Frontier Fury

2

Shenandoah National Park, Virginia: Two days earlier

Skyline Drive was aptly named. It ran along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains for 105 miles, from Front Royal at the northern terminus to Rockfish Gap at the southern end. Because its full length was within a national park, visitors paid an entry fee of fifteen dollars per car or ten dollars per motorcycle, thus obtaining a seven-day pass.

Mack Bolan could have saved his money by displaying an ID card he’d received from Hal Brognola through a drop box, which identified the bearer—“Michael Belasko,” with a nonexistent address and a photo that could pass for Bolan’s likeness—as an employee of the National Park Service, but he’d figured why bother?

He didn’t need to see the ranger in the ticket booth look worried, wondering if he’d done something wrong, or if something critical was happening inside the park and he had missed the memo.

Anyway, the fifteen bucks made Bolan feel that he was giving something back.

Built between 1931 and 1939, at the nadir of the Great Depression, Skyline Drive was convoluted and tortuous. Scenes of epic beauty dazzled drivers all the way, but caution was required on the winding turns where bicycles and black bears shared the relatively narrow highway. Park police enforced a strict 35 mph speed limit, and Bolan didn’t want to risk a speeding rap.

Rolling through Mary Rock Tunnel, 670 feet of pitch darkness, with his headlights on high beams, Bolan wondered where Brognola planned to send him this time. There had been no warning on the telephone—there never was—and Bolan had been left, as usual, to speculate in vain.

One thing he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt—it wouldn’t be a social call.

Somewhere, somehow, someone had stepped across a line, and Bolan would be sent to reel them back or punch their ticket for one long, last ride.

He could refuse the job, of course. That flexibility was built in from the start. But in reality, he’d only turned thumbs-down on a few assignments in the time he’d worked with Brognola and the assembled team at Stony Man Farm.

The Farm was named for Stony Man Mountain, the fourth highest in the park at 4,010 feet, but it wasn’t actually on the mountain. It did not appear on any map available for public scrutiny, and while it was a working farm—in more ways than one—its crops were not marketed under the Stony Man name.

Trespassing was rigorously—sometimes fatally—discouraged.

Roughly half the time, when Bolan visited the Farm, he flew in and out. Stony Man had its own airstrip and helipads, complete with stinger missiles and hidden batteries of antiaircraft guns to deal with any drop-ins who ignored the radio commands to steer clear of restricted airspace.

It had only happened once, to Bolan’s knowledge, with a careless pilot running short of fuel halfway between Pittsburgh and Winston-Salem. In that case, the guns and rockets hadn’t fired, but several days of house arrest and chemically induced amnesia left the interloper scrambling to explain how he had missed his scheduled wedding.

The groom did not live happily ever after with his bride…but at least he lived.

Some others who had trespassed at the Farm with sinister intent were not so fortunate.

Bolan cleared the tunnel and killed his headlights, braking just beyond the next curve for a line of deer crossing the road. A nine-point buck was last across, pausing to stare at Bolan for a moment through the tinted windshield of his rental car.

Bolan wondered if the deer spent their whole lives inside the park’s 306 square miles, or if they sometimes strayed outside. With hunting season on the way, he wished them luck.

So many predators, so little time.

BOLAN DIDN’T try to spot the guards staked out along his route of travel from the gate to the farmhouse that served as Stony Man’s HQ. He was expected, so went unchallenged by the Farm’s team of “blacksuits.”

At any given time, Stony Man’s security staff included active-duty members of the U.S. military who dressed as farmhands but were armed.

Brognola was waiting on the farmhouse porch with Barbara Price—the Farm’s mission controller—when Bolan got there, slowing into his approach. A stocky farmhand with a military buzz cut waited two steps down, to spirit Bolan’s rental car away and out of sight once he had cleared the driver’s seat.

“Good trip?” Brognola asked, as Bolan climbed the porch steps and shook his hand.

“Normal,” Bolan replied.

