Force Lines

The wide, undivided but paved road was nowhere to be found on any map.

Using its own intelligence sources and renowned cyberhacking, the Farm—after the soldier had faxed Kramer’s CD with what were believed encrypted marching orders—believed the ranger station was a front for a classified government facility, but for the life of them they didn’t know what went on there. With cyclone fencing around a squat steel-walled compound, the cyberwizards learning the road was slashed out of the forest and grasslands a few years back by the Army Corps of Engineers, and after Bolan had seen from a distance through his field glasses…

Well, the posted warning at the far south end of the road had sealed it. No trespassing, property of United States Government, and authorized to use deadly force cued the soldier that, despite his prisoner’s ignorance of the finer details, this was the right place where the wrong thing—and what that was remained to be seen—would go down.

According to Kramer it would all begin any time now. What the cargo the Sons of Revelation planned to hijack, well, Bolan could venture a sordid educated guess.

WMD, of some type, and the soldier hadn’t brought along his HAZMAT suit for the lethal party.

And with Kramer mentioning something about two men in black he read as spooks gathering for two recent private meets with the so-called Highest Sons that he knew of…

Problems, all around, but Bolan was never short on the determination, skill and experience to work them out.

Then there were enemy numbers to consider, and which could range from anywhere to a known forty or fifty to another ten to twenty. If there were snakes wrapped in the Stars and Stripes and hidden among the spook convoy that was due to roll its way from the north, if an inside job was about to land a cache of biological, chemical or radiological matériel into the hands of the Sons of Revelation for reasons that included money, twisted ideology…

Bolan turned and dropped a long look on Kramer. The question hung in his mind, as the Stony Man warrior knew a moment of truth had painted him into a corner. “Who was she? Saint Rita.”

A tired smile crossed Kramer’s lips, his eyes telling Bolan he was reaching back into memory. He slipped the prayer card into a coat pocket, said, “I was in a motel room, real crumby part of Hollywood, which really isn’t saying much. I was loaded, as usual, with some hooker. I wasn’t two steps inside the room when her pimp, or boyfriend or whoever, drove a knife square into my gut. Another inch or so higher, if he’d twisted up some even, or ripped down…sixty-two dollars and forty-four cents is what they took off of me. Funny, you know, how a guy can remember something so damn trivial, exactly how much his life might have cost him…or the amount of money he was prepared to throw away on his soul.

“I remember the girl. One of these corn-fed Mid-western blondes who comes to Hollywood, thinking she’s the next Marilyn Monroe, but ends up tricking and doing porn and looking like an eighty-year-old hag by the time she’s thirty. She was cussing like a fleet of drunken sailors the whole time he’s rifling my pockets, pissed because that was all I had on me. Here I am, bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig, holding in my guts, and all she’s worried about is how much dope she’s going to get from setting me up and seeing me eviscerated, all in a snit because it’s not nearly enough she’d hoped for. Funny thing, I saw her kind more than I count, worked some of the worst murders when I was a cop, but when cold-blooded murder is actually happening to you like that, when you’re helpless and your number is up…Anyway, she kicks me a couple real beauts like only a junkie whacked out of her gourd and dying for the next hit can, all that geeking rage and hate. She wants the knife to finish me off but her boyfriend wouldn’t give it to her—why, I couldn’t tell you. Funny. Miserable as I was, how often I thought about dying—you know, Dear Mother of God, won’t you come and take me away from this vale of tears—when it’s actually happening I was terrified and wanted nothing more than to live, more out of my conscience screaming at me that what was waiting on the other side was a whole bunch of accounting.

“Long story short, I crawled to the phone, reached up like my arm was shot out of a cannon. Knocked the phone down and along with it comes a Bible. Brand-spanking new. I remember that because the edge of the spine felt like a steel rod when it bounced off the side of my face. The thought hit me—why in the world do they keep Bibles out for the kind of people go there to do what they’re doing anyway? God is the very last thing on their minds. Well, turned out, somebody was reading it. Out comes the bookmarker.”

“Saint Rita.”

“Yeah, Saint Rita. How it ended up in my pocket, how it was still there when I was released from the hospital.” Kramer paused. “I don’t know how long it was, but I entertained a wicked desire to use some cop buddies I still had in Hollywood. Track those two down. Payback, the likes of which I couldn’t even imagine the Devil himself conjuring up. Then, for some reason I can’t explain, I’m in a library, a nagging suspicion that as bad as my life was it could get a whole lot worse, when I stumble across an encyclopedia on the lives of the saints. Who was she, you ask? Saint Rita wanted nothing more than to go into a convent when she was a young girl, but it seemed her family had promised her out in marriage. She marries, they have two sons, but her husband was murdered. Her two sons then set out to avenge his death. She prayed that they would die before they could carry out their plan of cold-blooded murder, thus condemning themselves to eternal ruin. Seems her prayer was answered. They died, but no one knows the circumstances. After that, she entered a convent, like she always wanted, became an Augustinian Nun. Prayed to share in Christ’s suffering and bore the mark of a thorn on her forehead until she died. Almost six hundred years ago, and her incorrupt body is still just like it was, resting in a basilica in Cascia, Italy. My little motel misadventure was no epiphany, but I’ve kept her with me ever since. I’m not sure I can explain why.”

