Force Lines

Fear.

Then he felt the sweat run cold down his face, slithering up under his jaw and chin, but where it ended suddenly, as the hood had been cinched—or noosed?—tight around his neck. The faceless human viper chuckled about something but the cold steel bit into his wrists as he felt his fists clenching, so hard his knuckles popped off like pistol cracks.

Impotent rage was not a feeling he was used to.

The former United States Special Forces captain knew how to keep his cool, though, and under the worst of conditions. These—as it next turned out to his mounting horror—were worse than dodging Iraqi bullets and sniffing out chemical and biological stashes for a little known black op during Gulf One called Operation Specter Run. And his heart began to beat like a jackhammer, harder than before, if such a thing was possible, as the Voice recited, chapter and verse, the daily routines of his wife and two sons. Their likes, dislikes, habits. Right down to the type of music Ben and John both listened to, Kit’s favorite television programs and which room she preferred, which sealed it that the house had been wired for visual spying. Then their movements, and by the hour, the eateries and friends they visited after school, when, where and who, down to the same time his wife hit the same health spa after work, and which housewives and where she had two dry gin martinis at her favorite bar, and which two days of the week. Son of a…

Stay cool, breathe slow, he told himself. Instinct told him nothing had happened to his family—yet—and he kept hope alive.

There was a long pause, during which Radfield wondered if his captor had left the room, the building, the boat, wherever he was.

“I have yet to hear the usual questions, Mr. Radfield. Even for a Medal of Honor winner, you’re too cool and collected.”

“Okay. I’ll bite. Who are you?”

“Wrong first question. Unanswerable anyway.”

“Right. If you told me, you’d have to kill me. You want something. What? And if I don’t agree, then what happens to my wife and sons?”

“What happens?” The Voice made a noise somewhere between a chuckle and a snort. “Do I actually have to say the words?”

Radfield ground his teeth, steadied his breathing some more. No, the bastard couldn’t see him sweat, but he had to control his own voice. “Yeah. You do.”

“They’ll be killed. Very quietly, very efficiently.”

“Are they safe?”

“For the moment, they’re going about their daily routine.”

“What do you want?”

“How do you like Miami, Paul?”

Friendly like, confidence growing, the hook was in.

“Too hot, too much crime, too phony.”

“Agreed. Not to mention there’s something vaguely disturbing about an entire city built right over a swamp.” The Voice chuckled. “It’s almost as if the fools who live there are begging for some natural calamity to happen, between a giant sinkhole swallowing them whole and hurricanes blowing them clear out to the Everglades. Anyway…be that as it all is, it’s the business you perform as part of your duties for your company out of Miami that will require an immediate attitude readjustment on your part.”

And there it was. But the punch line, he suddenly knew, was merely part of the irony of his predicament.

His captor knew as much, and went on to tell him, “As chief of security for Manexx PetroChem, you designed certain safety procedures at the Trans-World Bank of Miami.”

“Okay. And?”

“Hasn’t it ever struck you as odd that you are required every three months to escort the same three men donning the exact same black sunglasses and wearing the same three-piece black suits and who you, of course, do not know but provide security to and from the WBM and to and from their posh hotel suite, and who literally have the same briefcases chained to the same wrists? That for all of their public mantras about the need for this country to tap into new oil reserves that there are all of two—count them—two Manexx platforms out on the Gulf and with no plans in the foreseeable future to expand? That when you designed their off-shore security there was virtually no mention of deep-sea drilling, with just the basic equipment and skeleton crews necessary to maintain appearances?”

Radfield had, in fact, wondered about all of that, among a few other items not yet mentioned. As he had some nagging idea where this was headed, he felt the first itch of nicotine craving coming on when—

Fingers like iron rods twisted up the hood around his mouth. He heard something metallic—the snap of scissors?—then raw combat instincts flared. There was fire in his limbs, sudden anger to strike back coiling him. He was an inch or so off the seat when the gun muzzle was shoved against his temple. He barely heard the snip against the metallic click of the weapon’s hammer as a section of hood was sliced away from his mouth.

