Colony Of Evil

Not if I can kill them first, he thought, then focused once again on his hasty Plan B.

Plan A had been to trail the targets, find a place to kill them without drawing any real attention to his team and do the job efficiently. Now that the basic scheme was shot to hell, he needed an alternative that wasn’t based entirely on the prowess of his personnel.

Plan B had Krieger circling around behind his targets, looking for an angle of attack while Rauschman and the six mestizos kept them busy. Now that he considered it, already on the move, it might have been a better scheme with Rauschman circling to the left, a pincers movement, but that hadn’t come to Krieger in his haste.

Besides, he needed someone with the peasants, to make sure they didn’t drop their guns and run away.

More shooting, as he edged around the rusty housing of a bulky cast-off air-conditioner. He marveled at the things some people threw away, while others in the country lived in cardboard shanties or had no roof overhead.

Gripping his pistol in both hands, he was about to edge around the far end of the obstacle when more headlights lit up the scene behind him. Turning, half-expecting the police or some kind of security patrol, Krieger saw a fourth civilian car, convertible, slide to a halt some thirty yards behind Rauschman’s Mercedes.

Who in hell…?

But Krieger’s mind rebelled at what he saw next.

A young woman, pretty at a glance, leaped from the convertible without resort to doors.

Clutching a pistol in her hand.

BOLAN ALSO OBSERVED the fourth car’s entry to the battle zone and saw its lights go out as someone vaulted from the driver’s seat. He had no clear view of the new arrival, but it seemed to be a single person, no great wave of reinforcements for his enemy.

Whoever they were.

Bolan had his IMBEL autoloader cocked and ready as he circled to his left around the bulky generator. It was shielding him from hostile fire, but it also prevented him from taking any active part in the firefight. To join the battle, he had to put himself at risk.

Same old, same old.

Erratic gunfire—pistol shots, full-auto bursts, a shotgun blast—and he wondered whether Guzman had already fled the scene on foot. Bolan could hardly blame him, if he had, but he still hoped his guide and translator was made of stronger stuff than that.

Leaving the generator’s cover, moving toward what seemed to be an air-conditioner, he glimpsed the fourth car’s driver rising from the murk behind his vehicle and squeezing off to shots in rapid-fire.

Another pistol, aiming…where?

It almost seemed as if the new arrival fired toward the pursuit cars, rather than toward Guzman’s vehicle. Bolan dismissed it as an optical illusion, knowing Guzman had no allies here this night, except Bolan himself.

He started forward, cleared another corner, and immediately saw one of the hostiles standing ten or fifteen feet in front of him. Blond hair, as far as he could tell, and military bearing, minus a defensive crouch.

Take him alive for questioning, Bolan thought, but instantly dismissed the notion as too risky. He had nine guns against himself and Guzman. Playing games with any of his adversaries at the moment was an invitation to disaster.

Bolan raised his IMBEL .45 and shot the stranger in his back, high up between the shoulder blades. It wasn’t “fair” by Hollywood standards, but Bolan wasn’t in a movie and he couldn’t do another take if anything went wrong.

At that range, if the .45 slug stayed intact, he was expecting lethal damage to the spine and heart. If it fragmented, jagged chunks might also pierce the lungs and the aorta.

Either way, it was a kill.

His target dropped facedown into the dust, quivered for something like a second, then lay still. Bolan approached him cautiously, regardless, thankful that the dead man’s comrades couldn’t see him for the bulk of old equipment strewed between them.

Bolan rolled the body over, saw the ragged exit wound and looked no further.

One down, eight to go.

How long before police arrived? He guessed that it was noisy in the factories surrounding him, but someone would be passing by or working near an open window, maybe pacing off the grounds on night patrol. Even in Bogotá, where murders were a dime a dozen, someone would report a pitched battle in progress.

But until the cops showed up, he had a chance to win it and escape.

A sudden escalation in the nearby gunfire startled Bolan. First, he feared the hunters had grown weary of their siege and had decided it was time to rush the Fiat, throwing everything they had into the charge. As Bolan moved to get a clear view of the action, though, he found something entirely different happening.

