Radical Edge

Bolan grabbed the back of his vehicle’s passenger seat. Pain shot up his arm. Looking over his shoulder, he wheeled around the stricken Caprice. He was going to use the same tactic again. Bullets ripped holes in the roof and smashed through the windshield only inches from his face. The gunman with the Uzi was hosing him down.

The rear of the Camry ripped the passenger door from the Chevy. Bolan’s stolen ride stuttered under the abuse he was heaping on it, then stopped when he struck the same telephone pole. The gunman ran his magazine dry and, rather than reload and try again, dived back into the Caprice. Suddenly, the Chevy’s engine was roaring and the vehicle was mobile once more.

Bolan threw his door open and jumped from the Toyota. He landed on his feet, stumbled, and managed to recover. The FN P90 was barbed wire in his damaged palms as he brought the weapon to his shoulder and tried to acquire his target.

The Caprice struck another telephone pole. The gunman, practically on top of his dead colleague, went for something out of sight on the floor of the car.

Bolan dropped to one knee and took careful aim. The pain in his hands had the sights jumping around in his vision. The beat of his pulse was a metronome of punishment that rocked its way up his arms with every thud of his heart.

Traffic around the danger zone was slowing. Frightened drivers were honking. Others were screaming. Bolan had to stop this now, before someone wandered into the impromptu battlefield.

His shot was clear.

Bolan squeezed the trigger. Even the light recoil of the 5.7 mm cartridge caused a fresh blossom of pain in his palms when the P90 went off. He fired again and again, punching rounds through the side of the Caprice, trying to hit the Uzi gunner before he could pop up and start spraying the neighborhood anew.

Bullets peppered the pavement by Bolan’s feet. His enemy was shooting back through the car door, crouching down below the window. The danger of ricochet had to be severe, yet he kept on. He was either insane or very daring.

Bolan shifted, duck-stepping from his kneeling position. The Uzi gunner was firing blind. The danger was greater for innocents than to Bolan himself, but thankfully, the area behind him was free of pedestrians. It was, in fact, a small parking lot, where some of the parked cars were taking bullet holes. A car alarm went off.

In the distance, above the cacophony, the first sirens could be heard.

Bolan sprayed out the 50-round magazine on the FN P90, holding the trigger all the way back, grouping his rounds in the car door, where his enemy had to be hiding. The soldier then changed magazines, moving quickly. Even that act hurt him. When he slapped the new magazine home, he saw bloody, partial fingerprints on the plastic. He retracted the cocking lever and adjusted his aim for the rear of the Chevy, where the Uzi shooter seemed to be creeping. He was using shadows on the pavement to gauge the enemy’s movements.

“Hey!” the Uzi gunner shouted. “You out there! Are you law?”

“Justice Department!” Bolan shouted back. “Lay down your weapon! Come out now with your hands where I can see them!”

“No way, pal.”

“Identify yourself!” Bolan barked.

The sirens were louder, but still far enough off that much could happen before emergency personnel complicated the situation. While Bolan normally hoped for the combat stretch to resolve things himself, without endangering others, he had to admit that backup might be useful in this situation. His vision kept fuzzing at the edges.

“Identify yourself!” he repeated. “Who are you? Are you with Hyde?”

“Hyde’s filth!” the gunner yelled.

“What’s your involvement?” Bolan called back.

“Every last one of them is going to die,” the man shouted. “They all deserve it. Don’t try to tell me they don’t!”

“That’s not your call!” Bolan said. “This is bigger than whatever play you’re making.”

There was a pause. Then, from the Chevrolet: “You’d die for them? For white supremacist garbage?”

“I don’t intend to die for anybody today,” Bolan retorted. “Last chance!”

The gunner rolled on the asphalt, his Uzi held before him, stretched along the pavement. Bolan had expected something like that. The blast went wide, as the soldier thought it might; an automatic weapon, especially a subgun, was no easy thing to control on the fly. He took careful aim, braced himself mentally for the slap to his palms, and fired on full automatic, walking his 5.7 mm rounds up the road and into the gunner.

The man saw it coming and tried to roll back. Bolan’s fire stitched him across his shoulder and tore holes in his back. He crawled back behind the Chevrolet, trailing blood without a word.

