Patriot Strike

And what if someone started shooting? They’d have cops up the wazoo in nothing flat, the very last thing he needed on a job like this. He thought about the shit storm that would rain down on him if he got arrested, and it made his chili supper curdle in his stomach.

Not a freakin’ chance.

Haskin clutched his Ithaca 37 shotgun—the Deerslayer Police Special version—in hands that were suddenly sweaty. At first he had relished being in charge of this mission, taking it as a sign of advancement, but now he saw how it could blow up in his face. Spoil everything, in fact. And it would be his fault if anything went wrong.

Across the parking lot, the lady Ranger was within twenty feet of Mr. X and closing in. They hadn’t started talking yet, as far as Haskin could tell, but he couldn’t swear to it. There’d likely be some kind of recognition signal, or a password, then they’d either start to do their business or the Ranger would bail out, if she discovered the guy wasn’t who she had come to meet.

The odds of that were nil, but Haskin wasn’t taking any chances.

Wait and see.

Now they were close enough to speak without raising their voices, and he wished he’d brought a shotgun microphone to supplement the Ithaca. Something to let him eavesdrop for a little while before they rushed the couple, maybe pick up something useful for the chief, in case one or both of the targets went down for the count or was trained to resist interrogation. It would stand him in good stead, a little extra boost, but thinking of it now did Haskin no damned good at all.

“We goin’ in or what?” Bodine asked.

“Hang on a sec,” said Haskin.

“But—”

“You heard me!”

“Jeez.”

He knew that it was risky, waiting, but he had to do this right the first time. There would be no do-overs. Wishing he’d brought more men or spread the ones he had around the park with walkie-talkies, Haskin scowled into the night.

“All right,” he said at last. “Hit it!”

* * *

“WHAT BRINGS YOU to the Alamo at night, mister?” the Ranger asked when she was twenty feet away.

“Greetings from your uncles,” Bolan told her.

“Uncles?”

“Sam and Hal.”

“That makes you...?”

Knowing she had the name and nothing more, he told her, “Matthew Cooper.”

“I’m Adlene Granger. Sergeant Granger.”

“Right.”

“You want to see ID?” She reached toward an inside jacket pocket.

Bolan waved it off. “Been there, done that.”

“So there’s a file on me?” she said, half smiling.

“There’s a file on everyone.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said, shifting gears.

“Well, here I am.”

“And you know what this is about?”

“Not all. The basics,” Bolan answered. “I was told you’d fill me in.”

“Right here?”

“Your call,” Bolan said. “We can take a walk, a ride, whatever.”

“You weren’t followed?”

“No.” He’d spent some forty minutes driving aimlessly through San Antonio to guarantee it.

“I guess this is as good as anyplace,” she said. “But maybe we could step out of the light.”

As if on cue, a set of high beams blazed to life, pinning them where they stood. Bolan made out the hulking shape of what appeared to be a full-sized SUV, charging from its hiding place behind the screen of trees surrounding Alamo Plaza. It hadn’t trailed Granger’s Dodge, meaning it had been in place before the meet, its occupants apprised of when and where to strike.

“You said—”

“They didn’t follow me,” Bolan assured her, as his Glock cleared armpit leather.

Adlene Granger drew her own sidearm, a Heckler & Koch HK45, and raised it in a firm two-handed grip. “I can’t believe I missed them, damn it!”

“Who says you did?”

“But—”

“We should go,” he told her.

“They’re between us and my ride,” she said.

“Not mine,” he said. “Come on.”

She almost seemed reluctant not to stay and fight it out, but turned and followed Bolan at a sprint, the SUV roaring across the parking lot behind them. The headlights tracked them until they cut around the rear end of the Alamo and ran into another line of trees.

“What about my car?” she called to Bolan.

“We’ll come back for it,” he said. Skipped the obvious, not adding, if we can.

A twelve-gauge blast echoed out behind them, buckshot chipping the flagstone walk that had been laid around the old mission-cum-fortress. It was hasty, not a good shot, but they couldn’t count on someone with a shotgun missing them consistently.

Bolan was grateful for the cover when they reached the tree line, doubly glad that architects and landscapers hadn’t designed any access to the property on this side of the Alamo. Unless the SUV was supercharged, with a bulldozer blade attached, its driver would be forced to turn around and circle north or south around the plaza to pick up their trail.

