* * *
Mack Bolan heard the burst of submachine gun fire directed from the Secret Service SUV and saw the slugs tattoo Sergeant Ernesto Menendez’s chest without apparent effect. The body armor came as no surprise. Rangers routinely wore it on their combat missions overseas, and would conceal it here because such things drew notice in the States, sometimes even from gawkers driving past on busy thoroughfares.
But one thing Bolan knew: armored was not invincible.
Bolan lay prone on the cool, wet grass, the city’s sprinklers bathing him like slightly chilled spring rain. A flash of intuition told him to remain in place and wait another moment, just in case the sergeant made another stab at opening the lead transport with what appeared to be a shaped charge of C-4 or Semtex high explosive.
And here Menendez came, slipping around the right front fender of the armored truck a second time, his left hand still clutching the wad of simulated clay, firing his M-4 carbine’s measured 3-round bursts one-handed as he advanced. He had the range and target acquisition for the Secret Service SUV, chinking its windshield with his 5.56 mm rounds and driving its four occupants to ground, although it didn’t seem he’d wounded any of them yet.
Bolan was ready for him this time, aiming well below the hemline of his OD jacket with the Steyr AUG’s sight, firing a burst that raked across the sergeant’s thighs and groin. Blood spurted from the Ranger’s denim jeans as he cried out in mortal pain and toppled over backward, squeezing off a last burst skyward from his autocarbine as he fell.
What happened next took Bolan by surprise, making him wonder if Menendez had been fool enough to arm his charge’s detonator for the second rush, linked to a cell phone or some other triggering device, whatever he could think of to save time.
Bad move.
The charge blew as Menendez landed on his back, loosing a crimson fountain from the ruin of his torso, shearing off his left arm at the shoulder and silencing his final scream as it erased his face. Gore splashed across the pavement of East Byrd Street, sprayed the lead Secret Service transport and resolved itself into a scarlet mist while Bolan hugged the grass and felt remnants of human shrapnel whistle overhead.
The door Menendez meant to blow, meanwhile, remained unscathed.
Another Ranger down. That left four at most, assuming Colonel Knowlton had been fit to join the raid. That shaved the odds, but Bolan still hoped he could wrap the action up before a swarm of first responders reached the scene and made themselves the unintended victims of a cross-fire massacre.
Speckled with blood across his scalp, shoulders and back, Bolan pushed off and went to join the war.
Chapter Thirteen
Approaching East Byrd Street
Richmond, Virginia
Hal Brognola’s chopper was an H120, manufactured by Airbus Helicopters, a five-seat, single-engine, light utility airship roughly half the size of Jack Grimaldi’s Bell. It had a cruising speed of 138 miles per hour, maximum 172 mph, with a range of 440 miles, or four times the distance from DC to Richmond.
No sweat, but Brognola was still perspiring as he stripped his jacket off in flight and shrugged into his TAC vest, tightening the Velcro straps on either side to fit snuggly while still allowing him to breathe. He left the Glock holstered on his right hip, below the vest, and checked his H&K MP-5 submachine gun with its retractable stock, a 30-round magazine already slotted into place.
A favorite with cops and military teams worldwide, the MP-5 featured four safety settings: “S” for safe, “E” for semiauto fire, “3” for measured 3-round bursts and “F” for fully automatic fire at a cyclic rate of 800 hundred rounds per minute. The big Fed’s weapon featured ambidextrous controls and a tritium-illuminated front-sight post for rapid target acquisition.
How long since he’d qualified using the MP-5? No point in worrying about it now.
As a last resort and killing time, Brognola checked his Ghost Survival Knife, drawing the weapon from its inverted scabbard, thumbed its full-tang stonewashed blade and put it back, hoping he wouldn’t need it in the fight ahead of him.
If he was forced to battle hand-to-hand...well, Brognola preferred the distance of a trusty firearm, but he’d use whatever weapon was needed for the job.
“I make it ninety seconds, sir.” His pilot’s voice came through the H120’s earphones, crisp and clear.
