Altered State

Any thought of bringing Falk and her companions in alive had vanished when the unknown shooter took out four of Scanlon’s men, then tried to do the same with Eddie Franks and his three backups. Falk and her Afghani stooge would have been killed, in any case, but now all three had to die without being subjected to interrogation.

Never mind.

By killing them, Scanlon would either cauterize the threat or, at the very least, require his boss’s enemies to start again from scratch, inserting new players into Kabul. And when the new players arrived, they would find Scanlon and his people waiting for them.

There was too much money on the table to permit the DEA’s fumbling investigation to proceed. Perhaps he should have killed Falk earlier—it was debated at the time, then shelved in favor of approaching her superiors with bribes—and next time Scanlon would be ready.

Even if he had to act alone.

But he’d take care of this mess first.

Gunfire, away beyond two mounds of garbage to his right, distracted Scanlon from the hunt for all of two heartbeats. He never lost focus completely—he was too good at his job for that to happen—but he had to wonder whether Franks had met the enemy or if his men were firing at shadows.

Scanlon lost sight of Farid Humerya as his driver moved around the garbage heap, scuttling after the point men Scanlon had dispatched ahead of them. He almost called Humerya back, then bit his tongue.

The more the merrier, if they ran into trouble.

And, as if in answer to his thoughts, there came a rapid pop-pop-pop of pistol fire. Nine-millimeter, by the sound of it, but swiftly joined by something heavier, maybe a .45. A strangled cry of pain raised Scanlon’s hackles as he waited for Kalashnikovs to answer the challenge.

And heard nothing.

Three down, that quickly? Was it even possible?

Hell, yes, he thought. In combat, damn near anything was possible.

Scanlon reviewed his options, listening to autofiring from the second, farther garbage heap, and made his choice. Someone had to survive this fucked-up set and carry word to headquarters, or it was all in vain.

Cursing and flushed with shame, he turned and ran back toward his car.

B OLAN MIGHT HAVE chased his three remaining enemies around the garbage heap all afternoon, but the retreating shooters met someone who put steel in their backbones, snapping orders at them in a fair approximation of demonic rage.

“Where do you think you’re going, damn it?” stormed the unseen man in charge. “Both of you get your yellow asses back in there and fight!”

It could have been a trick to stall him, keep him waiting while they circled to his rear and came up on his blind side, but he didn’t think so. There’d been too much anger in the loud, commanding American voice. If that was fake, the speaker ought to take home an acting award for Best Performance by a Heavy Under Fire.

So, Bolan waited. Kneeling in the shadow of the refuse mountain, hard against it on his right, he sighted down the barrel of second hot Kalashnikov and covered the approach that was their only way to reach him from the front. He counted the seconds, feeling sweat bead on his forehead and begin the slow crawl downward toward unblinking eyes.

Two of them came at him together. Bolan recognized the leader as the one who got away, and saw that he was none too thrilled about returning to the fight. His leading adversary clutched an AK in a white-knuckled death grip. The second in line was almost duck-walking, crouched to present the smallest possible target.

Bolan gave the first one two rounds through the chest, punching him back into his waddling companion. Both fell together, the live one struggling to extricate himself from the other’s deadweight. Bolan waited until he’d almost reached his feet again, raising his gun, then shot him in the neck, with one more through the face to make it stick.

And now, a cautious rush to find the one who gave the orders, wondering if he would stand and fight or cut and run. Would pride outweigh the man’s survival instincts when it counted?

Bolan heard the sound of heavy footsteps crunching toward him, froze in place and had his shot lined up before the husky target stepped into his line of fire. The face and accent of his speech made him American, though Bolan couldn’t place where he’d been born and raised.

No matter. He was dying here.

A 3-round burst surprised the mercenary, dropped him on his backside in the dust with an amazed expression on his face. He clearly hadn’t planned to die that afternoon, but now he had no choice.

It took a moment for the dead man to collapse backward, and by the time he’d managed it, Bolan could hear an engine revving on the far side of the garbage mountain. Snatching up the merc’s AKSU, he ran around the pile and was in time to see the Prius barrel across the waste ground, toward the street.

