Enemies Within

by Don Pendleton

  Then he could turn the game around, damned right.

  He had only two choices: pivoting to his left or to his right. He wouldn’t have much time, but blasting 3-round bursts from his M-4 carbine should be enough to drop his adversary or at least to disable him. And once the guy was down...

  The rest wouldn’t be easy, as he understood the term, but it could still be doable. Pick up the duffel bag of cash and leg it to the nearest cemetery wall, where he would scramble over it by hook or crook and find another public street in front of him. A street meant cars; whether he found them parked or passing by, it made no difference. He could hotwire most models, and a gun would get him any ride he needed, if its owner cared to keep on breathing. After that, he’d think about the Secret Service, local cops and sheriff’s deputies, and all the rest of his assembled enemies.

  Take one step at a time, and step one was escaping from the boneyard with his life.

  Tanner took time to double-check the setting on his carbine’s safety, even though he knew it had been set for automatic bursts. Aiming would be a luxury when he was face-to-face with his pursuer, but he’d do his best on that, as well.

  Hit first, hit hard and make it stick.

  They should have put that in the Ranger Creed.

  * * *

  Darby glanced backward when he heard the single rifle shot, clearly a 5.56 mm NATO round, and saw Tanner go down. A heartbeat later he knew Walton wasn’t dead, just dazed, swept off his feet, as he clambered behind a gravestone to find cover from the man who’d tried to finish him.

  He was a big guy, right around the major’s height and bulk, advancing on the spot where the captain had gone to ground. He seemed implacable, relentless as one of those robots from the Terminator movies, but then his head swiveled around, eyes reaching out to Darby, marking him as next.

  Why not right now? the Ranger asked himself. Another lucky shot might injure or disable him, while Mr. X went on to deal with Tanner, then came back to make it a clean sweep. Was he that confident of taking Darby down before he reached the cemetery wall and scrambled clear?

  Turning away from death personified, Darby poured on more speed. Tanner would serve his purpose as a decoy, if he bought the major time to put more ground between him and his determined enemy. Another human sacrifice, as planned from day one of the scheme.

  But the red-brick wall was still at least two hundred yards away and Darby’s legs were tiring from the extra bulk strapped to his back. Who knew the future weighed so much?

  “You did.” He answered his own question, nearly breathless. “Had it planned to the nth degree and then some.”

  Sure. But that was then and this was—

  Suddenly a burst from an automatic weapon ripped through the solemn cemetery air, and Darby wasted no more time on Tanner, fighting for his life. The captain would survive. Or he would not. Whatever happened next was down to luck or fate, and Darby put his trust in speed.

  * * *

  Mack Bolan closed in on the monument bearing the surname Hamilton, with given names and vital stats for husbands, wives and children scrolling down below. He didn’t count how many were interred there, already preoccupied with sniffing out one of the only three men still alive inside the cemetery’s walls.

  Across the grounds, still laboring to reach another of the graveyard’s distant walls, he saw the last survivor of the AWOL Ranger team. The fleeing man was still within his Steyr’s range, but Bolan stayed his hand and concentrated on the raider crouched behind the weathered stone in front of him.

  “It’s over,” he advised the hidden Ranger, stationed where he had all angles of the headstone covered, any way his adversary broke. “Don’t make it any harder on yourself.”

  A ragged laugh came back at him. “Harder? Please! What’s harder than a life in Supermax or in a dog cage at Guantanamo?”

  “No life at all,” Bolan replied.

  A hesitation, then, “I’ve got a couple billion in this bag. You let me walk, I’ll give you half of it.”

  “Too rich for my blood,” Bolan said.

  “A modest guy. Well, can I know who ran me down, at least?”

  “You wouldn’t recognize my name,” Bolan replied. “Besides, who would you tell?”

  “Hell, nobody,” the captain replied. “It’s just for me. I’d like to—”

  He never waited to find out, twisting away from the headstone to Bolan’s left, likely considering that most people were right-handed and would hesitate for just a fraction of a second when presented with an unexpected move.

  But then, the Executioner wasn’t most people.

  A burst from Bolan’s AUG slammed into Tanner’s OD jacket, hammering the body armor underneath like angry fists, and he was going over backward, gasping but still nearly fit to fight, when two or three rounds caught him in the face.

  After that, he wasn’t fit for anything.