It was a lucky break, but nothing more. They still had two long blocks to cover before they reached his rental on Crockett Street. The shooters could reverse their course and gain some ground, but they’d be confined to streets, while Bolan and the Ranger could run in a straight line, due south to his ride.

“Jesus!” Adlene Granger gasped, close on his heels. “If they knew I was coming here—”

She didn’t have to finish it. Prior knowledge meant a leak somewhere. It meant someone on her short list, one of the people she trusted, had no place there. Bolan, reasonably certain the tip hadn’t originated from his side, wondered how far the lapse would set them back.

Or whether it would get them killed.

They made it to the RAV4. Bolan keyed the automatic locks from half a block away, hearing the chime, seeing the taillights flash once. He slid behind the wheel, let Adlene take the shotgun seat and gunned the straight-four 1AZ-FSE engine. Peeling out on Crockett, eastbound, he saw headlights racing down Alamo Plaza, then turning to follow him.

So much for shaking the tail.

“Are you ready for this?” he asked Granger.

Half turned in her seat, pistol still in her hand, she replied, “Bet your ass.”

There it was then. Game time.

Chapter 2

Washington, D.C.—Earlier

Mack Bolan stood before the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, considering its four bronze lions—two male and two female—guarding a pair of cubs. Beneath each brooding cat he found a carved inscription. Tacitus, from ancient Rome, stated In valor there is hope. The Book of Proverbs reminded Bolan that The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are as bold as a lion.

He wasn’t sure about the second part, having known some so-called righteous folks who didn’t have the courage of their own convictions. He could buy the first bit, though. The wicked could run, but they couldn’t hide.

At least not from the Executioner.

Bolan’s visit to Washington, and to this memorial in particular, was not a matter of coincidence. He wasn’t a casual tourist and most emphatically was not on vacation. He had come to meet one of his oldest living friends, a certified member of an endangered species, to discuss a matter of the utmost urgency.

Or so Bolan had been told.

This friend, Hal Brognola, had an office nearby, in the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Bolan had not seen it from the inside, and he likely never would. Although no longer wanted by the Feds and physically unrecognizable to those who’d hunted him during his long one-man campaign against the Cosa Nostra, Bolan knew that strolling through the halls of justice would be deemed a breach of etiquette. How could he be there, anyway, when he officially did not exist?

So, when he got an urgent call from Brognola, they either met at Stony Man—a working farm and the nerve center of the clandestine operation Bolan served, sequestered in the Blue Ridge Mountains—or at some public location in or near D.C. Crowds kept the pair of them anonymous, while they discussed their bloody business with a modicum of privacy.

Hiding in plain sight.

Today Bolan perused the names of fallen heroes who’d been shot, stabbed, bombed and bludgeoned while defending those in peril. Some had died in car crashes, during hot pursuits or when their aircraft had plummeted to earth on a surveillance mission. Others had succumbed to strokes or heart attacks on duty. Buildings had collapsed on some, as in New York on 9/11. Some had been cut down by friendly fire.

It was a war out there, as Bolan knew too well from personal experience.

He would have liked to say the good guys were winning, but each day the news refuted it.

Part of the memorial was still under construction—a National Law Enforcement Museum authorized in 2000 and scheduled to open in 2015. Bolan hoped he’d be around to visit it sometime. For now he stood and watched the workmen from a distance while a stocky figure sidled up to join him.

“Planning to pitch in?” Brognola asked.

“Not my kind of tools,” Bolan replied. He was more inclined toward the demolition side of things.

“Good flight?”

“The usual.”

Bolan had been in San Diego, visiting his brother, when the call from Washington had come through. A red-eye flight from San Diego International to Dulles, through Chicago O’Hare, had delivered him in time for breakfast and his meeting with Brognola.

“How’s Johnny?”

“Busy,” Bolan said. “What did they used to say at Pinkerton’s? The eye that never sleeps?”

“Gets bloodshot,” Brognola replied. “I hope he’s working on a low profile.”

“I think the spot as P.I. to the stars was taken.”

“Just as well. If he starts showing up on the entertainment channel, it might ring somebody’s bell.”

