Face Of Terror

Now it was time to pursue the other four running in opposite directions across the wide-open spaces of the pastureland.

Bolan whipped the wheel to the right and accelerated once more. The Hummer dived and jumped over the uneven surface beneath its tires. Ahead, Bolan could see two of the running mafiosi—one wearing a charcoal-gray business suit, the other dressed in a more comfortable track suit—running as best they could. But regardless of the fact that he wore running clothes, the man inside them wasn’t a runner. He was at least fifty pounds overweight and doing more waddling than actual running.

As they closed the gap to roughly ten yards, the fat man pulled a bright nickel-plated revolver from somewhere inside his jacket and threw a wild shot back at the Hummer. Bolan pushed the pedal down harder, and a second later the big vehicle was rolling along right next to the man.

The overweight Mafia man was huffing and puffing like a freight train on its final run before being scrapped. And it looked to the Executioner as if it took all of his last strength to lift the brightly shining wheelgun in his hand toward the open window of the Hummer.

Bolan extended his left hand out the window and tapped the trigger yet again.

All three 9 mm hollowpoint rounds coughed out of the sound-suppressed weapon and into the face and throat of the fat man.

Bolan drew a bead on the other man heading in the direction of the highway. He was on the other side of the Hummer, and Bolan said, “Get ready.”

Jessup nodded and extended his rifle barrel out the window. But for this shot there would be no need to kneel on the seat or strap himself in. He could do it from where he sat.

A lone, frightened and confused cow suddenly appeared in front of them as if out of nowhere. The Executioner twisted the wheel hard, barely brushing past her without hurting her. The mooing sounded more like a roar as they drove on.

Fifteen seconds later, they were next to the man in the charcoal-gray suit. It was the same man Bolan had hit in the shoulder, and he held that shoulder with his other hand as he ran, a grimace of severe pain covering his face. But that hand also held a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, and as the Hummer neared, he attempted to raise it just as his overweight friend had tried with his nickel-plated revolver.

Jessup changed his plans. For life.

The Executioner watched out of the corner of his eye as the DEA agent lifted the barrel of his rifle and carefully triggered a double-tap of 5.56 mm NATO rounds into the mafioso. The first one caught the man in the center of the back, causing him to suddenly halt his running. The second round exploded the back of his head as he fell, leaving no question in either the Executioner’s or Jessup’s mind that he was dead.

Bolan wasted no time.

Another quick U-turn and the Executioner was already flooring the accelerator across the pasture. Ahead, he could see two tiny moving specks that he knew were the final two Mafia soldiers. They were still moving, but they looked as if they were tired. One speck had even slowed to a walk.

Bolan glanced to his right as they passed the wreckage of the other two pickups again. Far in the distance, hustling deeper into the pasture, he could see the Jeep and two pickups that had darted away as soon as the Hummer had left the road. If he and Jessup could just take out these last two mafiosi quickly enough, there was still the chance that they’d have time to catch up to the men escaping with the drug money.

Rolling on across the prairie, Bolan drove up next to the walking man. Dressed like the others, he had taken time to light a cigarette and now huffed and puffed on the unfiltered smoke that was clenched between his teeth.

As the Hummer neared, the man turned and looked back at it.

Bolan wondered if he might be able to take this man alive. If he could, he would. Not out of any sympathy for such a parasite who fed off the misery of others’ addictions, but in order to collect information.

The Mafia man gave him no such chance.

As they neared the man, he turned and raised a small Skorpion submachine pistol. A smattering of bullets hit the windshield but the small, low-velocity rounds barely even marked the windshield. As they drove on, however, nearing the man, his angle of fire changed.

A second before he had a shot at Bolan through the driver’s window of the Hummer, the Executioner extended his hand once more and tapped another 3-round burst into the man’s face. Not even his mother would have recognized him as he settled on the grassy ground of the cow pasture.

Kicking their speed yet another notch, the Executioner came to a man who looked to be much younger than the other mafioso. In his early twenties, Bolan guessed, he was definitely in better shape. But the uneven pastureland was no cinder track, and the ruts and holes—not to mention the mounds that often crumbled under the feet—were slowing him.

