Fire Zone

Fire is the test of gold; adversity of strong men.

—Seneca

c. 3 BC-AD 65

All that glitters isn’t gold. Nobody can put a price on justice.

—Mack Bolan

THE MACK BOLAN LEGEND

Nothing less than a war could have fashioned the destiny of the man called Mack Bolan. Bolan earned the Executioner title in the jungle hell of Vietnam.

But this soldier also wore another name—Sergeant Mercy. He was so tagged because of the compassion he showed to wounded comrades-in-arms and Vietnamese civilians.

Mack Bolan’s second tour of duty ended prematurely when he was given emergency leave to return home and bury his family, victims of the Mob. Then he declared a one-man war against the Mafia.

He confronted the Families head-on from coast to coast, and soon a hope of victory began to appear. But Bolan had broken society’s every rule. That same society started gunning for this elusive warrior—to no avail.

So Bolan was offered amnesty to work within the system against terrorism. This time, as an employee of Uncle Sam, Bolan became Colonel John Phoenix. With a command center at Stony Man Farm in Virginia, he and his new allies—Able Team and Phoenix Force—waged relentless war on a new adversary: the KGB.

But when his one true love, April Rose, died at the hands of the Soviet terror machine, Bolan severed all ties with Establishment authority.

Now, after a lengthy lone-wolf struggle and much soul-searching, the Executioner has agreed to enter an “arm’s-length” alliance with his government once more, reserving the right to pursue personal missions in his Everlasting War.

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

Prologue

It was a perfect day to start a forest fire.

The weather in Idaho had been dry all summer long, the result of an overly aggressive La Niña drying up the usual rains that made the mountains come alive with greenery. What was, in good years, a hillside covered with ponderosa pine and juniper now stretched as dry as a tinderbox, not quite brown but far from the vibrant green that the Boise National Forest usually enjoyed. The camo-dressed man moved swiftly through the woods with his twenty-pound pack, heavy footsteps crunching dried pine needles.

He held up a GPS unit to better see the display and adjusted his path according to the satellite-sent information until he came to an area that looked like any other at the edge of a meadow. But this was the spot. The Spot.

He shrugged off the backpack and let it fall to the ground, placing the GPS beside it to verify the exact location. Even with the enhanced number of satellites—he needed at least three for a proper fix—he couldn’t get closer than three yards to the spot. For what he intended, this was good enough. Dropping to his knees, he rummaged through the pack and pulled out two plastic-wrapped boxes the size of bread loaves. He carefully placed each on the forest floor in a pattern he had practiced until it was second nature. Drawing out the last box required more finesse, since it contained the PETN detonators.

As he stripped off the plastic wrapping from the det cord laid into the packages like snowy white intestines, he froze. The wind had died, but his keen hearing picked up sounds from a hundred yards away.

Laughter. Snippets of a bawdy song wailed by a man with a baritone voice, followed by a higher-pitched woman’s complaint. The complaint disappeared suddenly, replaced by a baritone laugh and girlish giggles. He was not alone.

Tipping his head to one side, he homed in on the two hikers moving across a meadow in front of him. Fading back into the forest and letting them pass was out of the question. A quick check of his watch showed that the deadline was rushing down on him. He touched his earbud and considered calling Red Leader. The thought passed as quickly as it had come to him. He knew what Red Leader would say—and it would scorch his ass.

Leaving his partially unwound det cord and blasting caps where he had placed them on the ground, he stood and reached behind to the small of his back. His fingers closed on a sheathed KA-BAR knife. He watched the hikers steadily approaching. As he had thought, a boy and a girl, maybe not out of their teens, intent on an afternoon communing with nature and each other.

The girl saw him first and tugged at her boyfriend’s arm. The boy half turned, misinterpreted her intentions and tried to kiss her. She ducked away and avoided his lips, speaking rapidly.

The boy turned and looked across the meadow. His shoulders slumped in resignation at the realization that what he sought most in the national forest was not going to be found as soon as he had hoped.

“Hello!” the boy called in an attempt to make the most of his bad luck.

The man in camo stood silently, hand behind his back, fingers lightly circling the hilt of the knife. For all his outward composure, inside he seethed. He was going to be behind schedule. Red Leader would do more than scorch his sorry ass if that happened. They were on a tight schedule, and every man had to execute to the second.

“Hi, there,” the girl said more hesitantly. “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

The man only nodded. He did not trust his English, though that hardly mattered. Tourists from all over the world came to the Pacific Northwest, and many vacationed to the east in Idaho. He had been told this for his cover.