Two of the hostile shooters—make it three, now—had stopped firing at the Fiat and had turned to face the opposite direction. Bolan checked the access road, saw nothing but the last car to arrive—and then he understood.

The driver of the sleek convertible wasn’t a member of the hunting party: he was something else entirely, and he had been firing at the chase cars, rather than at Guzman.

Why? Who was it?

Bolan couldn’t answer either of those questions in the middle of a gunfight, but he recognized a universal truth.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The strange diversion gave him hope and opportunity.

The Executioner had never wasted either in his life.

JORGE GUZMAN WAS FIGHTING for his life, and he was hopelessly confused. He couldn’t figure out how anyone had tracked him to the airport, but it wouldn’t matter if the gunmen killed him in this filthy place, with rank pollution blotting out the stars above.

He also didn’t understand why a strange woman in a car he didn’t recognize had joined the fight, apparently on his side. It defied all reason, made Guzman question whether he was hallucinating, until one of his opponents stopped a bullet from the woman’s gun and crumpled to the ground.

Don’t think about it! Guzman told himself. Just stay alive!

That was no small task, in itself, with eight men—seven, now—intent on blasting him with automatic weapons, pistols and at least one shotgun. Even in his near panic, Guzman could recognize the sounds of different weapons, picturing what each in turn would do to him if he was hit.

Flesh torn, bones shattered, blood jetting from wounds to drain him dry in minutes flat. Maybe he’d suffer every agonizing second of it, or a bullet to the brain might grant him swift release.

Guzman peeked out, around the Fiat’s left-rear fender, and fired two shots toward the nearest of the enemies who’d pinned him down. He guessed the shots were wasted, since the two men he’d been hoping to deter immediately answered him with rapid fire.

Bastards!

As far as Guzman knew, he hadn’t even wounded one of them, although he’d been the first to fire a shot. God knew it hadn’t helped him, but at least he’d had a fleeting moment when he almost felt courageous, capable of anything.

Now that the grim truth of his situation was apparent, he could only wonder who the woman was, and what had happened to the tall American.

It seemed impossible that Matt Cooper had simply run away and left Guzman to fight alone. He had to have had some strategy, but so far—

Even with the other din, Guzman picked out a gunshot from one side, off in the dark field to his right. Cooper had run in that direction when the Fiat came to rest, not long ago in real-world time, although it felt like hours with the bullets snapping past Guzman.

He wondered if his car would ever run again, after the hits that it had taken and was taking, even now. He doubted it. Cars were such fragile things, despite their bulk and high price tags. A single loose wire ruined everything, and now his little ride was taking bullets like a target in a shooting gallery, most of them through the hood and grille.

Stranded, he thought, then almost laughed out loud.

What did it matter if his car was broken down when Guzman died? Where did he plan on driving, with his brains blown out?

That image made him angry, spurred his need to fight and leave the other bastards bloody, hurting, when he fell at last. Blazing away from cover, Guzman emptied his pistol’s magazine and actually thought he’d seen one of his targets fall before the weapon’s slide locked open on an empty chamber and he fumbled to reload.

He slapped his next-to-last clip into the receiver, knowing that it might as well have been the very last, since he would never have a chance to take the third one from his pocket. Once he rose, exposed himself, and charged the hostile guns, his life span would be timed in nanoseconds.

Still, the Latin concept of machismo said he had to do something, take some action that did not involve hiding and waiting for the enemy to root him out. If he had to die this night, at least it would be as a man and not a cringing worm.

Guzman lunged to his feet, snarling through clenched teeth as he felt the air ripple with bullets zipping past him. One of them would find him soon, but in the meantime he was firing, choosing targets, giving each in turn the double-tap that a policeman friend had taught him at the firing range. Advancing without hope that he would see another sunrise.

And, incredibly, his enemies fell back from Guzman’s wrath, reeling as his rounds sought their flesh and blood. It didn’t quell the hostile fire, but at the very least it spoiled their aim, sent some of the incoming bullets high and wide.

Amazing!

