Blood Play

“Thereabouts. Turns out he’s got a couple friends flying in with him.”

“I’ll meet you at the airport,” Orson said. “You think those guys might be into playing a little Hold ’Em?”

“Dunno,” Colt told him. “I’ll ask when they get in.”

“Great.” Orson wrapped up the call, then walked over to scratch his terrier behind its ears. “What say, Ranger? A quick lap around the track so you can do your business?”

Ranger seemed in no hurry to leave his bed. Before Orson could try any further coaxing, however, the dog suddenly turned its head and growled low as it stared past the boxes stacked near the door.

“I hear ’em, too,” Orson said. “Easy, boy. Shh.”

Orson flicked off the main overhead lights and moved to the nearest window overlooking the driveway. He parted the blinds and peered out.

“Good, they fell for it,” he whispered.

Orson moved from the window and grabbed a shotgun racked on a wall illuminated by the dull glow of a nearby bench lamp. It was another Mossberg, identical to the one he’d bought for his groundskeeper a few days earlier after coyotes had killed his other terrier.

“Payback time, Ranger,” Orson told his dog.

The inventor was thumbing the rifle’s safety when he heard the other Mossberg fire. Ranger bounded from his bed and began to yelp. Orson ventured back for another look out the window. The coyotes had fled the Dumpster and were scurrying down the driveway. None of them appeared to have been hit.

“He missed ’em!”

Orson headed for the doorway. Ranger beat him there, still barking,

“Sit!” Orson commanded. When the dog obeyed, he gently pulled it back from the door. “Don’t worry, if I get those critters in my sights they’re toast.”

The bespectacled inventor slipped outside and was closing the door behind him when he detected movement to his immediate right. Turning, he caught a brief glimpse of someone pointing a gun at his head. It was an image he would take with him to his grave.

THE MOMENT HE SAW Orson drop at Vladik Barad’s feet, Petenka Tramelik made a quick call on his cell phone.

“It’s done,” he whispered. “Get up here, quick!”

Tramelik was slipping the phone back in his pocket when Barad jogged over, holding the small Raven Arms MP-25 he’d just used on Orson. “Those damn coyotes almost ruined things.”

“Never mind that,” Tramelik said. “Give me a hand.”

Barad stuffed the handgun in his waistband, then took hold of Donny Upshaw’s ankles. Tramelik grabbed the groundskeeper by the armpits and together they hauled him across the grounds to the stables. Ranger was barking wildly behind the closed door. Once they’d set Upshaw on the ground a few yards from Orson, Barad drew the Raven again and threw the stable door open. The terrier backed away momentarily, then was about to charge when Barad put a bullet through its chest, dropping the dog in its tracks.

“There’s been enough racket here without having to listen to that,” he told Tramelik.

Tramelik nodded. “It’ll be a nice touch once we’re finished. Let’s do it.”

Upshaw had begun to groan slightly but was still unconscious when Barad crouched beside him and put the Raven in the groundskeeper’s right hand, then clasped his own hand over it and guided Upshaw’s index finger onto the trigger. Tramelik helped Barad aim the weapon at Orson, who lay on his side facing them, blood draining from his left temple where he’d been shot.

“Okay, Donny,” Tramelik whispered to Upshaw. “Put one through his heart for good measure.”

Barad gently pressed his index finger against Upshaw’s and the Raven fired once again. Orson’s body stirred slightly as it absorbed the round.

Far down the driveway the men heard the crunch of tires on gravel. It was the Dodge Caravan, heading up toward the garage with its lights out.

“I already got his keys,” Tramelik told Barad. “Get Orson’s, then we’ll wrap things up here so we can go take care of the chief.”

CHAPTER THREE

Antwerp, Belgium

Evgenii Danilov thanked his valet for bringing him the evening edition of the International Tribune and took the paper to his study, a lavish room that, like much of the small centuries-old castle, had been painstakingly restored to its medieval origins. Through the large stained-glass window he could see night falling over his secluded upscale neighborhood. It had snowed earlier, and downhill from Danilov’s two-acre front lawn there was still a light frosting on Grote Steenweg, the ancient Great Stone Road that had once been the main thoroughfare linking Antwerp and Brussels. This stretch of the road had been historically presevered every bit as much as Danilov’s home and strategically planted trees blocked his view of neighboring homes as well as any other sign of modern civilization.