“You see anybody else out here? In the last hour or so?” The boy came forward, staying a step or two ahead of his girlfriend as if he might be afraid someone would spirit her away.

“No one.” The man went cold inside. Were there others here to slow him and further delay the execution of his mission?

“Good. We were hoping we’d find a spot to, you know, sit and talk.”

“Oh, Jerry,” the girl said, punching him playfully. “That’s not what you said you wanted to do.” She stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. The boy grinned crookedly. The man had a good idea what she had said. She was a typical looking American teenager. Too much meat on her bones, though after the skinny women in his country, he did not mind that so much. But she tittered and appeared pushy. He did not like that in American women. Even the ones he did not spend the night with.

“What’s all that in your pack? Looks like rolls of toothpaste.” The boy came closer, frowning as he studied the contents of the pack. “Thought you were getting ready to cook some lunch. But I’ve never seen anything like—”

He got no farther in his examination of the explosives. The man in camo moved swiftly. Two steps took him behind the boy. A brawny arm circled the neck and lifted up a stubbled chin to expose a vulnerable throat. The quick slash sent blood spewing outward in a bright arterial spray.

The move was so practiced and easy that the girl didn’t realize her boyfriend was dead before she, too, was killed. The knife slid under her rib cage and angled upward as the man grabbed her Radiohead T-shirt and pulled her forward to prevent her escaping his blade. A tiny gasp escaped her lips, followed by a touch of pink froth and then death. He stepped away as she dropped to her knees and finally fell facedown onto the ground.

He drove his knife blade into the drought-hardened ground to clean it off before he returned it to the sheath at the small of his back. Cursing in three languages but sticking with French for the worst of his rant, he unwound the det cord and strung it along the edge of the trees. When he drew out the full ten yards, he placed a detonator cap on the end and carefully attached wires to it. He retreated to where he had begun and placed the thin wire leads on the ground. He repeated the procedure, going along the edge of the forest in the other direction and placed a second detonator. He ran hard to get back to the juncture of the two lines of explosives and fastened the wires to a small receiver.

He had barely finished screwing down the leads to the radio receiver when his earbud crackled with three short, staccato bursts to alert him.

“Red Leader to Red Two, report.”

He swallowed and wiped sweat from his face.

“Red Two here, good to go,” he said.

“Fifteen minutes.” That was all Red Leader said. That was all the time he had to clear out before the explosives detonated along a twenty-yard stretch of forest. The meadow would allow plenty of oxygen to flow in to feed the fire as it moved deeper into the Boise National Forest, feeding off dead undergrowth and dried trees. Within minutes a hundred hectares would be ablaze.

He slung his now-lightened pack onto his back and loped across the meadow in the direction from which the two young lovers had come. He never broke stride as he stepped over their bodies along the way.

RED LEADER PUSHED the night-vision goggles higher on his forehead. It was late afternoon on a summer day. If he used the NVG in the daylight, he would have been blinded by the full sun, but in a few minutes they would be quite useful to him. He moved around the fire tower at the western edge of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, taking care to step over the body of the dead forest ranger. A single shot to the forehead had dispatched an unwanted witness.

Red Leader gave no thought to the dead man, because it was his fault he had died. He was supposed to be out on a road doing a fire danger appraisal. For whatever reason, possibly the typical American laziness, he had returned to the fire tower and found a trespasser had broken in.

Red Leader looked at the PDA and chafed at the delay. The mission was running late by almost five minutes. “Red One, come in.”

“Red One, aye,” came the whisper over the radio. The voice was almost lost in a sea of static. The dry conditions caused interference.

“Are you done?”

“Red Leader, almost finished. Got the det cord strung a bit deeper into the forest than I intended.”

Red Leader looked at the small dot moving on his PDA map display. Red One had gone deeper into the Salmon-Challis National Forest to the east than necessary. That threw off the timetable.

His thumb worked the tiny keyboard until a regional weather report slowly scrolled on the screen. The isobars showed the air pressure. The lines squeezed together, indicating mounting wind to the east.

“Are you done, Red One?”

“All done, Red Leader,” came the smug reply.

Red Leader pressed another button on the PDA. The Salmon-Challis National Forest erupted in a fireball that sent flames blasting a hundred feet into the air. Red One should have been on time. Red Leader pressed another button and started the timer. The emergency response to this fire would be imminent. Minutes.

Even as his timer hit ninety seconds, the ranger’s radio crackled with warnings and orders to call out firefighters.

Red Leader let the fire burn for another eight-and-a-half minutes before triggering the explosives laid by Red Two. All the emergency response in the area was en route to the Salmon-Challis blaze. The fire on the edge of the Boise Basin would be ignored for the time being, since it was smaller in scope.

