Dual Action
Bolan fired two quick rounds toward the west, then pivoted, already moving, and triggered two more to the east. He was running south toward the command post when someone to the east returned his fire, immediately echoed by a weapon to the west.
Good hunting, Bolan thought, and left them to it. Gunfire popped and crackled through the compound, drowning out the gruff voice of the officer who tried to shout it down. The leader would have a rough time with control, Bolan calculated, but the danger hadn’t passed, by any means. A stray shot could be just as deadly as a sniper’s well-aimed bullet, and the sudden crash in discipline meant sentries would be trigger-happy all around the compound.
Bolan concentrated on his first task, pushing on through firelight and shadows toward the command post. If the object he sought wasn’t there, he was stumped—and that boded ill for his mission.
Where was it?
What was it?
Bolan had hoped he’d recognize the object when he saw it, but so far the camp had yielded nothing even close to what he sought. If he struck out at the CP, he’d have to seek another source of inside information that could put him on the track.
Inside.
Someone from Camp Yahweh might do the trick, but that would mean escaping with a hostage under fire. It would be risky, at the very least, perhaps impossible. A last resort, in any case.
Bolan stayed focused on his first priority. The camp CP was fifty yards in front of him, with two men posted on the porch. He saw no trace of the leader, guessing that the bearded officer would be among his troops.
So much the better.
Closing from their right-hand side, the Executioner drew the 93-R from its armpit rig and triggered two quick shots. The nearer guard collapsed as if he were a puppet and someone had snipped his strings. The other spun to face a danger he couldn’t identify, and Bolan dropped him with a quiet Parabellum round between the eyes.
He left them there, shrouded in shadows, and passed through an unlocked door into the boss man’s private quarters. They were neat enough, but still possessed a kind of musky odor that he couldn’t place.
Ignore it, he thought.
Bolan swiftly checked any hiding places he could think of in the Spartan quarters: closets, footlocker, beneath the sturdy cot. He checked desk drawers, in hope of finding sketches, plans, perhaps a note that would direct him to a secret cache.
Nothing.
Bolan retraced his steps through empty rooms, back to the porch. The two dead guards were lying where he’d left them, but they weren’t alone.
Five gunmen ringed the porch, all watching Bolan over weapons pointed at his chest.
“DROP THE WEAPON! Raise your hands! Don’t move!”
The shouted orders echoed from behind Simon Grundy, causing him to turn and squint through firelight toward his quarters. Several of his men were clustered there, pointing their weapons at a tall man on the porch.
A tall man dressed in black, faces and hands painted with combat cosmetics to match.
“Hold up, there!” Grundy shouted at them. “Don’t—”
Before he could complete the thought, a burst of automatic fire blazed from the stranger’s weapon, toppling one of Grundy’s troopers from the porch. At the same instant, as if propelled by his weapon’s recoil, the trespasser sprang backward, slammed the door with his free hand and disappeared.
The others started pouring fire into the bungalow, as fast as they could pull the triggers on their AR-15 carbines. Bullets drilled the wall, blew out the windows, rattled the vibrating door in its frame. Grundy imagined his belongings in there, shot to hell, but he was focused on the stranger.
“Cease-fire, dammit!” Rushing among them, he grabbed first one rifleman and then another, wrestling them off target, shouting in their faces to be heard above the small-arms racket. “Hold your fire! I want that bastard breathing!”
“Too late, Major,” one of them replied. The youngster grinned and giggled.
“Oh, you think so?” Grundy shoved him toward the bullet-scarred front door. “So, get in there and check it out.”
The skinhead hesitated, then put on his war face, nodded once and rushed the door. He didn’t think to try the knob, but kicked it open, Grundy waving others in behind him as he rushed the living room.
There was no body in the living room, no blood to indicate that any of his men had scored a hit with their wild firing through the wall and windows. They fanned out, checking the corners, even though they offered no concealment for a man-sized target.
Stalling.
Grundy led them to the bedroom door, which he knew he had left ajar. The trespasser had closed it, and two bullet holes marked the painted surface, as if peepholes had been carelessly installed, off center and at different levels.
“Nowhere else for him to go,” one of the soldiers said. They moved in closer, ringed the door with scowls and steel.