  Bolan turned from the dead man and his duffel bag of currency, leaving them there for someone else to claim. Turning, he started jogging, traveling after the last ex-ranger still alive and on his feet. The major. Right. Presumably the brains behind it all.

  Some eighty yards remained before his target reached the cemetery wall and made his bid for freedom, but grim death was gaining on him now and narrowing the runner’s lead.

  * * *

  Randall Darby couldn’t say exactly when or how his best-laid plans had gone to hell, but it had always been a possibility he recognized. Nobody rolled the dice for billions without risking that they’d turn up snake eyes in the crunch. Now here he was, alone and running for his life, with no more than a squeaky fifty-fifty chance of making it.

  So what?

  Most people never got to play at the high table, and if you only got there once, by God, you were obliged to bet whatever you could lay your hands on: medals, reputation, even life itself.

  Another burst of gunfire drew Darby’s attention back to where he’d last seen Tanner go to ground. He was just in time to see the former captain—now disgraced and stricken off the regimental lists like all the rest of them—collapse into that boneless sprawl that only the dead could achieve. Details were hazy in the distance, but the smear of blood on Tanner’s face told Darby that his final thoughts had been dispersed into thin air.

  The shooter who had finished Tanner turned toward Darby and started double-timing from the latest kill site, following his sole surviving target.

  Darby took a chance, shouldered his M-4 carbine long enough to tap a 3-round burst downrange, and saw his adversary duck with a shoulder roll that spoke of long experience in battle zones.

  All right.

  They’d sent a pro to kill a pro, of course.

  Darby expected nothing less, and knew that there were countless candidates available, from Delta Force to Green Berets and Navy SEALs, the Marine Corps’ Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team or Force Recon, Night Stalkers from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—the honor roll went on and on.

  He wouldn’t know the man who’d come to kill him, didn’t care to, but he damned sure recognized the type, from being one himself: a pro who wouldn’t stop unless you put him down so hard he’d never rise again.

  And Darby had already missed his first, perhaps best, shot.

  It was the other man’s turn now, Darby recognized, and turned his jog into a headlong sprint across soft grass.

  * * *

  Bolan already knew his 5.56 mm Steyr wouldn’t penetrate the Type III armor that Darby most likely wore. Instead of duplicating failure from the last time, he lowered his rifle’s muzzle, pegged its integrated telescopic sight on one of Darby’s madly pumping legs and stroked its trigger lightly, squeezing off a single shot at something close to eighty yards. He saw the FMJ projectile strike blue denim, spraying blood on impact, and his man went down face-first.

  Still dange
rous, of course, but Darby wasn’t going anywhere.

  When Bolan closed the gap by half, he heard the wounded Ranger’s tortured breathing, curses muttered at the pain but minus the sobbing a civilian might have offered up on being shot. From Darby’s dossier, he knew the major had avoided any combat wounds while overseas. But he was hurting now, no guarantee that he would ever walk again, even if he surrendered on the spot.

  Which, Bolan reckoned, wasn’t in the cards.

  With effort and a gasp, Darby rolled over onto his back, supported by the duffel bag of cash as if it were a pillow placed to prop him up in bed. The exit wound from Bolan’s rifle shot was ugly: bone exposed—a shattered femur—and a snarl of mutilated muscle draped across the inside of his thigh.

  “Well, hell,” Darby said, striving for the semblance of a grin. “It’s come to this.”

  “Looks like it,” Bolan said.

  “I’m guessing Tanner tried to buy you off already?”

  Bolan nodded. “I turned him down.”

  “He offered...what, half?”

  “Half,” Bolan agreed.

  “Forget that. Keep his whole stash. Just forget you saw me here.”

  “And what?” Bolan asked. “You just crawl away like this, over the wall? Then what?”

  “Not your problem.”

  “But it would be. Living with it.”

  “Geez, you do-gooders.”

  “You still don’t have to die,” Bolan reminded him.

  “Oh, no? I’m suddenly immortal now?”

  “I meant today.”

  “As good as any other, I suppose.” The smile on Darby’s face was more relaxed, no longer forced.

  Bolan could see the major making up his mind.

  “Before we do this,” Bolan said, “just tell me—was it worth it?”

  “What, the gamble? Hell, yeah. You ever play the high table? I didn’t think so. If you’ve never felt that rush, I recommend it.” As he finished speaking, Darby’s right hand darted toward the M-9 pistol holstered on his hip.