There were times, like now, when Danilov could stare out the window and imagine himself transported back to the age of his forefathers, specifically Prince Eugene of Savoy-Carignan, one of Europe’s greatest military commanders and mentor to Frederick the Great, whose Prussian Empire included the land upon which this, one of Danilov’s six homes, stood. Over the past fifty years the silver-haired St. Petersburg native had carved out a financial empire of his own that was impressive in its own right. But for all his success, to Danilov the world of commerce, in the end, didn’t hold quite the same allure as military or political conquest. Yes, he’d made a lifetime of negotiating shrewd investments, but how could that compare with the visceral passion his ancestral hero had to have taken with him to the battlefield when crushing Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Zenta? If he had it all to do over, Danilov wouldn’t have bought his way out of military service, because in the years since, in his heart of hearts, he’d come to know that his greatest yearning was to be more like his namesake: a true warrior.

Little wonder, then, that while known to the world as the billionaire founder and CEO of Global Holdings Corporation, Danilov’s preferred renown was that of a covert financial backer of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. It was a position that allowed him, without fanfare, to be a party to decisions geared toward returning his motherland to a state of global prominence surpassing even that of Frederick the Great’s empire or the once-formidable juggernaut that had been the Soviet Union.

It was in this warrior’s state of mind that Danilov turned from the window and eased into his favorite chair facing the fiery hearth that staged a battle of its own, fending off the unseasonal chill outside the castle. The financier read with fervor the Tribune’s front-page headlines, many of them devoted to America’s ongoing preoccupation with the forces of radical Islam. The U.S. was still bogged down in Iraq and was repeating Russia’s grand mistake of thinking it could impose its influence in Afghanistan. And these were just two fronts on which Washington was distracting itself. There were also headlines about threats posed by North Korea, Iran and China. Danilov had to turn to the fourth page before he came across any mention of U.S. concern over Russia, and that was with regards to Moscow targeting missiles at Eastern Europe. As it had been for some time, there was no mention in the entire paper that America so much as considered the idea that its one-time greatest rival might be silently working on the means by which to launch a preemptive strike that would make the horrors of 9/11 seem tame by comparison. And the notion that such a blow might be dealt from within the United States’s own boundaries rather than by way of long-range missiles? Danilov felt certain the powers-that-be in Washington were far more wary such an attack would be instigated by al Qaeda than on orders from Moscow.

Next to Danilov’s chair was a large antique globe resting on a pivot stand that allowed it to be spun or tilted at a variety of angles. When purchasing it, the selling point for the Russian, besides its exacting geographic detail, was the fact that it was not divided into countries in a way that would have made it obsolete every time some fledgling nation won its independence or borders were redrawn by some existing power. As such, when he slowly rotated the globe until the United States came into view, he had to guess as to the exact whereabouts of New Mexico, where he and the SVR had elected to carry out their long-range plan to do what the latest economic downturn had failed to do: bring America to its knees. To some, the desert sprawl of the Southwest may have seemed an unlikely place from which to stage such a grand scheme, but Danilov found the location not only ideal, but fitting. After all, it was in New Mexico that the U.S. had finalized tests for the Manhattan Project and ushered the world into the age of nuclear weapons. What better place for Russia to create a trove of warheads that could be put to use without having to contend with the multibillion-dollar measures the U.S. was committing itself to as a defense against long-range attacks.

The groundwork had already been laid when Danilov, with the help of SVR agents, had fabricated the scandal that had led to the removal of the Rosqui Tribal Council’s previous partners at the Roaming Bison Casino as well as the reservation’s long-running nuclear waste facility. When Global Holdings had subsequently moved in to fill the void, Danilov had taken care to orchestrate things so that it appeared that his corporation was interested primarily in gaming operations and would be taking over the waste facility with some reluctance. In the years since, GHC’s public-relations arm had followed this cue and shone a bright light on the casino and its resort amenities while steering focus away from the storage of spent fuel rods and other radioactive waste. Likewise, the late-night construction of ancillary bunkers in the mountains flanking the waste plant had been every bit as secretive as the intended use of the new structures. The new sites would be completed within the year, at which point all that would be needed was a more viable source of uranium than that coming from the fuel rods to carry out what Danilov had convinced SVR to call Operation Zenta, in honor of the battle in which his famed namesake had lost only five hundred men while slaying thirty thousand Turks.

