Season of Slaughter

by Don Pendleton

  Adonis stood and pulled up his muscle shirt, revealing a belt full of grenade pouches hidden by the loose hang of the tank top. He plucked a grenade free and lobbed it atop the SCS. “Sorry, Fixx.”

  He turned and started away from the box when a pair of arms wrapped around his ankles. The giant tripped, hands flying out to catch himself just as the shock wave of the explosion washed over them.

  Adonis twisted, prying his feet from the vise grip of the stocky Dave Kowalski. Arms clawed and groped, trying to keep the blond giant from crawling to freedom. Though blood poured from bashed lips and flames burned on his pants, the lawman was still fighting.

  The blond mass murderer bent double, bringing down one massive, clubbing fist hard into the side of Kowalski’s head, making it roll on its shoulders. Again, the pit bull of a human being wouldn’t let go, despite the laceration down his temple. As blood flowed, more fight seemed to invade him, like a shark smelling blood on the water.

  Adonis again brought down his fist.

  This time the arms went loose and the golden-haired titan scrambled free. He looked around for his Desert Eagle to finish off the little freak when he spotted the sleek, bug-like form of the Black Hawk skimming across the airfield.

  Adonis bent and gave the bloodied face of David Kowalski a gentle, almost grandmotherly squeeze.

  “Don’t forget me, little man. We’re still going to have fun.”

  JACK GRIMALDI WAS apoplectic. Gunfire was raging at the Main Terminal “M” gates and there was someone popping off a missile from near Midfield Concourse B. A passenger jet had just come screaming out of the sky, turning into a fiery phoenix from which no creature would rise.

  “Stony Man! Stony Man! Do you read me?”

  “This is an open line, G-Force!” Barbara Price admonished on the other end.

  “Too freakin’ bad! Dulles is being turned into a hell zone!” Grimaldi snapped back. “Someone took out air traffic control here. We already have a passenger jet full of casualties!”

  The Stony Man mission controller went from angry to business in a moment.

  “We’re running a fast diagnostic through Dulles right now!” Price responded. “Keep under control. What do Dragon Slayer’s systems say?”

  “Radar just went from haywire to a semblance of normal. There might have been on-the-ground jamming causing…”

  Grimaldi looked up through the bubble windshield of the high-tech helicopter. Two planes, not quite overhead, clipped each other. One wobbled and managed to keep on a straight path.

  The other wasn’t so lucky. Chunks were torn from the tail.

  “Dammit!”

  “Jack! Get it together, man.”

  “I’m fast-dumping the readout from my systems,” Grimaldi replied.

  “Flight recorder data being received,” Price answered.

  Grimaldi could hear her, distant and muffled, shouting for members of the Farm’s cyber team to get on the case. The pilot, however, was watching the damaged airplane trying to hold itself straight. His forearm muscles flexed in sympathy, fighting against the movements of the plane with an imaginary joystick. “Come on, come on.”

  His throat went tight and constricted. One of the wings suddenly disintegrated, not in a flash of spraying volcanic jet fuel, but in a shower of metallic flakes tumbling off the side of the jet.

  “No!” Grimaldi wheezed, watching helplessly as the aircraft suddenly did a savage flip, nose diving into a clot of trees beyond the second runway.

  He wanted to look away, but he watched the blossoming of a new flower, dying inside as he watched the death of hundreds.

  CARL LYONS GAVE a vicious back fist across Dark’s jaw, flesh bruising and tearing on his knuckles and the terrorist’s face. The two men were engaged in savage combat, the Stony Man warrior and the mass murderer given in to unbridled homicide. Again and again, the Able Team commander was bringing his ham-size fists flashing and darting, impacting against the deadly agent.

  Lyons, if he was paying attention, didn’t care that most of his blows were being deflected with effortless speed. A forearm against a wrist would blunt a chop. A fist would slam into bicep muscle instead of ribs.

  Dark was weaving and dodging, blocking and blunting the lightning-fast shotokan strikes Lyons was firing out, realizing the pattern. In a moment he danced lazily backward, like a ballerina exiting the stage, rebounding off one of the metal ribs holding the angled windows of the M terminal in place. Lyons kept the chase.

