Dual Action

They hadn’t cornered Bolan yet

But it could happen if he didn’t stay ahead of them. Step one was blacking out the light, before it marked his place and someone on the sidelines made a lucky shot.

He saw the glaring beam wash over his position, even though it couldn’t find him in the shadow of the small communications hut. It wouldn’t take the sentries long to close around him, pin him down. Numbers could defeat him then.

He wasn’t Superman, wasn’t invincible. A storm of fire would drop him where he stood.

Unless he found a way out of the trap.

MACK BOLAN®

The Executioner

#255 War Bird

#256 Point of Impact

#257 Precision Play

#258 Target Lock

#259 Nightfire

#260 Dayhunt

#261 Dawnkill

#262 Trigger Point

#263 Skysniper

#264 Iron Fist

#265 Freedom Force

#266 Ultimate Price

#267 Invisible Invader

#268 Shattered Trust

#269 Shifting Shadows

#270 Judgment Day

#271 Cyberhunt

#272 Stealth Striker

#273 UForce

#274 Rogue Target

#275 Crossed Borders

#276 Leviathan

#277 Dirty Mission

#278 Triple Reverse

#279 Fire Wind

#280 Fear Rally

#281 Blood Stone

#282 Jungle Conflict

#283 Ring of Retaliation

#284 Devil’s Army

#285 Final Strike

#286 Armageddon Exit

#287 Rogue Warrior

#288 Arctic Blast

#289 Vendetta Force

#290 Pursued

#291 Blood Trade

#292 Savage Game

#293 Death Merchants

#294 Scorpion Rising

#295 Hostile Alliance

#296 Nuclear Game

#297 Deadly Pursuit

#298 Final Play

#299 Dangerous Encounter

#300 Warrior’s Requiem

#301 Blast Radius

#302 Shadow Search

#303 Sea of Terror

#304 Soviet Specter

#305 Point Position

#306 Mercy Mission

#307 Hard Pursuit

#308 Into the Fire

#309 Flames of Fury

#310 Killing Heat

#311 Night of the Knives

#312 Death Gamble

#313 Lockdown

#314 Lethal Payload

#315 Agent of Peril

#316 Poison Justice

#317 Hour of Judgment

#318 Code of Resistance

#319 Entry Point

#320 Exit Code

#321 Suicide Highway

#322 Time Bomb

#323 Soft Target

#324 Terminal Zone

#325 Edge of Hell

#326 Blood Tide

#327 Serpent’s Lair

#328 Triangle of Terror

#329 Hostile Crossing

#330 Dual Action

The Executioner®

Dual Action

Don Pendleton

The fires of hate, compressed within the heart, Burn fiercer and will break at last in flame.

—Pierre Corneille 1606-1684

Le Cid

I’m fighting fire with fire this time. The risk is that the end result may be scorched earth.

—Mack Bolan

To Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Epilogue

Prologue

“Jeez, you get a load of that one?” Eddie Sawyer asked.

“There’s nothin’ wrong with my eyes,” Joe DeLuca answered from the shotgun seat beside him. “Twenty-ten, last time I read the chart.”

“So, what’s the score, Hawk-eye?”

“I’d give her six.”

“I bet you would,” Sawyer quipped, “if you had the six to spare.”

He tried to get another quick glimpse of the blond hitchhiker in his right-hand mirror, but the armored truck was rolling at a steady 60 mph, and her form had dwindled to the size of a toy soldier in the glass.

“I’m sayin’ I’ve seen better,” DeLuca said.

“Not today, you haven’t.”

“Well—”

“Let’s ask the mole.” Sawyer reached back and keyed the intercom that linked the driver’s section of the truck with the cargo vault behind. “Hey, Tommy boy!” he called. “You see that sweet young thing?”

Tom Nelson’s scratchy voice came back at Sawyer through the speaker. “Screw the botha youse.”