Smaller but more important. He snapped his head down and brought the infrared goggles over his eyes, squinting as he adjusted the intensity. Even then, blocking out most of the daylight, he saw a wall of intense dancing light. Red Two’s fire burned exactly as they had planned. Heavy smoke from the underbrush would lay a pall over the lower lying countryside as the fire worked its way toward Shepard Peak. Except in extraordinary cases, fires were predictable. They burned upward.

Up the side of the mountain and away from the scene of the real action.

“Blue Leader, you have cover,” Red Leader said. His radio crackled. The burgeoning fires caused even more static interference.

“Moving in now, Red Leader. Rendezvous in three hours. Mark.”

“Red Leader to Blue Leader, out.”

He turned off his radio and reset his stopwatch. Three hours to the second. The carefully planned raid proceeded as flawlessly as it had so many times before. He stepped back over the annoying corpse drawing flies in the small lookout tower and spiraled down the stairs, taking them three at a time in his hurry. There was little enough time to skirt the fires his team had set and reach the rendezvous where the real backbreaking work would begin.

1

No matter where Mack Bolan looked, fire devoured the land. Trees exploded hundreds of feet below him, sending fiery sap close to the V-22 Osprey’s rotors. Looking out over the Idaho forest convinced him that nothing could survive down there. The fire was too intense and spread like…a wildfire.

“Where you want to land?” The voice in his headphones might have been either the pilot or the copilot. Bolan couldn’t be sure, and it really didn’t matter. It took both men’s skill at the controls to keep the tilt-rotor aircraft from being buffeted to pieces in the fierce superheated air currents caused by the fire.

“Not down there,” Bolan said. His keen eyes studied the raging inferno and found nothing. No landing zone was possible when the very earth itself appeared to be on fire. Besides, Salmon-Challis National Forest was not the spot he was most interested in. It might have been the first place to be torched, but he found the other side of the spiny ridge more interesting. More than his gut feeling, the powers that be back at Stony Man Farm agreed. The real evidence of who set the fires was not here but over near Shepard Peak.

“We’re running low on fuel, sir.”

This time Bolan knew who spoke. The pilot leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his unexpected passenger. Bolan had been high up in the Rockies north of Leadville at the end of a mission when Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman had contacted him. Bolan had been looking forward to a much-needed break, possibly taking time to climb Mount Elbert for the solitude it offered and, for a while, simply not worry about someone shooting him in the back.

The V-22 had been dispatched from the 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to pick him up. The altitude near Leadville made helicopters unstable to operate, and the V-22 afforded a quick method of transport. For all the fly-by-wire technology involved in the vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, Bolan was more interested in speed. It duplicated the helicopter’s vertical capability and added an airplane’s range and ability to move him to his target at more than three hundred miles per hour.

“Head due west,” Bolan said.

“The other fire?”

Bolan nodded and the pilot went back to his controls. The Osprey banked sharply, giving Bolan another look at the devastation below. Kurtzman had sent a video taken by a commercial airline pilot who had happened to be above the forest when it erupted in flame. Careful examination of the low-resolution video by the Stony Man analysts had given a chilling view of the first seconds of the fire. Bolan recognized the sudden wall of flame for what it was: detonation of a long string of explosives, probably dat cord. The second fire had erupted almost exactly ten minutes later, showing coordination and intent.

The charred stench made his nose wrinkle as he leaned out the doorway and peered down. Intense heat like a mile-long blast furnace seared his face, but Bolan saw only the courage of the firefighters below risking their lives to keep the fire from spreading and devouring more untold square miles of the tinder-dry forest.

“Sir, we’re here,” the pilot said. Bolan tapped his earpiece. The static interference almost deafened him. “But we got a problem. We can’t land down there.”

Bolan saw the problem immediately. The fire west of Shepard Peak had devoured too much of the forest for him to get into the spot where he believed the second, more important fire had been set.

“We could get down, but we might never get back into the air. I’m not risking a seventy-million-dollar aircraft, even if the SecDef himself ordered me down.”

Bolan knew the pilot held some resentment toward him personally for being sent on this mission. The orders had come down fast from on high to deliver a single passenger of unknown affiliation to the middle of a forest fire.

“What’s your operational ceiling?”

“Twenty-six thousand.”

“Take me up to fifteen, then you can go home.”

The engines changed pitch as the pilot started an upward spiral. Bolan began getting into his gear. He had to hand it to Kurtzman. The man had anticipated everything. The parachute included with the pack on board when he rendezvoused with the V-22 was exactly what he needed.

“What do you want me to do?”