  Dark leaped forward, charging as he was charged, bringing a steel-toed boot into contact with Lyons’s upper chest. Bones snapped and the blond ex-cop spit up blood. It didn’t slow him. Lyons pivoted and spun, bringing the lithe, tall murderer to the ground with a spine-jarring impact. Had not Dark flattened out, tucking his chin to his throat, his skull and spine would have been smashed to pieces.

  Dark snapped his heel up and into Lyons’s face. The Able Team leader staggered backward, brain jolted by the sudden impact. Rivulets of blood flowed from his nose and the corner of his mouth. Dark noticed that the feral rage in the cold blue eyes of the lawman was glazing over, losing its focus.

  If pressed, this dumb bastard would fight to the point of brain death, and keep going, like something out of a George Romero zombie movie.

  A savage punch lashed out and Dark grabbed the wrist, swinging his elbow up and over, bringing it down hard on the joint. Bones cracked and Lyons roared in mindless, animal fury. Dark felt himself lifted up as if he weighed less than a feather, tossed nearly twenty feet down the hall.

  The terrorist landed, rolling with the impact before he skidded hard against a service counter. The cheap plywood and plaster cratered with the collision, his body forming a pocket where he struck. The big blond guy was tearing down the hallway like a freight train.

  Dark pulled his pistol, a high-capacity Caspian .45, and opened fire on the lunging form, bullets slamming into his attacker in a seemingly endless stream. But he kept coming and coming, even though his legs and shoulders sprouted streams of blood. As the last shot left the barrel of the custom-combat pistol, Dark realized that he was firing at center of mass, and probably only impacting a set of concealed body armor, similar to the armor that had stopped this crazy bastard’s two .357 Magnum rounds.

  Lyons leaped across the last few yards between him and the prone Dark. The tall, thin man in the trench coat surged out of the way at the last heartbeat, leaping from the path of the muscular jungle cat in human form, bringing the Caspian’s frame down hard against him.

  Lyons smashed the counter to pieces and Dark whirled, stamping his steel boot down hard on both his ankles. Bones cracked and snapped as the onslaught caught Lyons off guard. Dark straddled the downed Able Team commando and used his empty pistol as a hammer, bringing it down and down again, savagely pummeling until his own hands were drenched with blood.

  An angry shout filled the air and Dark looked up just as he was about to bring the bent frame of his .45 down one more time. There were a dozen armed men racing up the hall and he was fresh out of ammo or guns. Scooping up Lyons, he used the half-conscious Stony Man warrior as a shield, gunfire cutting wildly across the distance when a strangled cry told them to stop, but not before a few more slugs chopped into unarmored arms and legs, as well as his Kevlar-protected torso. The body jerked against him and Dark managed to drag the limp figure of Carl Lyons to the hole someone had made to go after Adonis.

  “Get down here!” Adonis bellowed.

  Dark gave his adversary a hard shove to the side. The man was still breathing and, in a way, Dark was glad for that as he spun and dropped from the window, landing with knees bent to absorb the impact.

  That man of iron had given him a damn good fight.

  Someday they’d have to finish the war that started today.

  Dark looked around, plumes of choking smoke and flame rising from the multiple plane crashes. Circling jets were sweeping away, and their helicopter was racing in, right off the deck.

&nb
sp; “I love it when a plan comes together,” Dark said with a mirthless grin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The trail had not grown cold.

  Even if it had only been the carnage and destruction caused at Dulles, Mack Bolan would still be stalking through the shadows of the warehouse district, laden with weapons and dressed to kill.

  If it merely had been the wounding of one of the few close friends he had in the world, Carl Lyons, Mack Bolan would still be on the prowl of the midnight alleys of Washington, D.C., stalking the savages he had labeled Animal Man.

  The combination of hundreds of innocent lives and a fellow soldier from across all his bloody miles set the Executioner to seething. He wasn’t a man given to rage or petty revenge, but blood cried out for blood, and Bolan was reminded of the origin of his crusade in the spirit of vengeance for his fallen family. He fought the anger, wrestled it under control like a writhing, savage crocodile, harnessing that reptilian fury and force into the power and precision he would need to carry off his penetration into the hell zone this night.