It was the standard small-talk introduction to his latest job. He hadn’t flown across country from San Jose to Washington, then driven south from there to Stony Man, to talk about the Shenandoah scenery.

“Okay,” Brognola said. “We may as well get to it, then.”

But first, they had to reach the War Room, situated in the farmhouse basement, theoretically secured against direct hits with conventional munitions. That remained untested, and if all of them were lucky, it would stay that way.

They rode the elevator down and disembarked into a corridor that led them to their destination, through a coded secure access door. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman was waiting for them in the War Room. He was seated in the wheelchair that had kept him mobile since a bullet clipped his spinal cord, during an armed assault on Stony Man.

Bolan shook hands with Kurtzman, then moved around the conference table to take a seat to Brognola’s left, while Barbara took the right-hand side. Kurtzman remained at the keyboard that controlled the War Room’s lights and AV apparatus for events such as the current mission briefing.

“Akram Ben Abd al-Bari.” Brognola managed the pronunciation flawlessly, smiling grimly as he said, “You recognize the name, of course.”

“It rings a bell,” Bolan replied.

Brognola didn’t need to tell those present that al-Bari had been among the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives since 2001, with a four million dollar price tag on his head, dead or alive. Although the names on that dishonor roll were not officially prioritized, only al-Bari’s boss—known in the trade as O.B.L.—rated a higher bounty. Both had managed to evade manhunters during the Afghanistan invasion and remained at large, with open warrants naming some four thousand murder victims from the 9/11 raids and other terrorist events dating from 1993.

Behind Brognola, Kurtzman displayed revolving photos of al-Bari on the large screen. Like the human monster’s reputation, the images were several times larger than life-size. Bolan had seen them all before, including the grainy captures from the latest video that had been aired last month on CNN and BBC, promising hell on Earth for the American Crusaders and their lackeys.

“Also among the missing,” Brognola announced, “Ra’id Ibn Rashad, his number two.”

More photos appeared on the big wall-mounted screen. Rashad’s brown, bearded face was seldom seen on Western television, and while he didn’t rank among the Ten Most Wanted, he was close. One million dollars waited for the bounty hunter who could bring him in alive, or prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was dead.

Delivering his hands would do it.

Or his head.

“Big fish,” Bolan said, “but they’re still not in the net—are they?”

“No, you’re right,” Brognola said. “But now we have a good idea of where to drop our line.”

“That sounds familiar.”

There’d been countless leads on al-Bari, Rashad, and O.B.L. himself, over the years. One thing the tips all had in common was that none of them had panned out. Agents and mercs had died on some of those wild-goose chases. But most had simply ended in frustration, time and money wasted in pursuit of shadows.

“Sure it does,” Brognola said. “Except…”

Another photo came up on the screen. This one revealed al-Bari and Rashad in conversation, over plates of food Bolan couldn’t identify. The angle of the shot made him suspect it had been snapped clandestinely.

“That’s new?” he asked.

“Taken ten days ago,” Brognola said.

“Location?”

“Somewhere in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. We don’t have exact coordinates.”

That stood to reason. If the Pentagon could put their finger on al-Bari and Rashad, they likely would have plastered him with smart bombs and cruise missiles, then apologized to the Islamabad authorities at leisure—if at all.

Bolan could see where this was going.

“Someone has to go in and confirm it,” he said, not asking.

“Right. And take whatever action may be feasible, once confirmation is achieved.”

“Presumably with someone who can speak the language.”

“Absolutely,” Brognola agreed.

“Okay,” Bolan said. “Let me hear the rest of it.”

THE REMAINING DETAILS were quickly delivered. “Someone” had located al-Bari’s hidey-hole in northwest Pakistan, where he shared lodgings with Rashad and other members of al Qaeda. Some of them were only passing through—dodging pursuers, picking up their orders or delivering reports—but there appeared to be a constant staff of four or five top aides in residence, plus bodyguards.

How many guards?