“Here, have a smoke.”

It was placed on his lip and lit.

“Now. Sit down, relax and listen. Should you even for the flash of an instant again think about fighting back you will be shot dead, dumped in the Gulf and…well, you can imagine the next regrettable step. Or, rather, three steps.”

The weapon fell away, the second presence melting back. That left his captor, right in front of him. Two, then, at least, and his hands were cuffed in front of him, as he lifted them to work the cigarette. If not for his family…

“Are you with me so far, Paul?”

“I’m listening.”

“We know that you suspect fallen comrades under your command in Gulf One were infected by our side in a vaccine program that was meant to combat the effects of what is now commonly referred to as Gulf War Syndrome.”

“But which, was, in fact, our guys contracting the effects of a nerve gas agent and an unknown bio agent that was covered up by Washington after we blew up a couple of depots and were infected by subsequent fallout and which we were never told what was in said depots.”

“Or everyone in the area in question was stricken by undetermined biohazards relating to Saddam’s torching of those oil fields when his soldiers were sent packing from Kuwait.”

“Or both.”

“Or both. Correct. You made something of a spectacle a number of years back, but, as is the case of general public apathy when it comes to the military and the running assumption out there in America that national security is, in fact, ‘secured,’ and how it gets done is none of their affair as long as their lives go happily on in blissful ignorance, you kept up contact with certain men in the armed forces. Most of whom, I need to inform you, are no longer among the living. You were fanning the flames from the shadows, Paul.”

“I was looking for the truth.”

“The truth. You want to know about the truth, Paul?”

“I bet you’re going to tell me, ‘I can’t handle the truth?’”

The Voice turned cold. “That stash you came across in southern Iraq was some of the most virulent bacteria before then known to man. Those three mobile labs you seized? Those bioagents were confiscated and shipped back to America for analysis.”

“For upgrade and potential deployment, you mean. Unless some of those late comrades of mine you mentioned missed their guess, they were cultivated in germ factories in Idaho and Montana—recombinant DNA, altered genes and so forth—and for the advancement of a secret biological-chemical warfare scheme.”

“Of which you and the others had nary a clue as to what it was—is—really all about.”

Radfield pulled on his cigarette, blew a stream in what he suspected was the general direction of his tormentor. “Really? So, our theory that a general conspiracy about a shadow government within our government engineering a controlled genocide program and running experiments on live test subjects without them knowing it is a bunch of nonsense?”

“Not necessarily. What you suspect has been done before. Pesticide spraying in New York, New Jersey, Miami, for instance.”

“Where there were so-called mosquito infestations that were spreading the West Nile Virus? Except the only areas being sprayed were the black and Hispanic neighborhoods? That conspiracy?”

The Voice chuckled. “You’re getting warm. Think of a circle, Paul. Think of how the past somehow all circles back to the present.”

Radfield felt his hand freeze as he put the cigarette on his lip.

“That’s right, Paul. Manexx PetroChem.”

“You’re telling me…”

“I am, indeed. You work for a classified Homeland Security operation that is involved in producing both counter and offensive biological and chemical weapons, the likes of which would be catastrophic if they were unleashed. Only there is far, far more involved.”

“Homeland Security?”

“That’s right, or, rather, a recent and covert arm known only among the few elite as National Security Military Intelligence. Paul, you were chosen, you were groomed, and specifically for this moment in time. Think of it as destiny calling.”

Radfield was inclined to believe the man, all of it. There were secrets, things—black ops—the United States government did in order to protect, secure and maintain the country’s vested interests, both at home and abroad. Even if he were a nonmilitary citizen, reason alone would tell him the United States was number one in the lion’s share of global weapons sales. That, all by itself, informed even the most unsuspecting and naive that America was, by and large, using its vast wealth to either thwart the expansion of rogue nations and terrorism, or seeking to foment chaos and plant their own lackey criminal regimes in countries of interest in order to keep the United States on top of the world heap. At the forefront of that list were the oil-producing nations. Then there were various strategic nation states that could serve as buffered armed outposts where attack could be launched with the quickest of ease…

Then it hit him.

