Sabotage

The local law enforcement had, as usual, been extremely suspicious. Bolan had given them his “Matthew Cooper” identification and the Justice Department credentials Brognola’s people had issued to that alias. It had still taken a few phone calls, one of them eventually fielded by the big Fed himself, before the police were satisfied. They had grudgingly accepted Bolan’s presence after that, and even done a pretty good job of pointedly ignoring him. The soldier could understand some of the territoriality that came with the job, and he knew only too well that his violent intervention wasn’t something that good cops just dismissed easily.

To those police and any other observer, Mack Bolan was simply waiting around. There was no good reason, in the minds of the police, for this mysterious federal agent not to leave the scene. Bolan imagined they thought he, too, was being territorial, perhaps not trusting the local boys to do a thorough job with the crime scene. The truth was something far different, of course. Bolan was playing a hunch, one spurred by long experience and countless battlefield scenarios.

Something wasn’t quite right, and he could feel it.

There was a loose end somewhere; Bolan was sure of it. As he stood, seemingly observing the police as they took the Riders’ statements, he was surreptitiously scanning the perimeter of the cemetery. The spotter, if indeed there had been one working with the shooters in the van, was bound to be somewhere along that perimeter somewhere, offering him a view similar to the one Bolan had enjoyed from his sniper’s vantage. Unless the man—or woman—had the sense to flee immediately when the action went down, he or she was still up there. Bolan had been watching. That feeling that he, in turn, was being watched was something he couldn’t shake. He had been under fire enough times to know to trust his gut. His finely honed combat instincts were screaming at him. He was listening.

A knot of the Riders no longer speaking with the police had drifted toward Bolan. They were a fairly typical bunch, at first glance—mostly large men in leather jackets, boots and jeans, with a sprinkling of other accessories and licensed motorcycle brand accoutrements. There were a few tattoos in evidence. They looked like bikers, but without the hard edge that Bolan had seen in so many outlaw clubs. These were simply citizens who rode motorcycles, first and foremost, and in this case for a good cause.

The nearest man, who sported a blond crew cut and wore a pair of sunglasses on a cord around his neck, shuffled closer to Bolan and cleared his throat. This was the man Bolan had seen talking to the funeral director.

“Excuse me, sir?” the man asked.

“Yes?”

“Mitch Schrader, sir,” the biker said, extending his hand. Bolan shook it; Schrader’s grip was firm, but not aggressive. “With the Patriotism Riders.”

“So I gathered.” Bolan nodded. “Matthew Cooper.”

“So you said.” Schrader grinned. “You really with the Justice Department? You’re not FBI, or something?” Schrader asked.

“I really am,” Bolan said. In a certain sense, it was true. The soldier worked for nothing more than unbridled justice, justice in its purest and most righteous form.

“I wanted to thank you,” Schrader said. “The boys and I, we, well, we wondered if maybe something like this might happen.”

“What do you mean?” Bolan asked.

“Well—” Schrader shrugged “—the protests, they’re bad enough. We’ve been fighting that for a while. But we figured it was only a matter of time before they stopped being ‘peaceful,’ you know? It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I’m not aware of any violence at the funerals of military personnel,” Bolan said warily.

“’Course not.” Schrader grinned. “You’d have to say that, wouldn’t you? But come on, Cooper, you and I both know that’s probably not true. You hear things. Most of the guys are vets themselves. We stay in touch. We network. That’s how we know what the buzz is, where to ride, what services to protect. Makes me sick.” Schrader turned and jerked his chin toward the bodies of the attackers. “They aren’t all like them, I suppose. Not all terrorists or murderers or whatever. But the ones who march and chant, they’re just as bad, aren’t they? Pissing on the graves of war dead. Upsetting the families. Turning the deaths of brave men into a political statement.”

“And women,” one of the other Riders put in.

“And women,” Schrader stated, grinning. “That’s Ben. He’s our resident equal rights activist.”

“Up yours,” Ben snarled.

“Anyway,” Schrader said, his smile fading, “I mean it, man. You didn’t just save them—” he motioned toward the few mourners still present, who were speaking with the funeral director beyond the circle of bustling police “—you saved all of us. We’d have been the first to catch one. I thought maybe, well, it’s hard to explain. But I knew coming here might be bad for us. We couldn’t stay away, though, not thinking there was a protest going down.”