The Hummer was still twenty yards behind him when the younger man turned. Instead of a business or track suit, he wore khaki slacks, a blue blazer and a paisley tie around the collar of his white button-down shirt. He looked more like a young attorney than a Mafia soldier, the Executioner thought as he twisted the steering wheel, turning his side of the truck to face this last man, then skidding to a halt.

The young man reached under his left armpit with his right hand.

But that was as far as he got toward his weapon.

The final 3-round burst in the Beretta’s 15-round magazine flew out of the barrel with three quiet burps. All three hit the center of the mafioso’s chest and exploded his heart. He fell straight back away from the Hummer, dead before he hit the ground.

The Executioner turned immediately for the vehicles still escaping across the pasture. They were at least a mile away now, and they’d be hard to intercept. Maybe impossible. It depended on whether they were just fleeing haphazardly or if they’d had some backup plan for a situation such as this.

Bolan frowned. They looked as if they knew what they were doing. And his gut instinct was that this escape route was part of a well-thought-out backup plan.

As he took his foot off the brake pedal and returned it to the accelerator, Jessup said, “You think there’s a chance of catching them?”

The Hummer tore up more wild grass as it picked up speed. “I don’t know,” the Executioner said. “But it won’t hurt to give it a shot.”

BEHIND THE WHEEL of the Jeep, Harry Drake looked up into the rearview mirror. “Those bastards in that Hummer are coming after us,” he told Sal Whitlow, who sat in the passenger’s seat of the vehicle. Like Drake himself, Whitlow wore green camouflage BDUs and a boonie hat. A Russian Tokarev automatic pistol rode in a holster on his belt, and a Russian Kalashnikov AK-47 lay across his lap.

“They’ll never catch us.” Whitlow chuckled, turning in his seat to smile back into the pasture. “That yellow submarine’s almost like a tank. But this Jeep and the four-wheel-drive pickups are enough for this terrain.”

“I hope you’re right,” Drake said as he turned slightly to miss a small scrub tree. “And I hope our ticket out of here is waiting where he’s supposed to be.”

“He will be,” Whitlow said confidently, turning back to face the front. “Joe Knox is solid SAS. I met him several times when we trained with the Brits.”

Drake nodded. He was trusting Whitlow’s judgment, as well as his word. They’d served together as Army Rangers during the first Gulf War, then worn the green beanies of the Army’s Special Forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The two men were more than friends. They were like brothers.

Just the same, Drake was glad he’d downed a Lortab and a Xanax—painkillers—with a mouthful of whiskey right before the yellow Hummer appeared. His nerves had been on edge lately, and the mixture of drugs was sometimes all that kept him from screaming out loud.

As the Jeep took a rise, then suddenly plunged downward toward a dry creek bed, Drake twisted his neck and looked at the Ford F250. It was negotiating the rugged ground as well as the Jeep. He turned his head back and saw the Dodge Ram just outside his open-topped vehicle to his right. It was doing fine, too.

Whitlow was right. They had stolen the four-wheel-drive pickups, along with the Jeep, earlier that morning from a farm twenty miles away, and they’d been perfect vehicles in which to deliver the cocaine. And the farmer who had owned all three vehicles wouldn’t need them anymore, either.

He and his wife lay dead on a pile of hay in the barn.

Drake took another quick glance at the Dodge Ram and saw Felix Bundy riding shotgun. Though he couldn’t see past Bundy in the higher vehicle, he knew Donald O’Hara was in the driver’s seat. Both men had been Navy SEALS and served in the Middle East just like Drake and Whitlow. Drake glanced one more time at the Ford F250 as all three vehicles came up out of the creek bed and raced on toward a county section road just past a barbed-wire fence another two hundred yards away. Elmer Scott was behind the wheel of the Ram, with Charlie Ducket riding shotgun for him. The two of them had been U.S. Marine recons and had shot their share of Arabs just like the rest of the team.

Harry Drake instinctively ducked lower behind the Jeep’s windshield as the front bumper burst through the barbed wire. The pickups had fallen in directly behind him, and now he raced up the bar ditch to the dirt road.