The pilot’s words spilled from the earpiece dropped onto the deck. Bolan was already out the door and tumbling through the turbulent air above the Boise National Forest. He got a good look at the terrain and how the fire had burned from the obvious line where the blaze had started. It looked as if someone had taken a fiery razor to the ground.

More det cord.

Turning slowly as he fell though the heated air, Bolan arrowed his way toward the seared meadow just to the west of the first ignition point. When he was only five hundred feet from the ground—definitely HALO to avoid the worst of the heated updrafts—he pulled the rip cord. The jerk as the parachute deployed caused his teeth to clack together. Then he hit the ground hard. His knees bent and he rolled in the blackened grass, tangling in the shroud lines as they collapsed rapidly. He finally scraped to a halt and got to his feet. A few minutes later, Bolan had the parachute gathered and weighted down under a rock so it wouldn’t blow around in the hot wind all around him.

It was time for the Executioner to go to work.

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

AARON KURTZMAN LOOKED up from his computer console to see the mission controller, Barbara Price, standing in the doorway. The dark circles under her eyes told him she hadn’t slept much in days. She said nothing and didn’t have to. Kurtzman felt the weight of her unspoken question.

“Nothing yet,” Kurtzman said. “Striker has just dropped into the Boise Basin and is doing a quick recon.”

“Have you filled him in?”

“I’m still gathering intel,” Kurtzman said, glancing at his screen. He looked back up. “What more can you tell me?”

“Not much more,” she admitted, heaving a deep sigh. “It seems more and more like an outright attack on the U.S. economy. All the gold was earmarked for delivery to the government to bolster the dollar on world markets. There’s no doubt that the last attack was done by a PMC.”

“Identified?”

Price shook her head and looked even grimmer.

“How many private military companies can there be on the loose within U.S. borders?” Kurtzman asked aloud, but he didn’t expect a response. The question was rhetorical because no one could answer, and they both knew it. The homegrown paramilitary militias had died down over the past few years as government activity against terror cells escalated. This was not the atmosphere a paranoid, super-secret paramilitary group could thrive in. When they were ignored, they flourished in backwoods and the mountains where no one had cared if they blew up old cars with RPGs or shot cutouts of their particular bogeyman. With air travelers having to take off their shoes to check for explosives and everyone jumpy over the slightest thing amiss, the paramilitaries had come under such governmental scrutiny that they could almost be written off.

But not the PMCs. The government used them for security in Iraq and other hot spots around the world. That was fine. What wasn’t fine were the PMCs employed by fat cats as bodyguards and even by dictators as personal armies. Most of the PMCs contained mercenaries honed to a keen edge in a dozen different armies worldwide. The various Special Forces branches of the United States supplied their share, but so did the Russian Spetsnaz, the British SAS and all the other European countries with their super-secret, always denied special ops forces. Kurtzman didn’t even want to think about the disaffected mercenaries operating out of South Africa, Europe and elsewhere. Too many men and women around the world sold themselves to the highest bidder.

“The last two strikes accounted for well over fifty million dollars in gold,” Price said. “That much gold weighs close to two tons. The M.O.s match what’s going down in Idaho. I hope Striker can get on their asses in a hurry. We’ve got to stop them before they bankrupt the country.”

Kurtzman felt a shiver travel up and down his spine. Forest fires were set to divert authorities. The PMC strike team had moved into mines with smelters on-site and killed anyone who had not been evacuated. Then the gold had simply vanished. Tons of it. Gone. Like so much golden smoke.

He touched a screen to get a news ticker scrolling slowly along the bottom and smiled without humor. “Gold just hit nine hundred dollars an ounce today, and it’s still going up. They’re making money even after they steal the bullion. You’ve got to wonder how they transport that much.”

“The question I can’t get a handle on is why they need so much,” Price said.

Kurtzman felt a little colder. Greed was one thing, but this transcended mere avarice. Whoever was responsible for the thefts was amassing enough cold, hard currency to fund a revolution. A big one.

He opened communication with Bolan to get an update.

“Striker, it’s Bear. Report.”

“TWO BODIES,” Bolan told Kurtzman. “Both murdered.” He lightly prodded the man’s head with his feet and saw how the spinal cord had been almost severed with a savage slash. The charred corpse revealed little else. The female with him was harder to evaluate, but Bolan wasted no time figuring it out. She was dead and probably by the same hand. He thought she had been knifed in the belly and then the point driven upward into her heart. Bowels, lungs and heart were cinders, but her head remained firmly affixed to her spine. A murder-suicide was out of the question, since there wasn’t a knife anywhere to be seen.