“He’s covered,” Bolan said, hoping that it was true.

“Ready to take a walk?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

They strolled past waist-high curving granite walls decorated here and there by wreaths, bouquets and brightly colored bits of paper bearing messages of love and sorrow. To their left, a woman in her mid-thirties knelt, tracing one of the names as Bolan had seen others do at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“What do you know about secession?” Hal inquired.

“It didn’t work out well for the Confederacy,” Bolan said.

“I mean more recently.”

“I’ve heard some rumbles. Saw something on CNN.”

“After the last election, Boston Tea Party types in all fifty states filed petitions for secession from the Union,” Hal informed him. “Most of them were no more than farts in a whirlwind. You need twenty-five thousand signatures to garner a response from the White House, and most didn’t come close. Texas led the field with over one hundred twenty-five thousand signatures. On the other hand, a petition to deport everyone who signed a petition to withdraw their state from the U.S. has close to thirty thousand signatures, and it’s still growing.”

Bolan smiled at that. “Is secession even legal?”

“Nope. Doesn’t stop the nuts from trying, though.”

“Not much we can do about that,” Bolan said. “If I remember my high school government class, the right to petition is guaranteed by the First Amendment.”

“And it’s not the scribblers who concern me,” said Brognola. “I was thinking more about the flakes who just might try to pull it off.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“As a matter of fact,” Hal replied, “there might be.”

“Might be?”

“Here’s the deal. Three nights ago, in Lubbock, Texas, persons unknown killed a fellow named Jerod Granger. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of him. It barely made the news in Texas, much less anywhere outside the state.”

“But you’re aware of it.”

“Only because I know his family. Back in the day when I was with the Bureau’s field office in Dallas, my partner and I got assigned to a case in that neck of the woods. Kidnapping for ransom that turned into murder. You know the G gets in on those under the Lindbergh Law, presumption of interstate flight, yada, yada. Anyway, while we were working it, I got to know a Texas Ranger who was on the case. Lou Granger.”

“Relative of the victim?”

“His father. We stayed friendly, which doesn’t happen often, and we kept in touch after I transferred out of Texas. For a while there, Jerod and his sister used to call me Uncle Hal. Go figure, eh?”

“Why not?”

Hal shrugged. “Anyway, the day after Jerod went down, I got a call from his sister, Adlene. She’s a Ranger now herself. Jerod had phoned her to arrange a meeting with a G-man, ultraurgent. Spoke about secession and catastrophe, gave up some names but wouldn’t cover any details on the phone. Jerod had a face-to-face lined up the next morning with sis’s trusted number one guy, but Jerod never made it. Next thing Adlene knows, she’s making an I.D. for the Lubbock County coroner.”

“And then she called you.”

“Right. Not much to offer in the way of evidence, but when I got the gist of it and heard the names...well, something clicked. It’s worth a closer look, I think.”

“How are the parents taking it?” asked Bolan.

“Cancer took the mother, Jeannie, back in ’95. Lou bought it in a single-car collision two years later.”

“Rough,” Bolan said.

“So, anyhow, I said I’d see what I could do. What we could do.”

“Except she thinks that ‘we’ would be the Bureau?”

“Hmm.”

“Why not the Rangers, since she’s one of them?”

“There could be problems with security.”

“The FBI? Homeland Security?”

“Both say the information is too vague, one of the names too prominent. Plus this is Texas. They’re still having nightmares over Waco.”

“When you say ‘too prominent,’ who are we looking at?” Bolan asked.

“Have you heard of L. E. Ridgway?”

“Rings a distant bell,” Bolan said, “but I can’t place him offhand.”

“No great surprise. The ‘L. E.’ stands for Lamar Emerson. He’s the founder, president and CEO of Lone Star Petroleum and Aerospace Technology.”

“That’s not a common merger, is it?”

“Not at all. In fact,” Hal said, “from what I gather, it’s unique. Lamar made his first couple billion from the East Texas Oil Field, pumping crude and natural gas in the fifties. Today he’s got rigs all over the state and offshore. The aerospace deal fell into his lap when NASA started cutting back on some of its programs. He started out making components for their rockets and space shuttles, then got the bright idea of privatizing outer space.”

“Say what?”