Drake frowned, thinking at lightning speed. The county road was a temptation. It would be easier going, with less chance of one or more of his convoy breaking down. But the Hummer would likely catch up to them more quickly if they took the easy route. Besides, once they reached the highway they’d be sitting ducks for Oklahoma highway patrolmen and any small-town cops who got word of what was going on over the radio.

By the time he had decided to go on through the next pasture he was already halfway down the bar ditch anyway. The Jeep popped the barbed wire surrounding the next quarter section as easily as it had the first one, and sent a small herd of Black Angus cattle scurrying away in terror.

As they raced across the pasture, Drake saw the white paint of the helicopter peeking between the branches of a small grove of trees. Behind the controls, he knew Joe Knox would be waiting to take them skyward. He slowed the Jeep and prepared to jump out, abandon it and help the men with the money load the briefcases before they abandoned the pickups.

As soon as he’d ground to a halt, Drake held his hand up to his eyes. Looking out over the pastureland, he could see the yellow Hummer just now crossing the county road and coming up through the hole in the fence that they had made.

“Okay, guys!” Drake yelled above the sound of the whopping chopper blades. “Get that money on board and let’s get out of here!” He slung his AK-47 over his shoulder on the green web sling and hurried to the F250, where he seized four briefcases. “And from now until we’re safely airborne, we change languages just in case!” A grin curled the corners of his mouth, making the ends of his handlebar mustache rise to tickle the sides of his nose.

He had chosen his crew carefully, including in his criteria for recruitment their exceptional combat skills, intelligence, willingness to break the laws of the nation that had trained them and they had defended, but even more for one other skill they all possessed.

Each and every one of Harry Drake’s men spoke fluent Farsi, the national tongue of Iran.

“Aye-aye,” one of the Marines yelled. Drake couldn’t tell which one.

But it didn’t matter. What did matter was that they get the half-million dollars in cash on board the chopper and fly out of here before that big yellow monstrosity of a vehicle arrived and its passengers shot them all.

Drake had a bad feeling about that canary-colored Hummer. Not so much the vehicle itself but the men inside it.

Something told him that at least one of the men—the driver, who had shown such competency in taking out their Mafia associates—was a superior warrior to each and every last one of them.

THE MAN DEA SPECIAL AGENT Rick Jessup had been told to call Matt Cooper continued to guide the yellow Hummer as it bounced in and out of the ruts and mounds that made up the cow pasture. Far in the distance, the specks that Jessup knew were a Jeep and two more pickups were gradually growing larger. As they banked down into another creek bed, then up the other side, he was suddenly able to differentiate between the vehicles. The Jeep was a standard CJ-5 model. One of the pickups was a Dodge Ram, the other a Ford F250.

Jessup couldn’t remember the license numbers he had seen for a brief second as the three vehicles had fled the scene a few minutes earlier. But if memory served him right, they had all had local farm tags.

Which meant the men driving and riding in them had stolen them from somewhere close to this area. And they had to have stolen them recently. No reports of missing vehicles had gone out over the police-band radio mounted in the Hummer. That could only mean one of two things: either the rightful owners hadn’t discovered their property missing yet or they were dead.

Considering the fact that his snitch had told him it was radical Islamic terrorists who had sold the coke to the Mafia, Jessup’s money was on the latter possibility.

The DEA man watched the vehicles ahead of them slow, then stop as they reached a lone grove of trees in the middle of the pasture. Just above the treetops, he could barely make out the whirling blades of a helicopter.

“So that’s their plan,” Bolan said from behind the wheel. The words came out sounding hard and stark after the silence that had reigned over the Hummer for the past several minutes.

“They’ll just abandon the pickups and Jeep. My guess is they were stolen anyway,” Jessup said.

Bolan nodded, then turned briefly toward Jessup. “Take the wheel,” he said.

Jessup reached over and grasped the steering wheel.

The Hummer slowed momentarily as Bolan took his foot off the accelerator and thrust himself backward over the seat into the rear passenger area of the Hummer. But it was done so quickly and smoothly—obviously a much-practiced move—that Jessup was able to slide behind the wheel and take control immediately.

A second later, Bolan had climbed back into the front, now in the passenger’s seat where Jessup had been a second before. Reaching down to the floorboard, the big man lifted his Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun.

