Homeland Terror

VanderMeer couldn’t be certain, but it looked as if he was coughing up blood.

“Jesus, are you okay?” she asked.

Yarborough shrugged. “Down the wrong pipe,” he said. “Don’t sweat it.”

VanderMeer stared at Yarborough, then went on, “Look, there’s something you should know. Not everything from that heist was stashed away in the shed here. There was one piece that—”

The woman was interrupted as the door to the patio swung open and Jason Cummings poked his head out, a 9 mm Uzi submachine gun clutched in his right hand.

“There you are,” he told Yarborough. “Grab a gun, quick!”

“Problem?” Yarborough asked, grinding his cigarillo into the gravel. His coughing jag had passed as quickly as it had overtaken him.

“Somebody tripped an alarm out on the grounds,” Cummings said. “They’ve broken into that storage shed near the pond.”

THE ALARM WAS SILENT, but Bolan spotted the separated sensor pads above the door the moment he entered the storage shed. The entire system was rigged from the inside, and there was no way he could have spotted it prior to picking the lock, but still the Executioner chided himself for the oversight. I should have known, he thought to himself angrily.

Bolan fought off the urge to flee. Instead he tapped his earbud transceiver as he moved deeper into the enclosure, directing the beam of his palm-sized flashlight onto the crates stored against the far wall. There were more of them than he was anticipating—nearly a dozen in all—but only a few bore stenciling that linked them back to the Aberdeen proving grounds. By the time Jack Grimaldi’s voice crackled in his ear, Bolan had honed in on one of the stenciled crates and pried the wooden lid open.

“What’s up?” Grimaldi asked.

“I tripped an alarm,” Bolan reported, even as he was staring down at the cache of missing weapons he’d come to the fantasy camp looking for. “The good news is I found the rocket launchers. All but one, that is.”

Secured within custom-cut, foam-lined compartments inside the crate Bolan had just opened were three Army-issue M-136 AT-4 rocket launchers, each loaded with an 84 mm warhead capable of piercing nearly 400 mm of rolled homogenous armor, a thickness surpassing that found on most tanks and concrete bunkers. There was a conspicuous cavity in the molded foam where a fourth launcher had once rested.

“Forget the damn launchers,” Grimaldi snapped. “I’m coming in. Get your ass out where I can see it!”

“Will do,” Bolan said, “once I find something better than Cowboy’s popgun to defend myself with.”

Bolan clicked off the earbud and hurriedly inspected the contraband stored in the other crates. By the time the first glimmer of Jason Cummings’s headlights shone through the open doorway of the shed, Bolan had found what he was looking for.

“I KNEW IT WAS A MISTAKE to move that stuff here and sit on it!” Jason Cummings seethed as he gave the Hummer more gas. “We should’ve stashed it all off-site somewhere!”

“Hind-fucking sight doesn’t help us!” Mitch Brower snapped in response. He knew Cummings was right, though, and was furious with himself for having insisted they keep their cache of stolen weapons close by until they’d brokered deals to sell them. There was still a chance this would prove to be a false alarm—something as benign as rats tripping the sensors or one of the campers out snooping around—but in his gut Brower knew better. They were in trouble.

The Hummer’s front tires squealed in protest as the retired sergeant rounded the curve leading to the workout area. The Uzi was cradled in his lap. Brower sat next to him with a slightly larger 9 mm L-34 A-1 Sterling, the mainstay subgun of Britain’s Royal Marines. Glowing in the rearview mirror were the headlights of the Jeep that Marcus Yarborough was driving.

Eddie Chang was riding shotgun alongside Yarborough in the rear vehicle, having ignored Cummings’s orders to stay behind with Joan VanderMeer, Louie Paxton and Xavier Manuel. Having no idea what was at stake, the martial-arts expert was treating the whole affair as a lark. He was unarmed and assumed that Yarborough’s Uzi was loaded with blanks.

“C’mon, admit it,” Chang shouted over the roar of the Jeep’s engine. “This is one of those improv exercises, right? Like that time the sergeant hired those Green Berets to barge in pretending they were armed robbers fleeing a bank job.”