“You heard me right,” Hal said. “Lone Star is planning junkets to the moon aboard their own space craft, beginning sometime in the next couple years. They’re catering primarily to governments, with a projected round-trip price tag of one-point-five billion dollars, but private parties who can foot the bill are also welcome.”

“So, if you’re Bill Gates and you want to take the flight of a lifetime, they’ll send you?”

“Just imagine,” Hal said. “The Koch brothers can take off and really look down on us earthlings.”

“Well, it’s odd, I grant you.”

“Here’s the kicker. For as long as he’s been filthy rich, Ridgway has been a top contributor to far-right causes. Started with the Birch Society and veered off toward the fringe from there. Militias, neo-Nazis, Klans, Army of God—”

“The clinic bombers?”

“Yep. With friends like those, you know he has to be pro-life. But lately he’s been concentrating on a home-grown bunch of mixed nuts calling themselves the New Texas Republic.”

“And we’re back to secession,” said Bolan.

“In spades. They started out running maneuvers, getting ready to defend us from some kind of weird Red Dawn scenario, plus armed patrols along the border for illegals. Now they claim the country can’t be saved. It’s too far gone with socialism, communism, fascism, Sharia law—they aren’t exactly scholars, if you get my drift.”

“And Ridgway’s keeping them afloat?”

“In high style,” said Brognola.

“Maybe he could send them to the moon.”

“Funny you’d mention that. About those rockets...”

Bolan felt a chill, although the morning sun was warm.

“In that last call from Jerod to his sister, there was mention of fissile material.”

The stuff that caused chain reactions in nuclear fission. The modern Big Bang.

“And Homeland still won’t touch it?”

“Not until we have a better case,” Brognola said.

“Okay. Let’s hear the rest.”

The rest—or most of it—was in files on a CD Brognola gave to Bolan for more leisurely perusal, while he waited for his flight to Texas. Adlene Granger was expecting him—expecting someone—for a meet in San Antonio at midnight. Why she’d picked the Alamo was anybody’s guess. As good a choice as any, if it worked; as bad as any other, if it didn’t.

At Dulles, Bolan found a corner seat near his departure gate, back to the wall, and used earbuds to keep anyone nearby from eavesdropping. The files, as usual, included still photos, video clips and facsimiles of documents.

First up was a biography of L. E. Ridgway, from his humble roots in Oklahoma through his first East Texas oil strike, the remarkable bad luck that haunted his competitors—fires and explosions, vandalism to their rigs and vehicles, some disappearances—and his advance to the top of the Fortune 500 list.

While his business and his wealth grew, the FBI began to notice his increased financing of far-right extremist groups—all dedicated to the proposition that America was under siege by enemies within; as well as standard adversaries like the Russians, North Koreans and Chinese. Ridgway and his compatriots apparently believed that every U.S. president since Herbert Hoover was a communist, a fascist or some whacky, nonsensical combination of the two.

These extremists hated government, minorities, the very concept of diversity and fumed nonstop about ephemeral conspiracies to persecute white Christian men. As for the ladies, the members thought they should just stay home, cook dinner, tend to the kids—and, if required, help clean the guns.

Not all of the yahoos were just talk, of course. Several groups that Ridgway had supported over time were linked to acts of domestic terrorism. Everybody knew about the Klan’s shenanigans—cross burnings, bombings, drunken drive-by shootings.

But Ridgway had also been connected to a handful of so-called militia groups that had stockpiled illegal weapons, threatened government officials and conspired on various occasions to attack public facilities: federal buildings, natural gas pipelines—never Ridgway’s—and power plants.

One “Aryan” gang wanted to poison a midsized city’s water supply in Arkansas, but state police foiled their plan. None of the indictments from those cases ever touched Ridgway or Lone Star Petroleum, but Ridgway lurked in the background like a fat old spider spinning its web.

The move into privatized aerospace technology had been a break from Ridgway’s normal style. He was literally going where no man had gone before, hiring personnel laid off by NASA, planning to conquer space and turn a tidy profit in the process. With billions to spend, he had acquired a decommissioned space shuttle, set his team to work improving it and pronounced it ready to soar.