  Avenge the dead. Protect those yet untouched.

  The first motto was allowed to run its course, because that activity inevitably would lead him to the second vow. Dead terrorists weren’t nearly as good at killing innocents. Not when they were swept away by the cleansing flames of the Executioner.

  Rage and vengeance, though, only took the Executioner so far. The rest came from a soldier’s duty to protect those he was sworn to defend.

  Perched on the corner of a warehouse rooftop, Bolan put the pair of night-vision binoculars to his eyes, fighting off the memories swarming unbidden to him like moths from the shadows.

  BOLAN HEADED the vanguard through the hospital halls, his face drawn with the news of that afternoon’s mayhem. Trailing behind like the swept-back wings of a Tomcat, Hermann Schwarz and Rosario Blancanales kept the pace, keeping in tight formation, their shorter legs pumping faster to handle the breakneck speed of the tall soldier’s looping strides.

  Schwarz and Blancanales—Gadgets and Pol to most who knew them—were the partners of the man lying helpless in a hospital bed.

  Bolan spotted Hal Brognola at the entrance to the ICU, standing over a familiar form sitting in a chair, head swathed in a bandage, cold packs lashed fast to his skull. The young man looked up, eyes swimming for a moment and then focusing on the Executioner.

  “Colonel?” David Kowalski asked. He sounded dazed, unfocused, but only for a moment. The slouch suddenly left his spine and he squared off his shoulders. “Sir…”

  “Just Mack, not sir,” Bolan told Kowalski. “What happened?”

  “Monsters. They weren’t human, sir.”

  Bolan felt a chill, remembering a rampaging serial killer in Denver, sent by an enemy to specifically call him out. It was a nightmare the likes of which the soldier never wanted to encounter again. “Were they specifically targeting anyone?”

  “Mostly people who were fighting back,” Brognola stated. “But the one guy who took down Stone, he was using armor-piercing ammunition. At least, he was firing AP ammo as far as the submachine guns went. For every fatal hit, there were three people down the line or behind cover injured by stray bullets.”

  Bolan looked at Brognola and he remembered the tally of dead and injured. Nearly a thousand were injured and over five hundred dead from the Dulles massacre. Uneasy anger fought his outrage at the treatment of his friend. Bolan took the nearest distraction he could. “Are you okay, Kowalski?”

  “I’ve got a concussion, but I’ll be okay in a few hours,” the U.S. Marshall answered.

  “The doctors told him he should be in bed for the next 48 hours,” Brognola corrected. “He wouldn’t stay in bed.”

  Bolan looked at the doors to Lyons’s ICU room. All he could see was a bulky figure on the bed. “Carl?”

  “Eight broken ribs. Both ankles are broken. His left elbow is dislocated. Ten bullets removed from his thighs and arms. He has a collapsed lung. He has nine skull lacerations, but only one skull fracture,” Brognola explained. “It’s a miracle he doesn’t have brain damage.”

  Schwarz managed a half chuckle. “I always knew that thick skull of his was good for something.”

  Bolan felt a token of relief. “Can we see him?”

  “Sure,” Brognola said. “But only for a moment. He’s under heavy sedation.”

  Bolan led the others, somehow having picked up Kowalski as one of the flock, into the ICU room. Carl Lyons lay, stretched out, eyes heavy lidded, one arm wrapped in heavy plaster, IV tubes everywhere.

  The Executioner was stunned, pausing at the foot of the bed. “Carl?”

  “…dammit…”

  “I don’t want to hear that out of you,” Bolan ordered.

  Angry blue eyes stared back from under a thick, contorted brow. “Failed…”

  “You fought them off. The whole airport could have been destroyed. Dozens more killed and scores more injured,” Bolan replied.

  “Pullman stopped that computer thing they had,” Kowalski spoke up. “And he might never be able to use his arms again.”

  Bolan could see Kowalski’s face redden at the realization of what he’d said. Lyons was feeling a world of guilt and wasn’t physically much better off than Pullman with his shattered arms.

  “Computer thing?” Schwarz asked, diverting the subject from horrific injury back to business.