Jessup got the Hummer back up to speed as Bolan strapped his leg down with the seat belt. A moment later, he was more out of the window than in, and firing 3-round bursts from the H&K subgun.

Through the windshield, Jessup could see tiny figures loading what looked like briefcases from the pickups onto the helicopter. He also saw the small grass and dust storms erupt as his partner’s 9 mm slugs fell a few feet in front of the men.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jessup watched Bolan raise his point of aim slightly. As more subgun explosions sounded from the other side of the Hummer, he looked out of the windshield again and saw two holes appear in the side of the chopper.

But they were still too far away for the submachine gun to be relied on for accuracy. It was a short-range weapon, and trying to force it to become a sniper’s rifle was like using a screwdriver for a hammer.

Bolan tossed the MP-5 over his shoulder into the backseat and lifted the AR-15 that Jessup had used only minutes before on the Mafia men. He leaned out of the window again, and Jessup could see that the assault rifle was angled more horizontally this time. The 5.56 mm NATO rounds should reach the chopper more efficiently.

Bolan pulled the AR-15’s trigger three times in a row, and a trio of rounds sailed across the grassland and pocked the side of the helicopter—just to the side of the open side door. But they did so as the last of the briefcases was loaded, and the last man in cammies reached up, took the hand of another terrorist and allowed himself to be jerked up into the chopper as it began to rise.

Bolan pulled the trigger several more times as the Hummer raced closer. But they were still too far away for his rounds to be effective, and to complicate things further, his target was moving as well as distant.

Jessup drove on. When the helicopter was perhaps a hundred feet in the air, the pilot turned its nose directly at the oncoming Hummer. Jessup watched as a man in green camouflage, secured to the helicopter by a ballistic nylon strap, leaned out of the same sliding side door through which the men had boarded.

Resting on his shoulder was an OD-green bazooka.

“Twist the wheel!” Bolan yelled. And even as he spoke, he dropped the AR-15 and reached across the Hummer with both hands.

The bazooka’s charge exploded out of the mammoth barrel even as the back blast flew past the rear of the helicopter. Together, Bolan and Jessup turned the wheel as if their very lives depended on it.

The explosion ten feet to one side of their vehicle created a crater in the prairie ground roughly the same size that a hand grenade buried beneath the surface would have made. Bolan looked back up at the sky and saw the man with the bazooka disappear back into the helicopter. Then the chopper rose higher into the air, turned and flew away.

Jessup turned the Hummer back toward the helicopter as it grew smaller in the distance. Both he and Bolan stepped out of the yellow vehicle and watched.

“Any idea where they might be going?” Jessup asked.

Bolan shook his head. “Even on ground this flat, they’ll be completely out of sight in another minute or so. Especially if they stay as close to the ground as they were. They could keep going, turn right or left, or even fly a few miles one way or another and then double back past us.”

“They might figure we’ll wait here and see,” Jessup suggested.

“They might,” Bolan said. “But it’s not likely. They can spot this yellow Hummer a long time before we see them in the air. Come on.” He got back behind the wheel of the big vehicle as Jessup jumped into the passenger’s side. They drove only slightly slower as they returned to where the three Toyota pickups lay in ruins.

“It’s gonna take a while to get all that coke rounded up, inventoried and loaded,” Jessup said as they neared the overturned truck. “Want me to radio in for some assistance?” He started to reach for the microphone mounted on the dashboard.

Bolan shook his head and Jessup’s arm froze in midair.

“I’ve got a faster and much more efficient way of handling things,” the big man said as he pulled up next to the overturned truck. Quickly dropping down from the Hummer, the Executioner walked to the back of the Hummer and grabbed a five-gallon can of gasoline. Then, walking from truck to truck, he dribbled a trail of gas in his wake, removing the cap to each pickup’s gas tank when he reached it.

Finally, Bolan dripped gas in his tracks as he walked backward to the Hummer once more. Punching the cigarette lighter into the dash, he turned to Jessup as the DEA man got in on the other side. “You don’t smoke, do you?” he asked.

“No,” Jessup said.

Bolan nodded. Pulling the cigarette lighter out of the Hummer’s dash, he glanced for a second at the glowing orange disk inside it, then dropped it out of the window.