It was a running joke among the men of Truck 13, Ohio Armored Transport. Nelson’s line of vision from the vault was strictly limited, and it was well-known that he spent his travel time immersed in Popular Mechanics, trying to “improve” himself. He never saw the sweet young things at roadside, standing with their thumbs out, and a good deal more besides. They always asked him, though, and his reply was perfectly predictable within a narrow range.

Screw you.

Piss off.

Blow me.

The Nelson repertoire.

It never failed—and always got a laugh out of DeLuca.

“Never mind there, Tommy. Sorry I disturbed you,” Sawyer offered in meek apology before switching off the intercom.

During the spring and summer months, girl watching was a principal diversion for the men of Truck 13. Of course, they lost the female scenery in autumn, and they saw no one at all on foot during their long runs in the winter. It got boring in a hurry, then, with nothing to watch out for but the black ice on the highway, waiting for a chance to put them in a ditch.

Their long run, once a week, was back and forth from Dayton to Columbus, with a stop in Springfield on the eastbound leg. It wasn’t all that far, really—no more than fifty miles—but it seemed longer with the load they had to escort over open country.

Wednesday mornings, as regular as clockwork, they were out on Highway 70 with ten to fifteen million dollars riding in the back.

On Wednesdays, Sawyer had an extra cup of coffee in the barn before they hit the road. It kept him sharp, ready for anything—although, in truth, nothing had ever happened on a Wednesday run, or any other time.

He had been lucky driving Truck 13. DeLuca was a decent partner, if somewhat opinionated. Sawyer had seniority with four years longer on the job, and both of them had Nelson ranked. He was the baby of the family, all six feet seven inches of him, with a pair of hands that made the M-16 they kept in back look like a toy.

Not that they’d ever had to use the rifle, or the shotgun mounted on the dashboard, or the pistols on their hips. Sawyer had never fired a shot himself, except in practice, and he hoped he never would.

Still, you could never tell.

“You hear about that orange alert on the news this morning?” he asked DeLuca.

“Sports arenas, what they said on Channel 7. Maybe sports arenas, maybe on the coast. Of course, they couldn’t say which coast. ‘No further details. Sorry. As you were.’”

“I hear you.”

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Ohio Armored’s management had tried to keep up with the terrorist alerts from Washington, but who could follow all of that? It had been years of running through the color code with “credible” alerts from “trusted” sources, and they never came to anything. Lately, Sawyer suspected the alarms were issued automatically, either to justify the Homeland Security payroll or to make the Feds seem like they were achieving something with their sound and fury.

Mostly, Sawyer thought it was a waste of time and energy, but if he dropped his guard and something happened for a change, it would be his ass in a sling. He was the senior man on Truck 13, and thus responsible for anything that went awry.

He glanced at the odometer and told DeLuca, “We just hit the point of no return.”

It was another ritual. DeLuca grunted, as he always did, acknowledging that they would have to top off the gas tank before they started back to Dayton from the capital. The armored truck burned fuel like there was no tomorrow, no price gouging at the pumps, no crisis in the Middle East. Come rain or shine, Truck 13 guzzled gas, and Sawyer didn’t want to be caught short when they were on the open road.

Not that a chase was anything to fret about. If anything went down, they had a cell phone and a two-way radio with which to summon reinforcements. State police could reach them anywhere along the route within ten minutes, give or take.

Ten minutes wasn’t bad.

“We got some company,” DeLuca said.

The road ahead was empty, but a square gray van was gaining on them from behind, growing in Sawyer’s left-hand mirror. “Let ’em pass, if they’re in such a—What the hell? You see that, Joe?”

“See what?” DeLuca asked.

The mirror needed cleaning, which prevented him from seeing details, but it seemed to Sawyer that a portion of the van’s windshield had opened. Was that even possible with modern vehicles? Some of the old jeeps used to have windshields that—

“Jesus!”

A jet of flame shot from the dark hole in the van’s windshield, and Sawyer heard the ringing impact as a high-powered projectile slammed into the rear of his truck. Before his tongue could wrap around the first of the emergency commands they had rehearsed a hundred times, Tom Nelson started screaming in the cargo vault.

