Hazard Zone

“I hope so, very much,” he said. “Now, what can I do to help you?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure there’s much you can do,” he admitted. “At this point, I’m simply following my instincts. Would you mind if I took a look around the property, maybe talked to some of the staff?”

“Not at all,” Kroger said. “I can escort you, if you like, or our new security manger, Mr. Kowal, whichever you prefer.”

“I’d like to meet Mr. Kowal, anyway,” Bolan said. “Since he’s new, he may be able to offer a unique perspective.”

Kroger agreed and picked up the phone, calling Mr. Kowal, who arrived several minutes later, and introduced himself. “Call me Rob,” he said.

Kowal was a rather unassuming man, with brown hair and eyes that likely made him unnoticeable most of the time. His manner was one of friendly professionalism. “What would you like to see first, Agent Cooper?”

“Let’s start with the security tapes from the night Amber Carson was last seen alive,” he suggested. “Then I’d like to talk with housekeeping.”

“If you’ll follow me?” he asked.

Bolan nodded, thanked Kroger and followed Kowal out of the office. The security manager’s office was a short distance down a back hallway, and Bolan found himself pleasantly surprised. Most hotels and resorts couldn’t afford—or wouldn’t spend—the money for a genuine security professional, let alone the kinds of equipment on display here. The office was clean and well organized, and a bank of camera monitors was placed against one wall. They displayed views of every hallway, the lobby, the driveway and the back patio area. A uniformed security officer was watching the monitors closely, occasionally tapping a button to change a camera angle.

“Impressive,” Bolan said. “This is a pretty nice setup for a resort.”

“Unfortunately, it’s not as good as it could be,” Kowal said. “I was brought on board just a few days ago, and it’s too late to help that young woman.”

“What was the security situation when you were hired?” Bolan asked.

“Pretty standard,” he said. “The cameras were all operational and recording, but there was no monitoring security staff. After midnight, the resort was running only a single security officer for the entire property, and he spent most of his nights rousting drunk rich kids instead of looking for real trouble.”

“What have you changed since you came on board?”

Kowal gestured to the man seated at the monitors. “As you can see, I’ve got a man assigned just to watch the camera feeds—rotating staff there every three hours to keep their eyes fresh. I also added the gate guard, and we have four officers on foot patrol during the day–it bumps to six between 6:00 p.m. and midnight, and then drops to three between midnight and 4:00 a.m.”

“Sounds about right,” Bolan said. “Any trouble so far?”

The security manager shook his head in disgust. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Drunk rich kids carrying on, for the most part. A couple of minor scuffles out on the patio, and once on the beach—all easily handled and nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Have you talked to the staff on duty that night?” he asked. “Reviewed the video footage?”

“Both,” Kowal said. He turned to the officer seated at the monitors. “Dave, can you bring up the footage from the night of Amber Carson’s murder, please? Just from the patio.” He moved to a blank monitor, turned it on and gestured for Bolan to sit down.

Both men watched as Amber and her friends drank shots out on the patio, then saw her move to get something to eat. There wasn’t an audio feed. “Who’s the guy hitting on her?” Bolan asked.

“Actually, a member of the staff. He was off duty, and so long as things didn’t get out of line, the management had allowed it. I’ve since changed that policy.”

“Wise,” he said. “Has this employee been questioned?”

“By the local police, myself, Mr. Kroger and two federal law-enforcement officers who came in yesterday evening,” Kowal said.

Bolan thought that was curious. He asked which agency the federal officers were with, and Kowal snorted. “They showed FBI credentials, but I don’t think so. Maybe military or NSA, but not FBI.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Educated guess,” Kowal said. “They didn’t talk like FBI.”

“You seem to know your way around law enforcement,” Bolan said. “Better than most resort security officers I’ve ever heard of. What’s your background?”

Kowal smiled. “Secret Service until four years ago. I quit to launch my own company.”

“Doing resort security? Kind of a step down, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

This time Kowal actually laughed. “No, my company is a security consulting agency. Once they’re set up here and I’ve got a good man in place to run things, I’ll be on my way to wherever the next job takes me. It may not sound as cool as Secret Service, but it’s about ten times the money.”

“Makes sense,” Bolan said. “So, what’s your take on this situation?”

