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  Bolan rode past the turnoff, and when he was out of sight of the intersection, he made a U-turn and headed back. Once again he rode past the main drive up to the derelict compound he'd spotted earlier. He knew it was the only possible place they could be taking Anderson. When he got to the back route to the compound he turned off the highway. When he was about a half mile from the building site, he rode off the road and down into a shallow gully. He removed his riding gear, revealing digital camo-pattern Marine MARPAT fatigues. In the broad daylight, his blacksuit would have been almost as visible as a neon-pink leotard, but the Marines had a digital desert camo pattern that was perfect for the dry hills north of Santa Cruz. Under his marine blouse he wore the soft body armor he'd had on when he'd crashed his motorcycle. It had taken a beating and its integrity was questionable if someone shot him in the exact same spots he'd been hit before, but it was better than nothing.

  He stowed his riding gear in the top box, equipped himself with the P90, extra magazines for both the little FN subgun as well as for his Beretta and Desert Eagle, and clipped more grenades to his utility belt. They'd come in handy on this mission.

  When he was ready for battle, he leaned his bike against a dirt bank and threw some sage brush over it for camouflage.

  Bolan crept through the brush alongside the road, plotting a course that would take him into the compound in an area not likely to be heavily guarded. He emerged from the brush in a clearing near what looked like a lived-in trailer home. He crept to the rear of the trailer and raised his head just high enough to see into the window of the master bedroom, or what passed for the master bedroom in the rusted, filthy little receptacle of broken humanity.

  Broken humanity was exactly what he saw inside the trailer. A nude woman lay sprawled on the bed, her body so emaciated that he could see the outline of her hipbone through her skin. Her body fat was so low that her breasts, if she had ever had them, had virtually disappeared, leaving just loose skin with brown nipples. The space between her thighs had to be three inches wide. The only thing that kept the Executioner from thinking he was looking at a corpse was that he could see her bony chest rising and falling as she breathed.

  A man sat on the bed, banging a needle in his arm. Judging from his equally emaciated state, the syringe must have contained methamphetamine. Judging from the smell that permeated the compound, a tub full of meth cake was cooling somewhere close by.

  Bolan made his way to the outbuilding closest to the trailer. Unlike many of the outbuildings that comprised the compound, this one had glass in the windows. It also had a lock on the door. Bolan pulled a small, flat bar from his utility belt and pried the lock latch free from the door. The five screws holding it popped from the rotting wood on the doorframe with such ease that the soldier really didn't need to use the pry bar. With his sound-suppressed Beretta leading the way, the soldier entered the building, spinning around to make certain it was empty.

  It was empty of people, but it did contain all the equipment a person needed to have a medium-scale methamphetamine manufacturing operation. An old claw-foot bathtub sat to one side, and inside a sheet of meth cake cooled, waiting to be processed. The stench of the chemicals was so powerful that Bolan had to exit the building as quickly as possible.

  He pulled a small pair of binoculars from a pouch on his utility belt and scanned the compound, looking for a building large enough for Botros and bin Osman to use for storing the van carrying the plutonium. Across the road he saw what he was looking for — a long, low turkey shed, the only large building in the compound without a caved-in roof. The corrugated-steel building was about ninety feet long and about fifteen feet high at the peak of the roof. Green skylight panels ran from the gables to the peak every ten feet, and the sides were covered with louvered ventilation panels spaced out at similar ten-foot intervals. Three-foot tall, fifteen-foot wide wooden doors ran along the bottom of the building. When turkeys had been raised there, they would be opened to let the turkeys move in and out of the shed.

  In addition to being intact, the building stood out for a couple of other reasons. First, a brand-new power pole stood in front of the building, with a halogen yard light mounted atop it and thick, new power lines ran from the top of the pole to the turkey shed. It was the only building in the compound that had new lines running to it. Any of the other out buildings that had power lines running to them had old, decaying lines with insulation that was flaking off in big chunks. Excluding the new line running to the turkey shed, there wasn't a power line on the place that looked less than fifty years old.