The passenger door opened. Bolan, on his feet, came around the Chevrolet, his head swimming. He was close to passing out, but cleared the rear bumper of the Chevy in time to see the gunman pulling a leather shoulder bag from the car.

The wounded man’s hand came up with a grenade.

No, Bolan thought. Not a grenade. An incendiary device. The red canister was clearly marked. There were more of the weapons visible in the leather bag. It was possible the gunner and his driver had been a mop-up crew, whose job may well have been to burn the safe house to the ground—and shoot down any stragglers in hiding within, who would be driven outside by the flames. It was a proved tactic when cleaning out a nest of vermin.

The hostiles, whoever they were, hadn’t counted on being interrupted. Bolan’s presence had to have thrown them off their game. Then again, the fire raging in the kitchen would have consumed the house eventually. The occupants of the Chevy might have been waiting to see if that happened, saving them from leaving behind more evidence that wouldn’t quite fit with a nice, clean theory of gang warfare among skinheads and other criminals.

The theories flitting through Bolan’s mind were sound enough but, he realized, disjoined and oddly timed. He was fading on his feet. The muzzle of the FN P90 began to drift… .

The wounded man saw his opportunity and took it. He popped the pin on the incendiary and made as if to throw it.

Bolan shot him.

The Executioner tried to snap his weapon back into position, but his knees were turning to rubber beneath him. He managed to hit his enemy in the chest.

The incendiary, pin freed, fell into the bag of similar bombs.

Every hardwired instinct Bolan had told him to go, and go fast. He turned and found himself stumbling, dragging, rolling. Clawing at the pavement, he nearly fell flat on his face, but then was up and running, pumping his legs, screaming. He let the P90 fall to the end of its sling and bellowed at the bystanders who had not already sought cover from the gunfight.

“Go! Bomb! Run!”

They fled before him, trying to escape the seemingly crazed, bloody man flapping his scorched limbs at them.

The first incendiary went off. Almost, but not quite in the same beat, the others erupted. A white flash and a ball of heat punched Bolan in the small of his back, burning his neck, singeing his hairline. He tried to turn, tried to cover himself, tried to bring his arms up to protect his head.

Then he was falling. As he floated through the air, suspended in space, he turned his head and saw the finger of thick black smoke roiling from the flash-burned Chevy and climbing high into the sky.

The pavement rushed up to meet him.

The soldier didn’t feel the impact. He was suddenly prone, staring at the blue sky, watching the smoke climb to heaven. He was losing all sense of time. He heard voices; he saw faces. Were civilians gawking at him? Trying to help him? He had no idea how long he lay there. It might have been seconds; it might have been hours.

As gray snow crawled in from the edges of his vision, finally carrying him to oblivion, he thought he heard the sound of helicopter rotors.

The darkness claimed him.

CHAPTER FIVE

He woke to find himself staring into Jack Grimaldi’s face.

“Somehow,” Bolan said, “I always knew it would end like this.”

“You aren’t dead, Sarge,” Grimaldi said, grinning widely. “And I’m sure no angel.”

“I was thinking just the opposite.”

“You must be feeling better if you can make bad jokes. Here. Take a sip of this.” Grimaldi handed him a bottle of water and helped the soldier to sit up. Bolan realized they were in the back of the Pave Hawk. He had been lying on an olive-drab Army blanket between the bolted seats.

Bolan took a long sip of water and then looked down at his hands. Grimaldi had sprayed them with translucent, liquid skin. His palms were numb.

“Switch that to your left hand,” Grimaldi said, “and give me your right.” Bolan extended his right hand, which his friend turned palm-up and began dressing with light gauze.

“How long was I out?” the soldier asked.

“Not long enough,” Grimaldi said. “I gave you some painkillers that will be wearing off soon. There’s more in the medical kit.” He gestured for him to switch hands, then began the process of wrapping his left palm. Bolan sipped more water. It wasn’t cold, but was delicious anyway. His throat felt raw.

He looked out past the unmanned door gun of the Pave Hawk. The chopper sat in the center of a broad expanse of scrub and sun-baked dirt on what he took to be the outskirts of Alamogordo.

“You’re in rough shape, Sarge,” Grimaldi said. “Nothing that won’t get better provided you take a couple weeks’ vacation.”