All had gone well with the project until the past week, when the SVR team in New Mexico had faced a string of setbacks. First had been Taos Pueblo President Walter Upshaw’s refusal to accept a partnership with GHC, thereby foiling—at least temporarily—the SVR’s hope to secure uranium from the tribe’s long-abandoned mines. Then there had been the matter of Alan Orson, the Taos geophysicist they’d been lobbying to help develop a quicker means by which to process mined uranium into weapons-grade plutonium. Orson had been courted with the understanding he would be helping GHC conduct a feasibility study for using the uranium as a nuclear power source, but the inventor had balked, ironically out of fear that his work might somehow fall into the wrong hands.

At the time he turned down GHC’s offer, there had been no indication that he had any suspicions about the organization, but over the past few days it had come to light that he was friends with Roaming Bison security officer Franklin Colt, who had apparently come upon some as-yet-unknown evidence of GHC’s ulterior agenda at the reservation. Colt had gone to Upshaw with his findings and the fear was that Orson had been brought into the loop, as well. Left unchecked, it was a security breach that could well undermine Operation Zenta, but Danilov had been assured by his point man in New Mexico, Frederik Mikhaylov, that all three men—Upshaw, Orson and Colt—were about to be taken out of the equation, with the bonus of the SVR getting its hands on not only Orson’s research data on uranium processing but also a handful of invention prototypes, some of which could be put to good use by the Russian army as well as its intelligentsia. In fact, before retiring for the evening Danilov expected to receive confirmation that the mission had been carried out. Once he got the call, he would breathe a little easier, but, on the whole, he remained optimistic that destiny was on his side and that in the end he and the SVR would prevail.

As he waited for the phone to ring, Danilov stared into the fireplace a moment, then glanced up at the oil portrait of Eugene of Savoy-Carignan hanging over his mantelpiece. In the portrait, the wild-haired military strategist stared out with a look that Danilov normally found to be expressionless. This night, however, he fancied that in his forefather’s eyes he could see a glimmer of approval. Moreover, he wanted to think that if the portrait could talk, Eugene would be telling him, Well done, Evgenii.

CHAPTER FOUR

Albuquerque, New Mexico

“Any luck?” John Kissinger asked his friend Franklin Colt.

Colt shook his head as he slipped his cell phone back in his pocket.

“He’s still not picking up,” he said. “Must be all this rain has things backed up on the highway.”

“I guess we can stick around awhile and wait for him.” Kissinger glanced over at Jack Grimaldi, the Stony Man pilot who’d flown him to Albuquerque along with Mack Bolan. The Executioner stood a few yards away, his back turned to the others, cell phone pressed to his ear.

“Fine by me,” Grimaldi said, adjusting the brim of his baseball cap in preparation for stepping out into the rain. The four men stood outside the main terminal at Albuquerque International, an overhang shielding them from the drizzling remains of a downpour that had left pools of water on the sidewalk and out in the traffic lanes separating the airport from the outdoor parking lot. The Stony Man warriors had arrived nearly an hour earlier and deplaned on the runway, where, thanks to arrangements made by Barbara Price, an airport police officer had picked them up in a shuttle cart and brought them around to the front of the terminal, allowing them to bypass security screenings that would have turned up the small cache of weaponry and ammunition they’d brought with them. Colt had been out on the sidewalk waiting for them.

“No, let’s go ahead and get you guys checked in,” Franklin told the others. “I left a message for Al to catch up with us at the hotel. It’s just down the road and he’s got a room there, too.”

“Works for me,” Kissinger said.

Bolan rejoined the others once he was off the phone. After Kissinger filled him in, the Executioner replied, “There’s been a change in plans on our end, too. Seattle’s off. I’ll give you the details later.”

Colt grinned knowingly. “I’ve got a better idea,” he suggested. “Why don’t I go get the car and swing by to pick you up? That’ll give you time to debrief…or whatever it is you guys call it.”

“Appreciate it,” Bolan told Colt.

“I told John I’ve got a little intrigue of my own going on at the reservation,” Colt countered. “Maybe at some point we can swap stories.”

The crossing light changed before the Stony Men could reply. As Colt headed out into the rain and sidestepped puddles on his way to the parking lot, Kissinger turned to his colleagues.