  The second feature that set the building apart was the front door. A brand-new overhead door stood in center of the building's facade. The large door looked as if it cost more than the building was worth. From the brand-new corrugated steel that flanked either side of the door, it appeared that the building had been equipped with a pair of sliding doors until fairly recently. The door was closed, but judging from the glow coming from the skylights, lights burned inside the building.

  Bolan scanned the area through his binoculars. He was looking for signs of life. He saw several derelict vehicles had been strategically placed around the building. Upon close inspection Bolan made out a man hiding within each of them. Inside one of the vehicles, a rusted Chevrolet Caprice from the late 1970s, he saw the short barrel of an SAR-21 bullpup combat rifle poking up from between the legs of the man inside.

  Bolan still had the binoculars to his eyes trying to count the number of sentries guarding the building when he heard the fast-moving low growl coming at him from behind. He dropped the binoculars and swung around just as the guard dog lunged through the air toward his jugular. Years of experience had honed the Executioner's reflexes to a point where he reacted before his brain could shoot the synapses needed to process a dangerous situation and when he grabbed the dog by the side of its head and swung it to the ground, he did so on pure instinct.

  The dog squirmed and lunged back up at Bolan. Bolan deflected it with his left arm, ripping open the dressed wound from the previous night's knife fight. With his right arm he again grabbed the side of the dog's head and twisted it away from his body, preventing the animal from locking its powerful jaws in his flesh. This time Bolan followed the dog down and slammed his knee into its neck. The dog tried to squirm free, thrashing its legs, neck and head back and forth. The dog's sharp claws slashed through Bolan's fatigues and tore into his skin, but he held firm and kept the dog pinned. Grabbing its head with both hands, careful to steer clear of the lethal mouth, the Executioner twisted the beast's head with all his strength, pinning the neck as hard as he possibly could with his knee and lower leg. Finally he heard the loud sound of the dog's neck breaking and the thrashing stopped, replaced by the spastic twitching of the animal's death throes.

  "Now why'd you have to go and kill my dog," a voice behind the soldier said. Bolan turned to find himself staring down the barrel of a sawed-off Mossberg 500 12-gauge pump shotgun. Behind it stood the ghastly scarecrow of a man he'd seen in the trailer. The man stood about four yards away from the soldier, far enough for the pattern from the short-barreled shot gun to hit the body armor and take Bolan's head off at the same time. The man had the drop on Bolan and there was nothing he could do.

  * * *

  Jameed Botros stared at the bloated, disfigured carcass that just a short while before had been Nancy Maurstad. After Gunthar Maurstad had finished assembling the nuclear explosive device, bin Osman had tortured the man's wife to death, just to demonstrate what would happen to the man's daughter should the device fail to detonate. Botros was a hard man and he had seen much violence in his fifty-some years of life, but he had never seen anything like this. Bin Osman clearly knew what he was doing, cutting very slowly and keeping the woman alive far longer than Botros would have ever thought possible. What was left of her looked more like a butchered hog than the remains of a human being.

  It was typical of bin Osman to have his fun and then leave Botros to clean up his mess
. The arrogant Malaysian considered himself to be above Botros and his men. Botros loathed bin Osman almost as much as he loathed the decadent Westerners whose entire world he and bin Osman were in the final stages of permanently upending. The fact that he couldn't do this without the Malaysian's help was the only thing that kept Botros from slitting the swine's throat. As he looked at the bloody mess tied to the chair in the middle of the building, he admitted to himself that a healthy amount of fear also kept him from disposing of bin Osman.

  Botros ordered his men to clean up the mess and remove the large woman's carcass. He would have preferred to abandon this site altogether, kill that miserable addict who owned the place along with his harlot of a wife and get back to the racetrack, but bin Osman had left the Maurstad girl tied up in the cleaning room at the rear entrance of the building. He'd kept her alive in part to motivate her father to activate the nuclear device once they placed it in the recently abandoned California State Automobile Association headquarters in the heart of San Francisco. All of the men who had been hired to work as security guards at the building belonged to the BNG, meaning that bin Osman and his men would have the complete run of the place.