Guzman bellowed at them now, his rage echoing to the sounds of gunfire. He was vaguely conscious of new weapons firing on his left and right, joining their voices to his IMBEL’s hammering reports, and while he knew one of them had to be Cooper’s pistol, one of them the unknown woman’s, Guzman felt as if he had the battlefield all to himself, charging his enemies with more courage than common sense.

The bullet, when it found him, had the impact of a giant mailed fist, slamming viciously into the side of Guzman’s skull. He staggered, felt the earth slip out from underneath his feet, then saw it rush to meet him in a wave of darkness as he fell.

BOLAN SAW GUZMAN DROP but couldn’t help him at the moment. Only finishing their other adversaries would allow him to examine, and perhaps to treat, his contact’s wounds. Meanwhile, he also had to figure out who else had joined the fight, and why a total stranger would risk death to help him.

Nothing made sense yet, in the chaotic moment, and he couldn’t stop to mull it over while five or six gunmen were trying to kill him.

Bolan circled toward the Benz through darkness, ready with the IMBEL .45 for anyone who challenged him. His first clear shot, after the blonde he’d left behind him in the junk-yard, was a short and swarthy shooter with some kind of AK-looking weapon, firing from a fat drum magazine.

The gunner didn’t see him coming, likely never knew what hit him when a single round from Bolan’s autoloader drilled his skull behind the right ear, dropping him as if he was a puppet with its strings cut.

Forward from the crumpled corpse, between the dark Mercedes and the Volkswagen, three shooters bobbed and weaved, rising to fire at Guzman’s Fiat, crouching again for someone else’s turn. Two of them had the same short rifles as the man Bolan had killed a heartbeat earlier; the third carried a sleek pump-action shotgun with extended magazine.

Bolan came in behind them, wasted no time on a warning, caught one of them turning to investigate the sound of his last shot. He drilled that shooter through the left eye, swung a few feet to his left and gave the survivor a double-tap before the target realized that anything was wrong.

The shotgunner was turning, quicker than the others, ratcheting his weapon’s slide-action. Bolan wasn’t sure that he could beat the other man’s reflexes, but it didn’t matter.

From Bolan’s left, a gunshot sounded, and the side of his adversary’s head appeared to vaporize. The dead man standing looked surprised, but if the killing shot had caused him any pain, it didn’t register in his expression. He stood rock-still for a few heartbeats, then folded at the knees and toppled over backward, sprawling on the pavement.

Bolan had already swiveled toward the source of that last shot, the IMBEL automatic following his gaze. The woman who had saved his life—he saw her clearly now, and there could be no question of her femininity—held up an open hand, as if to block his shot, then nodded toward the other gunmen who were still blasting at Guzman’s car.

Split-second life-or-death decisions were a combat soldier’s stock-in-trade. Bolan made his and nodded, turning from the woman who could just as easily have killed him then, returning his whole focus to their common enemy.

Bolan had no idea where she had come from, who she was, or why she’d risk her life to help him in the middle of a firefight, but those questions had to wait. There would be time enough for talk if both of them survived the next few minutes.

Part of Bolan’s mind, condemned to deal with practicalities, wondered if he’d need Guzman to translate his conversation with the woman. And if Guzman died, how in the hell would they communicate?

Focusing once again on here and now, Bolan moved up toward the Volkswagen, with the woman flanking on his left. As far as he could see, two gunmen still remained. One was a short mestizo like most of the others, while the second was a dirty-blond white boy, stamped from the same mold as the one Bolan had left behind him, in the waste ground.

Bolan took the shooter nearest to him, offered no alerts or other chivalrous preliminaries as he found his mark and drilled the rifleman between his shoulder blades. The gunner went down firing, stitching holes across the trunk of the Volkswagen, while his Nordic-looking partner ducked and covered.

Rising from his crouch, the sole survivor caught sight of the woman first, and raised his pistol to confront her. She was faster, snapping off three rounds in rapid fire, stamped a pattern on her target’s chest and slammed him to the ground.

Bolan advanced with caution, made sure that the dead were all they seemed to be, then took another risk and let the woman have a clear shot at his back, while he ran to examine Jorge Guzman’s wounds.

Guzman was grappling back to consciousness as Bolan reached him, tried to raise his pistol, but he didn’t have the strength to stop Bolan from taking it away. Blood bathed the left side of his face and stained the collar of his shirt.