DeLuca swiveled in his seat, shouting, “Tommy! What’s going on, man?” When the only answer was another high-pitched scream, DeLuca slammed his palm against the speaker. “Listen, dammit! Will you—”

“Joe!” Sawyer shouted. “Wait! He isn’t on the intercom.”

DeLuca blinked at that, then opened the sliding hatch that screened their only interior view of the vault. He stared at the square of inch-thick glass and then recoiled, gagging.

Sawyer was losing it. So many years of training, practice runs, and still the real thing took him by surprise. His eyes were torn between the road ahead, the gray van in the mirror, and his partner’s stricken face. He clutched the steering wheel in hands that ached, their knuckles blanched bone-white.

“What is it, Joe?”

“He’s burning,” DeLuca moaned. “God Almighty, Tommy’s burning up!”

Sawyer could smell it, the scorched-flesh smell he’d never quite forgotten from the summer twelve years earlier, when he had driven past a five-car pileup on the interstate, southeast of Cleveland. Bodies cooking, doused in gasoline.

This smell was different, though.

No gasoline, for one thing—and those corpses hadn’t screamed.

“Pull over, Eddie! Jesus!”

“Are you kiddin’ me? We’re under fire!” he told DeLuca.

“Shit!” DeLuca keyed the intercom and leaned into the speaker, kissing-close, to shout, “Use the extinguisher, Tommy! It’s right behind you!”

There were thrashing sounds followed by more screams.

“Get on the radio!” Sawyer snapped. “Get some help out here, right now!”

“The radio. I hear ya.”

As DeLuca swung toward the dashboard, reaching out for the microphone, Truck 13 took another hit and began to fishtail. Sawyer fought the swerve, turning a deaf ear to the screams of agony behind him, but he couldn’t keep it on the road. Another second passed and he felt the front tires spitting gravel, losing traction. The armored truck rolled over on the driver’s side.

1

Clay County, Arkansas

Mack Bolan crouched in darkness, studying the “holy city” from a hundred yards outside its southeastern perimeter. He’d never seen a piece of Paradise on Earth before, but on the rare occasions when he pictured it, his vision had excluded razor wire and guards in camouflage fatigues, with military rifles slung across their shoulders.

Then again, Camp Yahweh wasn’t what most mainstream pastors would’ve called a theological retreat. Its population—269 at last report—was committed to a militant version of Christian Identity, the “seedline” doctrine that proclaimed Nordic folk the true offspring of Adam, while nonwhite “mud people” sprang from Eve’s adulterous affair with Lucifer in reptile form.

Camp Yahweh was a monument to racial hatred, but that didn’t make it anything unique in the United States, or in the world at large. There were at least a hundred similar communities that Bolan was aware of, from Alaska to the bayou country of Louisiana, high in the Sierra Madre or—like this one—tucked away in the Ozarks.

Venomous hatred didn’t make Camp Yahweh special.

The Executioner was in search of something else.

The eight-foot cyclone fence with razor wire on top was not electrified. He’d tested it on his first visit to the compound, after snapping photos of the layout to prepare himself for penetration. Bolan guessed they’d found the cost of generator fuel prohibitive in recessionary times, when even zealots had to pinch a penny and donations on the neo-Nazi fringe fell short.

He had the compound’s blueprint firmly fixed in mind, knew the routines of the soldiers on perimeter patrol and when they were relieved. He didn’t know exactly where the object of his search might be concealed, but there were only three apparent possibilities. One unit plainly served as storage. The sentries drew their weapons from another, prior to going on patrol. His third choice was the base command post, occupied by a bearded, long-haired character who could’ve been auditioning for a part as a nineteenth century mountain man.

Bolan rated the command post unlikely, but he couldn’t say for sure until he had a look inside. If he struck out on targets A and B, he’d have to try his luck with C.

But first, he had to get inside.

Bolan crept forward, boots and elbows digging at the soft soil underneath him. He was dressed in black, his face and hands painted to match. The compound wasn’t brightly lit, and while they had floodlights mounted in twin watchtowers, north and south, they weren’t illuminated at the moment. Bolan guessed that they would save the major candlepower for emergencies or combat drills.