Now he knew who and what the Voice represented. Now there was no choice how he left what was, without question, the hot seat.

“I can almost hear your thoughts, Paul. Play ball, save your family or—I would at least allow you the dignity of making your peace with God.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go to your office. Proceed with the day as you normally would. You will receive an e-mail that will give you step-by-step instructions on the access codes we require. Your movements for the immediate future will be detailed, and monitored. You will obey?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“There’s always a choice, Paul.”

“I’ll go with the program.”

“Then, not only will I spare your life and the lives of your family, but I assure you that when this is done you will be more than adequately compensated. Both in terms of money, and the truth you seek.”

And he was abruptly dismissed, as the cigarette was knocked off his lip and a viselike grip hauled him to his feet. There was no point in counting paces, direction and time from there on, but instinct took hold. It was roughly a dozen yards before a door opened and the sense of sound and smell began to give him some clue as to his whereabouts. There was a faint but sickly taint of sulfur in the air. There was no other smell like it he knew of, and it was more than noticeably noxious in certain areas around Galveston Bay where the waters around the island city were still yellow from ships spilling the infernal toxin from years gone by. He heard seagulls, caught a whiff of shrimp and diesel fuel, figured he was in the general vicinity of Seawall Boulevard, named so for the ten-mile, seventeen-foot-high wall built after the 1900 hurricane had all but wiped the fledgling town off the map and dunked it in the Gulf. He was three steps, smelling and listening, when a hand he figured could palm two basketballs dropped over his skull, bent him at the head and shoulders and shoved him ahead where he crashed into the soft padding of a long seat.

“Don’t move.”

By God, he wanted to spring at the new voice, would have if it had just been himself he was looking to save. Before he knew it the cuffs were gone, the cinch around his neck loosened. The hood was whipped away, but just as he began adjusting his eyes to harsh sunlight the figure was a blurring shadow, slamming the door in his face. His temporary home, he found, was the well of a limousine, with, of course, the windows blacked out from the inside. Hunched, he moved to the other seat, discovered the driver’s partition was likewise blackened, and, most likely, shatter-proof. As he picked up the small black file on the seat beside him, a voice patched through the intercom and told him, “You are to read and memorize that and leave it on the seat when you leave. Do what you are told, Mr. Radfield, and you and your family will be fine.”

They were pulling away, smooth and slow, when he picked up the file. No sooner had he opened and looked at the first sequence of numbers than Paul Radfield felt his stomach wanting to roll over. He wasn’t one hundred percent certain what they wanted, but judging by what they wanted him to do—at least initially—a dark cloud settled over his thoughts.

Conspiracy and treason leaped to mind.

And which he was now part of. With three innocent lives he cared about more than his own life he was along for the full ride.

Stuck.

No way out.

CHAPTER FIVE

23:59:59.

It was T-minus now, and it was all Donald “Brick” Lawhorn could do to keep the smile off his face.

He was moving for the curtained balcony—hitting a button on the side of his Rolex watch, making the instant readjustment with a quick depression and scrolling reset on the digital secondhand display—when he heard the groan.

“Where are you going? What time…”

There was some purred question about why the clock was ticking backward as 50 flashed to 49.

Pulling an ice-cold Heineken beer from the small fridge, cracking it open, he looked back over his shoulder. She was a perfidious little courtesan, straight out of the Yellow Pages under Sweet Dreams Escorts, self-centered, self-indulgent, as vain as the night had been long. She had served his needs well enough, he supposed. That was when he could get her face out of the coke and shut her mouth long enough for her to stop talking about herself. She was supposedly working her way through some local college, doing porn on the side, telling him with a smirk as wide as Biscayne Bay beyond the balcony she got off thinking how other men would abuse themselves while looking at her naked body, all the legions of perverts and family men out there who could only ever have her in their inflamed imaginations, her spreads stoking their evil fantasies and leaving them suspended in frozen burning desire for her while she, on the other hand, could pick and choose who was worthy enough to even breathe the same air as her. Briefly, he pictured his hands around her throat, staring into eyes that silently begged him to spare her life. Any other time…

He gave her a look he hoped would send her diving under the covers. Instead, the overpaid trollop reached for the tray of white powder on the bed stand.

