By then, it wouldn’t matter who still bought the cover story and who thought it was a pile of crap.
“Sounds like we’re good to go,” Knowlton said, barely wincing when he shifted on the seat and got a quick jab from his gunshot wound.
While Moseley operated solo in a stolen Honda CR-V, Sergeant Menendez would be running parallel to him in a Saturn Outlook SUV, no longer manufactured but maintained in tip-top shape from its last owner, who’d be pining for it now and hoping the police came up with something soon.
Fat chance.
Between their SUVs, Darby knew they could carry most of the old currency slated for burning, but he also understood there was a fifty-fifty chance that one or more of the hot cars would be disabled, whereupon they’d have to try an end run with the GM Canyon armored trucks and make it out that way. Plan B. The whole thing was a gamble, as it had been from day one, but they were all committed now. No turning back.
Well, maybe all but one.
Menendez was the major’s nagging headache now, still smarting over what they’d tried to pull with his fiancée, even though he should have understood the absolute necessity behind it. Love was truly blind in some respects, Darby supposed, but if he planned to screw them near the finish line, how would Menendez pull it off?
Just watch him, Darby thought, and take him down the first false move he tries to make.
Simple. Except that the sergeant had been trained with the best of them, adept with any weapon he could reach and cool at thinking on his feet. At least it seemed that Tyrone Moseley had accepted Darby’s lie about his brother in Newark—and if he hadn’t, what the hell. If Darby’s plan succeeded, only two Rangers would ride into the sunset with enough money for six or seven lifetimes, come what may.
And years from now, unless some unforeseen calamity stepped in to cut life short, who would be laughing then?
Chapter Ten
Salisbury, Maryland
The drive from Baltimore to Richmond spanned 150 miles, most of that on Interstate 495, also known as the Capital Beltway, circling around the urban sprawl of Washington, DC. Express lanes channeled traffic at a legal maximum of 65 miles per hour, though most drivers kicked it up a notch, trusting their eyes or illegal radar detectors to warn them of highway patrol cruisers prowling for speeders.
Moving violations were the least of Captain Dillon Elsberry’s concerns this day, transporting $8.25 billion and change to the shredders and incinerators at the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank. Riding in the front passenger seat of the Secret Service chase car, with an FN P-90 submachine gun on his lap, Elsberry felt as if he might be headed into mortal combat, and he wondered whether he was up to it.
His SMG was a personal defense weapon designed as a compact but powerful firearm for vehicle crews, operators of crew-served weapons, support personnel, Special Forces and counterterrorist teams. Its compact bullpup design with integrated reflex sight and fully ambidextrous controls reduced overall length to twenty inches, while featuring a 50-round detachable box magazine and a full-auto cyclic rate of 900 rounds per minute, with an effective range of 200 meters and a maximum range six times that. In expert hands, it placed its two-gram FN 5.7 mm rounds on target at a velocity of 2,350 feet per second.
And if Elsberry couldn’t manage that, he still had his SIG Sauer P-229, kicking ass with .357 SIG rounds designed to duplicate the performance of 125-grain .357 Magnum loads fired from a four-inch-barreled revolver. Backed by the eleven other members of his transport team, he couldn’t miss, right?
Wrong.
So far, there’d never been an interdiction of a transport shipment bearing mutilated bills to any Federal Reserve bank anywhere in the United States, and Elsberry was damned if he would be the first one to go down in infamy with that black mark against his name. He’d rather die fighting, without a chance to tell his wife and kids goodbye, than bear that shame. But if it came to that—
His driver’s voice cut through Elsberry’s gloomy reverie. “Smooth sailing so far, eh, Captain?” Earley Olmstead asked.
“Christ, don’t jinx it!” Elsberry replied. “Just drive and keep your eyes open.”
“Sorry.”
“Remember, if it happens—when it happens—” he included agents Lois Warner and Carl Tilman in the SUV’s backseat “—we’ll have backup dropping in, but there’s no word on who or how many. Shouldn’t be a problem, separating CID or whatever they are from the rogue Rangers, but we don’t take any chances, right?”
“Affirmative.” Three voices came back to Elsberry’s ears as one.
“Keep in mind all that training at Glynco,” he said, meaning the firearms instruction they’d all been through at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center outside Brunswick, Georgia. “Aim for center mass to start, and if they’re armored, try for head shots. Failing that, go for the legs and pelvis. Break your targets down and make damned sure they don’t get up again.”
Heads nodded, but their voices didn’t answer that advice. Killing went with the job sometimes, but no one liked to think about it in advance.
Until they had to, right, and there was no remaining choice.
Like now.
La Plata, Maryland
“I make it 86 miles, give or take,” Grimaldi said, “before they drop the cash.”
“With all things being equal,” Bolan answered.
“Minus Army Rangers, right.”
“So, anyplace between here and the Fed.”
“Not likely here, though.”
“Copy that.”
La Plata, near the state line and Potomac River, was the seat of Charles County, with some nine thousand year-round inhabitants. It wouldn’t be a bad place for the shipment interdiction, necessarily, but if the Rangers wanted better cover, lots of traffic and civilians for collateral, Bolan still put his money on the final stretch of East Byrd Street.