“Wha-What? Am I…Are we…?”

Bolan examined him and said, “You’ve got a nasty graze above your left ear, but the bone’s not showing. Scalp wounds bleed a lot. It doesn’t mean you’re dying.”

“Not…dead?”

“Not even close,” Bolan replied. “You may need stitches, though.”

“Hospital…no…report….”

“I can take care of him,” a new voice said from Bolan’s left. He glanced up at the woman as she nodded toward Guzman. “I’ve stitched up worse than that, believe me.”

Bolan helped Guzman to his shaky feet and held him upright, left hand on the other man’s right arm. It left his gun hand free as he turned toward the woman, saying, “Maybe we should start with names.”

“Of course,” she said. “I’m Gabriella Cohen, and I work for the Mossad. We share, I think, a common goal.”

CHAPTER THREE

Two days earlier, Northern Virginia

The Blue Ridge Mountains looked entirely different from the air than they appeared to earthbound motorists and hikers. Bolan was reminded of that fact each time he flew to Stony Man Farm.

Airborne, he always tried to picture how the area had looked before the first human arrived, despoiling it with axes, saws and plows, road graders and the rest. Sometimes Bolan thought he was close, but then the pristine image always wavered, faded and was gone.

Maybe next time, he thought.

The Hughes 500 helicopter was a four-seater, but Bolan and the pilot had it to themselves.

On any graduated scale of secrecy, the Farm and its activities would rank above “Top Secret,” somewhere off the chart. From day one, Stony Man’s assignment—seeking justice by extraordinary, often extralegal means—had been one of the deepest, darkest secrets of the U.S. government. Beside it, aliens at Roswell and the stealth experiments performed at Nevada’s Area 51 paled into insignificance. Aside from on-site personnel and agents in the field, only a handful of Americans knew Stony Man existed.

Fewer still knew the extent of what it did, had done and might do in the future.

At its birth, the concept had been simple: organize a unit that, when necessary, in the last extremity, would set the U.S. Constitution and established laws aside to deal with urgent threats and/or to punish those whose skill at gliding through the system made them constant threats to civilized society at large.

Some might have called it vigilante justice; others, sheer necessity. In either case, it worked because the operation wasn’t public, wasn’t influenced by politics, and didn’t choose its targets based on race or creed or any factor other than their danger to humanity. Sometimes, Bolan thought it was more like dumping toxic waste.

“Ten minutes,” the pilot said, as if Bolan didn’t know exactly where they were, tracking the course of Skyline Drive, a thousand feet above the treetops. Cars passing below them looked like toys, the scattered hikers more like ants. If any of the hardy souls on foot looked up or waved at Bolan’s chopper, his eyes couldn’t pick them out.

Bolan had been wrapping up a job in Canada when Hal Brognola called and asked him for a meeting at the Farm. Quebec was heating up, with biker gangs running arms across the border from New York. Some of the hardware, swiped from U.S. shipments headed overseas, traveled from Buffalo by ship, on the St. Lawrence River, while the rest was trucked across the border at Fort Covington. Don Vincent Gaglioni, Buffalo’s pale version of The Godfather, procured the guns and pocketed the cash.

It had to stop, but agents of the ATF and FBI were getting nowhere with their separate, often competitive investigations. By the time Bolan was sent to clean it up, they’d lost two veteran informants and an agent who was riding with his top stool pigeon when the turncoat’s car exploded in a parking lot.

Bolan had sunk two of the Gaglioni Family’s cargo ships with limpet mines, shot up a convoy moving overland, then trailed Don Gaglioni to a sit-down with the gang leaders outside Drummondville, Quebec. The meeting had been tense to start with, but they’d never had a chance to settle their dispute. Bolan’s unscheduled intervention, with an Mk 19 full-auto grenade launcher had spoiled the bash for all concerned.

It had been like old times, for just a minute there, but Bolan didn’t set much store in strolls down Memory Lane. Especially when the path was littered with rubble and corpses.

