Enemies Within

They’d met the first time during his campaign against Miami mafiosi, then again in Vegas, when they’d nearly joined forces. But Bolan had resisted government entanglement until the wrap-up of his “final mile” against the Mob, ending with his faked death in New York City’s Central Park, the alteration of his game face—not the first—and purging of all his records, just in case his fingerprints surfaced somewhere down the road.

Since then, he’d risked his life for Hal Brognola and the team at Stony Man Farm—a covert antiterrorist organization based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia—a thousand times, eliminated countless threats to the United States and civilized society around the world, but it would never be enough. No victory was ever claimed for good; no enemies were buried or incinerated who could not be easily replaced by other villains, equally as bad or worse.

In short, a warrior’s work was never done.

He started walking toward Brognola’s distant figure, planning on a meet halfway between their present places in the cemetery. At this hour, there were no tourists around, though that was bound to change since Arlington hosted some three million souls per year, or eighty-two hundred per day. It wouldn’t matter, even if they started clocking in by now, since visitors to Arlington were generally on their best behavior, leaving others to themselves, speaking in muted tones, seeking specific markers of the honored dead.

If worse came to worst, a silent glare from the big Fed or Bolan should ensure they were not disturbed. There would be no need to produce the weapons both men carried concealed beneath their jackets.

When they were close enough to speak without shouting, the two old friends greeted each other, closed the final gap and shook hands as they always did, like soldiers in a common cause, too long apart. Each knew the other’s story intimately, understood what set them on converging paths of no return.

Both men knew how their journey would end, beyond doubt, but had not reached that point, although they would be ready for it when it came.

As they released each other’s hands, Bolan asked, “What’s up? Your short text sounded serious.”

“It’s always serious,” Brognola replied. “But this time...hell. I’m not sure what to make of it myself.”

* * *

“I guess you’re current on the US Army Rangers,” Brognola remarked as they made their way through the ranks of polished headstones, weathering to various degrees, one dating back to May of 1864 but lovingly maintained.

“I’ve trained with Rangers on more than one occasion, and fought with them in the field, before Pittsfield. They’re based at Fort Benning. That’s about the size of it.”

Brognola didn’t have to ask what Bolan meant by “Pittsfield.” It was the Executioner’s hometown in Massachusetts where a Mafia loan shark had hooked Sam, his father, and drawn Bolan’s sister, Cindy, into bondage with an escort service after Sam had been beaten, nearly crippled, for defaulting on his debt. Something inside Sam Bolan had snapped and he’d tried to spare his loved ones further shame by wiping out the family. The sole survivor had been Bolan’s younger brother, Johnny, who had shared the tragic story with his older brother, thus launching the Executioner upon his one-man hellfire trail against the Mob.

“Then would it surprise you,” Brognola said, “if I said six Rangers have gone off the grid after declaring their loyalty to ISIS?”

Bolan responded with a frown and said, “Surprise would be the least of it.”

He’d followed ISIS in the media and classified reports from Stony Man. Officially it was a virulent al Qaeda splinter group whose terse initials stood for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Sometimes the leaders called it ISIL—the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—or simply IS, the Islamic State. Their stated goal was to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate, to which end, strangely, they waged war primarily against their fellow Muslims, razing villages and cities, scourging libraries, museums and random monuments of great historical significance to the Islamic culture. All of which, to Bolan, indicated raving psychopaths in charge.

“Six Army Rangers going over?” he echoed, watching Brognola nod.

“And not just any Rangers,” said the man from Justice. “There’s a major, a lieutenant colonel, with a captain, first lieutenant, plus a staff sergeant and sergeant.”

“And we know this how?” Bolan inquired.

“Their so-called manifesto,” Brognola replied, “which they are demanding we publish through official channels, send-ups on the Pentagon and White House websites, plus all major TV networks and the top ten US newspapers, with a combined readership exceeding 8.3 million.”

“But you’ve held it back,” Bolan observed.

“So far. We’re on a ticking clock.”

“What happens when the clock strikes twelve?” Bolan inquired.

“A ‘major terrorist event,’ whatever that means. Mega casualties, no hope of disguising it.”