“Zip it!” Yarborough yelled back, eyes fixed on the road ahead. He took the next turn sharply, staying close behind the Hummer. Up ahead, he thought he could see a figure charging out of the storage shed. Yarborough thought back to earlier in the day when he’d grudgingly helped Mitch Brower haul several weapons crates into the shed from the back of a Ford pickup. He wondered if he’d gotten himself caught up in some kind of government sting operation, and as he quickly scanned the surrounding grounds, he half expected to see a SWAT force materialize out of the shadows. What he got instead was the sudden, blinding glare of a flash grenade that had just detonated on the road in front of the Hummer.

“What the hell?” Eddie Chang raised a hand before his face, but the grenade had already left him temporarily blinded.

Yarborough was similarly stricken, and he feared Cummings and Brower had probably been blinded in the Hummer directly ahead of him. He figured Cummings would go for his brakes and did likewise.

The Jeep’s tires screeched, and Yarborough felt the vehicle go into a skid. Any second he expected to slam into the rear of the larger vehicle.

“We’re dead,” he muttered.

BOLAN KNEW the incendiary flash was coming. Before the grenade burst forth with its blinding light, the Executioner turned his back to the explosion and cast his eyes downward, locking them on the 7.62 mm Belgian FN FAL carbine he’d wrested from one of the crates inside the storage shed. He’d already fed a 20-round cartridge into the breech and cleared the weapon for firing. The grenade had tipped the balance in his favor, but only for a moment. Bolan knew he was outnumbered. If he didn’t act fast, any second he would be outgunned, as well.

Once he heard the crunch of colliding metal, Bolan turned back toward the road and drew a bead on the Hummer, which had slewed sideways and skidded halfway off the road. The vehicle was so large it was difficult to even see the Jeep that had rear-ended it. Not that it mattered. Bolan’s focus was on the men in the front seat of the Hummer. He could tell that Brower and Cummings were still half-blinded, but they both had their subguns in view and would likely start firing once they could see their target.

Bolan wasn’t about to let it come to that. Finger on the trigger, he cut loose with the assault rifle, raking the Hummer’s front windshield with a concentrated autoburst. The glass shattered and the men inside the vehicle shuddered as the rounds slammed into them, killing them both before either could get off a shot.

By now the afterglow of the flash grenade had dissipated, leaving the grounds even darker to the eye than before the explosion. Far behind Bolan, past the tree-lined knoll, the Executioner could hear the first cries of the fantasy campers as they rushed from their barracks, drawn by the blast. Bolan suspected guards from the main gate would also be racing to the scene any second, joined perhaps by more men from the main building. No one had yet emerged from the Jeep that had crashed into the rear of the Hummer, but Bolan wasn’t about to waste precious seconds moving forward to engage them. He wasn’t about to stand around waiting on the arrival of Jack Grimaldi, either.

Bolan had taken a second grenade with him when he’d left the storage shed, this one an avacado-sized M-61 fragger. Once he’d stepped several yards to the edge of the man-made pond, he thumbed free the safety pin, then lobbed the projectile back toward the shed. He’d left the door wide open, and the grenade sailed clearly through the opening. Bolan couldn’t recall exactly how much of a delay the grenade was equipped with, but he took advantage of what little time he had, casting aside the carbine and diving into cold, murky depths of the training pond. By the time the grenade detonated, he’d clawed his way inside the half-submerged sewer pipe.

THE INITIAL BLAST of the frag grenade was fierce enough. But when shock waves and incendiary bursts ripped through the weapons carts and triggered secondary explosions, the shed was turned into the equivalent of one large bomb. For a second it looked as if the sun had briefly awakened from a nightmare, as the shed gave off a glow far more baleful than that of the flash grenade.

Off in the distance, the campers who’d rushed from the barracks clutched at the nearby magnolias to keep from being thrown to the ground by the earthquakelike trembling beneath their feet. Downhill, the shock waves were even more intense, rocking the Hummer sideways and sending it tumbling on top of the Jeep, which had already been rendered inoperable after rear-ending the larger vehicle.

Eddie Chang, dazed and still half-blind in the front seat of the Jeep, opened his mouth to scream when the Hummer loomed above him like some pouncing beast. The scream died in his throat, however, as he was crushed by the three-ton juggernaut. Marcus Yarborough was spared a similar fate, as he’d been thrown sideways out of the Jeep during the initial impact. He’d landed hard on one knee, then passed out when his head struck the asphalt.