  They had chosen the building because of its proximity to the hotels where the three traitorous Islamic leaders were staying. Those men suckled at the teat of Western decadence and were a disgrace to all of Islam, with their so-called progressive policies. They were moving their countries away from Sharia law and had to be eliminated. The fact that they would eliminate most of San Francisco, the most decadent city in the most decadent nation since the waning days of ancient Rome, was only icing on the cake.

  Bin Osman had taken Maurstad with him to San Francisco, but first he had made the man watch as he carved up the scientist's wretched wife. The only thing that brought the scientist back to a state resembling sanity was the knowledge that if he didn't cooperate and arm the bomb, bin Osman would do the same to his daughter.

  Not that bin Osman had any intention of sparing the girl. Botros knew that the main reason bin Osman kept the girl alive was because he intended to torture her, too, after the bomb was activated. After he had sliced the daughter into pieces in front of her father, Botros had no doubt that he would do the same to the father. Meaning that Botros and his men would have two more messes to clean up before they could leave this disgusting place.

  A bleating car horn outside the door broke his train of thought. Botros looked through the viewing slot they'd built into the side of the building and saw that it was the BNG members who had been assigned to stalk Eddie Anderson. He knew they wouldn't be there if they hadn't killed or captured the young American. One of his men pressed a button on a box mounted on a steel post sunk into the cement to the left of the door, where it could be reached from the cab of a vehicle, and the big overhead door began to rise on its tracks toward the ceiling. A gaudy Mitsubishi with a racing wing drove into the building, followed by an equally gaudy pickup truck that rode just inches off the ground on ridiculously sized wheels and tires.

  The BNG had no idea what Botros and bin Osman were up to; they'd been ordered to assist the men by their parent organization in the Philippines and like good soldiers they carried out their orders, but that didn't stop Botros from despising them as much as he despised all other Americans. The BNG members hadn't been informed of the plan to destroy San Francisco because the plan called for the BNG members to be destroyed with their city. These loyal soldiers in the service of decadence and depravity unknowingly worked to bring about their own demise, and they didn't appear to have the intelligence or intellectual curiosity to question what they were doing.

  When they shut off their loud vehicles, Botros could hear the grating sound of Eddie Anderson's voice shouting curses at the Filipinos from the back seat of the car. It looked like the Filipinos wanted to beat the loudmouthed American into submission, but there didn't appear to be room in the cramped back seat to take a swing at him. Botros' suspicions were confirmed when the Filipinos dragged Anderson out of the car and began beating him.

  Botros wished they had killed Anderson where they'd found him but he knew why they'd brought the American here. It was the same reason Botros couldn't let them beat the man to death in spite of the fact that doing so would be the most expedient route. He knew that the sick Malaysian who was calling the shots wanted the opportunity to torture Anderson, which was why they would be forced to keep the miserable creature alive until after bin Osman and his men returned from setting the bomb in San Francisco, which likely wouldn't be until early the next morning.

  Botros worried that the Malaysian's twisted obsession would bring about the failure of their plan; every loose end was one more weak point in their plan, and the big American who had been tormenting them since Qatar was the loosest end of all. There should be no way for the man to know where they were or what they were doing, but he had already proved that he was capable of the impossible. He'd discovered the warehouse, and he'd uncovered Team Free Flow's link to the plutonium. He had almost discovered the plutonium twice, and he'd dispatched every team that Botros and bin Osman had sent after him with seeming ease.

  Botros consoled himself with the fact that they should be safe here, and even if, by some miracle, Cooper did find his way to the compound, they'd placed well-armed guards around the perimeter of the building. Cooper's luck couldn't hold out forever.