Stay dark, he mentally ordered the sentries in the towers. Don’t look down.

Bolan was ready if they saw him, with a Colt Commando assault rifle slung across his back, a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle semiauto pistol on his hip and a sound-suppressing Beretta 93-R selective-fire side arm nestled in a quick-draw armpit rig. His other battle gear included extra magazines for his three firearms, a stiletto, a garrote, grenades and wire cutters.

He used the cutters first, selecting a well-shadowed portion of fence where wild grass had grown taller than usual, nearly knee high. He settled amidst it, waited for the sector guard to pass, then busied himself with the wire. Nocturnal insects covered ered the sounds that his cutters produced, snipping links on a line two feet high, then six inches across.

Bolan timed his move, slid through the flap, then sealed it loosely behind him with a black twist tie. It wouldn’t pass a close inspection, but the guards he had observed so far were young—for Nazis, anyway—and seemed to have no fear of imminent attack.

Indeed, as Bolan knew, there’d been no challenge to their compound at its present site. The first Camp Yahweh, in Missouri, had been raided by a flying squad of FBI and ATF agents in 1997, but the raiders were embarrassed by their failure to discover fugitives or outlawed weapons. The sect had called a press conference to crow about its “victory,” then pulled up stakes and moved to Arkansas.

There had been other changes, too. The former Seed of Yahweh was under new management these days, renamed the Aryan Resistance Movement. Its leaders were more militant, more outraged by the slow drift of society toward equal rights for all.

And if the information out of Washington was accurate, they had a deadly secret.

Finding it, defusing it, was Bolan’s job.

He lay in shadow, clutching the Beretta, while yet another sentry passed by, heedless of his presence in the weeds. When it was clear, the soldier rose and bolted toward the compound’s armory.

He reached it, tried the door and found it locked. Bolan was kneeling, pick in hand, ready to remedy that problem when a scuffling footstep sounded close behind him and a gruff male voice demanded, “Who the fuck are you?”

SIMON GRUNDY LOVED his life. It was a strange thing for him to imagine, knowing where he’d come from—foster homes and juvey hall, a half-assed motorcycle gang, state prison—but it was God’s honest truth.

Praise Yahweh.

Who’d have guessed that a habitual offender, malcontent and full-time badass would mature into an officer and gentleman, committed to salvation of his race and nation from encroachment by an enemy who made the Russians and the Red Chinese seem penny-ante by comparison?

Grundy supposed it would’ve made his mother proud, if she had crawled out of a bottle long enough to focus on her only son for ten or fifteen seconds in her worthless life. As for his father, well, Grundy would need a name to find that shiftless bastard, and it wasn’t worth the trouble after thirty-seven years.

The Aryan Resistance Movement was his family now, and that made Grundy proud.

He stood before the mirror in his quarters, counting brushstrokes as he groomed his flowing beard. Most of his troops preferred the skinhead look, but Grundy favored a more biblical style. It could’ve looked bizarre, but he believed his hulking build and forceful personality made him imposing, rather than ridiculous.

Grundy was midway through stroke ninety-five, just after midnight, when somebody gave a shout outside. He didn’t recognize the voice, heard no coherent words, but any breach of Camp Yahweh’s decorum was his ultimate responsibility. Grundy set down his brush, considered putting on a shirt, then stepped outside bare-chested.

Let the ladies look, if they were so inclined.

At first glance, from the doorway of his quarters, nothing seemed to be amiss. He checked the towers, then the fence, and found his sentries standing ready, trying to pinpoint the sound. They were having no luck, so far.

The voice had been a man’s, but Grundy couldn’t say if it had sounded angry, startled or afraid. He ruled out joy, since none of Camp Yahweh’s inhabitants would draw attention to themselves with shouts of glee at midnight.

He should count the guards, Grundy decided, make sure none of them had suffered any kind of mishap or—

The fireball nearly blinded him. Its shock wave struck a second later, driving spikes of pain into his eardrums. Grundy rocked back on his heels, with the concussion of the blast, then felt its heat wash over him.