“I’ll get right on that,” Bolan told him.

“Right.” Grimaldi shook his head. “I shot you up with some of the pain amps in your kit. As much as I dared. It’s going to wear off and you’re going to hurt again. You’ll need to stay on top of that.”

“I can manage.”

“We’ve got a blacksuit squad on-site cleaning up the damage,” Grimaldi said, “and running interference with the Alamogordo PD, who’re hopping mad. All but the two cops whose lives you saved. They’ve been debriefed.”

“Somebody beat us to the safe house. Killed everyone inside.”

“Yeah.” Grimaldi nodded. “The officers kept asking me if you did that. Although I don’t think they really believed it.”

“The house?”

“A complete loss,” Grimaldi said. “The bomb started a fire that burned the place to the ground. You’re lucky. It could easily have killed you and your two new friends.”

“The Chevy,” Bolan said. “Getaway car. Two men. One automatic weapon. They were with whoever hit the safe house.”

“Uh…yeah.” Grimaldi hesitated. “About that. Both men and the car were burned to a crisp. Any clues we might have found inside…well. You get the idea. We’ve had the bodies routed to a facility we control, for autopsy, but running their dental records will take time.”

“Yeah.” Bolan shook his head.

“Here,” Grimaldi said. “I made you something.” He handed over a pair of leather gloves. Bolan held them up curiously. He realized that the fingers had been removed.

Grimaldi held up a pair of medical shears. “These are yours, too.” He put them back in the kit. “Those gloves are sized for my mitts, which are a little smaller than yours. Without fingers, though, it won’t matter.”

Bolan pulled the leather shells on over his hands. They fit snugly but weren’t too tight. The cut-up gloves covered his dressings and protected his scorched palms.

“Thanks, Jack,” Bolan said. “You know you’ve got a pretty decent bedside manner?”

“No, I don’t,” Grimaldi replied. “I’m about to spoil your mood. You want the bad news or the bad news?”

Bolan said nothing. He raised an eyebrow.

“We’ve got a big problem,” Grimaldi explained. He produced a replacement earbud and his own secure satellite phone. “I can use the transmitter here in the chopper to relay to the Farm,” he said. “Use my phone. The earbud is from the spares here.”

“The problem?” Bolan prompted.

“Idle hands,” Grimaldi said. “You didn’t find Shane Hyde at the second target house,” he said. “I know, because I’ve been talking to the Farm while you were out. Shane Hyde and his Twelfth Reich boys have been very busy. If he was here, he was long gone before you got yourself blown up.”

“Doing what?”

“I’ll let Barb tell you that,” Grimaldi said. He pointed to the earbud. “You’re hooked in through the chopper.”

Bolan put the device in his ear. “Striker here.”

“Striker?” Barbara Price sounded worried. “Jack says you’ve sustained some injuries. If you need to come in—”

“Negative,” Bolan said. “I’m all right, Barb.”

She paused. “All right. Striker, what I have for you is significant. Bear and his computer team have identified, through a series of account transfers and our internet chatter algorithms, a hijacking perpetrated by Twelfth Reich.”

“Perpetrated as in already conducted?” Bolan asked.

“As in happening right now,” Price said. “We’ve checked it at the source and we’re confident it’s ongoing. So is the domestic intelligence network. Right now Hal is sitting on DHS and the Bureau, who are gearing up to take action. Hal held out for confirmation from you. He’s pushing hard to get you in on this.”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember O’Connor Petroleum Prospecting?”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “The oil outfit that had some trouble in Honduras when the dictator there nationalized their equipment and took some of their employees hostage.”

“O’Connor has finagled a deal with the relatively new government of Honduras, the powers that are in Guatemala, and the new, moderate regime in Mexico. They’re running a pipeline from newly discovered oil fields in Honduras to a refinery in Mexico, from which they’ll ship oil across the Texas border and around the country. This energy initiative is very important to the Man and, as you know only too well, is the result of some recently resolved political turbulence in all three nations.”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “That sounds vaguely familiar.”

“We have identified a series of account transfers, among other things, that helped us identify some suspicious industrial purchases of fertilizer. There were multiple indicators that Bear, on his own time, cross-checked. The pattern emerged slowly—too slowly for us to stop it before it could begin.”