“Jamaica is a gilt-covered cesspit,” he said. “But generally speaking, the real bad guys, the posse crews, leave the tourists alone. Too much trouble—high risk, low reward. I think Amber Carson was targeted, if what I’ve heard is true.”

“What have you heard?” he asked.

“She was raped, ritualistically murdered, and then somehow her body was rigged with a light explosive that was attached to weaponized anthrax. When it went off, it killed Senator Carson, some folks in the examination room where they were conducting the autopsy, and turned Bethesda Naval Hospital into a quarantine zone.”

Bolan leaned back in his chair and reassessed the man sitting before him. Not only was his information dead-on accurate, but it was only known to a handful of people in the world right now. “I thought you were out of the Secret Service,” he finally said.

“I am,” Kowal said. “But I still have friends there, and I like to keep in the loop about what’s going on in that end of things. You know how it is. You’re never really out of service.”

“You’re well-informed,” he admitted. “Most of that hasn’t been made public yet. Kroger still thinks her father is alive. Have you heard anything from the staff that makes you think they might know more than they ought to?”

“No, but I’m the new guy and not a local, so that makes me persona non grata with the islanders. It’s a closed community in general and really hard to break into, but I’m not here to make best friends. I’m here to get a job done.”

“Kroger’s going to find out, probably sooner than later. They won’t be able to keep that under wraps for long,” Bolan said.

“I know,” he said. “But he won’t find out from me. Right now, I’m just doing the job I was hired to do—make the resort as secure as possible. Though that horse has already left the barn, I think.”

“Me, too,” Bolan said. “I just wish I knew where the damn thing ran off to.”

4

After finishing up with the security manager, Bolan decided to give the property a quick visual inspection. Kowal had happily agreed. Though the man seemed more than competent, another set of eyes might spot something new or different. First, Bolan went up to Amber’s floor and checked out the condominium, which was still protected by police tape and unchanged from the night of her death. Then, he went all the way to the roof, which turned out to be unremarkable—as did the beach, the patio and the walkways around the main resort building. In short, nothing jumped out at him as out of place.

Walking along the rear of the building, Bolan heard two male voices on the other side of a brick screening wall, and he stopped to listen. The conversation was unclear, but both men seemed to be unhappy with their jobs. He started to dismiss them and move on, when they walked away from the area with their backs to him. One of the men wore a sleeveless T-shirt, and it revealed a heavily inked tattoo that looked all too familiar—the symbol of the Undead Posse.

Pausing to take another look, Bolan saw that the other man sported the same tattoo. Two people from the Undead Posse working here felt like a lot more than a coincidence to him. Bolan decided to follow them to see if they led him somewhere interesting—or at least somewhere he might be able to ask them some questions in a more private setting.

Bolan followed the two men as they left the employee’s entrance and exit area and walked toward a private parking lot shielded from sight by a row of massive palm trees and a vine-covered iron fence. They rounded the corner and Bolan walked a bit faster, not wanting to lose them. As he came around the fence, he saw that they had paused, and one had drawn a compact semiautomatic handgun.

Bolan hit the ground in a dive roll just as the shot rang out. He didn’t stop his movement, just kept the roll moving forward until he found his feet, then launched himself full force into the man with the handgun, driving his head like a battering ram into his gut and knocking him to the ground.

The man lost his grip on the gun, which bounced and clattered over the pavement of the parking lot. Out of the corner of his eye, Bolan saw the second man take off running. He’d have to finish this one quickly if he had any hope at all of catching up. He drove his knee piston-style into the crotch of the man beneath him, then shifted as the man groaned in pain and dropped the knee into his rib cage. Bolan felt at least one give way beneath his weight, and the groan became a breathy scream.

“Who are you?” Bolan demanded, leaning back slightly to let the man breathe.

Through a grimace of pain, the man said, “Death!” He spit the word as he brought around a hidden knife with his free hand, trying to stab the blade into Bolan’s neck.

The Executioner grabbed his wrist before he could connect, silently thanking his lucky stars that he’d seen it coming, and twisted the joint. As the man fought beneath him, Bolan contorted the wrist further, the ligaments snapping as he pushed it down, down, and then with a final shove stuck the blade into the man’s throat. The nameless thug twitched beneath him, then sagged in the release of death.

“Damn it,” he muttered, pushing himself up off the body that lay on the ground. He looked around for the other man, and saw him slipping into a Jeep on the far side of the parking lot. Knowing he had no time, Bolan leaped to his feet and took off running back toward the resort and the street where he’d parked his rental car. He ran all out, shouting for the guard to open the pedestrian gate.