  * * *

  The human scarecrow forced Bolan inside the trailer at gunpoint. If the man had ever possessed the capacity for abstract thought, the scrambling that his brains had taken from years of drug abuse had banished that capacity and he didn't bother to disarm the soldier, even though he wore his Desert Eagle on a leg holster outside of his pants and had the Fairbairn-Sykes strapped to the opposite leg. The man barely seemed to know where he was, but that didn't make the shotgun he pointed at the Executioner any less lethal.

  The two entered the structure in what should have been a combination kitchen-living room, with the two spaces separated by a counter and overhead cupboards. But the kitchen had not seen any cooking in a long while, judging from the amount of trash piled on the stove and counters, and the living room had not seen any living, since it too was covered with garbage.

  The place smelled like an indoor trash dump. The toothless man with the shotgun motioned for the Executioner to move down the hallway to the bedroom area where he'd seen the man injecting drugs earlier. Bolan checked each room they passed for signs of life, but saw none.

  When they got to the bedroom, the smell changed from garbage to urine and sweat, but it wasn't the smell of normal sweat, the kind a person got from hard work; rather, it was the sick, salty smell of a junkie lying on a sidewalk in a pool of his own fluids. It was the smell of humans in the process of dying.

  When they entered the room, the woman who had been unconscious earlier stirred and rose up. She made no attempt to cover her naked, emaciated body. "What you got there, Randy?" she asked.

  "I found this one out poking around by the meth lab. He killed McVeigh."

  It figures that this clown would name his dog after one of America's most notorious terrorists, Bolan thought, but said nothing.

  "I need you to go out and tell that Osman fellow that we caught some kind a soldier poking around the place."

  "He left about an hour ago," the woman said. "They took that white van and headed north on the highway."

  "Can you watch the big guy here, Lee Ann?" The man handed the shotgun to the woman.

  Lee Ann gave a predatory look. "I think I can take care of him. Randy, you go on ahead and do what you have to do."

  12

  Bin Osman stood on the loading dock as the BNG member backed the white cargo van into the loading bay in the basement of the abandoned CSAA building. He followed it inside just before the BNG members who had been hired as security guards closed the overhead door behind them. He gave instructions and guided the forklift he'd rented as another gang member loaded the pallet that held the container with
the plutonium. He had the driver transport it to the back of the loading area. Then he did the same with the explosive device that Maurstad had assembled. When bin Osman had the equipment where he wanted it, he went into the back of the van to get Maurstad himself.

  He'd had the scientist bound tightly, but he probably needn't have worried; Maurstad lay on the floor in a nearly catatonic state, his soft weeping interrupted only by the occasional violent sob. Perhaps Botros had been correct; perhaps he had gone too far when he dismembered this man's wife before his very eyes. The act seemed to have destroyed the mind of his nuclear scientist, but as far as bin Osman was concerned, it had been worth the price.

  He bent over the weeping man and grabbed him by the lapels of his sport jacket. "Dr. Maurstad," bin Osman said. "You must compose yourself. We still have work to do."

  When he failed to get a response from the man he slapped him hard across the face. This caused the man to cast his wild eyes in bin Osman's direction. "You have seen the fate that is in store for your daughter if you do not cooperate, Dr. Maurstad. Now I suggest you pull yourself together and finish your work."

  The mention of his daughter seemed to focus the man and after bin Osman untied him he stood, no longer sobbing, although on close inspection bin Osman noticed that tears still poured from his eyes.

  "What do I do now?" he asked bin Osman.

  "Now you arm the weapon with the plutonium and set the timer."

  "I'll need an NBC suit."

  "Of course you will." Bin Osman had one of his men get the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical protection suit they'd secreted away on the site. Bin Osman knew that Maurstad really didn't need an NBC suit — he would not live nearly long enough to develop cancer after handling the plutonium — but he couldn't tell Maurstad that if he wanted the man to cooperate and complete the final steps to activate the bomb.