“He was kidding,” he told them. “He knows what I do, and who I do it with, isn’t up for discussion.”

“I figured as much,” Bolan said.

“Any idea what he meant about the reservation?” Grimaldi asked.

“Not sure,” Kissinger said. “He mentioned it when we first spoke but all he said was that things were a little hinky there. Probably something at the casino.”

“He seems like a straight-up guy,” Bolan said.

“Franklin’s the best,” Kissinger said. “I still can’t believe we fell out of touch for so long.”

Years ago, Kissinger and Colt, a full-blooded Rosqui Indian, had worked together as field agents for the DEA and forged a strong friendship. Kissinger had saved Colt’s life during a drug raid a few months after they’d partnered up, and Colt had returned the favor less than a year later, taking a few rounds while shoving his colleague out of the line of fire during a botched undercover operation.

The wounds had been severe enough to place Colt on extended medical leave, and though Kissinger had initially made a point to keep tabs on the other man’s recuperation, as time passed and Kissinger’s shift into covert operations demanded more secrecy, their contact had become sporadic and, as often happened with even the best of friends, eventually the men had drifted apart. More than a dozen years had slipped away before Kissinger sought to reestablish contact. With help from Stony Man’s cybercrew he’d been able to track Colt down to the Rosqui reservation north of Santa Fe, where he worked graveyard shift as a security officer for Roaming Bison Casino, one of several tribal-owned resorts located just off the major interstates running through New Mexico.

After a two-hour long-distance phone conversation, Colt had suggested a face-to-face reunion. Kissinger had been all for it and volunteered to fly out to Albuquerque, where he figured he could squeeze in some business for the Farm by attending the city’s annual New Military Technologies Expo. Kissinger had mentioned that his present government work was classified, but Colt had assumed it had something to do with Cowboy’s fascination with firearms and weapons systems. He’d suggested that Kissinger meet his poker buddy Alan Orson, who was driving in from Taos to run an NMT booth featuring several of his latest inventions. Kissinger was already familiar with some of Orson’s patents and looked forward to seeing what else the inventor had up his sleeve. Should Orson have something worth adding to the Farm’s arsenal, Kissinger knew SOG had the funding—and clout—to get first crack at putting any invention to use. For the moment, however, those considerations would have to wait on Orson’s arrival from Taos.

As they waited for Colt to pick them up, Grimaldi asked Bolan, “So, what’s up with Seattle?”

“Canada beat us to the punch,” Bolan explained. “I didn’t get the details, but apparently CSIS staged a couple preemptive raids across the border. They turned up grenade launchers and plastic explosives in a shipment of machinery parts earmarked for some retrofitting business in Takoma.” CSIS was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

“‘Retrofitting’ my ass,” Kissinger said.

Bolan and Grimaldi had their backs to the airport traffic lanes but Cowboy was facing the other way and, glancing over their shoulders, he could see Colt cross the street to the outdoor parking area. When they’d spoken on the phone, Franklin had boasted about the restoration work he’d done on a vintage 1969 Chevy Nova, and Kissinger could see the muscle car out in the parking lot, its yellow, laquered coat almost gleaming in the rain.

“Sounds like they shut down the suppliers,” Grimaldi told Bolan, “but what about the guys that stuff was being sent to?”

“That’s still on Able’s plate,” Bolan said. “They were already working the Takoma angle and figure they can follow through on their own.”

“If that’s the case, it sounds like we’ve got ourselves a minivacation,” Grimaldi said. “Sweet. Maybe we can get in that card game Colt was talking about.”

“Hang on, guys,” Kissinger murmured, eyes on the parking lot. “Something’s not right.”

Across the roadway, Colt had made his way past a handful of parked cars and was circling around his Nova when he was intercepted by two men bounding out of an unmarked black panel truck parked next to him. Kissinger’s first thought had been that one of the men was probably Alan Orson, but as he watched on, a sudden scuffle broke out between Colt and the others. Bolan and Grimaldi tracked Kissinger’s gaze to the altercation, just in time to see Colt being overpowered and dragged into the panel truck. Even as the other two assailants were clambering aboard, the truck was already backing out of its parking space.

Bolan and Kissinger were on the move. They sprinted into the pickup lane, their eyes on the truck as they signaled for oncoming traffic to stop. A cabbie was slow to respond and had to veer at the last second to avoid running the men down. Slamming on his brakes, the driver fishtailed to a stop, splashing water up past the curb and nearly drenching Grimaldi.