No one could say, with any certainty.

After the briefing, Bolan went up to his usual room. Brognola, or someone acting on his orders, had prepared a CD-ROM containing biographical material on Bolan’s two main targets and his Pakistani contact, plus a summary of known al Qaeda actions since the group was organized in 1988. Born out of battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan, al Qaeda—“The Base,” in Arabic—was a fluid band of Sunni Muslim militants, founded by one Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. A bomb blast killed Azzam and his two sons a year later, in November 1989, outside a mosque in Peshawar. Suspects named in different media reports included the Mossad, the CIA, and O.B.L. himself. Officially, the case remained unsolved.

The rest was history. With O.B.L. in charge, warriors of al Qaeda rolled on to murder thousands, from New York and Washington to London and Madrid, Djerba and Casablanca, Istanbul and Aden, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Jakarta and Bali. The world was their battleground. Their stated goals: destruction of Israel, eradication of all foreign influence from Muslim nations, and establishment of a new Islamic caliphate.

In practice, that meant killing anyone who disagreed with them on any point of doctrine, or who was perceived to aid the group’s enemies. Bolan had faced al Qaeda members in the past and managed to survive, but this would be his first crack at the group’s top-level leadership.

Which brought him to the men themselves.

According to Brognola’s file, Akram Ben Abd al-Bari had been born in Cairo, in September 1951. His father was a pharmacist and teacher, from a long line of physicians and scholars active in radical politics. Al-Bari joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age fourteen, went on to study medicine and served in the Egyptian army as a surgeon, married and had two daughters. By 1980 he was rising through the ranks of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which merged with al Qaeda in 1998. Three years later, when American smart bombs leveled Taliban headquarters at Gardez, Afghanistan, al-Bari’s wife and daughters died in the rubble.

Al-Bari escaped and channeled his grief into rage.

Ra’id Ibn Rashad was another Egyptian, younger than al-Bari. Conflicting CIA reports claimed he was born in April 1960 or November 1963, but neither date was relevant to Bolan. Rashad was a suspect in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, but he’d dodged indictment in that case and fled to Sudan with other members of al-Bari’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, later following his mentor into a merger with al Qaeda. FBI reports named Rashad as a guiding force behind two U.S. embassy bombings in 1988, which claimed 223 lives in Kenya and Tanzania, leaving another 4,085 wounded. Rashad had missed a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, but made the Bureau’s roster of Most Wanted Terrorists when that program was created after 9/11.

Neither target was a combat soldier, though Rashad had done his share of training in assorted desert camps. They weren’t guerrilla fighters in the normal sense, but both had proved themselves die-hard survivors, living on the run for over a decade, while the combined military and intelligence networks of the United States and Great Britain tried to hunt them down.

That told Bolan that they were determined and had a very strong support system. He wondered, now, if either man suspected that their hideout had been blown. Beyond the knowledge that their deaths obsessed some operatives in Washington and London, did al-Bari or Rashad know that specific plans were in the works to kill them?

Bolan had no way of knowing for certain if Brognola’s information was correct, but the team at Stony Man Farm had never let him down before. Yet Bolan knew that every operation was a fluid, living thing.

At least until the final shots were fired.

Al-Bari and Rashad might know they’d been exposed, or they might simply crave a change of scene and slip away before he got to Pakistan. In which case, Bolan might be able to pick up their trail—or he might not.

Some of the burden rested on his native contact, one Hussein Gorshani. Brognola’s dossier said that Gorshani would turn thirty-four the following month. He owned a small repair shop in Islamabad, specializing in electronics, and had roughly quadrupled the country’s average per capita income of $2,900 over the past ten years. He also drew a modest paycheck from the CIA, which was a story in itself.