“How did you find out about that?” Bolan asked.

“I got a phone call, man.” Schrader shrugged. “Last minute. Don’t know the guy. He said just that he was a fellow American, and that he knew the service today was going on, and that there was supposed to be a big peace protest here. Said he figured that would be of interest to me, and yeah, it was. It’s what we do. We stand up for people who can’t do it themselves, you know? People who’ve already given everything there is to give. You can dig that, right?”

“I can.” Bolan nodded. Indeed, he could.

“We network,” Schrader said, indicating his fellow Riders. “There are other chapters of Riders in this part of the country, and a few other groups that go by different names, folks who do the same thing we do. We stay in touch and we tip each other off when a ride comes up, especially if we think one of those protest groups, especially the crazier ones you see on the news, is aware of the service and looking to march on it. We were, all of us, on CNN just last month. But I’m telling you, Cooper, this is the first time I’ve ever gotten an anonymous phone call like that. I’m thinking now it was some kind of setup.”

“You could be right,” Bolan acknowledged. He took a small notebook from inside one of the pockets of his blacksuit. Using the metal pen clipped to it, he wrote down a phone number. The number would route a call through several satellite cutouts and eventually to Bolan’s secure satellite phone, while flagging the call as an unsecured transmission from a potentially unknown third party. No amount of tech-tracing would produce any intelligence on Bolan’s phone or the soldier’s whereabouts, but to the caller it would still appear to be a direct line. Bolan tore out the slip of paper and handed it to Schrader.

“If you hear anything more,” Bolan said, “anything through your contacts or those in your organization, call me. I’m interested in anything you hear about protests, or if you anyone calls you.”

“Here,” Schrader said, pulling out his cell phone and flipping it open. “I have the number on my phone from this morning, the number this Deep Throat or whatever called me from.” He recited it, and Bolan copied it down.

“That may help.”

“You’re wondering who’s got it in for our boys, aren’t you?” Schrader asked quietly, looking shrewd.

“Justice,” Bolan said simply. “I’m just looking for justice.”

“I heard that.”

Bolan excused himself and moved to the corpses of the shooters. He had already taken photos of each of them and sent them via secure upload to the Farm for analysis. The locals hadn’t liked that much, from their body language, but they hadn’t tried to stop him and they hadn’t asked any questions. Bolan had left the scene undisturbed while they were tagging and cataloging, but they were finished now. He knelt and carefully started searching the closest corpse.

“You won’t find much, sir,” one of the uniformed officers said. He nodded at Bolan and help up a plastic evidence bag. “I personally checked their pockets and the lining of their clothes. No IDs.”

“Thank you,” Bolan said. “Officer…?”

“Copeland, sir,” the cop said.

“Anything of consequence there?” Bolan nodded at the evidence bag.

“No.” The officer shook his head. “A few personal effects. Combs, pocketknives. A pair of wristwatches, domestic and unremarkable. Nothing, really. No car keys, no money, no matchbooks or scraps of paper. They more or less emptied their pockets beforehand, I guess.”

“What about him?” Bolan pointed to the driver, dead behind the wheel of the van. “And the vehicle.”

“We’re checking the vehicle identification number now.” Officer Copeland shook his head. “The plates came back already. They were stolen off a Toyota pickup twenty-five miles from here. I can tell you that van will come back as stolen. See that shattered side window up front, the little access window? That’s how they get in to hot-wire it. Sure sign the thing is hot. They must have grabbed it and then switched plates. It would have been enough cover in transit from wherever they got it, to here.”

Bolan nodded. He liked this Copeland. He was young but knew his business, and wasn’t afraid to share information with another department—in this case, one he had to know was decidedly above his pay grade.

“Nothing on the driver, either.”

Bolan looked over the dead men and women once more. That was strange. Amateurs were rarely so thorough, and these sign-waving shooters had hardly been professionals. They’d been sloppy, careless and, in the case of the one man who’d taken down two of his partners, dangerous to one another as much as to their targets. That didn’t make a lot of sense…unless these were the types of politically motivated pawns some greater interest, such as Trofimov, was controlling from higher up. That scenario made more sense. But if that was the case, then there definitely was likely to be someone—

“Agent Cooper?” Officer Copeland broke into Bolan’s reverie. “Uh, sir, is he one of yours?”