When he came to moments later, roused by the trembling of the road beneath him, Yarborough’s first impression had been that someone was shaking him awake. Disoriented, a din in his ears and his field of vision swarming with blips of light that zoomed about like errant spaceships, Yarborough groaned and slowly sat up. A shiver of pain radiated from his bruised knee. The Hummer had come to a rest on its side only a few feet away, and he could see Mitch Brower’s bloody corpse dangling halfway out the shattered windshield. The nearby Jeep had been left half-flattened, its tires blown out, Eddie Chang crushed nearly beyond recognition.

By the time Yarborough had fully regained his wits, a handful of fantasy campers were on their way down the slope leading to the workout area. Their eyes were not on the sharpshooter, however, so much as on the fiery crater where the storage shed had once stood. Nothing remained of the structure but a few chunks of foundation and smoldering bits of cinder block lying in the surrounding grass. Recalling the weapons crates he’d helped transfer into the shed earlier in the day, the sharpshooter began to realize what had just happened.

Before the campers could reach him, Yarborough heard the bleat of a car horn. Turning to his right, he saw the BMW Z3 pull up alongside him. Its lights were off, and he couldn’t see who was behind the wheel until Joan VanderMeer leaned over and swung open the passenger door.

“Hurry!” she urged. “Get in!”

Yarborough grabbed hold of the door and stood up, then tumbled into the front seat next to VanderMeer. He barely had time to close the door before the woman had shifted the car back into gear. She drove off the road long enough to circle around the other two vehicles, then returned to the asphalt and accelerated as she headed back toward the camp headquarters and the mountains that loomed behind it. As she switched on the headlights and gave the sports car more gas, VanderMeer told Yarborough, “We’re outta here!”

THE HALF-SUNKEN SEWER PIPE Bolan had crawled inside withstood the concussive force of the blasts that had neutralized the storage shed, but the pond had been showered with debris. When he emerged from the concrete tube and stood, drenched and shivering in the waist-deep pond, the Executioner was surrounded by floating bits of shrapnel, some of it giving off wisps of smoke. He’d lost his earbud somewhere in the pipe and wasn’t about to go back searching for it. Instead, he slogged his way to the steep embankment and pulled himself up to level ground.

Bolan quickly surveyed the aftermath of the mayhem he’d unleashed, then glanced skyward, alerted by the sound of an approaching helicopter. Soon he could see the aircraft sweeping past the magnolia treetops. He wasn’t sure if he was still giving off a GPS signal, so he made a point to wave his arms. If Grimaldi was looking his way, Bolan figured the pilot would be able pick up his silhouette backlit by the still-blazing crater.

One of the campers thought Bolan was signaling to him and waved back, shouting, “I see you, man! What the hell happened?”

“Is this for real?” another of the campers said, eyes fixed on the bodies ensnarled in the overturned Hummer and the half-crushed Jeep. “Hell, those guys look like they’re fucking dead!”

Bolan paid no heed to the questions. He’d shifted his gaze back toward the administration building and the hills behind it. He could see taillights up on the mountain road, and once he checked the parking lot next to the building, he knew that someone was fleeing in the BMW. He also knew that by the time Grimaldi picked him up, it would likely be too late for them to give chase. Just on the other side of the mountain was the main highway, as well as the residential sprawl of Sykesville. Too many escape routes, too many places to hide.

As he waited for Grimaldi to land the chopper, Bolan glanced back at the crater. At least he had the satisfaction of having destroyed the weapons cache before it could be put to use by enemies of the state. Even that realization was tempered somewhat, however, as Bolan couldn’t help wonder what had happened to the one rocket launcher left unaccounted for. It was still out there, he realized, like a proverbial loose cannon.

1

McLean, Virginia

Edgar Byrnes’s breath clouded in the chilled March air as he brushed snow off the woodpile and gathered a few logs for his evening fire. It was dusk. The moon was out, a thin, waxing sliver poised like a scythe above the dark storm clouds rolling in from the Atlantic. A faint breeze stirred through the forest of elms and sycamores surrounding the four-acre farm Byrnes called home. Leaves were budding on the trees despite the late frost, but through the branches Byrnes was still able to glimpse the outline of a monolithic building located a quarter mile away on the other side of the woods. It was the only visible trace of modern civilization, and in another week or two Byrnes knew the trees would fill in, obscuring the structure from view entirely.