There was enough of that in his future, he knew, without trying to resurrect the Bad Old Days of his one-man war against the Mafia. A little object lesson now and then was fine, but there could be no turning back the clock.

Which brought him to the job at hand—whatever it might be. Brognola hadn’t called him for a birthday party or a house-warming. There would be dirty work ahead, the kind Bolan did best, and he was ready for it.

Which was not to say that he enjoyed it.

In Bolan’s mind, the day a killer started to enjoy his killing trade, the time had come for him to find another line of work. Only a psychopath loved killing, and the best thing anyone could do for such an individual was to put him down before he caused more misery.

Soldiers were trained to kill, the same way surgeons learned to cut and plumbers learned to weld. The difference, of course, was that a warrior mended nothing, built nothing. In battle, warriors killed, albeit sometimes for a cause so great that only blood could sanctify it. Some opponents were impervious to grand diplomacy, or even backroom bribes.

In some cases, only brute force would do.

But those were not the situations to be celebrated, in a sane and stable world. Peace was the goal, the end to which all means were theoretically applied.

Back in the sixties, bumper stickers ridiculed the war in Vietnam by asking whether it was possible to kill for peace. The answer—then, as now—was “Yes.”

Sometimes a soldier had no choice.

And sometimes, he was bound to choose.

“We’re here,” the pilot said as Bolan saw the farmhouse up ahead. Below, a tractor churned across a field, its driver muttering into a two-way radio. There would be other watchers Bolan couldn’t see, tracking the chopper toward the helipad. Fingers on triggers, just in case.

They reached the pad and hovered, then began to settle down. Bolan looked through the bubble windscreen at familiar faces on the deck, none of them smiling yet.

It wasn’t home, but it would do.

Until they sent him off to war again.

“GLAD YOU COULD MAKE IT,” Hal Brognola said, while pumping Bolan’s hand. “So, how’s the Great White North?”

“Still there,” Bolan replied as he released his old friend’s hand.

Beside Brognola, Barbara Price surveyed Bolan with cool detachment, civil but entirely business-like. The things they did in private, now and then, might not be absolutely secret from Brognola or the Stony Man team, but Barbara shunned public displays. She was the perfect operations chief: intelligent, professional and absolutely ruthless when she had to be.

“You want some time to chill? Maybe a drink? A walk around the place?” Brognola asked.

“We may as well get to it,” Bolan said.

Clearly relieved, Brognola said, “Okay. Let’s hit the War Room, then.”

Bolan trailed the big Fed and Price into the rambling farmhouse that was Stony Man’s cosmetic centerpiece and active headquarters. From the outside, unless you climbed atop the roof and counted dish antennae, the place looked normal, precisely what a stranger would expect to see on a Virginia farm.

Not that a stranger, trespassing, would ever make it to the house alive.

Inside, it was a very different story, comfort vying with utility of every square inch of the house. It featured living quarters, kitchen, dining room—the usual, in short—but also had communications and computer rooms, though major functions were in the Annex, an arsenal second to none outside of any full-size military base, and other features that the standard home, rural or urban, couldn’t claim.

The basement War Room was a case in point. Accessible by stairs or elevator, it contained a conference table seating twenty, maps and charts for every part of Mother Earth, and audio-visual gear that would do Disney Studios proud.

How many times had Bolan sat inside that room to hear details of a mission that would send him halfway around the world, perhaps to meet his death?

Too many, right.

But it would never be enough, until the predators got wise and left the weaker members of the human herd alone.

Aaron Kurtzman met them on the threshold of the War Room, crunched Bolan’s hand in his fist, then spun his wheel-chair to lead them inside. As Stony Man’s tech master, Kurtzman commonly attended mission briefings and controlled whatever AV elements Brognola’s presentation might require.

Brognola took his usual seat at the head of the table, his back to a large wallscreen. Price sat to the big Fed’s right, Bolan on his left, while Kurtzman chose a spot midway along the table’s left-hand side. A keyboard waited for him on the tabletop, plugged into some concealed receptacle.

“Okay,” Brognola said, “before we start, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to keep up with the news these past few days.”

“Not much,” Bolan said. “Scraps from radio, while I was driving. Headlines showing from the newspaper dispensers.”