Grundy was trembling, but he couldn’t order one of them to go ahead of him this time. What would they think, if he sent someone else to check his sleeping quarters, maybe check under the bed for bogeymen.
Clutching his piece one-handed, Grundy turned the knob and shoved the door back with sufficient force to make it strike the wall, crouching as it swung open. Reinforcements crowded close behind him, leaning in to aim above his head and shoulders. If they fired, he would be deafened, but he didn’t mind the company just then.
The empty room made nonsense of their melodrama. Grundy rushed the closet, threw it open to reveal his extra uniforms, but no intruder hiding there. As he turned back to face the room, two of his men were peering underneath the cot from different sides and making faces at each other.
“Nothing,” one of them declared.
“The window’s unlocked, Major.”
Grundy saw it closed, the way he’d left it, but the corporal was right. The latch was open now. He always kept it locked from force of habit. Someone else had opened it, used it as an escape hatch. Leaning closer, he saw scuff marks on the wall, probably from boots.
“Outside!” he shouted. “Make a sweep! We have to find out where he went and stop him. If he gets away…”
He meant to say, We’ll never know who sent him, but his soldiers were already rushing out, not waiting for the why and wherefore of it. Orders were enough for them, these fine young savages. They lived for action, didn’t give a damn why they were fighting, as long as someone tagged the mission with a rousing call for race and honor.
They were children, but they weren’t afraid of dirty work.
He followed them outside, eyes sweeping Camp Yahweh for any sign of the intruder or companions who had thus far managed to avoid detection. Were there others, lurking in the shadows? Were they Feds or mercenaries? Members of some rival nationalist movement or some leftist private army?
There was only one way to find out.
He had to capture one alive and make him squeal.
“Stay sharp!” he ordered his assembled soldiers. “Cover every corner of the camp. We need—”
Across the compound, at the motor pool, an engine growled and headlights blazed. Before Grundy could snap out a fresh command, one of their jeeps was off and racing toward the gate.
THE JEEP was military surplus, which required no key. Bolan needed a ram to breach the gate, and speed to give him an advantage on Camp Yahweh’s infantry. A mile would do it, if he got that far. He could discard the stolen wheels, then, and proceed on foot to reach his own.
But first, he had to make it out of camp alive.
About the time that his pursuers finished ransacking the CP hut, he slid into the driver’s seat, reviewed the world’s simplest controls and gunned the jeep to life. There was no point in running dark, since they could see him by the light of leaping flames in any case, so Bolan used the high beams as offensive weapons, blinding any troops who stood directly in his path.
There weren’t that many of them. Most had rushed to join their CO at his quarters, or else fanned out to police the camp’s perimeter. Of the dependents in Camp Yahweh, the wives and children of the “Master Race” commandos, Bolan had seen nothing yet and hoped to keep it that way. They were not civilians in the strictest sense, having withdrawn from civilized society to live a racist pipe dream fraught with danger, but he didn’t want them in his line of fire, if it could be avoided.
Wherever they were hiding, none of them emerged as Bolan made his short run toward the gate. He gunned the jeep to its top speed, aimed at the double gates a hundred yards downrange. Two guards were stationed there, and by the time he’d covered half the distance to his target, others were arriving, racing to assist their comrades.
Others still were firing from behind him, peppering the jeep with semiauto fire that struck like ringing hammer blows. A hollow thunk told Bolan that one round had drilled the gas can mounted on the tailgate, but he knew he had fuel enough to get where he was going, and the gunmen would need tracer rounds to set the sloshing gasoline on fire.
Racing across the open camp, he swerved the jeep from side to side, ducking as low as possible while still maintaining visibility across the dashboard. By the time he’d covered fifty yards, the windshield was a pile of pebbled safety glass in Bolan’s lap and strewed around his feet. Sparks flew from glancing bullet strikes, while solid hits drilled through the fenders, flaking paint in perfect circles.
Thirty yards.
The soldiers on the gate were firing at him now, so Bolan aimed his autocarbine through the empty windshield frame and held down the trigger, sweeping its muzzle back and forth in short arcs, left and right. The Colt Commando’s 30-round magazine emptied in less than three seconds, but it lasted long enough to sweep the resistance from the gate and scatter bodies in Bolan’s path. One thumped beneath the tires before the Jeep hit the chain-link gates and powered through.