Bolan yanked a 9 mm Beretta 3-R from the shoulder holster concealed beneath his jacket. Kissinger already had his pistol out and both men braced themselves in the middle of the thoroughfare, drawing bead on the panel truck as it crossed the parking lot. There were too many innocent bystanders in the way, however, forcing the men to hold their fire. As traffic backed up in front of them, a number of motorists began pounding their horns. Bolan ignored the bleating as well as the cursing of the cab driver. He shouted to Grimaldi, “Get us some wheels!”

“On it!”

As Bolan and Kissinger broke their firing positions and crossed the roadway, Grimaldi slammed his fist on the taxi’s hood before its driver could pull away. The cabbie turned and glared when the Stony Man pilot tugged open the front passenger door.

“I need to borrow this,” Grimaldi said.

“Like hell,” the cabbie snapped.

Grimaldi produced his M1911 pistol and aimed it at the driver.

“I don’t have time to argue,” he said. “Get out! Now!”

The cabbie’s anger quickly morphed into fear. He put the taxi in Park and bailed out into the rain. Grimaldi tossed in his overnight bag, along with the totes Bolan and Kissinger had left on the curb. He was circling around to the driver’s side when a security officer raced out of the baggage terminal, his gun drawn. It wasn’t the cop who’d picked them up on the runway, and he had obviously quickly jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“Hold it right there!” he shouted at Grimaldi.

“Federal agent!” Grimaldi shouted back, taking the risk of reaching into his shirt pocket for the certified Justice Department badge he and his fellow commandos routinely carried while on assignment. SOG Director Hal Brognola was officially entrenched with Justice, ensuring that even though the badges were issued under aliases they would hold up under scrutiny. Given the circumstances, however, Grimaldi wasn’t about to wait around for clearance. He pointed at the racing panel truck and bellowed, “We’ve got a hostage situation!”

The officer paused, which was all the time Grimaldi needed to scramble behind the wheel and slam the taxi into gear. Raising a rainwater fantail, the pilot veered into traffic, nearly sideswiping a slow-moving Honda as he crossed lanes and plowed his way through a gap between two of several sand-filled steel drums separating northbound traffic from vehicles heading south, away from the airport. A shuttle bus in the oncoming lane swerved to one side to avoid colliding head-on with Grimaldi as he wrestled the taxi’s steering wheel, foot still on the gas, bounding over the far curb before completing a U-turn and aligning himself with southbound traffic. Up ahead, Bolan and Kissinger had reached the sidewalk and were firing at the panel truck, which had just smashed through a swing arm at the pay station and burst out of the parking lot. The truck clipped a passing Cadillac and forced the luxury car off the road into a curbside planter. Bolan and Kissinger aimed low for the truck’s tires but the getaway vehicle veered wildly on the rain-slicked asphalt and proved an elusive target.

Grimaldi sped forward, then pulled to a stop alongside his colleagues. Bolan and Kissinger piled in, slamming fresh cartridges into their weapons.

“Stay on ’em!” Kissinger shouted.

“I aim to,” Grimaldi replied. “Fasten your seat belts, boys and girls!”

The Stony Man pilot floored the accelerator. The taxi’s wheels spun in place a moment, then gained traction and hauled the vehicle forward, past the disabled Cadillac.

The chase was on.

BY THE TIME THE panel truck had left the parking lot, Franklin Colt’s abductors had already stripped him of his cell phone and hog-tied him by the wrists and ankles with duct tape. There were no seats in the rear of the truck, and Colt lay pinned against the cold metal floor, his captors kneeling on either side of him. They’d pulled a stocking cap down over his head, as well, and there was little he could see through the tight-woven fabric. He assumed the men were hoping to conceal their identities, but during the brief skirmish in the parking lot he’d gotten a good look at them. He didn’t know them by name, but he recognized them from the casino. They were regulars who spent most of their time at the roulette and blackjack tables. Franklin suspected they were more than mere players, however, given their burly physiques and the frequency with which they would wander off to the main bar to meet with one of the pit bosses whenever they went on break. Judging from their accents, he figured the thugs, like most of the casino’s executive personnel, were either from Eastern Europe or Russia. He had a good idea, as well, as to why they’d taken him hostage.