“Stop what, Barb?” Bolan asked.

“Twelfth Reich’s people have hijacked an OPP tanker train,” Price said. “We believe they’ve packed it with ammonium nitrate fuel oil bombs—ANFOs—in cargo cars attached to the tankers. They’re heading for an enormous O’Connor tank field outside of Dallas, one of the largest of its type in North America. The facility is adjacent to a kind of tent city, an encampment that has risen to serve Mexican immigrants working for O’Connor. That’s the target. Twelfth Reich wants to kill those people.”

Bolan frowned. “Likely casualties?”

“Potentially thousands,” Price said.

“Why not evacuate them?”

“These are migrant workers, Striker,” Price explained, “many of them in the country illegally. We can’t prove it, of course. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has swept the area twice now, and each time, the workers return as soon as they find gaps in the security cordon. It’s just too large an area for the INS to patrol. By the time we got enough men in there to link arms and surround it, the train would have arrived. The other problem is that, even if there is no loss of life among the workers, destroying that tank field will deal a serious blow to our economy. The waivers and other incentives needed to get all this moving with OPP were delivered because the nation needs that oil, Striker. Losing that infrastructure will wound us badly.

“The train will cross the border near Piedras Negras,” Price went on. “It will then follow a route through San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth. The terrorists could choose to blow the train themselves at any point, but Hyde and his fanatics don’t just want to destroy a train. They want that tank field. This is their ticket to al Qaeda status, as they see it. Their death blow to the hated American regime. They want to get where they’re going.”

“So we have to stop them before they get there.”

“That’s the problem,” Price said. “We can’t erect a barrier. There’s no time for that, and anything solid enough to halt the train will blow it. Blow the track itself, derail the train, and we risk creating an environmental disaster that will kill whoever’s unlucky enough to be nearby. Strike it from the air, it explodes, taking everyone aboard with it—and that’s if you can reach it. We have intelligence indicating Hyde may be in possession of antiaircraft weaponry, purchased from the Iranians.”

“Not good.”

“It’s worse. This train is one long bomb, but it’s a bomb with hostages aboard.”

“How many?”

“There’s a very special passenger car attached, near the engine,” Price said. “O’Connor, in an effort to protect its employees from the threat of kidnapping, to avoid future occurrences of its Honduras experience, has equipped the train with an armored personnel compartment. There are close to forty employees aboard, all of them O’Connor executives, returning to Dallas from an on-site conference across the border. They attended the opening of the new Mexican refinery, apparently.”

“Those people might already be dead, Barb,” Bolan said.

“They aren’t,” she replied. “The train’s security passenger car is hardened to external assault and has self-contained communications gear. We’ve verified that OPP is in contact with its employees. The terrorists can’t get in, not without damaging the train so badly they risk derailing it themselves. But those people cannot get out, either. Not with Hyde and his skinheads waiting to take them hostage the moment they do.”

“Well,” Bolan said. “Isn’t that a pretty picture.”

“It doesn’t get much more complicated,” Price admitted.

“Not with an unknown element killing our leads,” he muttered. “Jack apprised you of the situation?”

“Fully,” Price answered. “He said you recovered some .40-caliber casings on the scene before the evidence burned?”

Bolan patted himself down.

Grimaldi smiled and waved, giving Bolan the A-OK sign. “I’ve arranged for them to be couriered,” the pilot interjected.

“We’ll run them, for whatever good that will do,” Price said. “I’ll let you know.”

“So what’s the play?” Bolan asked.

“The Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security are running a joint operation outside San Antonio,” Price said. “Hal has been leaning on everyone involved, hard, to get you in on it. There’s been some resistance, but you know how these tugs-of-war usually play out.”

“Hal gets what he wants.”

“Most of the time. It doesn’t hurt to have the Man backing your play.”

“Any chance of getting some backup on this? People I can trust?”

“We’re spread thin covering potential ancillary targets,” Price said. “We believe Twelfth Reich may attempt, through satellite cells, to conduct parallel attacks while we’re occupied dealing with the train hijacking. Able and Phoenix are deployed here and abroad, for some of Hyde’s European allies may be involved. We’ve got blacksuit contingents covering other high-profile target areas. We’re just spread too thin, Striker. Except for our allies in Homeland Security and the FBI, you’re it.” Able Team and Phoenix Force were the Farm’s other field operatives.