Behind him, gunfire stuttered on for several seconds, but Bolan quickly killed the headlights and robbed them of their target. It was open country for another hundred yards or so, before he hit tall grass approaching spotty woods. Beyond that point, he had to risk the low beams as he sought a winding path around and through the trees.
Pursuit was possible, since Bolan hadn’t taken time to disable the other vehicles in camp, but it would take some time to organize, and he would see the headlights coming. By the time they found the abandoned jeep, Bolan would’ve found his way on foot back to the rental car he’d stashed a mile due north of Camp Yahweh.
If any of them followed Bolan that far, it would be their last mistake.
He found a place to park, then changed his mind and pushed the vehicle into a ravine with water rippling somewhere near the bottom. There was no point making its retrieval easy on the enemy, he thought. At that point, leaving empty-handed, any inconvenience he could cause was a victory of sorts.
And Bolan wasn’t finished with the Aryan Resistance Movement yet.
CampYahweh hadn’t yielded what he hoped to find, but there were other places he could look, people he could interrogate.
He wasn’t giving up.
The cost of failure was too high, in terms of human lives and suffering.
When Bolan’s job was done, the enemy would know it.
Those, that was, who’d managed to survive.
2
Two days earlier
A coded-access steel door barred them from the War Room at Stony Man Farm. Barbara Price keyed in her access code, then crossed the threshold as the heavy door slid open. Mack Bolan followed, heard the door shut behind him as he scanned the conference table for familiar faces.
Hal Brognola sat at the head of the table, flanked by Aaron Kurtzman in a wheelchair on his left, two empty chairs immediately on his right for Price and Bolan. Next to Kurtzman, facing one of the empties, sat Huntington Wethers, an African/American cybernetics specialist who’d been lured to the Farm team from a full professorship at Berkeley.
Bolan nodded all around in lieu of handshakes, took his seat and answered the usual small talk about his flight. Even with the chitchat still in progress, he could see Brognola stewing, anxious to be on about the business that had brought them all together.
“We’ve been saddled with a problem,” Brognola began, as if the team had ever been assembled to receive good news.
“I’m listening,” Bolan replied.
“Maybe you heard about the tank incident in Baghdad a few months ago?”
Bolan frowned. “Specifics?”
“An Abrams tank was on routine patrol when it was hit by something that burned through the side skirts and armor on one side, grazed the gunner’s flack jacket and sliced through the back of his seat, then drilled a pencil-sized hole almost two inches deep into the four-inch armor on the turret’s other side. No projectile was recovered. Officially, the incident remains unexplained.”
“And unofficially?” Bolan asked.
“The Pentagon’s as worried as hell. They don’t know what they’re dealing with, who’s got it, how many are out there—in short, they don’t know a damned thing.”
“A secret weapon,” Bolan said. “Each war produces innovations and surprises. Put the SEALs or Special Forces on it. Shake things up. They’ll find a guy who knows a guy and track it down.”
“No luck with that so far,” Kurtzman said. “Top priority or otherwise, they’re pumping dry holes over there.”
“One logical alternative,” Bolan replied, “is a defective weapon of some kind. Guerrillas mix and match. Sometimes they fabricate to meet their needs. New weapons frequently have unpredictable results when they’re first used in combat. Maybe your hotshot was a mistake, and they’ve worked out the bugs.”
“We don’t think so,” Brognola said.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s surfaced in the States.”
Bolan leaned forward in his chair. “Say what?”
“On Wednesday morning, in Ohio,” the big Fed confirmed. “There’s no mistake.”
“Go on.”
“Somebody hit an armored truck en route from Dayton to Columbus, carrying 65 million dollars. Somebody fired twice through the back doors with the supergun—whatever. Cooked the guard back there and spooked the driver, so he rolled it. After that, they used conventional C-4 to pop the doors, iced the witnesses, then made off with the cash.”
“That’s all we have?” Bolan asked.
“Not quite,” Brognola said. “The guards up front got off a radio alarm about the hit. An old gray van, they said, and ‘something weird,’ which pretty much describes the supergun. A couple of state troopers saw the van and started a pursuit.”