Media reports claimed Lone Star Aerospace was near completion of the solid rocket boosters necessary for a launch, along with an overhauled Lunar Excursion Module—the LM-14, scrapped when plans for Apollo 19 fell through—and a snazzy Lunar Roving Vehicle. Show up with a truckload of cash and anyone could drive a dune buggy around the dark side of the moon.

There was nothing on the CD about fissile material. Bolan would have to hear that from the Ranger, assuming there was anything to tell.

From Ridgway, he moved on to Hal’s files on the New Texas Republic, a secessionist militia outfit based in Tom Green County, near San Angelo, Texas. Headquarters was a rural compound squatting on scrubland west of town, home to eighty-odd families, by the FBI’s estimate.

The NTR’s founder and crackpot-in-chief was Waylon David Crockett, a self-proclaimed descendant of Davy Crockett, one-time Tennessee congressman and Alamo martyr. That genealogical link had never been confirmed officially, but Waylon’s adherents in the NTR were satisfied.

Crockett had grown up poor and tough in Brownsville, on the Tex-Mex border. Starting at the tender age of fifteen, he had been arrested nineteen times, convicted on two juvie raps and three adult charges. The most serious, drug dealing, had sent him to Huntsville’s prison for a five-year stay, but he was paroled in three.

Crockett had found the Lord while he was caged, and came out preaching a mix of politics and ultrafundamentalist religion, picking up disciples as he had roamed across the countryside. He first hooked up with Ridgway shortly after 9/11, when Crockett joined the Midland Militia, ready to defend his state against a rampaging Islamic horde that never showed up. Three years later he’d branched out on his own with the NTR and welcomed Ridgway’s whole-hearted financial support.

The New Texas Republic hadn’t been accused of any criminal infractions yet, but it was on watch lists maintained by the FBI, ATF and Homeland Security. Budgetary constraints and Crockett’s strict screening process for new recruits had foiled any covert infiltration so far, but there were always rumors: hidden arsenals, inflammatory words, dire schemes.

Crockett’s second in command was Kent Luttrell, ex-Klansman, ex-security guard for the Aryan Nations “church” compound in Idaho, ex-member of California’s Minuteman Project—the “citizens’ vigilance” border patrol praised by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2005 for doing “a terrific job” against illegal immigrants.

Five years running, Kent had made news for holding candlelight prayer vigils on June 11, the date when Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed for mass murder. Now Kent was the NTR’s sergeant-at-arms, enforcing discipline and supervising details of the minuscule “republic’s” daily operations for his chief.

The two of them made a peculiar pair. Crockett was five foot five and wiry, had a Charlie Manson smile and looked like he’d forgotten how to use a comb around the time he quit high school. Most of his photos showed a face with sunken cheeks and stubble, bushy brows and dark eyes possessed of a thousand-yard stare. He wasn’t quite the Unabomber, but a stranger could have been excused for thinking Crockett and Kaczynski had been separated at birth.

Luttrell, by contrast, was a strapping six foot five, clearly a bodybuilder, with a blond buzz cut and narrow brows to match. His thick arms swarmed with typical tattoos—iron crosses, lightning bolts and swastikas, the usual—while the police files said his broad back bore a life-sized portrait of Der Führer dressed in shining armor, battle flag unfurled.

That had to have stung.

Photos depicting Crockett and Luttrell together showed a Mutt and Jeff team—almost comical until you thought about their records and their crazed philosophy. They had been dangerous as individuals, before they met. Together, Bolan reckoned, they were even worse.

The New Texas Republic had an estimated 650 members, half of those residing more or less full-time at Crockett’s Tom Green County compound. A few of the others were locked up on various charges, mostly weapons’ violations or domestic violence, with the remainder at large throughout Texas. Bolan viewed the available mug shots and candid photos, memorizing the angry faces for future reference, in case they crossed his path.

Finally he turned to Adlene Granger’s file. It surprised him to discover that she’d joined the U.S. Army out of high school, age eighteen, with the announced intent of making a career in uniform. The 9/11 strikes occurred when she was two years in, and she’d been posted to Afghanistan.

Two tours over there, with action around Kandahar and Tora Bora, had changed her mind about an army life, but not the uniform. She’d separated from the service at twenty-two and had joined the Texas Rangers when they had started taking on women to prove they were diverse. She’d earned her sergeant’s stripes last year, something to celebrate.