The gasoline-soaked prairie grass next to the Hummer immediately started to burn, and the flame worked its way down the individual trails that led to the Toyotas, cocaine and dead men.

Throwing the Hummer into gear, Bolan tore up more grass and dirt as he floored the accelerator and raced back to the county road. He had driven through broken barbed-wire fence and traversed the bar ditch to the road when the explosions began.

2

Bolan watched the flames leaping in the rearview mirror as he drove the Hummer back toward the highway. Next to him, Jessup had turned sideways in his seat and watched as the three exploded pickups, the dead mafiosi and a half-million dollars of cocaine burned. “Well, Cooper,” he said finally, turning back to face the front. “That’s certainly a lot easier than bagging it all for evidence and transporting it for safekeeping until the trial—which won’t be necessary now anyway.” He paused and took a deep breath. “You sure we aren’t going to have to answer for this? I mean, calling this unorthodox behavior for a law-enforcement officer would be the understatement of the century.”

“Don’t sweat it, Jessup,” Bolan said. “Yes, I’m in charge of this operation. But I’m not a law-enforcement officer.”

The DEA man threw his head back against the neck rest atop his seat. “Oh, that’s great,” he said. “So you’re a spook. CIA? Department of Defense? Homeland Security?”

“Uh-uh,” the Executioner said. Ahead, he could see where the dirt rose up to the two-lane highway leading from Guyman to Boise City. “None of those.”

“Okay,” Jessup said. “I’ll quit wondering exactly who you are or who you work for. It doesn’t matter. You’re one hell of a…” He stopped talking for a second, looking for the right words. When he didn’t find them, he continued, “You’re one damn fine fighter. You immediately adapt to whatever situation presents itself.” Across the front seat, the Executioner saw him frown. “But do you not have to answer to anyone? Anyone at all?”

“Just the President,” Bolan said. “And we get along just fine.” He withdrew his scrambled satellite phone and tapped in a number. A few seconds later, Jack Grimaldi answered the summons.

“Yeah, Striker,” the ace pilot acknowledged. “What’s up?”

“We got the dope but missed the money,” Bolan told him. “We’re headed back to Guyman now to meet you.”

“You can do that if you want,” Grimaldi said, “but there’s no need to. I took a little recon flight an hour or so ago. Spotted your bright yellow vehicle on the road. But the important thing here is the terrain I saw. It’s so flat, I’d have to try hard to find a place where I couldn’t land.” He stopped speaking for a second so Bolan could take it all in, then said, “Want me to come to you? It’ll be a lot faster.”

“Sounds fine,” the Executioner said. He pulled off the highway onto the shoulder and threw the Hummer into Park. The entire roadway was asphalt, pocked with holes the size of volcanoes and, in general, rougher riding than the cow pastures had been. Pulling a small handheld Global Positioning Unit—GPU—out of his shirt pocket, he read the Hummer’s coordinates to Grimaldi. “When you start smelling smoke and seeing flames below, you’ll know you’re close.”

“That’s affirmative, big guy,” Grimaldi said. “I’m revving her up now. See you in a few.”

Bolan heard a click in his ear and folded his phone back before dropping it and the GPU into his pockets again. Then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “You never know when we’ll get another chance to rest once this mission gets off the ground,” he told Jessup. “So I’d suggest you take advantage of it now.”

IT SEEMED THAT BOLAN had just closed his eyes when he was awakened by the distinctive sound of twin Pratt & Whitney PW305 turbofan engines. He turned to Jessup, grabbed the DEA agent’s arm and gently shook him to consciousness.

Bolan smiled when the pilot landed and brought the Learjet 60 to a halt less than twenty yards away. His friend controlled whatever craft he was flying as if it were an extension of his body. Aircraft were to Grimaldi what firearms and other weapons were to the Executioner.

When Jessup was awake, both men got out of the Hummer, walked down and then up across the bar ditch, then climbed over the fence. The Executioner found the door to the Learjet already open when he reached it, and Jack Grimaldi grinning at him below his sunglasses.

A second later, Bolan had strapped himself into his seat next to the pilot and Jessup took the seat behind Grimaldi. The ace pilot revved the engines, and the plane began to pick up speed again in preparation for takeoff.