He slipped on the dark sunglasses, rolled his shoulders, enjoying the weight of the shoulder-holstered .45 Para-Ordnance P13. When she finally took a breath to deem him interesting enough to inquire what he did for a living, he had told her was head of security for a major computer-telecommunication company, and the VIPs he protected were in a different arena than the usual stuffed suits, hence the weapon. That either sufficed her phony attempt to be curious or she just didn’t give a damn, beyond, that was, collecting her thousand bucks.

As he brushed past the curtains and stepped onto the pink coral balcony, harsh sunlight, mirrored off the Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Art Deco enclaves and hotels of North Beach, glinted off stainless steel. He decided the morning sun felt good, another taste of paradise, in fact, as it beat down on bronzed naked flesh that was chiseled to lean, sinewy muscle. He was scarred around the torso and shoulders from ancient war wounds, and that had, indeed, caught her curious, anxious eye, trophies warning her that she was, indeed, sleeping with a lion.

The real thing.

At the balcony, picking up his cigarettes, shaking one free and lighting up, he stared down at the inline skaters, the lovebirds and the early morning breakfast crowd gathering under the thatched-roof cabanas, lounging poolside.

Oh, how he loved Miami, but it was more of a love-hate relationship now that he thought about it.

South Florida, he thought, was the East Coast’s answer to the shallow, superficial and spineless PC asylum that was Southern California. They partied, drank, drugged the nights away in South Beach. They drove the newest, hottest cars, looking good and outfitted with the latest fashions at the top of the list of their concerns. At the number-one slot of all things vain—they had to be “seen” in all the right and trendiest clubs, these hyena wanna-bes craving to rub elbows with all the vile film and recording and sports worms that had in recent years oozed down here in their silken, bejeweled, perfumed snakeskin carcasses when careers were usually circling the bowl and they had to find a way to keep their faces out there.

Beyond his general contempt, outside of New York City, some of the most atrocious, senseless crimes—fueled, in large part, by a drug scourge that had never really gone away—had become so commonplace they were little more than the most fleeting of sound bites on the local news.

As he took a sudden gust of hot breeze in the face and drank deep, the big man’s words rang through his thoughts.

“Picture this. Five hundred fall suddenly, mysteriously ill. Two hours or so later another five hundred or so are staggering into emergency rooms in yet another city, burning up with fever, puking and crapping all over themselves. Two or three hundred suddenly die. By the following morning it’s a thousand, two thousand. By noon another American city sees it citizens dropping like the proverbial sprayed flies. One, then two more cities find their citizens croaking, and from clear across the other side of the country as walking contagions board planes, trains, buses, or simply drive to the next town. It’s found in the water supply. It’s killing livestock, it’s infected produce, wheat. It’s in the air, the water, maybe even the ground they walk on.”

Shivering, as he killed the man’s voice behind the rest of his beer, Lawhorn became aware the sweat was running off his chin in fat, thick drops. Twenty-four hours. And after that? he wondered. Would there be enough time? Say if even one of them became stricken, then what?

There was international travel to consider. There was the rabble doing the first leg of the dirty work for them. There was the fact that once they left the country…

He stabbed out his cigarette, but lingered as he still smelled her from where he’d done her for the fifth time, mashing her face into the railing.

The evil creature disgusted him.

He found her huffing away, her voice on the petulant side as she informed him it would be another thousand dollars if he wanted her for the day.

Lawhorn grabbed another beer. “Shut up. Get dressed and get out of here. Take the garbage with you. On second thought.”

Before she could squawk or even blink, Lawhorn had the mirror in hand. He hurled it across the room, scattering a snowstorm of four to five grams. She became the perfect nude model for shock and horror.

“Five seconds to beat it, and then I get ugly.”