We can’t wait much longer, Byrnes thought to himself as he carried the logs past a weathered lean-to shared by three cows, two horses and menagerie of pigs, chickens and sheep. One of the horses, a sturdy roan with a jet-black mane and tail, was out in the corral, snorting as it paced back and forth through the mud.

“Sorry, Jefferson,” Byrnes called out. “Too cold to go riding tonight.”

Once he reached his small one-room cabin, Byrnes freed one hand to let himself in, then kicked the door shut behind him. Last month, shortly after he’d been hired to work the farm, his first job had been to patch cracks in the mortar between the hand-hewn logs that formed the cabin’s four walls. He’d done a good job but such crude insulation could only keep out so much of the cold; inside it was still freezing.

After setting the logs onto a bed of kindling in the large stone fireplace, Byrnes blew on his hands and rubbed them over the lone flame of an oil lamp he’d left burning on a nearby table. Once the feeling came back to his fingers, he plucked a few hay straws off the dirt floor and used the lamp to light them, then crouched before the stacked wood. The straws’ flames crackled as they took hold of the kindling and began to spread. Soon the logs had caught fire as well, sending smoke up the chimney.

Byrnes pulled a wooden rocker close to the hearth and sat down. His workday, which had begun nearly twelve hours ago at the crack of dawn, was finally over. He smiled tiredly, filled with a sense of accomplishment.

It would soon be a full eight weeks that Byrnes, a thirty-two-year-old Gulf War veteran, had been working at the Michael Conlon Farm, a state-owned Colonial homestead painstakingly maintained to reflect what ordinary farm life had been like back in the days of the country’s founding fathers. For Byrnes the experience had been a joyful revelation, so much so that there had been times when, for days on end, he had forgotten the true reason he’d come to work here. He’d learned so much in that time: how to make soap from tallow; how to tan animal hides and use the leather to make shoes and clothes; how to spin wool from sheep; the best way to fetch water from nearby streams and boil it with fresh vegetables from the garden to make a nourishing stew.

The past few weeks in particular, when he’d come to be the sole caretaker living on the premises, had been like heaven. Having the place to himself most days, he exulted in the solitude and isolation, the sense that he had indeed been transported back to a time when America was the home of those who were self-reliant and bound by high ideals—a time before values had eroded in the face of complacency and the government had grown into what Byrnes felt was a festering cancer eating away at the foundation upon which the nation had been built.

Staring into the fire, stroking the thick brown beard he’d grown to cover chemical burns sustained during his time in the Gulf, Byrnes found himself wondering, as he had so many nights before, what it had to have been like to have been a part of that simpler and nobler past. Of one thing he was certain: back then the men who’d put their lives on the line to fight the Revolution had been treated as heroes and looked after once the war had been won. Nothing like today. No being shuttled through some uncaring bureaucratic maze; no denial of hard-earned benefits; no shameless attempts to dismiss claims of illness stemming from exposure to carcinogens and other toxins while in the line of duty. And all those years ago, Byrnes knew there had been no insidious attempts to silence those who might dare to band together to give their grievances a stronger voice. Back then, the notion of a citizens’ militia had been applauded and championed, not spit upon by self-serving federal agents and the brainwashed masses.

Byrnes felt he’d been born in the wrong century. And the penalty for his bad luck? Instead of being honored as a returned warrior, he saw himself viewed as a pariah. An outcast and fringe lunatic. Little wonder it had taken the isolation of the farm for him to find even the faintest glimmer of inner peace. And he knew that peace was as illusory as it was temporary. Soon he would be called upon to carry out his mission, and when that happened, all his memories of the past months would be just that: memories. The realization darkened Byrnes’s mood as surely as nightfall had begun to press its inky blackness on the cabin windows. Byrnes could feel himself tensing in the chair as his rage, like some roused beast, began to once again overtake him.

