenaries working with him, are following the Corinos’ list.”
“We’re putting out hot spots all over the globe right now,” Price told him. “I don’t know if we can offer much in the way of backup.”
“I’ve got everything I need right now. With Jack and the Osprey to move me from location to location, and knowing what I’m up against...well, that and a full magazine are all I ask. But Stillwater and his bodyguards got taken out, which means that’s one name the Corinos, and Harmon, have already crossed off.”
“Understood, Striker.”
“I’m going to get him,” Bolan stated. “I’m going to bring him back in. And I’m going to put a stop to the Corinos’ plan. Striker out.”
12
Williamsburg, Virginia
Vincent Harmon laid into the heavy bag with everything he was worth, slamming low fists into the bag’s “ribs” and following up with knees and elbow strikes. The bag moved this way and that, simulating the movement of a living opponent as it swung on its chain. Harmon continued to smash it. His hands were lightly wrapped to prevent bloodying his knuckles too much, but other than that, he wore no protective gear. There would be no protective gear out there in the field. He trained as he fought, and he fought as he trained. That was, if he wanted to survive.
If he wanted to win.
The assassin was just finishing with the heavy bag when four men entered the gym. Unlike Harmon, they wore full protective gear: knee and shin pads, forearm pads, chest shields, padded mixed martial arts gloves and helmets. They were also armed with escrima, rattan sticks about two feet long used in Filipino martial arts practice.
“Well, then,” Harmon said. “Come on if you’re coming.”
The four men moved in, swinging their sticks in slow arcs, warming up their wrists. Rattan was a light wood; it frayed instead of chipping, which was what made it ideal for this type of fighting practice. No flying wood chips meant no danger of losing an eye from taking a fragment. Getting hit with one, even a stick that light, could break a man’s wrist or seriously ruin his face. A person would have to work at it to beat a man to death with rattan, but not that hard. There were full-contact escrima competition groups in the West, but they were all nuts. Everybody knew that.
Harmon smiled.
The first attack came in overhand. That was predictable. Harmon ducked to the side, let the stick go by and blasted the attacker in the arm, nailing the nerve where the pads didn’t cover. He twisted the man’s arm up and around, pushing it into a painful chicken wing that caused the fighter to drop his stick. Harmon folded the guy and threw a brutal knee strike up into his padded helmet for good measure. The fighter dropped.
The next two decided to coordinate their attack, having seen how quickly Harmon dispatched their friend. They came at him from opposite sides, ready to brain him with their sticks.
That wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t do at all.
Harmon had spent years studying various kung fu styles. Most practical fighting men leaned toward combatives. They went for the simple, practical stuff, the stuff that let you rip a guy’s arm off and beat him with it. It was macho, it was quick and it was simple to understand. Well, Harmon knew everything there was to know about simple, practical combatives after only a couple of years of studying every system he could get his hands on. From World War II combatives and SAS commando methods, to the combat manual of the Russian special forces, the techniques used by the Chinese communists, and the krav maga of Israeli special operatives, there wasn’t much Harmon hadn’t learned. He got bored fast.
He’d move on from that to more exotic methods. Kung fu had attracted him because there was so much of it, and what there was could be very complex. It took a long time to master those methods. It took a long time to be able to make some of the more intricate techniques “work” in a practical setting.
Like this double punch and kick technique, for example, Harmon thought.
He leaned forward on one leg, punching one man in the face while kicking the other one in the thigh. The opponent he kicked toppled; his thigh muscle had spasmed. The man Harmon had punched reared back, trying to recover, and the assassin wrenched the stick from his hand. He slashed the man across the front of his helmet with the stick and followed up with several kicks to the padded ribs while the man was on the floor. The other fighter fared no better, as Harmon turned back to him and stomped him while he was trying to get up. He tapped the mat in submission.
The fourth man did something Harmon hadn’t expected. He threw his stick. The rattan escrima flew like a javelin through the air, but Harmon batted it out of the way easily. He closed on the final fighter and took up a boxing stance.
“You new at this?” Harmon asked.
“Recruited just last month, sir,” the fighter said through his mouthpiece.
Amateurs. You never knew what they’d do. They were unpredictable in a way that skilled men were not. Harmon smiled.
“Put her there, kid,” he said, reaching out with one hand. The fighter made to do the same...and Harmon punched him in the face, hard enough to drop him to the mat. He struggled to get to all fours, obviously dazed. “Never trust anybody, kid,” Harmon told him. “Least of all me.”
The door to the training gym opened. A man in a shirt and tie, the shirt tucked into combat cargo pants that were bloused into combat boots, snapped his fingers at Harmon.
“When you’re done screwing around and injuring my men,” Edward Sharpe said, “I’d appreciate it if you came to my office.”
* * *
THE OFFICES OF the Veldt Security Group were so nondescript they might have belonged to any c
ompany, from a paper distributor to a software developer to a real estate firm. Most other office-cubicle farms didn’t boast a state-of-the-art training gym, but then, most didn’t have an armory full of M-4 rifles, either.
Most of the desks in the office area were empty and probably had never been used. The carpets were gray. The walls were gray. The furnishings were upholstered in gray and beige. There was nothing remarkable about the place in any way except for the glass-fronted office at the rear.
Lettering on the glass door proclaimed the office the domain of Edward Sharpe, head of Veldt and founder of the company. Vincent Harmon let himself in and took a seat in front of Sharpe’s desk without asking.
Sharpe looked up, clearly irritated. He shook his head and spread his arms to encompass the office space around them. “So tell me, Vince,” he said. “What exactly are you doing here?”
“I thought perhaps you might need some hand-holding.”
“Oh, because I’ve just lost my best field operative and thirty employees?”
“Yes,” Harmon said. “Exactly.”
Sharpe sighed. He closed the notebook computer on which he’d been typing when Harmon entered. Standing, he rolled his shoulders and stretched his back. “I hate sitting here,” he said. “I founded Veldt because I wanted to do anything with my life but ride a desk.”
“Have I ever told you about my mother?” Harmon asked.
“What? No, why?”
“Because there’s something I want you to understand.”
“Come on, Vince. We’ve served together since Afghanistan. I think we’re on the same page.”
“Cave Spiders! Cave Spiders!” Harmon chanted. “Eddie, there’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Don’t call me Eddie.”
“My mother wasn’t happy when she found out what I planned to do. There was no way she could have. She was old. On oxygen. Sick and getting sicker. She didn’t have much longer. I suppose it should bother me that she died fighting me, begging me to take the pillow away. It doesn’t. She should have been more supportive.”
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