  Bolan was ready for it, squeezed harder than last time on the Steyr AUG’s progressive trigger, and a burst of NATO tumblers ended it.

  Palming his walkie-talkie, Bolan double-checked to see that it was set for Hal Brognola’s frequency. Thumbing down the two-way radio’s transmitter button, he said, “We’re finished here. Somebody want to come and take a cool four billion dollars off my hands?”

  Epilogue

  Arlington National Cemetery

  The game ended where it began, among the honored dead. There would be no grand military funerals for six ex-Rangers who had fallen on the way, disgraced and dishonorably discharged now—not that it mattered to them anymore.

  Mack Bolan walked with Hal Brognola past the ranks of white headstones, deciding on the spot that he would stay away from cemeteries for a while. Their meeting place had been Brognola’s choice, however, and he hadn’t felt like arguing about it on the phone.

  “Jack’s doing well,” the big Fed said. “The medics think he’ll be out in another day or two, as soon as they’re convinced that his concussion won’t flare up after he’s released.”

  “A hard head comes in handy,” Bolan quipped.

  “Sometimes. No flying for a couple weeks, but that’s all right. He needs the down time, anyway.”

  “No sign of any manifestos in the media,” Bolan observed.

  “And there won’t be any. As far as any of the news hawks know, Darby and company were just a bunch of guys with PTSD from their duty postings, roped into a crazy scheme by Darby. What do the shrinks call it? Folie à deux?”

  “That means ‘madness of two,’” Bolan answered. “With five, it ought to be folie à cinq, but medics also call it folie en famille, assuming all five crazies should be in one family.”

  “Hey, look at you, spouting French,” Brognola said. “Now that I think of it, I guess they were a family of sorts.”

  “Gone wrong,” Bolan amended.

  “Well, it’s over now,” Brognola said. “We’re leaking items that connect them to the bomb in Central Park and at Richmond’s Black History Museum. They’re good for it, and no one’s left to contradict us anyhow.”

  “And the gas leak, before?”

  “We’re sticking to that story. Switching now just muddies everything and leads to more questions.”

  “It would,” Bolan concurred.

  Brognola gazed across the rows of pristine markers as he asked, “Do you suppose they got it at the end?”

  “Got what?”

  “That all they’d done was throw their lives away, and proud careers?”

  “Playing the high table, he called it,” Bolan answered.

  “Who?”

  “Darby.”

  “I’d call those sucker’s odds,” Brognola said.

  “Depends on how you look at it, I guess.”

  “Those offers,” Brognola said. “You weren’t even tempted, right?”

  “They only had four billion,” Bolan told him. “I was holding out for five.”

  Brognola smiled at that. “Maybe there’ll be a bonus in your Christmas stocking.”

  “Right.” Changing the subject, Bolan said, “So you, back in the field. I didn’t think you missed it.”

  “I felt it was an emergency. And, looking back, I don’t. I think a desk suits me just fine.”

  “Large and in charge.”

  “Not sure how large I feel right now. It almost got away from us.”

  “But didn’t,” Bolan reassured him. “That’s what matters.”

  “Same thing the Man said, more or less.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  “Where are you headed now?” Brognola asked.

  “A little down time. You know how to reach me.”

  “That I do. Stay frosty, eh?”

  “Name of the game.”

  Bolan stood watching as his old friend moved off toward Arlington’s Visitor Welcome Center and parking facility.

  When the big Fed was out of sight, the Executioner turned back, retraced his steps and came once more to stand before the Tomb of the Unknowns. The guard was changing and he watched them going through their paces, step by slow and measured step.

  Bolan decided, not for the first time, that he had much in common with the unknown soldiers buried there. Shorn of his birth name, with his face altered and every written trace of him eradicated from official files, how much was left of him?

  Not much—only the things he did, the missions he took on for Hal Brognola and the team at Stony Man Farm, guarding the country that was everything to him. To that cause he had pledged his life and risked it countless times, at home and at the far-flung corners of the world.

  And so he would continue, as long as strength and breath remained to him. The unknown soldier knew the stakes he played for at his own high table, and he knew someday the cards would eventually turn against him.

  But not this day.

  * * * * *

  For Sergeant First Class Leroy Petry, US Army Rangers. Congressional Medal of Honor winner, July 12, 2011.

  ISBN-13: 9781488096075

  Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Michael Newton for his contribution to this work.

  Enemies Within

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