By now the fire in the hearth was blazing. Agitated, Byrnes began to fumble with the buttons of his coat. The buttons were made of bone, and it was no easy task to work them through the hand-sewn loops. He was struggling with the task when an overheated strip of bark was launched out of the fire at him. Startled, Byrnes let out a cry and recoiled, overturning the rocker in his haste to throw himself to the dirt floor. Panic seized him as he crawled away from the fire and curled into a fetal position, clutching his head protectively. Sweat beaded his face and his heart convulsed inside his chest. He was overwhelmed by a mad rush of flashbacks taking him back to the hell that had been Khamisiyah. The rattle of gunfire, the stench of diesel, men howling in pain, the splash of something hot as molten lava against his face—the sensory overload was as intense as it was sudden. Within seconds the beleaguered veteran gave in to the recurring nightmare and blacked out.

Moments later he came to, cold earth pressing against his bearded face. The ember that had triggered his blackout lay a few inches away, still glowing faintly. Byrnes watched the ember burn itself out with cold detachment, waiting for his mind to clear and for his pulse to return to normal. Finally he was able to struggle to his feet and right the toppled rocker. He sat back down again, drained, trembling, eyes trained on the fire. A racked sob shook through him. He clenched his fingers around the arms of the chair, determined not to give in to his sorrow and feeling of helplessness.

“No more,” he murmured aloud, his voice hoarse. “No more.”

For the next hour, Byrnes remained in the chair, rocking gently, transfixed by the fire, watching it slowly burn itself out. The lamp on the table beside him went out as well, and as the cabin grew dark, several more embers snapped out onto the floor.

Finally, as the last few flames licked at what remained of the charred logs in the fireplace, the evening chill crept back into the darkened cabin. Even colder and darker now, however, was the expression in Byrnes’s eyes. He had the look of a man at the end of his tether, a man who’d reached a point where he saw but one course of action and was steeling himself for the demands that course would entail. Byrnes was through waiting for the call from his superiors. He’d decided it was time to take matters into his own hands, to renounce his inner demons and seize control of his own fate.

Rising from the chair, the veteran relit the oil lamp, then crossed the room and stood on a small wooden bench set in the corner. He reached up and gently worked free two loose boards straddling the rafters that made up the cabin’s ceiling. There was a small cavity between the slats and the roof. Byrnes used the space to store several of his concessions to modern-day technology. He made frequent use of his cell phone and notebook computer, but this night it was a third item—which he’d been given just two days earlier—that commanded his attention. He reached deep into the cavity and carefully pulled out a forty-inch-long M-136 AT-4 rocket launcher.

The fifteen-pound weapon—a high-tech fiberglass-wrapped tube housing an 84 mm warhead—was equipped with a night-vision sight and had an effective firing range of nearly a quarter mile, roughly the same distance between the farm and the building located on the other side of the woods.

Byrnes stepped down from the bench and set aside the stolen launcher long enough to place his cell phone and computer into a backpack, then added a few more items before carrying both the pack and weapon outside. A light snow had begun to fall. The large, almost weightless flakes reminded Byrnes of the ashes that had once rained down on him from the fiery skies of Khamisiyah. He did his best to shrug off the comparison. Now was not the time to give in to the memories. He needed to keep his focus on the present, on the task at hand.

As he passed the lean-to, Byrnes could see lights through the woods, illuminating the outline of the building that would be his target. The wind had died, increasing the chances of his getting off a good shot. He’d fired AT-4s during his tour of duty in the Gulf, and prior to coming here he’d taken a few refresher courses with similar weapons at the American Freedom Movement compound fifty miles away in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was confident he could hit his mark. After that? Byrnes had no set plan, but he knew that this would be his last night at the Michael Conlon Farm.

The roan horse was still out in the corral.

“Change of plans, Jefferson,” Byrnes called out as he hung his backpack on the corral’s gate latch. Clutching the rocket launcher in both hands, he told the horse, “It looks like we’re going to go riding tonight after all.”

2

Washington, D.C.

The Fourteenth Capitol Partners Spring Gun Show, one of the largest such annual gatherings held east of the Mississippi, had ended a little over an hour ago. The three-day event had been a rousing success, with sales running into the tens of millions of dollars, but there was still plenty of stock left over. A handful of larger suppliers had just finished taking down their stalls and were transferring leftover inventory into trucks parked behind the building, a one-time appliance superstore located in an isolated industrial park fourteen blocks from Georgetown University. The parking lot, like the surrounding neighborhood and the handful of other vehicles parked along the street, was lightly dusted with freshly fallen snow.