“Hal’s not expecting any prisoners, I take it,” Grimaldi remarked.
“He’d like some, I suppose, assuming that they’d talk.”
“All that resistance training...”
“Comes to nothing in the end if they wind up indefinitely caged at Gitmo, maybe someplace worse.”
So-called “enhanced interrogation” had been banned during the last administration, although die-hards called for its return, or even stepping it up a few more notches. Bolan didn’t know if that would happen, tried not to think much about it, but when Rangers crossed the line, somebody at the Pentagon or higher up was bound to have a yen for explanations. Thankful that he wouldn’t be involved in that end of the operation, if survivors were procured, Bolan supposed the better part of mercy would be putting down his opposition when he had the chance, leaving historians and analysts to sift the ashes afterward.
He was a soldier, not a prosecutor or inquisitor. His targets had already judged themselves and it was not his role to rewrite that decision on their part.
“Figure at least one of those cars down there is following the cash,” Grimaldi said.
“At least,” Bolan agreed. “More likely two or three. They’ll have the hit lined up, ready to go.”
“If we could pick them out—”
“Then we could hit them now,” Bolan concurred. “But since we can’t...”
“Just blowing smoke,” the Stony Man pilot groused.
“And staying ready. Razor sharp.”
“Don’t like the odds, though,” Grimaldi stated. “If we had some help from Able Team...”
“Busy on other things,” Bolan reminded him.
“Yeah, yeah. I know.”
Bolan knew that Grimaldi wasn’t suffering a lack of confidence, something the flyboy always had in good supply. He liked to gripe sometimes, like any other warrior in the field, as long as he didn’t allow defeatism to breach his mind or heart.
“A little closer and I’ll
start to scout the boneyards,” Grimaldi told him. “Someplace we can set down when it’s time.”
The Bell swept forward, picking up velocity, and left the armored transports briefly in its wake. Bolan kept quiet, gave Grimaldi room to prowl and plan the final confrontation with their enemies. When it went down, there’d be no time for second-guessing final moves. Commitment would be total, absolute and final, any way the hand played out.
The same as always, right. They’d go in locked and loaded, physically outnumbered and outgunned. Whoever came out on the other side alive could only claim a temporary victory and then the struggle would begin anew.
A game of life and death, where no one walked away long-term.
American Legion Memorial Bridge
Lower Potomac River
Riding solo in his sporty Honda CR-V, Tyrone Moseley drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, still fuming over his brother Jesse’s death. He hadn’t bought the bill of goods Major Darby had tried to sell him, Jesse’s murder coming mere hours before the bungled snatch attempted on Juanita Alvarado.
The question in his head at the moment: what should he do about it?
A rapper on the Honda’s radio was telling his homies to watch the throne, but that was only background music for the storm raging in Moseley’s head. The way he saw it, he had three choices.
First, he could tip the law right now and gut the master plan, surrender and wind up with nothing for himself except a term of life without parole at Leavenworth, the Army’s only US Disciplinary Barracks.
The second option was similar, a rat-out call, with Moseley in the wind before the Feds arrived. Maybe he’d make it out and maybe not, but either way, he wouldn’t have enough cash in his jeans to run or hide long-term.
The last option was fanciful at best, but maybe had a one or two percent chance of succeeding if he played it right. In that scenario, he’d go along with his so-called compatriots and when they started splitting up the cash to go their several ways, he’d spring his big surprise, cap Major Darby and the colonel, leave the others to their fate, and make off with whatever he could carry.
Moseley had worked it out online and knew a million dollars’ worth of twenties tipped the scale at fifty kilos. If it came in fifties, that would cut it back to twenty kilos, but he couldn’t count on any given denomination filling a pallet on its way to the incinerators. Try going for a hundred kilos, packing it into the Honda CR-V, and leave whichever Rangers were still standing to divide the rest. Whether he drove off with a million, two, or less, at least he’d have a start on his new life.
Or maybe Darby and the rest would smell a rat and take him down before he could even bust a move.
Gambling was risky, and the higher the table stakes became, the more a player stood to lose.
As far as arms went, he was packing an M-4 carbine, two M-9 pistols and a spare .357 Magnum Colt Python none of the others knew about. A gym bag full of frag and smoke grenades gave him an extra edge, but not a lot, considering the small arms his fellow Rangers would be carrying.
If it came down to facing all of them, Moseley made his chances slim to none, but maybe that was worth it for his brother’s sake.
Hoping that he could pull the third option out of his boonie hat, Moseley turned up the radio. The rapper had been waiting for a long, long time to pop some nines.
And, hell, who hadn’t?
Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building
Hal Brognola was following the Secret Service convoy and Grimaldi’s chopper on his laptop, via GPS, when one of his desktop telephones gave out a squawk that always made him think of an old cat disgorging hairballs. No one but the White House called that dedicated line and he picked up before the jarring sound echoed a second time.
“Brognola here.”
A secretary’s voice the big Fed recognized announced, “He needs to see you in the Situation Room.”
“How long?” Brognola asked.