Bolan saw the man just as the uniformed cop pointed him out. The figure, dressed in a dark hooded sweatshirt and slacks, had taken off at a dead run from the very edge of the cemetery, headed away from the graves.

Bolan broke away and sprinted.

He raced through the maze of tombstones, dodging this way and that. The runner looked back, saw him and produced a handgun of some kind. He loosed a round, but it went wide, ricocheting off one of the marble memorials. Then they were both free of the cemetery proper, the running man cutting across a two-lane road that backed the rear of the graveyard. A Honda narrowly missed the man, the driver honking in outrage.

Bolan yanked the Beretta 93-R from his shoulder holster, risking a glance left and right before rocketing over the road. His combat boots chewed up asphalt and the muddy grass of the field beyond in long, rapid strides. The distance closed; there was a small copse of trees some yards beyond, but no real cover for the fleeing man to seek. He snapped another shot in Bolan’s direction. The bullet never came anywhere near the sprinting soldier.

Mack Bolan was a crack shot, a trained sniper and marksman of decades’ experience. Even he, however, wouldn’t risk a shot on a running man he wished to keep alive for questioning. Instead, he poured on the speed, judged the distance and then launched himself in a flying tackle. He took the smaller man around the knees and rolled through the muddy earth. He came up standing above the runner, who looked up from his back. The Beretta 93-R was trained on the smaller man’s face. His hood had come off to reveal that he was Asian, maybe midtwenties.

“Don’t move,” Bolan ordered.

The Asian was lightning fast. His body torqued and his foot came up like a rattlesnake, snapping a vicious blow into Bolan’s wrist. The Executioner lost the Beretta and took a step backward. The Asian leaped up and was at him, raining a flurry of brutal, acrobatic kicks. Bolan felt the wind being pressed from his rib cage. He reeled, clawing for the Desert Eagle still in its sheath, protecting his head with his left forearm as kick after vicious kick hammered away at him.

He ended up on his back, pulling the Desert Eagle free as the Asian man dropped a knee onto his chest. Firing from retention with the massive weapon pressed against his body, Bolan put a single .44 Magnum round through the little man’s midsection. He yelped in surprise, rolling over and off Bolan, scrambling to his feet once more and taking a few shaky steps away from the soldier.

“Stop!” Bolan ordered, surging to his feet and leveling the hand cannon. The Asian man seemed not to hear him. He took another drunken step, lost his footing and collapsed on suddenly rubbery knees. His legs were folded beneath him as he stared at the sky and took a last, ragged breath, his eyes wide.

The death rattle was unmistakable.

Bolan checked the body carefully. There was little chance a man could fake that sound; the Executioner had heard it often enough for real. Satisfied that the man wouldn’t be going anywhere ever again, Bolan searched the grass for his Beretta and surveyed his surroundings.

Silence.

The empty field bordered several properties, a couple of them residential. The nearest buildings were quite some distance away. No one had heard the gunfire, or no one thought to check it. Either way, Bolan was alone with the dead man.

He’d hoped to question the Asian, but as viciously as he’d fought, it was unlikely he’d have been very talkative. Bolan knew the type. This man was a fighter. He’d have gone down struggling.

Bolan holstered the Desert Eagle and retrieved the Beretta. He ejected its magazine, catching it in his free hand, then racked the slide and caught the ejected round in his cupped hand. He inspected the barrel of the machine pistol, peering through the open slide up the spout, making sure there was no mud or other foreign matter obstructing the weapon. Then he loaded the loose round back in the 20-round magazine.

“Agent Cooper!” Bolan turned at the sound of his cover name.

“Are you all right?” Officer Copeland asked, breathing hard as he ran to catch up.

“Fine,” Bolan said. He gestured to the dead man. “I can’t say the same for him.”

“You got him,” Copeland said. Bolan made no response as none was required.