Pakistan is a self-proclaimed Islamic republic, and while about ninety-seven percent of its people subscribed to the faith, some Muslims were more equal than others. Hussein Gorshani belonged to the Shia minority, outnumbered four-or five-to-one by hostile Sunnis. Still, Gorshani’s dossier claimed that religious persecution had not sparked his decision to work for Langley. Rather, that had come about by slow degrees, as Gorshani observed his nation’s leaders drifting ever closer to covert support for O.B.L. and al Qaeda.

Gorshani had served four years in Pakistan’s army, rising to the rank of havildar, or sergeant. As a native of the North-West Frontier Province, he had served most of his time there, on border patrols with the paramilitary Frontier Corps. He was also trilingual, rated as fluent in Pashto, Urdu and English.

An all-around Renaissance man.

There were, however, two things that Brognola’s dossier could not reveal about Hussein Gorshani. First, despite his military training, there was nothing to suggest he’d ever fired a shot in anger at another human being. When the crunch came—and it would—could Bolan trust Gorshani to pull the trigger on one of his own countrymen?

The second question was more basic, but equally vital.

Could Bolan trust Gorshani at all?

Turncoats, double and triple agents were a dime a dozen in the murky realm of cloak-and-dagger operations. Every nation had its clique of spies, and the U.S. had more than most. Each and every spy network on Earth used bribery and blackmail to recruit from opposition groups, as well as from civilian populations.

Who could absolutely guarantee that Bolan’s contact wasn’t secretly working for Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, its Federal Investigation Agency, or some military outfit under the umbrella of Islamabad’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence?

Answer: no one.

It was a risk that Bolan ran each time he set foot onto foreign soil, relying on a local contact. He had beat the odds so far, but that just meant that he was overdue to roll snake eyes.

Bolan’s less-than-comforting thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a cautious rapping on his door.

“OH, GOOD. You’re decent,” Barbara Price observed, as Bolan stood aside to let her in.

“Depends on who you ask,” he said.

“I guess it would.” She nodded toward the open laptop with Gorshani’s mug shot on the monitor’s screen. “We’re pretty sure he’s clean,” she said, as if reading his mind.

“And he’s the only game in town,” Bolan replied.

“That, too.”

“He’s not the one who blew the whistle on al-Bari and Rashad, though.”

“No,” she said, “he’s not. Langley won’t part with that name. They’ve supposedly got someone deep on the inside.”

“So, he could do the job himself,” Bolan suggested.

“That was Hal’s first thought, but Langley doesn’t want to lose him. After all, someone’s bound to replace al-Bari and Rashad after you take them out. As long as Mr. X is still in place, the Company can track al Qaeda’s leadership.”

“The greater good,” Bolan said.

“Right. But I’d still be happier if Langley wasn’t in the mix at all.”

Some people blamed the CIA for al Qaeda’s existence, noting that the Agency had funneled arms to O.B.L. and others in Afghanistan to help them slaughter Russians, back when O.B.L. was still a “patriot” and “friend” of the United States. In fact, some claimed al Qaeda didn’t exist at all, but had been fabricated by the CIA to keep those covert dollars pouring in.

“We take what we can get,” Bolan replied.

“Speaking of that,” she said, and reached for Bolan’s hand. But before going any further, Price paused and said, “Listen, this is serious. About Gorshani.”

“I know.”

“We’ve checked him out as far as possible, same as we always do—but this is Pakistan.”

“Meaning they’ve elevated subterfuge to art-form status?” Bolan said.

“Meaning it’s a bloody can of worms. The North-West Frontier Province makes Medellín look like Utopia. They stopped publishing casualty figures in 2004, when the tally became too embarrassing. And it’s not just the government versus rebels. Every village has at least one illegal arms dealer. In the cities, you can’t walk a block without tripping over Kalashnikovs and RPGs. They’ve logged more than twelve thousand arrests for gun-related crimes over the past three years, and that’s barely scratching the surface.”

“Sounds like Dodge City,” Bolan said.

“Dodge City on angel dust,” she replied, “with unlimited ammo and a side order of religious fanaticism. On top of which, if you can make it past the bandits and militias, we suspect the government is covering your targets.”