Bolan fired after it, peppered the trunk and took out half of the rear window, but the car kept going. He had missed the driver, and a sharp left turn at the next intersection put his target out of range.

“I missed him, too,” Falk said, approaching with her Glock in hand.

“And I,” Barialy added, sounding glum.

“It was his lucky day,” Bolan replied. “And ours, too.”

“He’ll report back to the man,” Falk said.

“No doubt,” Bolan replied. “While he’s running, we can ditch the Ford, pick up another ride. And then, we need to talk.”

CHAPTER THREE

Chesapeake Bay, Two Days Earlier

Standing on the dock at Tilghman, Maryland, Mack Bolan felt as if he had gone back in time, not merely to some past familiar day but to a bygone century. The ticket in his hand entitled him to one two-hour cruise aboard the skipjack Rebecca T. Ruark, departing at 11:00 a.m. and returning at 1:00 p.m.

It might as well have been a time machine.

When Hal Brognola had proposed the cruise, suggesting that a sail would grant them maximum security, Bolan had not known what a skipjack was. He’d looked it up online, discovering that it was a type of nineteenth-century sailboat, developed by fishermen on Chesapeake Bay for oyster dredging. Despite modern advances in technology, the boats remained in service because Maryland state law banned use of powerboats for oyster fishing.

The Rebecca T. Ruark, built in 1886, was a classic skipjack, with its V-shaped wooden hull, low-slung freeboard and square stern. A dredge windlass and its small motor—the only mechanical engine aboard—were mounted amidships, but conversion of the ship to tourist cruises had given the Chesapeake’s oysters a long, welcome respite.

Bolan boarded with a dozen other passengers and made a brief walking tour of the ship—all fifty-three feet of it—trying to forget that a freak storm had sunk it in 1999, trusting that its owners had refurbished the vessel and kept it seaworthy since then.

If not, he reckoned he could swim to shore from any point where they went down, but Bolan had his doubts about Brognola.

Speaking of Hal, where was he? They had five minutes before the ship set sail, and if the man from Justice had been stuck in traffic or distracted by some crisis, Bolan was about to waste two hours on the briny deep.

He spent the time remaining in a futile bid to read the big Fed’s mind. Brognola often presented mission briefings at Stony Man Farm, in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, or on walking tours of Arlington National Cemetery. The vast graveyard of heroes offered ample solitude, and with the exception of a single disastrous lapse, Bolan had never questioned the security at Stony Man.

“Too many ears around these days,” Brognola had explained, without really explaining anything. “A sail sounds good.”

And so it had. Bolan had no problem with seasickness, no fear of open water or the gliding predators that it concealed. A cruise had sounded fine…but he still wondered why the change in their routine was necessary.

Ears, of course, meant spies —but whose?

The Department of Homeland Security had risen from the 9/11 rubble, tasked with coordinating intelligence collection and defense against all manner of enemies, both domestic and foreign. It was supposed to end the age-old bickering and backstabbing that put the CIA at odds with FBI and NSA, and sparked unhealthy feuds among the several branches of the U.S. military.

Note the qualifying phrase supposed to.

In reality, no branch or bureau of the government had ever given one inch to a rival without bitter resistance, sometimes verging on mutiny. Bolan knew, as a matter of fact, that tension was rife throughout all of America’s intelligence and security agencies, each on tenterhooks from fear of another terrorist raid—and each determined to expose that plot, whatever it might be, before “the other guys” could vie for a share of the glory.

It was the same old story, made potentially more dangerous by the official mask of peaceable cooperation that concealed the dissidence and subterfuge within.

But was it what Brognola had in mind?

Or was there something— someone —else?

One minute left until the ship cast off, and Bolan had begun to think that the big Fed was cutting it too close for his own good. A panting sprint along the dock would only call attention to him—which, presumably, was the last thing Brognola wanted.

Bolan drifted to the dockside rail, shook hands in passing with the ship’s captain and settled into the countdown.

If Brognola did not appear, he had a choice: jump ship and eat the thirty-dollar ticket’s cost, or take the cruise alone and hope that his old friend was waiting for him when the skipjack berthed again. He had his cell phone, for a point of contact, but a ship-to-shore briefing made absolutely no sense to him, when a thousand different listeners could snatch their words out of thin air.