“I’m guessing that they didn’t catch it,” Bolan said.
“You’re right. The fugitives lit up a gasoline truck, killed the driver, forced the troopers off the highway, set the fields on fire.”
“The troopers?” Bolan asked.
“One of them’s in a Cincinnati burn ward as we speak. The other didn’t make it.”
“What about the van?”
“Stolen out of St. Louis two weeks earlier,” Brognola said. “Painted and overhauled. They torched it outside Louisville, Kentucky. Wiped out anything forensically significant, but they left stolen license plates from Little Rock, and we could still see how they modified the van inside.”
“Is that significant?” Bolan asked.
“Absolutely,” Wethers interjected. “First, they built a swivel unit where the backseat used to be, then ditched the shotgun seat and fixed the windshield so the right-hand side would lower on a hinge.”
“To fire the supergun,” Bolan said.
“In our estimation, yes. With the arrangement we discovered, they could aim it fore or aft. They made it mobile, and it served them well.”
“Too bad we don’t know who they are,” Bolan remarked.
“I just might have a lead on that,” Brognola said. “It isn’t definite, by any means, but—”
“Give me what you have,” the Executioner replied.
“How much do you know about Christian Identity?” Brognola asked.
“A neo-Nazi version of King James. The Nordic tribes of Israel. Jews are demons, nonwhites are mud people, the usual racist garbage.”
“That’s it, in a nutshell,” Brognola said, “with the emphasis on nuts. It used to be the creed of choice with white supremacists until the 1990s, when a lot of them turned Odinist to claim their Viking roots. The hard core hanging with Identity is more extreme than ever now, maybe to balance what they lost in numbers.”
“If you want to call that balanced,” Wethers said.
“In any case,” Brognola said, forging ahead, “we’ve got a clique of suspects who line up with the events in question geographically. Are you familiar with an outfit called the Aryan Resistance Movement?”
“Not offhand,” Bolan replied.
“Aaron?”
Kurtzman keyed a button from his chair, and Bolan watched a screen descend behind Brognola. From the far wall opposite, a slide projector hummed to life, projecting a map of the central U.S. on the screen. Brognola half turned in his chair to eye the map, as he continued speaking.
“They’re a neo-Nazi outfit, as you might imagine from the name. Still clinging to Identity theology, against the far-right trend. They have a compound here.” He pointed to the northeastern corner of Arkansas with an infrared beam. “You’ll find their background information in the file I brought you, but to summarize, they started in Missouri, then moved south, and they’ve been getting more extreme—more militant—as time goes by. Nonsense about the call to topple ZOG, and so on.”
“That’s the Zionist Occupation Government,’” Barbara Price reminded him. “Otherwise known as the U.S. of A.”
Bolan nodded, familiar with the term from other contacts on the fascist fringe. He waited for Brognola to continue.
“Anyway,” Brognola said, “geography.” The pointer danced across the broad projected map as he continued. “Here we’ve got the ARM, holed up in what they call Camp Yahweh. A hundred miles to the southwest is Little Rock, source of the stolen license plates. Due north, St. Louis, where the movement got its start—”
“And where the van was stolen,” Bolan finished for him.
“Right, you are. Ohio, where they made the hit on Wednesday, is a straight shot, more or less, from northern Arkansas along the interstates. And coming back, there’s Louisville. Stop by and torch the van that’s served its purpose.”
“It’s suggestive,” Bolan said, “but it’s also circumstantial.”
“Granted, but we’re looking for a weapon, not preparing for a trial.”
“Okay,” Bolan replied. “Convince me.”
“Right. For starters, three known members of the ARM were once associated with the Phineas Priesthood and the Aryan Republican Army.”
Both of those groups, Bolan knew, had robbed banks and armored cars across the United States in the 1990s to finance a scheme they liked to call Racial Holy War. Some members had been prosecuted and were serving time, but others wriggled through the nets for want of solid evidence connecting them to a specific crime. Broader sedition charges filed against both groups had been dismissed on grounds that anyone in the U.S. was free to advocate destruction of the government, as long as they made no attempt to pull it off.
“All right, we’re closer,” Bolan said.