The man came out looking stunned at Bolan’s sudden appearance.

“Open it!” Bolan yelled as he slammed into the gate. “Open it now!”

The guard hurried into his shack, and the big American saw the Jeep pull out of the employee lot two blocks down. The gate buzzed and Bolan shoved himself through it.

“What’s going—” the guard tried to say as he ran past.

Bolan didn’t have time for conversation. He raced to his car and jumped in, gunned the engine and took off after the Jeep.

The roads were crowded enough that he had to weave through traffic like a madman. Tires squealed and horns honked as he forced his vehicle past irritated drivers until he saw the Jeep ahead of him by several blocks and he felt comfortable enough to slow down. The traffic thinned as the Jeep headed out of Montego Bay, back toward Kingston. He stayed back as far as he could, noting how the driver of the Jeep was moving along the street carelessly and dangerously. It careened around cars that were moving slower than he wanted to go, and a couple of times he nearly caused an accident. Still, Bolan didn’t think the man could see that he was being followed so much as he was in a hurry to get away.

The Jeep continued on down the highway, and Bolan was thankful that this was really the only road between the two cities. A number of vehicles stayed on the highway the whole time, so there was no reason for the driver of the Jeep to think he was being followed simply because Bolan’s car happened to be behind him. It took a couple of hours for them to reach Kingston, and then he had no choice but to move closer.

The late-afternoon traffic was getting heavier and heavier, and if Bolan lost his mark, then all of this would have been for nothing. The soldier wished he hadn’t had to kill the man back at the resort. No doubt that Kowal and Kroger would be upset by another death on the property—even a necessary one.

The heart of Kingston was the polar opposite of Montego Bay, which was mostly a tourist area. Kept clean and inviting, with signs of wealth the hallmark of the coastal area, Montego Bay was welcoming and looked safe. The heart of Kingston was anything but hospitable: it was a place for the locals, mostly members of Jamaican posses. Spray-painted graffiti, rusted or burned-out cars and garbage in the streets made for a stunning contrast to where he’d just come from.

As the Jeep got closer to the Tivoli Gardens district, Bolan began to wish he was in an armored truck, instead of a four-door rental car that wouldn’t hold off a determined attack by a Chihuahua, let alone a gang of Jamaican thugs.

The fighting in the Tivoli Gardens area was practically legend, and the area had been highlighted in his mission briefing materials as extremely dangerous to outsiders. He knew that already. One large graffiti sign said Shoes of Jamaica and had an arrow pointing to a bloody shoe on the ground.

Bolan maneuvered his car through large stacks of pallets, and vehicles that were parked partly in the road. He was making another turn when the Jeep stopped and cars swarmed from different directions to pin his vehicle between them. Two cars were behind him, the Jeep in front and another blocked the exit to his right as several Jamaicans got out of their cars and began to move in on his rental. Two men were holding crowbars, while a third held a bat with massive nails through the end.

“Here we go,” Bolan muttered, watching in his mirror as the closer of them reached the back of his car. He slammed the stick into Reverse and gunned the engine. The tires screeched and the man tried to get out of the way, but he wasn’t fast enough. The rear bumper crunched into his legs, and he let out a scream of agony even as he smashed the crowbar he was carrying into the back windshield. The glass spidered but somehow held.

Bolan shifted into First and floored the gas pedal, ramming into the back end of the Jeep and narrowly missing the man he’d been following, who’d gotten out and was approaching his car with the others. The Jeep shuddered with the impact and rolled forward slightly, offering a narrow exit. The sudden burst of gunfire from behind made it more than clear to Bolan that it was time to go. But first it seemed as if making a point was necessary.

The Executioner drew his Desert Eagle, aimed through the passenger window and fired. The .50-caliber round shattered the safety glass with ease and made a mess of the nearest posse member. The entrance wound was bad, but the exit wound was worse, and the velocity knocked the man backward into the vehicle he’d been driving, a bloody, dying heap.

Another burst of gunfire blew out Bolan’s back window, and he ducked lower, shoved the car into gear and aimed for the small opening. His car clipped the Jeep with the grating sound of metal, but he managed to make it through. Behind him, angry shouts and gunshots continued, and he knew they’d follow. Considering his mode of transportation, Bolan considered himself extremely lucky to have all four tires and a vehicle that ran at all.