With forty seconds left, a black sedan appeared and coasted to a stop at the far end of the dock. Bolan saw Brognola exit the shotgun seat, dressed in a sport shirt, nylon windbreaker and jeans, surmounted by a shapeless fishing hat, with size-twelve deck shoes on his feet.

Compared to Brognola’s habitual dark suits, it might as well have been a clown costume, but Bolan realized that no one else aboard the ship would notice the discrepancy. Hal was a total stranger to them all, and dressing in his normal Brooks Brothers’ attire would have raised caution flags among his fellow travelers.

The big Fed didn’t sprint along the pier. Rather, he walked “with purpose,” as the drill instructors used to say in boot camp, and he reached the gangway just as crewmen were prepared to take it up. He muttered an aw-shucks apology for being late, which was dismissed with airy smiles.

Eye contact from the dock told Bolan that Brognola knew exactly where to find him. They would seem to meet by accident, fall into casual discussion of the ship, the bay, whatever, and conduct their business at a distance from the other passengers who jammed the rails or lingered near the loudspeakers to catch the captain’s commentary.

No unwanted ears aboard the skipjack, unless some demonic master of disguise had learned Brognola’s plan and come aboard with Bolan and the other passengers who’d paid their fares at dockside.

The big Fed waited for the lines to be cast off and let the vessel find its course before he drifted toward Bolan, walking with hands in pockets, still testing his sea legs.

“Nice day for it,” he said.

“Seems like,” Bolan agreed.

“I’d buy a round of drinks, but the sloop’s BYOB.”

“Skipjack,” Bolan corrected him.

“What’s the difference?”

“Sloops were warships, intermediate in size between a corvette and a frigate,” Bolan said.

“You live and learn.”

“With any luck.”

“I haven’t been out on a boat in years,” Brognola said. “I used to like it, but you own one, it’s a money pit. As far as friends go, I felt like a barnacle, you know? Just going along for the ride. Anyway, who’s got the time?”

“And yet…” Bolan replied.

“You’re wondering why this, instead of meeting at the Farm?”

“It crossed my mind,” Bolan admitted.

Brognola nodded, his shoulders slumping just a bit.

“I may be getting paranoid,” he said. “But you know what they say, right?”

“Just because you’re paranoid—” Bolan began the old slogan.

“It doesn’t mean nobody’s out to get you.”

“Right.”

“So, this is delicate ,” Brognola said. “I thought a little extra buffer couldn’t hurt. Hey, if I’m wrong, we’re only out a couple hours and sixty bucks.”

“Okay.”

Brognola scrutinized the other passengers, as far as possible, then said, “Let’s head back toward the stern.”

They made the shift, and no one followed them.

“Okay,” he said at last. “What do you know about a group called Vanguard International?”

“They do private security worldwide,” Bolan replied, “on top of various government contracts. They guard oilfields, corporate offices—anything, anywhere, from what I understand.”

“Assuming that the customer can pay their going rates,” Brognola said.

“I didn’t think it was a charity.”

“I guess you’ve heard about the controversy in Iraq?”

“Only what CNN reported,” Bolan said.

He was aware that three Vanguard employees had been kidnapped and executed on camera by Iraqi terrorists in 2005. A few weeks later, Vanguard commandos had raided an Iraqi village said to be hometown of the kidnap team’s ringleader, gunning down three dozen unarmed men, women and children. An FBI investigation found that the victims were slain “without cause,” but Iraqi officials and State Department spokesmen mutually ruled out any criminal charges.

Some people wondered why.

“Well, what they ran was the tip of the iceberg,” Brognola said. “We’ve got allegations of Third World gun-running, and half of the UN is up in arms over supposed violations of the Mercenary Convention.”

“Makes sense,” Bolan said.

He couldn’t quote chapter and verse from the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, approved by the UN’s General Assembly in 1989, but he understood the gist of it. The declaration defined mercs as private soldiers recruited expressly for profit and condemned their employment either in general warfare or for specific projects, such as toppling governments. Companies like Vanguard and its handful of competitors skirted the rules by posing as “security consultants,” or simply ignored the UN’s declaration in full knowledge that it was a toothless order, virtually unenforceable.