“You think they can deliver?”

“There’s a chance they already have,” Brognola said. “A teaser, anyway. We’ve kept a lid on it so far.”

“Particulars?”

“Some kind of noxious gas attack in Baltimore, a shopping mall. Two dead, a couple dozen treated at the hospital for symptoms that resembled sarin poisoning. We’re calling it a leak, natural gas from one of the mall’s restaurants, and squaring it with their insurance carriers. The Rangers gave thumbs-up to burying the news for now, as long as we get cracking on the broadcast of their manifesto by high noon, the day after tomorrow.”

“So much time?”

“It seemed a little leisurely to me, as well,” the big Fed said.

“I’m guessing that this outfit has a name?”

“Funny about that,” Brognola replied. “They haven’t floated one, so far. That strikes me as a clumsy oversight.”

“Unless it’s all a scam.”

“Or that.”

“I can’t help noting that this sounds like something for the MPs at Fort Benning. It’s their home turf, their people going rogue.”

“They tried already. Kicked it upstairs to the CID, a task force supervised directly by the Provost Marshal General.”

“I hear a ‘but’ coming,” Bolan observed.

“You do. They traced their runners to North Carolina, to rented tourist quarters in a tiny town on Topsail Island. Ever heard of it?”

“Can’t say I have,” Bolan replied.

“I hadn’t, either. Anyway, they went in hard last night, a six-man strike team with a captain, a lieutenant and four noncoms. Sent up the balloon at 0330 hours, but they walked into a shit storm. All CID agents were listed KIA on-site, another story that we’ll have to fabricate before we contact next of kin. Call it a training exercise gone wrong, I guess.”

“No casualties on the other side?” Bolan queried.

“Nary a one. They walked out clean, left nothing but the rental property all shot to hell—and one more copy of their manifesto, mounted on a bathroom wall in case we missed the point.”

“Which brings us here.”

“In a nutshell,” Brognola stated. He fished one hand underneath his jacket and produced a DVD, passed it to Bolan, and the warrior tucked it neatly out of sight.

“You’ll find full dossiers and service records on the six alleged defectors,” Brognola went on. “They haven’t got much in the way of family. One has a brother in New Jersey and one guy’s father is a retired Marine. That’s about the size of it. Another one was talking marriage to his girl when he went AWOL, but she swears she hasn’t heard from him since then. We’ve got her covered—taps and bugs, the works—but no contact so far.”

“You’re calling them ‘alleged defectors,’” Bolan noted. “Should I ask if any of them have converted recently and started singing Allah’s praises?”

“Just one Muslim in the bunch, as far as we can tell, and nothing recent. His grandparents were Iraqi refugees, granted asylum by the State Department under Reagan. He was born into the faith and joined the Army out of high school, pulled a tour in Afghanistan without a hiccup and came back wearing a Silver Star, together with a Purple Heart.”

“So, honorable service, then.”

“Nothing says otherwise, until this shit show he’s involved in with the rest of them.”

“You’re doubting the religious motive?” Bolan asked.

“Can’t disregard it, but it doesn’t sit well with me,” the big Fed replied. “You know these types are big on names, if they’re legit. First thing they do is sit around a table and decide what to call themselves.”

“Right.”

“Step two, they normally adopt Arabic names, but none of them has done that, either. Just the one, still going with his birth name.”

“Right.”

“On top of which, we have eyes inside ISIS, overseas and in the States, a couple sleeper cells that think they’re still secure. So far, nobody claims to know these guys, and they’d be trumpeting the news if half a dozen Army Rangers joined their cause en masse.”

“You’d think so, anyway. But if they’re faking the ISIS connection, what’s their end game?”

Brognola gave him a wry smile. “We won’t know that until you run them down.”

“Speaking of which, mobility should be our top priority on this.”

“Agreed.”

“What’s Jack up to, these days?”

“I’ve got him on standby.”

Jack Grimaldi was an ex-Mafia flyboy who could handle anything with wings or rotors. He had first crossed Bolan’s path while working for the Mafia, then converted to the big guy’s cause when he’d decided that his Mob-related life was going nowhere fast. Since then, he had delivered Bolan to hot spots around the world, providing air support as needed on the firing line. And, when necessary, he heard the call to arms and fought beside the Executioner on the line.