Bolan checked the body. The man’s gun, a Glock 19, was on the ground nearby. Copeland retrieved the weapon, checked it, then unloaded it. Bolan nodded his approval. The dead man had nothing on him except a spare magazine for the Glock, a compact pair of binoculars and a short-range two-way radio, the sort of device hunters and other sportsmen used to coordinate groups of people in the field.

“Did you find one of these?” Bolan held up the bright yellow, rubberized radio. “In the van, or on any of the bodies?”

“Yes, actually,” Copeland confirmed. “It was in the van, in the back with a bunch of junk.”

“Junk?”

“An old dog blanket, a few cardboard boxes full of mostly trash.” Copeland shrugged. “The sort of thing that collects in the back of a van. It was rolling around loose back there. We thought it was just part of the debris, along for the ride after the vehicle was stolen.”

“Not an unreasonable conclusion,” Bolan said, nodding. “But this—” he wagged the radio at Copeland “—changes everything.”

“Who was he?”

“My guess,” Bolan said, “is that this man was a spotter. He was watching the service and called in the gunners in the van for maximum effect.”

“Copeland,” a distorted voice said from Copeland’s belt. “Copeland, come in.” The officer unclipped the walkie-talkie from his duty belt.

“Copeland here,” he said.

“We’ve found something. That federal hotshot will want to see it.”

“That federal hotshot is right here.” Copeland grinned at the Executioner. “What have you got?”

“We found a video camera on one of the gravestones,” the voice came back. “It was still running.”

“Set to record what?” Copeland asked.

“It was pointing at the grave site.”

Copeland looked at Bolan.

“Publicity,” Bolan said. “Had this gone off as planned, they would have killed everybody down there, collected their video and left. Chances are the camera was left by this one.” He jerked his chin toward the dead Asian. “He must have decided getting clear was more important than working his way back around to retrieve the camera.”

“So if the shooting had worked—”

“If it had worked,” Bolan said grimly, “the video of those people dying would have been all over the Internet by the weekend. Count on it.”

“Bastards,” Copeland muttered.

“And then some,” Bolan agreed.

The soldier crouched over the dead Asian, once more taking out his secure satellite phone and taking a digital picture. He paused to transmit it to the Farm. No instructions were needed. Aaron Kurtzman and his team of cyber wizards would know that any corpse shot Bolan sent was a request for identification and intel. He did, however, take a moment to text message Kurtzman with the phone number he’d gotten from Mitch Schrader. It was unlikely the number would prove to be useful, but one never knew. So far Bolan’s enemies had been a curious mixture of sloppy and professional. Someone, somewhere, might have been careless and used a number that was traceable in some way.

Bolan and Copeland made the long walk back to the cemetery. The soldier’s own vehicle, a rental SUV, was parked on the opposite end of the access road leading out the front of the property. He would need to collect his gear and get back to the airport, where Grimaldi and the jet would be ready to go. While the Farm checked on the intelligence Bolan had gathered so far, the Executioner would travel to the nearest Trofimov facility from his target list. There was no telling what he’d find, but it was his experience that if he made enough forays into enemy territory, sooner or later he’d find something or someone would take a shot at him. That would be the only break he’d need.

Once the Executioner was certain how far deep the rot went, he was going to slash and burn it out of the nation’s heartland.

The Patriotism Riders remained on the scene, though the police were getting ready to pack up. The police changed their minds about that quickly when Copeland informed them that there was yet another body to account for. As they scrambled, a few of them shooting suspicious looks Bolan’s way, the soldier went to the group of Riders to see what held their attention so firmly.

“I don’t believe it,” Mitch Schrader was saying. This was met by a chorus of agreement from the others, who sounded angry. Bolan looked over the shoulder of the nearest Rider, who noticed him and moved out of the way. Sitting on one of the motorcycles, another of the Riders had a small portable television, apparently something he carried in his saddlebags. The little device showed a newscast with the TBT logo in the corner. Trofimov’s cable news network, Bolan thought.

“You’re not going to like this,” the man on the motorcycle said, looking up at Bolan. “You were military, right? You got the look.”

Bolan had nothing to say to that. He focused on the little television.

“We were getting ready to roll out,” Schrader explained, “when Norm thought to check the news, see if anybody’d gotten wind of all this.” He gestured around him. “I figured, no way, there aren’t any news cameras here, you know?”