How could the UN stop America, Britain, or any other country from hiring private troops to guard facilities abroad? And if those “guards” should run amok, committing acts that qualified as war crimes if performed by soldiers of a sovereign state, what was the legal remedy?

In Vanguard’s case, apparently, there wasn’t one.

“We wouldn’t normally concern ourselves with anything like this,” Brognola said. “Hell, Stony Man was founded to reach out and touch the bad guys when the law can’t do it. And the gun-running, that falls to State or Treasury, if either one of them decides it’s worth their time.”

“So, what, then?” Bolan asked his oldest living friend.

“So, heroin,” Brognola said.

“Explain.”

“You know we keep track of the traffic, right?”

Bolan nodded, waiting for the rest.

“Well, what you may not know is that Afghanistan surpassed Turkey in heroin production during the nineties. In 1999, the Afghanis had 350 square miles of opium poppies under cultivation, with smack refineries running around the clock. A year later, the Taliban moves in and takes control of the country, declaring the drug trade ‘un-Islamic.’ Whatever else we think of them, hiding Osama, treating their women like slaves and the rest, they reduced Afghan poppy cultivation by ninety-odd percent in one year, down to thirty square miles in 2001.”

“What’s the bad news?” Bolan asked.

“That would be 9/11,” Brognola replied. “Down come the towers in New York, and we invade Afghanistan. Boot out the Taliban and supervise elections. Never mind missing Bin Laden. Anyone can have a bad day, right? Or eight bad years? The trouble is, that with the Taliban deposed, the drug trade started up again, big-time.”

“So I heard. But, what’s the most recent data?”

“Right now, opium cultivation is back up to three hundred square miles and climbing. The UN’s International Narcotics Control Board says Afghanistan produced 3,500 tons of heroin last year, up from 185 tons in 2001. That’s an increase of nearly two thousand percent. Scotland Yard says nearly all the heroin in Britain comes from Afghanistan now. They’ve frozen out the China white and Turkish product, underselling their competitors because they deal in bulk. It isn’t quite that bad, stateside, but I can promise you, we’re getting there.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Bolan said. “But where does Vanguard come into the picture?”

“It’s looking more and more like they may be the picture,” Brognola replied. “Or, anyway, the transport side of it.”

“I’m listening.”

“They aren’t just in Iraq, okay? That little blow-up got the company its first global publicity, but they’ve got outposts everywhere you go. Saudi Arabia. Bangkok. Jakarta. Take your pick.”

“Afghanistan,” Bolan said.

“Almost from the start, back in 2001,” Brognola said. “They weren’t front-line, but they moved in behind the coalition troops, guarding oil pipelines, corporate HQs and CEOs, the usual. And somewhere in the middle of all that, we think they hooked up with the poppy growers and refiners.”

“When you say we think , that means…?”

“We know,” Brognola said. “We have surveillance tapes of Vanguard personnel guarding the opium plantations, running convoys on drug shipments, piloting some of the planes.”

“So, lock them up and shut it down,” Bolan replied.

“Ah, that’s the rub,” Brognola said. “So far, nobody’s caught them with a shipment anywhere in U.S. jurisdiction, or in Britain. They’ve been able to evade surveillance for the hand-offs, and they let the buyers run with it from there—wherever there is, for a given load.”

“We must have pull inside Afghanistan,” Bolan said. “With the Army, FBI and CIA in place? A president we basically appointed to replace the Taliban? You’re telling me nobody can arrest drug dealers operating in plain sight?”

“It’s all about ‘democracy,’ these days. Democracy and appearances , okay? Afghanistan was on the economic ropes when we moved in, back in 2001. The government, such as it was, was drowning in red ink and weird religious proclamations from the Taliban. Now they’re on track again—or seem to be—but tossing out the zealots left a vacuum. And who fills it? The same characters who were in charge before the Taliban started its holy war. Oil men and heroin producers. The DEA calls it a ‘heroin economy.’ I won’t say that drug smugglers own the president, but draw your own conclusions.”

“So the job is what, exactly?” Bolan asked.

“We can’t wipe out the poppy farms or the refineries,” Brognola answered. “No one can, unless the Afghans managed to elect a government that’s more concerned with law and common decency than profit.”