“Roger.”
A minute and a half.
The Justice man knew that damned near anything could happen in that fleeting length of time. Warriors could die or suffer crippling injury; a battle’s course could shift from victory to grim defeat, leaving a trail of corpses in its wake. Would he arrive to find the game already lost or Bolan and Grimaldi as the last men standing on a field of blood?
And what about the Secret Service or the local law? How many officers were racing toward the scene right now, some of them frightened, others yearning for a bit of action on a day that might have started slow with no relief in sight?
The pilot’s voice came back at him. “Sir, there’s a bulletin incoming.”
“Tell me.”
“An explosion’s been reported at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. That’s on West Leigh Street in Richmond, they’re reporting.”
“A diversion,” Brognola replied, mouthing a silent curse for punctuation.
He was vaguely conscious of the celebrated tourist draw, originally built as some immigrant’s mansion in the style of a European castle, later the Leigh Street Armory before it was converted to an educational facility. Beyond that, he could only draw a blank, but recognized the value of that target with a timed charge planted somewhere on the grounds. Local police and sheriff’s deputies would instantly respond to an explosion there, along with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, tasked with investigation of domestic terrorism in the States. While eager ants were swarming over that scene, Randall Darby must have hoped they’d be too late to intervene with a hijacking on East Byrd Street.
But the major and his Rangers hadn’t counted on Mack Bolan following their progress, tracking them and setting up an airborne ambush of his own.
Hal Brognola wasn’t superstitious, but he crossed his fingers anyway and offered up a silent invocation to the Universe, willing the Executioner to succeed in taking down his foes.
* * *
Bolan was dripping with bits of Ernesto Menendez as he rose to his feet and went in search of other prey. Somewhere behind the leading Secret Service armored transport, out of sight, he knew Tyrone Moseley had to be hiding, making himself small to keep from drawing hostile fire. The other AWOL Rangers, three or four of them, would be approaching from the convoy’s rear to close the trap.
And where was Bolan needed most?
Until the others showed themselves, he had no doubt: tracking Lieutenant Moseley.
If Menendez had been carrying a shaped charge, Bolan reckoned Moseley would be packing one, as well. The GM Canyon had two doors that granted access to its rear compartment, with a ton of currency inside and two more transport agents, both presumably alive and reasonably well so far. If he could keep them that way and eliminate a threat to one half of the money shipment, it would be at least a partial victory.
Which way to go?
Bolan already knew the transport’s driver and his up-front passenger were dead or critically disabled. Bloodstains on the inside of the cab’s bulletproof windows told him that in no uncertain terms. He also saw that the gun port on the rear compartment’s side door, facing him, was shut, presumably latched tight from the inside after one of the Rangers had breached the cab’s defenses and taken out the escort team in front.
Bad news for two heroes, but it ensured that Bolan could approach the transport’s starboard side without being cut down by friendly fire.
He took the chance and made the spring past hissing sprin
klers, sliding to a crouch beside the cab’s passenger door, blood painted the inside of its armored window as if daubed on with a brush. A ducking glance below the truck showed Bolan nothing but the final clouds emitted by a smoke grenade, masking whoever might be hiding on the GM Canyon’s driver’s side.
Instead of wasting live rounds on a grazing burst, hoping to take out Moseley’s legs by chance, Bolan crept toward the transport’s nose, moving as swiftly as caution allowed. He got there just in time to see an ovoid object lofting toward him from the far side of the Canyon, wobbling in midair but angling on a course that would have dropped it in his lap with any luck at all.
It took only a heartbeat for the Executioner to recognize the incoming M-26 grenade. From memory, he could have quoted what was stenciled on its OD cast-iron shell in yellow lettering, but recognition had already wasted one of his remaining four or five critical seconds as the timer fuse burned down.
Swiveling in a crouch, Bolan pushed off and used his legs to power away from the grenade, landing on soggy grass and rolling toward the curb of East Byrd Street, dropping six inches into swirling smoke beside the stationary armored truck. The blast’s shockwave swept over him, but shrapnel from the frag grenade tended to fly outward and upward, missing Bolan on its first pass, dozens of metal shards rattling against the Canyon’s starboard side and falling back again.