“Right now.”
“I’m on my way.”
He closed the laptop, grabbed his jacket from the tall back of his swivel chair and buzzed his driver with an order to report downstairs immediately. Strictly speaking, there was no way for the Justice man to divine what might be on the President’s agenda for a “hurry” call, but if he’d had to bet, Brognola would have put his money on the Secret Service convoy, five rogue Rangers on an interception course, and Bolan soaring overhead to fall upon them like the wrath of God.
That was, if all went well.
Brognola had begun his federal service as an FBI “brick agent,” working cases out of half a dozen field offices before he was assigned to the Bureau’s fledgling Organized Crime Division. In that capacity, he’d met Mack Bolan as an adversary first, then felt his grudging admiration for the hellfire warrior growing first into covert alliance, then, in time, open collaboration near the end of Bolan’s war against the Mafia. From there, the rest was history, Brognola rising to become a key figure in the DOJ’s Criminal Division, officially divorced from everything except the daily workings of his covert team at Stony Man Farm. As such, he was on call around the clock to higher-ups, including the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General and the President of the United States.
Beyond that, well...whoever turned up in the Situation Room this day would come as a complete surprise.
While most DOJ executives were unarmed, depending on their bodyguards for security, Brognola found that old law-enforcement habits died hard. He’d upgraded his sidearm from the FBI’s original Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver, issued to him when he graduated from the Quantico Academy, to pack the current-issue Glock 22 chambered in .40 caliber. He qualified monthly, and would until the bosses ultimately forced him to retire. From there on, he’d continue carrying the automatic as authorized under the 2004 Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act, permitting retirees in good standing to retain their weapons in the public interest.
And, of course, because it had become a part of him.
His driver met him at the curb on Constitution Avenue, held his door while Brognola slid into the backseat of a year-old Lincoln Town Car, then got in behind the wheel and started on the six-block drive from Justice to the White House gates. En route, the big Fed palmed his cell and sent a text to Bolan, somewhere in the air.
Taking a summons to the WH. Back in touch ASAP—HB
Brognola didn’t wait for a reply. Expected none, with Bolan on the job. With any luck, the action would go down while he was in the Situation Room and give him some good news to share, for once. Otherwise...
He’d have to let the AWOL Rangers call the tune.
Airborne Over the Potomac River
“Hal’s been called to see the Man,” Bolan told Grimaldi over the Bell’s communication link.
“Hey, better him than us.”
They cleared the American Legion Memorial Bridge’s airspace and soared on toward the Fed. The Secret Service convoy wasn’t hard to spot below—or from the street, Bolan assumed, where any AWOL Rangers still on track to hit it should be closing in by now.
“East Byrd Street ahead.” Grimaldi’s voice crackled in Bolan’s ears.
Another moment and the landmark cemeteries came within his line of sight, one still accepting silent customers, the other closed to newcomers since Richmond fell to the bluecoats some 150 years ago. Each graveyard still admitted visitors, of course, and either one would make a decent quick stop for a cash exchange between the armored trucks and private vehicles on hand to take the cash.
Bolan hated the thought of turning either final resting place into a battlefield, but that depended on his enemies. For once, he almost wished the Rangers had been true jihadist converts rather than a gang of mercenary thieves intent on turning into instant billionaires.
The puzzler: were they all on board with the master plan? And, if not, would that final revelation help to t
ear the outlaw team apart?
Whichever, Bolan and Grimaldi would have ample mopping up to do in either case.
“Feed from the drone?” Bolan inquired.
“Online and running,” the pilot replied. “Still nothing firm.”
Cruising at two thousand feet above the Bell, a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper—one of the Army’s unmanned aerial vehicles—focused heat-sensitive cameras at vehicles running parallel to the cash transport convoy, counting living bodies inside SUVs, sedans and minivans bearing more than two passengers each. The drone could judge their size, though not actual ages, and determine which were likely carrying a contingent of Rangers bent on intercepting the shipment. One drawback was that the would-be bandits wouldn’t all be packed into a single vehicle, thereby restricting movement and their opportunity to stop the armored trucks en route.
Say two vehicles, then, or even three, and with so many cars below having a single passenger alone, the drone wasn’t much help. If it could spot the hard core of the Ranger team, all right, but otherwise...
The Reaper was unarmed this day, no Hellfire missiles to deliver, in accord with Bolan’s strict requirement that it not turn East Byrd Street into a random slaughterhouse of shrapnel, burning fuel and smoke that blinded drivers bound for wreckage up ahead. Whatever killing happened near the Fed this day, it would be Bolan’s doing, or Grimaldi’s, and the Rangers’.
And he guessed there would be death enough to go around.
Chapter Eleven
John F. Kennedy Conference Room
The White House Situation Room was a 5,525-square-foot basement conference chamber administered by National Security Council staff to monitor and deal with crises at home and abroad and to conduct secure communications with outside persons, often overseas. Its advanced communications equipment permits US presidents to maintain command and control of military forces around the world—except, of course, for AWOL rogues. The facility comfortably seated two dozen VIPs, but only four were present at that morning’s urgent conference.
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