Bolan smiled ruefully and said, “Good luck with that.”

“Meanwhile, we need to shut down our part of the pipeline. Vanguard’s crossed the line, but we can’t touch them legally. Between the jurisdiction thing and their connections from Kabul to Washington, arrests aren’t happening.”

“Connections,” Bolan said. “Whose toes will I be stepping on?”

“Vanguard has friends in Congress and around the Pentagon,” Brognola replied. “They serve huge corporations, which means lobbyists are at their beck and call. As far as opposition on the ground, watch out for people from the Company.”

Bolan suppressed a grimace. Elements within the CIA had dealt with organized criminals from the Agency’s inception in 1947. Espionage was a dirty business, but some of the CIA’s allies were filthy beyond redemption: French heroin smugglers in the late 1940s and early ’50s, Asian traffickers during the Vietnam War, and South American cocaine cartels throughout the Contra mess in Nicaragua. Each time they were caught, the spooks cried “national security” and vowed that they would never touch another load of contraband.

In each and every case, they lied.

“I see a problem going in,” Bolan remarked.

“Which is?”

“I’ll need a guide, interpreter, whatever,” he replied. “We usually use a native who’s been working for the Company. But if they’re on the other side, this time…”

“You’re covered,” Brognola replied. “The DEA’s been working overtime on this. In fact, most of the information I’ve just given you came straight from them. One of their agents will provide a native contractor to meet your needs.”

“We’re in the middle of a bureaucratic civil war, then,” Bolan said.

“No one in Washington will ever call it that,” Brognola stated. “Vanguard’s the target. Do it right, there’ll be some backroom grumbling, but no politician’s going public to defend drug smugglers who’ve already been accused of killing innocent civilians. They can spin the killings seven ways from Sunday, but there’s no way to explain shipments of heroin.”

“And if the Company steps in?”

“Wrong place, wrong time,” Brognola said. “Do what you have to do. They bury their mistakes. It’s one thing they know how to do.”

“I’ll need more background on the targets,” Bolan said.

Brognola took a CD in a plastic jewel case from an inside pocket of his windbreaker and handed it to Bolan on the down-low.

“Everything’s on there,” he said. “Including info on your DEA contact. Just wipe it when you’re done, as usual.”

“I’ll check it out tonight,” Bolan replied, and made the CD disappear into a pocket of his own. “When do I leave?”

“Sooner the better,” Hal replied. “You’ll have to fly commercial, I’m afraid. A charter where you’re going raises too damn many eyebrows, but the CD has some addresses in Kabul where you can pick up tools of the trade. In fact, from what I hear, guns are the one thing in Afghanistan that’s easier to find than heroin. Come one, come all.”

“So, it’s Dodge City in the middle of a bureaucratic civil war.”

Brognola smiled. “Picture Colombia, devoid of any self-restraint.”

“Sounds like a blast,” Bolan replied.

A S PROMISED , the CD contained all of the information Bolan needed, and then some. There was a capsule history of opium and heroin production in Afghanistan, spanning the period from British domination in the nineteenth century, through Russian occupation, modern civil wars, up to the present day. Bolan skimmed over it and focused chiefly on the maps and satellite photos depicting known heroin trade routes.

The background on Vanguard International demanded his closer attention. The company had been founded in 1995 by present owner-CEO Clay Carlisle and a partner, improbably named Thomas Jefferson, who had dropped out of sight after selling his shares to Carlisle in August 2001. Carlisle was the undisputed king of Vanguard, fielding a private army larger than those deployed by some Third World nations.

As for Carlisle himself, he was the son of a self-ordained evangelical minister, born in 1964, who had graduated “with honors” from an unaccredited parochial high school, then volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps and served with distinction in Grenada. After eight years in the Corps, he’d pulled the pin and entered corporate security as a hired bodyguard. In 1994 he’d shot it out with kidnappers who tried to snatch his client—a Texas oil billionaire—and had suffered a near-fatal wound in the firefight. The grateful client, who emerged unscathed, was pleased to bankroll Carlisle in creation of his own security firm, Vanguard, which claimed the oilman’s vast empire as its first client.