“It’s apparent from the new group’s publications that they idolize the Phineans and ARA,” Brognola added, “but their straight-up heroes are Bob Mathews and The Order.”
In the early 1980s The Order—also called the Silent Brotherhood—had blazed a path of mayhem across the Pacific Northwest. Its membership was never more than twenty-five or thirty diehards, but the group had declared war on “Red America” and financed its campaign with a series of daring armed robberies that netted several million dollars from banks and Brinks trucks.
“You’re looking for a blueprint,” Bolan said.
“Already found it,” Brognola replied. “It’s right there in The Turner Diaries.”
Bolan nodded, frowning. While he hadn’t read the novel, self-published in 1978 by a former physics professor turned Nazi guru for a pack of dim-witted disciples, Bolan knew the basic plot: America, enslaved by “ZOG,” is rescued from the brink of race-mixing and social chaos by a band of vigilantes called The Order, who rob banks, hang “race traitors” and finally demolish Congress with a huge truck bomb. The Diaries had inspired a host of homegrown terrorists over the past quarter century, from Mathews and the real-life Order to various Klansmen, militias and the Oklahoma City bomber.
Playing the devil’s advocate, Bolan noted the obvious. “They’re not the only bunch of redneck psychopaths who have the Diaries memorized. I’m guessing you could point to six or seven other groups right now, within the same half-dozen states.”
“You’re right again. I could. But only one of them has been in touch with this guy. Aaron?”
On the screen, a grinning face replaced the map. The man was bearded, sunburned, appearing to be an Arab. He looked vaguely familiar to Bolan.
“Wadi Amal bin Sadr,” Brognola declared. “He’s an Iraqi Shiite cleric, presently in exile. We’ve had sightings from Tehran to Paris, but the only one confirmed so far was here.”
The picture changed again. This time, the man stood with two Caucasian males. Flat desert and a small adobe building could be seen in the background. All of them were smiling for the camera, apparently delighted to be there.
“Wadi again,” Brognola said, aiming his pointer at the second face in line. “This one is Curt Walgren, self-styled supreme commander of the ARM, and on his left is Barry James, his second in command.”
They didn’t look like much to Bolan, though they could’ve been a pair of Gulf War veterans in their desert camouflage fatigues. Bush hats concealed what might have been evidence of skinhead sympathies, or simply military-style buzz cuts. They had no visible tattoos, and sunglasses concealed their eyes. About all he could judge from the group photo was their strong, white teeth.
“When did they meet?” Bolan asked.
“This was taken in October,” Brognola replied, “outside of Ciudad Juarez. That’s just across the Tex-Mex border from El Paso.”
“Been there,” Bolan said.
“Oh, right.”
“Stop me if I’m mistaken, now,” Bolan began. “Our theory is that Sadr passed the supergun along to these yahoos, so they could—what? Rob armored cars? Raise hell at random in the States?”
“We can’t ask Sadr,” Brognola answered. “Rumor is the Israelis vaporized him with a rocket attack in Jordan, last week, but I doubt that we’ll ever confirm it. Motive-wise, there’s not much difference between his sect and what passes for Christianity inside the ARM. They both hate Israel and believe that Jews are children of the devil. Both regard the U.S. government as a Satanic instrument. Walgren would spit on Sadr for the color of his skin, but if the Arab helps him hit the Jews, he’d play along. You know the old saying—‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’”
Bolan nodded. “It’s logical enough,” he said. “You think they’ve got the weapon stashed at their compound inArkansas?”
“When we connect the dots, that’s where they lead.”
“No inside information, though?”
The man from Justice shook his head. “So far, the ARM has been impervious to infiltration. Strict security, including polygraphs for all prospective members and alleged initiation ceremonies that would compromise a law-enforcement officer.”
“Participation in some criminal activity,” Brognola said. “The rumors range from strong-arm robbery to murder.”
“No defectors? Rejects who tried out but didn’t make the cut?”
“None we’re aware of,” Price replied. “It makes us…curious.”
“Okay,” Bolan said, nodding toward the fat manila folder resting on the table. “I’d better read that file.”
BROGNOLA HAD FLOWN back to Washington after the briefing, leaving Barbara Price and her team at Stony Man to answer any questions Bolan had after he’d read the dossier on Walgren and the ARM.