“The locals are probably running interference,” Bolan said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a marked car parked at the entrance to this property, keeping the reporters out.”

“Figured as much,” Schrader said. “Anyway, Norm turns on the TV, and this is what we got.” He pointed to the television.

“…promising a full investigation at the highest levels of government and the military command in Afghanistan,” the young female news anchor was saying. “We at TBT are proud to bring you the following commentary from our president and CEO, Yuri Trofimov.”

The scene cut to the interior of a sumptuously appointed office. Behind a gleaming desk, Yuri Trofimov—text near the bottom of the screen identified him as such—looked out at the screen, his features grim. When he spoke, he had a slight accent, but this coupled with his expensive suit and his aristocratic manner gave him the aura of a foreign diplomat. He exuded confidence, competence and, above all, a barely suppressed righteous indignation. Bolan took one look at the man and knew he was dealing with a master manipulator. It oozed from every pore, from the man’s slicked, perfectly coiffed hair to the rings that glittered on his fingers as he clasped his hands on the desktop.

“We at TBT are deeply saddened to bring you this news,” Trofimov said. “But as always, we are committed to nothing so much as the truth, and to the unflinching reporting of that truth, no matter how graphic or unpleasant. I think I speak for many when I say, as proud as I am of my adopted country, that this is a dark day for the United States, and a day when I am ashamed to call myself an American.”

“Shut the hell up, you scumbag!” Norm interjected. Schrader shushed him, gesturing to the screen.

“It is my hope that we, as a nation, can eventually work through this,” Trofimov said soberly, “but I will not lie to you. It will be difficult. We will have to make some hard admissions about our standing in the world. We will have to come to terms with the barbarism that lurks, even now, within our armed forces. This will not sit well with many of us, but I know that we are up to the challenge. For TBT News, I am Yuri Trofimov, and I thank you for trusting us.”

Norm switched the set off in disgust. He looked ready to throw the little device.

“Can you beat that?” Schrader said. “I just…I just don’t know.”

“What happened?” Bolan asked.

“They’re reporting that a bunch of our guys attacked a village in Afghanistan,” Schrader said. “Totally unprovoked, they claimed. Burned the place to the ground, shot twenty, maybe thirty women and children. And Trofimov’s news says they have videotape of our guys doing it…and laughing about it.”

Bolan’s jaw clenched. Things were getting ugly.

They were going to get uglier.

CHAPTER THREE

“Word’s in from the Farm, Sarge,” Grimaldi said from the cockpit, his voice carrying over the jet’s intercom. “You’ve got another rental truck waiting for you at the field, and the care package you requested will be inside. The GPS unit in the truck should get you to the target location without any trouble.”

“Thanks, Jack,” Bolan said. He had finished cleaning the Remington and was replacing it in its Pelican case.

“I’ll stay with the jet once we land, and I’ll be ready to get us in the air again as soon as you’re done in Cedar Rapids. We’ll make good time to Kansas City after that. Barb confirms that your ‘driver’ should be waiting for you when we hit the tarmac again.”

“Copy that,” Bolan acknowledged.

His “driver” was, in fact, a government agent. As he always did, he had his reservations about the arrangement, but Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, Barbara Price, had done her homework. When she had contacted Bolan on his secure satellite phone minutes after the soldier boarded the new jet, she had wasted no time in breaking the news to him.

“The FBI,” she said, “wants in.”

“I’m listening,” Bolan had said simply.

“Kwok Jin,” the Farm’s honey-blond mission controller had stated. “That’s the identification that came back on your dead man, the Asian you said gave you such a hard time. I’m transmitting to you the files on the other shooters, too, but except for Kwok they’re amateur talent. Rabble-rousers with ties to known political agitator groups. Two were former members of PAAC and supposedly expelled, presumably because they were more radical than the group could tolerate. That alone says something. A couple have rap sheets, but nothing too serious. Some of the records go back quite a ways, and in one case it was a sealed juvenile case.”

“So in other words, they’re nobody. But someone put guns in their hands and sent them to kill innocent people. And somebody coordinated them and planned the operation for them.”