“Okay,” Bolan said. “Then I should be good, at least for now.”

“It would be nice if we could talk to someone from the team,” Brognola said, “but I don’t know how practical that is.”

“Rangers are trained the same as Green Berets and Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance—presumably the Company, as well—when it comes to resisting an interrogation. They all undergo hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, plus deprivation of warmth, water and food.”

“Of course,” the big Fed said, “that’s all illegal under various conventions, as we know.”

“And when has that stopped anyone on either side from using them?”

“I see your point. Some say we haven’t been the ‘good guys’ for a long time now, at least since 9/11.”

Bolan didn’t bother telling him to take it farther back, to Vietnam or even to the Philippines during the four-year Tagalog Insurgency kicked off in 1899. There was no point in hashing over ancient history, particularly when the here and now might bite them on the ass within hours or days.

“But if they can’t be caught alive...”

“Where are you parked?” Bolan asked his old friend, cutting their conversation short.

“In the metered garage on Memorial Avenue. You?”

“I found curb space outside, on Schuyler Avenue. I like the walk.”

“And you’ve got local digs?”

“The River Inn on Twenty-fifth Street Northwest, in DC.”

Brognola nodded. “Don’t get too comfortable.”

“When do I ever?”

They shook hands again and went their separate ways, each man freighted with secrets, craving answers he knew would be hard-won, if they could be unearthed at all.

Who was it that had once described the Russian mindset as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”? Bolan had the answer to that up front—it had been Winston Churchill, decades before anyone conceived the thought of ISIS or its killer spawn. This time, however, Bolan didn’t have a span of four decades to end a new Cold War.

He had to crack this riddle soon, before the whole thing went to hell.

Chapter Two

Bolan didn’t drive back to the River Inn at once. Instead he sat inside his rented Audi Compact Executive sedan, opened his laptop and popped in Brognola’s DVD.

The normal warnings stamped on every disk from Stony Man displayed themselves upon launch, as usual. Pointless, he thought, since anyone who’d stolen it would go ahead and watch it anyway, regardless of the threat of three years’ imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

There was no introduction. Just a half dozen icons labeled with the rank and surname of the subjects, waiting to reveal themselves upon command.

He started at the top, with Major Randall Darby, thirty-nine years old, a Ranger for the past fifteen. After fulfilling the Army’s requirements, he’d gone to Ranger school, beginning with the basic “crawl phase,” moving on to “mountain phase” at the remote Camp Merrill near Dahlonega, Georgia, passing on with honors to the “Florida phase” at Eglin Air Force Base, then on again to “desert phase” at Fort Bliss, Texas. Along the way, a journey of sixty-eight days, Darby’s leadership skills were judged by both his trainers and the other members of his squad, producing top marks on both sides.

After training, new Rangers typically found themselves in “the worst shape of their lives,” with common maladies including weight loss, dehydration, trench foot, heatstroke, frostbite, chilblains, fractures, tissue tears; swollen hands, feet and knees; nerve damage and loss of limb sensitivity, cellulitis, contact dermatitis, cuts and wildlife bites. Darby had survived it all, emerging with lieutenant’s bars.

He saw his first deployment overseas in Afghanistan, eight months after the US invasion, as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. He spent two years “in the sand,” rotated home for additional training, then flew off again to Iraq, saw action in the Horn of Africa against Somali pirates, fought the militant Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in North Africa’s Greater Maghreb, helped reopen the Transit Center at Manas, in Kyrgyzstan, then rotated back to Fort Benning as a Ranger school supervisory officer.

The file contained full details of Darby’s classified missions, and Bolan reviewed them briefly, spending time enough to satisfy himself that there were no black marks against the major’s name, no indication whatsoever of dissatisfaction with the service or the slightest bent toward any kind of radical philosophy or creed.

And yet...