FORMER LOS ANGELES Homicide Detective Mitch Kramer was nowhere near the full reprobate package the soldier had expected. After the first round of blunt questions and when Bolan decided he had enough to proceed he’d learned something about the ex-cop’s life, or, rather, lack thereof. The subsequent and toned-down Q and A was more to get a read on the man’s character and motivations than simple idle curiosity, since Bolan was on the verge of launching total war. He was still in the process of deciding what to do with the man.

With a few possible exceptions, Kramer’s tale of woe was pretty much the same for veteran cops worn out and broken down by the job. They were divorced, friendless with the exception of other cops, more often than not had kids who couldn’t stand being around them. They collapsed into all manner of vices, and more often than was publicly reported they ate their gun. As the years ground by on the job, their world shrank and grew darker by the day, and a once-decent conscience, beaming with good intentions and pointing the way of truth and justice, was blunted and callused to the point where a man became an angry loner, aware in some way he couldn’t quite define or understand that he had become contaminated by the very ills and crimes he used to abhor and fight. Oh, indeed, human nature being what it was—inclined to Self and its own needs and desires—the soldier could well imagine the eroding toll of having to listen to lies and excuses and the flimsiest justifications and even for the most heinous of crimes around-the-clock. Of being feared and held in disrespect and contempt by a society that was rapidly becoming more plagued by crime and corruption and where the bad guys were sometimes better armed than whole SWAT teams. Where even far too many law-abiding citizens couldn’t care less about a policeman, as long as they were front and center when they were faced with mortal danger or loss of money and property.

Bolan realized he was perhaps painting it with a broad brushstroke of cynicism, but, for damn sure, it took a special brand of man, a unique and iron self-control and discipline and courage to march out there, day after day, shift after shift, year in and year out, and do what the average citizen couldn’t or didn’t want to do, or didn’t dare dream capable of handling. Even with the most tenacious of moral resolve, a number of cops didn’t make it, couldn’t cut it. Used up, burned-out, staring over the edge of the grave and down into the waiting worms and maggots.

Kramer had fairly told him as much about himself, with a look and tone the soldier read as saying that a simple thank-you way back when would have sufficed to keep him chugging along with an eye toward a half decent tomorrow. But, Bolan, ever the realist, knew there were some professions where, if a man was looking for a pat on the back, promotion or glory, then he was in the wrong line of work. What was more—and even worse—he could never fully do the job.

Soldiers dropped into that particular category.

For the warrior on the front lines it was all guts and no less than steely commitment to duty, with no expectations, or they caved when it hit the fan, or ended up seething wrecks of whining recrimination, bitter regret and the kind of relentless self-pitying anger that rotted out the very soul itself.

The world was a tough place, but the soldier was more than acquainted with the bitter facts of good and evil, life and death.

Another look at Kramer, and Bolan wasn’t sure what to make of the man. He was no angel, but he was damn sure fallen. At the moment, the ex-cop was on his haunches, perched up against the base of pine tree. The laminated card was in his cuffed hands. Figure he was praying to the Holy Lady of Desperate Cases, and, for some reason, that alone was pushing the soldier toward a decision that might well prove one of his worst to date.

Or would it?

Bolan left Kramer to what sure appeared penitent reflections and silent imploring of divine intervention and walked forward several feet. Crouched behind a thicket of bramble and ferns—M-16 with M-203 grenade launcher having replaced the HK subgun now that it was all leaning toward open-ground warfare—the soldier gave the lay of the land a second thorough scan, while scraping together the few shreds of a strategy, given the few facts and rumor the ex-cop had laid out. Between the PDA and the mobile GPS unit he had mounted to the dashboard of his Explorer SUV, he found the remote wilderness where the big event was supposed to go down.

To the north, the misty shroud above the snowcapped sawtooth peaks of the Swan Range was being cleared away by the early morning sun. A few miles west, at the opposite edge of the Flathead National Forest, the Swan River ran in a north-south parallel course to Highway 83. Somewhere to his back, the soldier made out the cries of geese, mallards and other winged creatures taking to flight or searching out a meal. East, across rolling grassland he imagined once teemed with legions of bison, the soldier made out the road as it humped up and spined its two-mile-or-so course to what Kramer informed him was a forest ranger station.