“Understood,” Bolan said. “When do we go?”

“As soon as you signal Jack you’re ready to fly.”

“Then I’m ready to fly.” He looked at Grimaldi, stuck up one finger and rotated his hand in the universal “spinning rotors” sign.

“Striker…” Price said.

“Yeah?”

“You’re sure you’re up to this.” It wasn’t a question. The concern in her voice was obvious even through the scrambled, filtered and reprocessed connection.

“I’ll manage,” Bolan said. More quietly, he added, “Like I always do. I’ll see you soon.”

There was a pause. Finally, Price said, “Good hunting, Striker. Again. Out.”

Bolan, forcing himself to move without grimacing, pulled a pack from the locker bolted to the floor nearby. He unzipped the gear bag inside and began rifling through it. Grimaldi made a mock show of tapping his foot impatiently as Bolan shrugged out of his web gear, changed out the stiff, bloody and scorched shirt of his blacksuit, and donned his equipment. Then Bolan began to check through his weaponry, only to find it had been cleaned and reloaded. He looked at his friend curiously.

“You were asleep for a while,” Grimaldi said. “I had to keep busy.”

“Idle hands,” Bolan repeated. He smiled. “Thanks, Jack.” He made a cursory review of both of his pistols and the FN P-90, including removing the slide of the Beretta and checking its custom suppressor. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Grimaldi; this was simply long-ingrained habit, the result of years of trusting his life to the weapons he carried. One of the most basic rules of such weaponry was that you never simply trusted a weapon handed to you; you always checked it, for yourself, to make sure.

Grimaldi returned to the cockpit and began the process of firing up the chopper. He restored the in-flight connection, allowing them to speak to each other over the noise of the machine.

Once they were in the air, Bolan closed his eyes, breathed deeply and focused on his limbs. His hands and forearms were still numb, but rapidly warming. The ache that would pervade them could be blunted with painkillers, but these would fog his judgment and reaction time. He would have to err on the side of more pain, more awareness. He accepted as much and shrugged the thought from his mind. There was no point in dwelling on what couldn’t be changed.

Starting with his feet and moving up his legs, he tensed and then relaxed his muscles. As his focus moved up his torso, he rolled his shoulders, working the kinks out, feeling the tightness give way. Years of combat had left him a patchwork of scars and potential recurring stress injuries. The human body simply wasn’t built for the kind of punishment Bolan put himself through. If he allowed himself to dwell on it, he supposed he would have to chalk it up to effort of will. He was, after all, extremely well motivated. What he did, what he asked the men and women of Stony Man Farm to do with him, and what they did of their own will and motivation, wasn’t normal. That of itself was a shame, for a country as great as the United States deserved a citizenry whose every member thought superhuman effort preserving freedom was the norm.

Bolan couldn’t, and never had, faulted any man or woman for not following the path he himself had chosen. Lesser men and women might wrongly conclude that this wasn’t a choice at all; that circumstance, and tragedy, had forced Bolan to do what he did, to fight as he fought. That, of course, was ridiculous. Most men, confronted with the deaths of those they loved, grieved and absorbed the tragedy, soldiered on as best they could in the most benign sense of the word.

The men and women of Stony Man Farm weren’t truly the exception, for deep down, Bolan believed every man and woman had the potential, and the desire, to fight for what he or she valued most. It was simply that the counterterrorists with whom Bolan worked were exceptional, and that was the best way to describe them.

He snapped open the replacement satellite phone that Grimaldi had loaned him. A brief update bar appeared and, when it finished scrolling, the phone’s screen indicated that its new code assignment was STRYKR2. Grimaldi and Price had wasted no time getting him back up and running.

As Bolan watched, the send-receive icon started to blink. Data files began coming in, automatically shunted to a folder on the phone’s desktop, the wallpaper of which was still a graphic of Grimaldi’s choosing: a buxom woman in a red-white-and-blue bathing suit. Despite the grim scenario he faced, Bolan found himself smiling. Some things, he reflected, never changed. Jack Grimaldi was a constant in the universe.

Bolan supposed he was, too.