  “About this wide? Tiny flip-up screen?” Blancanales demonstrated, spreading his hands apart.

  “Yeah. It also had a radio handset. At first I thought it was just a SATCOM, then the airplane came in too steep and tore itself apart,” Kowalski mentioned.

  Bolan could hear the strain in the younger man’s voice. He lowered his voice, putting a hand on the man’s rock-tense shoulder. “You did what you could.”

  “What I could. Look at Mr. Stone…He’s wrapped up like a fucking mummy and has more tubes and wires sticking out of him than my fucking DVD player!”

  “Take it easy, kid.” Blancanales cut him off. “Just because you didn’t get as banged up as Ironman doesn’t mean you didn’t try. You’re supposed to be in a hospital bed yourself.”

  “I can walk,” Kowalski grunted.

  “I like this guy. He’s like Ironman, only smaller and cuddlier,” Schwarz cut in.

  Kowalski looked between Blancanales and Schwarz, then to Bolan.

  “Sorry,” he said with a half smile.

  “I’d feel just like you do,” Bolan admitted. “You weren’t prepared for what happened. Nobody was.”

  “We did receive some warning,” Brognola advised. “‘The sky will fall when we cut down the radome.’”

  “What was that?” Bolan asked.

  “A message received at both CIA and FBI headquarters a half hour before the assault began,” Brognola said. “It was signed the Righteous International Nihilism Group.”

  “The RING.” Bolan put together. A bitter taste filled his mouth. Bolan had been briefed, as well as Schwarz and Blancanales, about the madmen who called themselves the RING.

  “Who’re they?” Kowalski asked.

  Bolan glanced over to Brognola. The head Fed nodded approval at Kowalski being informed of top-level security information.

  “The RING has been showing up in intelligence captured from terrorist groups lately. I’ve found a couple references to them in Egypt, and these three—” Bolan waved his thumb at the men of Able Team “—picked up a reference to them when they raided a violent militia group a few weeks back.”

  “Terry Nichols and Timothy Mc Veigh did hire out their expertise to instruct the Abu Sayyaf Group in the construction of explosive devices,” Blancanales spoke up.

  “And the Abu Sayyaf Group receives much of its funding and organization from al Qaeda,” Bolan finished.

  “Christian identity nut bags and Islamic jihad crazies in bed together to attack the U.S. government?” Schwarz added.

  “Killumall,” Lyons murmured through his wired clenched
jaw.

  “Carl’s getting jealous,” Schwarz said.

  With almost Herculean effort, the Able Team leader managed to turn his hand around and raise a middle finger to the team’s electronics genius.

  “And he’s getting healthier,” Brognola said. The big Fed leaned over Lyons to emphasize his point. “But you’ll be benched for a while.”

  Lyons pointed to Kowalski. “Him.”

  Everyone looked over to the U.S. Marshall.

  “Not under strength,” Lyons growled. Bolan knew that Ironman wasn’t going to let Able Team enter the fray without its full compliment of three warriors. The blond ex-cop also knew that Bolan couldn’t fill that role because his part of the investigation might go elsewhere.

  “I…” Kowalski began.

  A low rumble escaped Lyons’s chest. “Watch my partners.”

  With that, Lyons’s eyelids drooped down, the fallen warrior slipping into half consciousness.

  FINALLY DISMISSING the memory, Bolan adjusted his position. He counted four men, trying to look like winos, but they were unconvincing. Not with clothes that didn’t show any fading. They were torn and frayed, but the colors were too fresh for them to be anything but quick camouflage. Even without getting close, the Executioner could also tell that the clothes were unsoiled by nature’s effects on alcohol-soaked bowels and bladders.

  He adjusted the Accuracy International AWC rifle and swept its scope across two of the four men he could see. The other two were walking lazily, trying to imitate a drunken stumble, most likely, toward the far end of the warehouse.

  Through the magic of optics, Bolan could make out the boxy frame of a MAC-10 or an Uzi under the folds of one of the many layers of abused shirts on the fake winos. Bolan swept up the scope and looked over the man’s face. It was too clean-shaven and not wrinkled enough to have been that of a man condemned to the streets. The eyes, though, were the biggest giveaway.