Some of them burned on impact, others cut through Bolan’s clothes and sliced his flesh with random, stinging cuts. One grazed his scalp, while the nearby explosion made his ears ring from its proximity.
How long before the grenadier rushed in to follow up, or tossed another lethal egg over the transport’s hood?
As if in answer to his silent question, Bolan heard the sound of running boots on blacktop, circling around the armored truck to finish it.
* * *
Dillon Elsberry was looking for the rogue Ranger he’d shot but failed to kill, hoping to get a second chance, when he beheld a total stranger rushing past him, entering the fray, and taking out the Hispanic Ranger with autofire from what appeared to be a Steyr AUG. Not only did he tag his target, but the would-be hijacker had somehow set off an HE charge that he was carrying when he went down, spraying the forward armored truck and its surroundings with a cloud of gore.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, a second blast came close behind the first. Elsberry hadn’t seen the frag grenade incoming, targeting the shooter who had taken down the Ranger, but the stranger had clearly seen it coming, ducking and diving for any cover he could find, and had barely made it—if he’d made it—when the second shockwave hit.
Elsberry was face-on toward the grenade when it exploded, ducking almost as an afterthought, while he heard Lois Warner yelp a startled cry behind him at the same instant. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge it all, apparently, as something hard and jagged struck his cheek an inch or two below his left eye, plowing through soft tissue at an angle, clipping off a portion of his ear as it emerged.
Elsberry dropped onto his back, as if a pro wrestler had body-slammed him in the ring. The left side of his face was numb at first, then burning hot and wet with the release of blood from mangled flesh. Somehow he kept his grip on the FN P-90 submachine gun without triggering an aimless burst, and kept his scrambled wits about him on the ground as Warner crouched beside him.
“Christ, Captain! Your face—”
“No shit,” he moaned. “How bad?”
She used a pocket handkerchief to dab blood from his left eye as she asked, “Can you see me?”
He could, in fact, with both eyes, which Elsberry took to be some kind of blessing. “Yeah. Sort of.”
“I need to move you. Get a compress on it. Can you help me?”
“Try to,” Elsberry replied.
From out of nowhere, then, Tilman knelt beside him on the other side, both agents sliding hands into Elsberry’s armpits, dragging him backward and out of hostile range—or so they hoped—behind their Secret Service SUV. Elsberry’s scrambled thoughts were clearing slowly, forming in sequence more or less, and even with his ears still ringing, plus a King Kong migraine settling in, he knew his first priority.
To stop the hijackers who still survived.
Warner snapped out to someone, maybe Agent Olmstead, “Get the first-aid kit, will you?”
Elsberry struggled to a seated posture, felt like swimming up from under water, and replied, “Forget that. We’ve got work to do. Don’t let them take the currency.”
“But, sir—”
“But nothing, Warner. That’s an order. Someone’s helping us, or maybe they already took him out. Whatever, we still have a job, and it’s killing time, patching me up.”
A whispered consultation somewhere overhead resolved itself when Warner and Tilman answered back, almost as one, “Yes, sir!”
“So, get me on my feet.” Elsberry prodded them with something he’d heard somewhere, sometime, maybe in a John Wayne movie. Anyway, it seemed to fit. “We’re burning daylight.”
Hands hoisted him again, lifting him through a mighty wave of dizziness and leaning him against the SUV’s tailgate. Elsberry braced himself with feet apart, clutching his SMG in a two-handed grip, and said, “One of the Rangers went up with an HE charge. Another one—Lieutenant Moseley, from the HQ file—is still up by the lead transport somewhere. One killed by CID or whoever they were, in Roanoke, and that leaves three still unaccounted for, the best that I can figure out.”