As Kramer fell silent, Bolan held the man’s look, thinking about the story he’d related, weighing the sincerity behind the words. As much evil as the soldier had faced in his War Everlasting, as many near death experiences as he’d brushed up against himself, he couldn’t help but wonder right then if maybe there was such a supernatural phenomenon as miracles, guardian angels, the guiding hand of a divine force that could hand out mercy to the repentant, justice to the wicked, but already knew the answer. The simple fact that he was prepared to always offer the ultimate sacrifice to keep the scourge of Evil from devouring the innocent and the peacekeepers was proof enough in his mind there was a God, a creator, an eternal judge. When the dust of battle always settled, and the living were separated from the dead, the wheat from the chaff, it was the only concept that made any sense.

The ultimate good was the only principal worth fighting for.

Bolan made the decision. He had crossed the point where he felt it safe to say it wouldn’t prove a fatal mistake. Mitch Kramer was a man in search of new life, who needed redemption, however and wherever it came.

So be it.

The soldier picked up the small war bag, inside of which rested the HK, with spare clips and a bevy of fragmentation, flash-bang, smoke and incendiary grenades. He went and removed the plastic cuffs off Kramer’s wrists, dumped the small arsenal by his side.

“Chances are,” Bolan told the man, “I’m going to need some help. Don’t let me live to regret it. Fair enough?”

Kramer nodded. “More than I deserve.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Bison One to Hammer Wheel.”

The man’s voice crackled around the cab of the Ford GMC, sounding as if it were reaching out from some cavernous echo chamber. He was alone, with only Grant’s voice reverberating in his head, and he wondered if maybe that by itself wasn’t the clue, the opening…

Mark Drobbler kept him waiting, staring out the windshield at the eye of the camera that was hidden behind some ferns. Had the spooks not done their job, he knew he would have been swarmed by men in black fatigues already. Or…

Either way, it was zero hour.

Which was why he found his hands shaking uncontrollably.

He took a deep swig of whiskey from the silver flask, for all the good he reckoned it would do to calm the firestorm of raw nerves and churning stomach. The grim chuckle he sounded against his will seemed to ring back, loud and insidious, in his ears, like a death knell. He was minutes away from venturing into what he suspected was no less than a dark world of hurt he couldn’t begin to imagine.

There were a few simple facts to consider along that line of pessimistic thought. First, he knew how spooks operated, despite all of Grant’s promises and reassurances they were aboveboard, and that coming from a man who had been little more than some backwater dirty badge with both hand and extra-marital tool out. Right. Mr. Fire and Brimstone, always preaching about the end of the world, how the elect needed to get busy scrambling to fight the good fight, and before the barbarians at the gate devoured the few standing God-fearing Christians. All this from a man who had his own agenda here on Earth, and that involved nothing other than big, quick and easy money, so he could coast through the rest of his golden years.

As for the spooks, they came to them, smiling sheep, pretending to be nothing other than simple government officials, but in this case, they came bearing gifts and promising Paradise on Earth—a cash ticket for Easy Street—for the Sons of Revelation. Drobbler knew their ilk. They were nothing less than snarling wolves behind the lamb’s mask. The clincher, in his experienced mind, though, was the fact the spooks had actually told them who and what they represented.

Homeland Security.

Considering what was before them, that revelation was unheard of, tantamount, in fact, to professional suicide.

Or capture.

Assuming they were to be believed, there was the dilemma all of them were being marched into an elaborate Federal trap, hammered and cut to ribbons, and whatever rabble left to be scooped up would be branded as treasonous cutthroats in front of God, man and country. All this before they were even out of the gate. To compound what he couldn’t deny was mounting horror and doubt, there was the attack at the lodge, right before daybreak. Car bombs, of all the maddening mystery—and planted under the very noses of watching sentries—though he thought of those guards in the loosest sense of anything close to resembling vigilant—had reduced to smoking rubbish what was a fleet of top-of-the-line vehicles, vintage classics a few of the less devout were still whining over, demanding immediate compensation, retribution, but, for God’s sake, were up in arms and angrier than ever to follow through with the mission. To throw fuel on the fire of the mystery, there was no sighting, no sign whatsoever upon subsequent combing of the woods and general perimeter of some adversarial force that had up and vanished like a ghost.

To make matters worse still, one of the High Sons was missing, a former L.A. cop, gone to take a leak, ostensibly, but vanishing into thin air.

Hence—the missing cop—was another godforsaken riddle, and this, after they’d been infiltrated by the Feds there was no telling…

“Hammer Wheel! Respond!”

He felt his hand reaching out for the gearshift, but realized he needed to turn on the ignition first.

Stay or go?

How far to 83? Missoula? How close was the nearest town…?

“Hammer Wheel! Why are you just sitting there?”

Drobbler flinched. They were watching. That sealed him in.

He picked up the radio. “Yeah?”

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking.”

“The thinking part’s already done. Move out and assume your position.”

Too late, but Drobbler had known as much, hours earlier. Whatever hope he’d clung to evaporated as he felt watching eyes somewhere in the forest. He grabbed up the Colt Commando assault rifle, the small nylon satchel with spare clips, shouldered out the door.

The trail was narrow, but he knew it by heart from prior walk-through. Originally, his role had been that of advanced scout only, which he was abandoning to now…

It was a short walk, and he saw it looming before his eyes, too soon, too sudden.

A beast of burden.

A monstrous thing of death and destruction.

The door was open and waiting. Drobbler climbed the few steps and dropped behind the wheel of Attila.

IT WAS T-Minus 21:48:47 and counting when Donald Lawhorn spotted them, and fought back the scowl before the look betrayed the murderous rage thundering in his heart. They were in the deep back corner, that section reserved for those fools under the delusion a few games of pool would stand them out as something more than the usual hyenas. The doors were barely open for business, and there they were, playing grab-ass with two strippers.

Cheap thrills he could understand, but this little floor show was beyond stupid.

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