The armory.

He didn’t have to guess. Even if Grundy hadn’t known Camp Yahweh’s layout perfectly, he would’ve recognized the sound of ammo cooking off, the rapid fire of boxed rounds burning. He instinctively recoiled, crouching, and scuttled back inside his quarters.

What in hell was happening?

He plucked an AR-15 from a wall rack mounted near the door and peered outside again. Guards kept their distance from the flaming ruin of the armory, ducking and dodging slugs that whined through darkness from the pyre. Grundy was on the verge of self-congratulation for their discipline—no panic firing yet—when suddenly an automatic weapon stuttered in the night, some thirty yards east of the burning building.

Full-auto? Something was very wrong.

Machine guns were forbidden in Camp Yahweh. Grundy knew each weapon in the armory—whatever might be left of it—and he examined every private piece brought into camp, from knives to long guns. Nothing was allowed that might provoke another raid, be it a switchblade or a silencer. Up front, at least, he played it strictly by the book.

Which meant that any shooter with full-auto capability was an intruder, wreaking havoc with his men.

Grundy was looking for the prowler’s muzzle-flash, tracking his noise, when someone called out in the night, “That isn’t one of us!”

The sentries started to converge, drifting off-station from the fence, but Grundy didn’t want them moving yet. If there was one intruder in the compound, why not more?

He shouted to the guards, identified himself and ordered them to stand their ground. They were conditioned to obey and did as they were told, although reluctantly. Grundy supposed he’d lose them soon, unless—

“Give me the lights!” he bellowed at the tower guards. “Light up the east side, now!”

As if in answer to his order, yet another thunderous explosion rocked the camp. It was the storage shed this time, roof lifting on a jet of fire that made him think of a volcano spewing lava toward the sky. Two of its walls fell outward, burning, while the others stood in stark relief against the darkness that surrounded them.

Storage.

They kept no arms or ammunition in that shed, but there was fuel for vehicles and generators, propane tanks for cooking. All together, burning fiercely now to light the darkest corners of the camp.

The floodlights blazed, sweeping the compound, bright beams crossing, passing on, returning to the site of the explosion. As they swept across the landscape, Grundy saw a black-clad figure ducking for the shadows, painted face averted from the light.

“Intruder!” he called out to anyone within earshot. Pointing, he ran after the stranger, shouting orders all the way. “Fall in, goddammit! Head him off! I want that prick alive!”

THE EXECUTIONER squeezed off a short burst from his autocarbine as the troops converged. One of his targets stumbled, fell and didn’t rise again.

The lights were trouble, tracking him across the compound when he might’ve otherwise eluded hunters in the dark. Ducking behind a hut that sprouted radio antennas from its angled roof, he craned around the corner, found his mark and milked a 5 or 6 round burst from his stuttergun. The nearest of the floodlights imploded and went dark as soldiers scattered from it, ducking out of sight below the tower’s waist-high walls.

Someone—perhaps the mountain man—was shouting orders at the other troops, coordinating the advance. They hadn’t cornered Bolan yet, but it could happen, if he didn’t stay ahead of them. Step one was blacking out the other light before it marked his place and someone on the sidelines made a lucky shot.

He saw the glaring beam wash over his position, even though it couldn’t find him in the shadow of the small communications hut. It wouldn’t take the sentries long to close around him, pin him down, and numbers could defeat him then. He wasn’t Superman, wasn’t invincible. A storm of fire would drop him where he stood, like anybody else, unless he found a way out of the trap.

Lights first.

Taking a chance, he stepped into the open, raised his weapon, sighting down the beam of that all-seeing eye. Before the startled hunters could react, Bolan triggered another burst and blacked out the floodlight, toppling one of its minders from his lofty perch into a screaming swan dive to the earth below.

The sudden darkness covered him, but not for long. On orders from their chief, the camp’s guards were advancing, still maintaining discipline of fire, but it would only take one glimpse of Bolan in the shadows, one stray shot, to spark chaos.

Why wait?