The next file up belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Knowlton, age thirty-five, a second-generation Ranger whose father, now deceased, had returned from Vietnam minus his right leg and left eye, after the Battle of Khe Sanh in Quang Trị Province, near its wind-down in July 1968. In the process, he had killed an estimated sixty-seven of General Vo Nguyen Giap’s North Vietnamese regulars and secured a Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, together with South Vietnam’s Meritorious Service Medal and a lifetime disability pension. His son had joined the Army right after graduating Alabama A & M, passed through Ranger school without a hitch, and served the years of duty every Ranger now expected in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Africa’s Trans Sahara region, interdicting terrorists and drug shipments earmarked for Central Africa.

At last report, Knowlton had been a lifelong Southern Baptist and rock-ribbed conservative who shared his forebears’ trend of voting for Republicans, airing his patriotism in annual addresses to the local chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars while home on leave. No one had ever heard him say a kind word about Islam, much less seek to convert and aid its most radical faction as a terrorist.

So what had happened to him, then?

The file on Knowlton held no clue—unless, perhaps, it was an ambush he had led against a small al Qaeda faction active in Nigeria. Knowlton had personally slain three of the terrorists that day, discovering after the smoke cleared that the eldest of them was sixteen years old, the other two, twelve and thirteen. They were already seasoned killers, but had something in the act of killing them caused doubt to germinate in Knowlton’s mind or heart?

If so, he had concealed it well until he’d followed Major Darby and four others in defecting from the Rangers and declaring war on the United States.

More questions lacking answers. So far, while the dossiers helped Bolan come to know his enemies, at least in part, the service photos staring back at him were blank, stone-faced, inscrutable.

Third up, in order of descending rank, was Captain Walton Tanner Jr., son of a Marine Corps veteran who’d won a Congressional Medal of Honor during the invasion of Grenada, code-named Operation Urgent Fury in November 1983. At age thirty-one, the captain seemed to be almost a carbon copy of his hero father, other than the service he had chosen as his military path. He’d won a Bronze Star Medal in Afghanistan, another in Iraq with an oak leaf cluster to denote additional awards, and claimed a Purple Heart on his third tour of duty in the sand, after he’d taken a sniper’s bullet to one leg. The Medal of Honor still eluded him, but there was every chance he might have earned one, with a fourth foreign deployment in the wings when he had suddenly and unofficially departed from the Rangers, trailing Major Darby and Lieutenant Colonel Knowlton into their small group without a name.

As with the others, Tanner’s file offered no clue to his defection, nothing to suggest he harbored any Muslim sympathies. He had been born and raised Episcopalian, and had earned a bachelor of arts in history from George Washington University in DC, then dropped out of its master’s program to become an Army Ranger. What followed was a virtual replay of the preceding files Bolan had scanned: Afghanistan, Iraq and, for a smidgen of variety, Operation Freedom Eagle in the Philippines, combating the Abu Sayyaf Group and Jemaah Islamiyah Muslim militants. The latter tour had sent him home with a Distinguished Service Cross, Homeland Security Distinguished Service Medal and a Purple Heart for minor shrapnel wounds.

If he had ever mentioned Islam publicly, no record of his comments was preserved in military files. He’d gone to chapel on most Sundays, when his scheduling permitted, and had showed no deviation from his faith or military oath until he went over the wall one night, with Darby and Knowlton. What drove him to that action, as with his companions, still remained a mystery.

One note and worth considering—Tanner had lost his mother and his only sibling, sister Lucie, in a random auto accident some eighteen months before his ultimate decision to defect. The good news: Bolan thought he could gain access to Tanner’s father, the true-blue leatherneck, and maybe get some kind of private insight missing from the dossier. MPs would have been after him first thing, Bolan presumed, but if they’d taken any notes from that interrogation, nothing showed up in Brognola’s file. Bolan would find out what he could, waste no unnecessary time, and then move on.

To number four, Lieutenant Tyrone Moseley, twenty-four, the rogue group’s only African American recruit. He’d been the designated “smart one” at his high school in Newark, New Jersey, taken a fair measure of shit for it, then learned to stand his ground, avoiding gangs and throwing hands effectively against the unaffiliated hallway thieves and bullies. A suspension for fighting prevented him from standing as his class valedictorian, but Moseley had still graduated second in his class of seven hundred. Eventually he’d found his way to Fort Benning and into Ranger school.