“They can’t be far away,” Warner said. “Have to be—”
But squealing rubber cut her off, another vehicle arriving on the scene, its driver slamming on his brakes. Elsberry just had time to glimpse the vehicle—maybe a Cadillac, maybe one of their flashy Escalades—before the new arrival’s doors flew open on both sides and riflemen piled out into the street.
* * *
Before the Caddy Escalade squealed to a halt on East Byrd Street, Darby reminded his companions, “When we hit it, take down anything that moves. The only friends we have out here are Moseley and Menendez.”
And he wouldn’t be counting the pair of them as friends much longer, if his master plan bore fruit. They were disposable, never intended to survive, and now that Colonel Knowlton had been wounded, even his head could be slated for the chopping block.
That posed a list of problems for the major: how to crack one of the armored trucks; then how much shrink-wrapped money could he transport to the Escalade and carry off to parts unknown before his fellow Rangers realized there’d been a double-cross and they were on the spot? Prospective billions might be dwindling into millions now, before his very eyes, but any tally touching seven figures was a damned sight more than he could ever earn while serving Uncle Sam.
“Colonel,” he directed Knowlton, almost as an afterthought, “haul out the Barkas when you bail.”
“Affirmative.”
No argument, and that was good. The Russian launcher’s extra twenty-two pounds would put added strain on Knowlton’s wound, might even start it bleeding all over again, but Darby couldn’t help it. They were on the firing line, against the Secret Service for a start, with other lawmen doubtless inbound, even with the HE blast he’d timed to draw off reinforcements toward Richmond’s Black History Museum.
Some plans were bound to fail in battle. That was part of life, but dedicated soldiers forged ahead and did their job regardless. Or, as the Ranger Creed declared, “Readily will I display the intestinal fortitude required to fight on to the Ranger objective and complete the mission, though I be the lone survivor.”
Even if Darby had planned it that way, more or less.
They had arrived seconds too late to witness Ernesto Menendez disintegrating from the detonation of his own shaped charge, but heard the thump of that explosion and beheld the next one, as a frag grenade went off beside the lead GM Canyon. The Secret Service chase car had already stopped, disgorging agent
s, when the storm of shrapnel hit and wounded one of them, scarring his face for life.
How many special agents left?
Darby knew only one way to find out and that was wading in to meet them on the ground, matching their wits and weapons against wage slaves in their uniforms, seeing which team came out on top.
And time was of the essence now, with not a second left to spare.
“Launcher!” he barked at Knowlton, jogging back to take the Russian Barkas from his partner’s hand and hefting it across one shoulder, turning back to join the melee swirling on the thoroughfare while heedless drivers streamed on past the action, deafened by their stereos or jabbering into their phones.
* * *
Colonel Knowlton felt his stitches part as he wrangled the Russian RPG-32 Barkas out of the Caddy’s backseat and passed it to Major Darby. That relieved the pressure in his side, but it was too damned late. Bleeding again, he tried to concentrate on other things—like getting off East Byrd Street and away from there with cash enough to lead another life, somewhere he wasn’t being hunted like an animal.
The odds against that outcome were increasing by the second and he knew it, but a Ranger never quit, never conceded defeat. In Knowlton’s case, surrender would mean life in Supermax if he were lucky, more likely a solitary cage at Gitmo, which one president had built, another had vowed to close, and none had taken any steps to shut down.
Right now, he had to focus on survival, keeping up with Darby to retrieve enough old cash in no sequential order that their futures—if they had any—were paved in gold. It wasn’t absolutely hopeless yet, not quite, but if he dragged ass any longer...
Darby had advanced upon the second armored transport, blocked in by its leader but undamaged, so far, save for bullet nicks and gouges in its black paintwork. He had the bulbous RPG already shouldered, a rocket ready in the tube. Upon release, its 105 mm projectile’s solid-fuel rocket motor would burn out before it left the launcher’s tube, five switchblade-type fins springing erect to stabilize its flight as soon as it was off and flying toward its target. Not a long shot in this case, no more than fifty yards, delivering its HE payload on the GM Canyon’s stout back door.
Enemies Within Page 13