The other vehicles were behind him in seconds, still shooting. Bolan whipped around a corner and found himself in a narrow lane that was crowded with wooden pallets and ended in a rusted chain-link fence. With the other cars right behind him, he didn’t have any other choices but to floor the accelerator, shift and plow straight ahead. The pallets shattered with a crash and wooden splinters flew in all directions. He ducked again as he hit the fence, which gave way before him, but not before a large section of it smashed into his windshield, spidering the glass.

Obviously, the people living in the area were not unaccustomed to gunfire. Whereas most people would stay hidden, Bolan saw these residents running out of their homes to see what was going on. He yanked hard on the steering wheel, choosing the first street that went away from the residential buildings.

Just as he glanced in the mirror, a burst of automatic gunfire sounded and took out the last of his rear windshield. Bullets pounded into the heavy cloth seats. Bolan accelerated until he saw a large truck blocking the road in front of him. “Damn it,” he said, tapping the brakes and looking for a way to pass. Knowing it was a risk, he started to move around, but another barrage of gunfire took out the back tires of the truck and the sudden change in speeds forced them together. Metal crunched, and Bolan slammed on the brakes, letting the truck go past, then he downshifted, popped the clutch and moved to the other side of the truck, which was weaving all over the road.

He steered around another corner, only to see an oncoming pickup truck headed straight for him. In the bed, two men opened fire with mini-MAC-10s. “Son of a—” he said as two trails of bullets ran up the length of his hood. Bolan ducked, then popped back up, the Desert Eagle in hand. He fired off five quick shots, and the final one smashed the engine block of the truck. Smoke rolled as it skidded to a halt.

Bolan rocketed past the slowing vehicle and slammed on his brakes as he realized he was at a dead end. He locked the car into Reverse, spinning it and spearheading his way back into the oncoming cars. The slam from the side caught Bolan by surprise and knocked his car into an apartment building.

Gunfire poured in through the windows as Bolan shoved the driver’s seat backward and shimmied into the rear area. He opened the pass-through compartment, pulled out his briefcase and opened it in one smooth motion. The gunfire suddenly stopped, and he could hear a voice shouting, “Enough! Enough! Stop!”

Pulling two grenades out of the case, he pulled the pins and waited three seconds. Then he popped through the sunroof like a paramilitary jack-in-the-box and tossed the bombs directly at the feet of the men closing in on his vehicle. They detonated milliseconds after impact, and the explosions ripped through the gang. Screams sounded as shrapnel tore into their bodies.

Bolan grabbed the case in one hand as he bailed out of the car. It contained his primary arsenal and there was no way he was leaving it behind.

He whipped around the corner and into an alley as the first rounds of renewed gunfire sounded behind him. Using the building as cover, he put the case on the ground and rapidly assembled the Tavor MTAR-21 mini assault rifle inside it. Slamming the magazine home, he risked a quick look around the corner.

They were headed his way once more.

“Persistent,” Bolan muttered, glancing down the alleyway. He needed to either end this or escape—and fast. The risks to his mission were mounting quickly. He couldn’t do the job if he was seriously injured, killed or captured, but these men obviously didn’t care about civilian casualties, either. They were in an area of rundown apartment buildings and a few shops. With all the gunfire, sooner or later there were going to be people hurt or dead who had nothing to do with the situation.

He risked another look and opened up with the Tavor in short, sharp bursts. The building facades echoed with the sound, and two of the approaching posse members went down before the others found cover.

5

Jacob Crisp stared out the window at the small market that filled the streets below his window. He smiled as the armored police vehicles drove by and bystanders threw rotted fruits and vegetables at the intruding vehicles. The irony that they were protesting in small ways because of his supposed death and all of the things that his posse had created was not lost on him. The vehicles continued out of the square, and Jacob closed the wooden shutter, blocking out further opportunity for distraction, and returned his attention to the men behind him.

Bastiene Durene was his most loyal companion. At six foot he was a couple of inches taller than Crisp, but leaner and meaner. Everyone called him Spook because he seemed to appear and disappear without any evidence. It made him an effective killer and an even more effective spy. He had almost left Spook out of his reincarnation, but he knew that the man would find out eventually anyway and then only see the slight as a betrayal.

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