From there, his dossier was much the same as the others Bolan had perused, with private twists and turns that made no time for war abroad. Cancer had claimed his mother’s life during Moseley’s first tour in Iraq. His father, grief stricken, was made of weaker stuff than either of his sons, committing suicide with an unregistered firearm while Tyrone served a second tour in Iraq and brother Jesse pursued a bachelor’s degree from the Newark College of Engineering.

Could Bolan, a white stranger, hope to gather anything from Jesse Moseley? He had doubts, but reckoned it was worth a shot—perhaps his only shot at learning any more about the wayward elder son.

None of the Moseleys had professed any religion, least of all Newark’s Black Muslims, aka the Nation of Islam. Tyrone’s maternal grandmother had been a “Shouter Baptist” at a storefront church in Newark, but she seemed to have left no imprint of her faith on her late daughter, son-in-law or grandchildren. In fact, she had been gone so long, a casualty of the 1967 riots, that her only legacy was bitterness against police whose random fire had cut her down in her tiny apartment.

Could latent hatred of authority have colored Moseley’s ultimate decision to defect with Darby, Knowlton and Tanner? It seemed unlikely, given that he’d joined the Army and the Rangers voluntarily, served three tours in the sand, and never said a word to indicate he was dissatisfied.

No, Bolan thought. It must be something else.

But as to what...

Dossier number five revealed the rogue group’s only verified Muslim, Staff Sergeant Afif Rashid. According to a footnote in the file, his given name translated from the Arabic as “chaste,” “pious” or “pure.” That might have indicated a religious zeal, but nothing in his background seemed to lean that way.

Rashid’s parents had come to the United States as refugees from Operation Desert Storm, bringing their only child—then nine years old—in February 1991. With government assistance, they’d acquired a small convenience store in New Rochelle, New York, and died when skinheads robbed the place in June 2000, two weeks after Afif graduated high school and joined the Army, distinguishing himself in Ranger school after boot camp.

Had the double murder of his parents, still unsolved, jaundiced Rashid’s view of America and set a time bomb ticking in his gut, while he acquired the martial skills to look for payback, somewhere down the road? If so, he’d kept it to himself and uttered no complaint about three tours of duty in Afghanistan, plus one deployment to Soto Cano Air Base, Honduras, where Rangers teamed with local forces to train antidrug units and counter transnational threats. On that leg of his journey through the hinterlands, Rashid had earned a Silver Star for aiding wounded fellow Rangers under hostile fire.

And through it all, no hint suggested that Rashid was a jihadist in disguise.

That left two dossiers on Brognola’s DVD, the next one for the Ranger outfit’s low man on the ladder in terms of rank. Sergeant Ernesto Menendez was twenty-four years old, a young man who’d enlisted after trying and rejecting one semester at a junior college in New Mexico. Like all the rest, his record with the Rangers was exemplary until he’d gone AWOL: two tours of duty in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, a Commendation Medal with a bronze “V” device denoting heroism in combat, ranked at a lesser degree than required for awarding a Bronze Star Medal. Specifically, Menendez had covered the withdrawal of medical corpsmen with five wounded Rangers in Kandahar Province, sustaining a flesh wound that added a Purple Heart to his résumé. The file logged thirteen kills to his record that morning, holding his ground till the others withdrew and called in air support.

Raised Catholic, another orphan with no siblings, Sergeant Menendez seemed to have no more in common with Islamists than he did with the Man in the Moon. A note in his file said that he had recently become engaged and his fiancée was a woman named Juanita Alvarado.

What drove him to associate with Darby’s outlaw band remained, as with the rest, a mystery.

Reviewing briefly, Bolan noted that a common theme among the rogue Rangers was lack of living family. Among the six, Captain Tanner had a father still above ground, Lieutenant Moseley had a brother whom, according to the MPs and the FBI, he had not contacted in the past two years, and Menendez had a fiancée. Was isolation part of it, somehow? And if so, how could loss of loved ones drive a polyglot collection of career soldiers into the arms of militant Islam?

Bolan tried to make sense of it, got nowhere, and finally decided that his best hope lay within the final dossier, its icon labeled “Manifesto.”