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  “So we hit the place at 5:30 p.m.,” Glenn said slowly, “and catch ’em with their pants down.”

  “That’s the plan, yes.”

  “A thirty-minute window,” Weinberg said, chewing a lip. “This is going to be tight. A few minutes either way and we’re screwed.”

  “It’s a gamble,” Bolan said honestly. “But worth the risk to take the place intact. I’m not paying you to knock over a fruit cart.”

  “Easy, chief. We can get the job done,” Gonzales said confidently.

  “Let’s hope so,” Bolan replied gruffly.

  “What normally happens during that hour?” Cosentini asked.

  “Lab maintenance,” Bolan said, touching the map in several locations with the highlighter. “Glassware has to be washed and filters replaced, or else the cooks would die from the fumes. Or even worse....”

  “Worse? What could possibly be worse than death?” Weinberg asked with a scowl, then smiled. “Ah, worse would be the excess exhaust fumes triggering the atmospheric sensors of the DEA!”

  “Ammonia is a bitch to control,” Bolan agreed. “Everything goes into the sewage system, along with the day’s accumulation of waste from the public washrooms.”

  “Damn, that’s a lot of ammonia to mask...” Gonzales said skeptically.

  “Ziggy regularly purchases a couple of tankers full of waste from a local septic-system cleaning company to mix in with that from the factory employees.”

  “Clever man.”

  Staying in character, Bolan grinned widely. “He used to be.”

  “So sneaking in through the sewer line is not an option?” Cosentini asked.

  “There are iron grates every ten feet, along with spinning blades to mix the run-off wash with the waste,” Bolan replied. “It would be like trying to swim through a wood chipper.”

  “Pass!”

  “How accurate are these?” Gonzales asked.

  “Very. I was there only a few days ago. These were made from the digital pictures I took.”

  “You just strolled in and started taking a few?”

  “Oh, they objected,” Bolan said, trying to sound like he was bragging. “But not very strenuously.”

  Weinberg punched the man on the arm. “That took real balls,” she said, grinning. “These fences hot?”

  “Yes, with razor wire on top.”

  “Dogs?”

  “No. But guards here, here, here and here.”

  “Piece of cake,” Weinberg told him. “Although it would be even easier if we could fly over the factory and drop the Grizzly on them.”

  “Tempting, but no.”

  “Pity.”

  “With Mr. Turrin, Kolawski and Hogan gone,” Cosentini said slowly, “we’re already down three people. Any chance we could hire some local muscle to help?”

  “Not a chance,” Bolan stated as the Hercules tilted slightly. “Everybody in this section of the state works for Ziggy.”

  “And there’s no time to find people out of state,” Weinberg muttered, scratching under her holster. “Okay, then, we go at dusk.”

  Pulling an old-fashioned pocket watch out of his pants, Glenn pressed the stud on top and the lid snapped open. “That will be in three hours,” he said, closing it again. “Adjusting for our current speed and headwind.”

  “Just enough time for food and a quick nap,” Cosentini said.

  “After which we prep the Grizzly,” Bolan countered, pulling out a buck knife. Walking toward the canvas lump, he snapped out the blade and started cutting a hole in the resilient sheet.

  Chapter 9

  Columbus, Ohio

  Pausing in the lee of the hedge maze, a pair of uniformed guards shouldered their assault rifles to light a joint, and dragged the sweet, dark smoke deep into their lungs.

  “Ah... That’s the stuff, Cletus,” the guard said after a long exhale. “Not like the shit they cook in the lab.”

  “Weed is natural, Devon,” Cletus agreed in a high-pitched voice, trying not to exhale yet. “Meth is just a bunch of chemicals. Rots your teeth, rots your brain...”

  “Weed cures cancer,” Devon said, accepting back the joint.

  “Does it?”

  “Near enough,” he replied with a shrug. “Weed is legal in California. Just need a doctor’s prescription.”

  “Doctor Feelgood? I know that guy.”

  “You are that guy.” Devon chuckled. “So what do you think happened to the boss? Haven’t seen him in days.”

  “Who the fuck knows? We work for a zoner. The man puts enough product up his nose to kill a velociraptor.”

  “Meth,” Devon said as if expelling a piece of offal from his mouth. “You ever see the guys in the lab? They look like astronauts in those crazy suits.”

  “Crazy,” Cletus said with great feeling.

  Suddenly a low roar filled the evening air.

  As the guards turned, a hulking great machine exploded out of the hedge maze and charged straight for them.

  Screaming in fright, Devon dropped his M14 and dashed away, shouting for help. Working the arming bolt, Cletus stood his ground and opened fire. The stuttering stream of 5.56 mm rounds musically ricocheted off the armored prow of the Grizzly like autumn hail.

  It only took a moment for him to switch to the 40 mm grenade launcher, but that was enough. As he swung up the barrel, the Grizzly slammed into the man and he violently doubled over the armored prow then rebounded, spewing red life from every orifice.

  “That was disgusting,” Weinberg said, using the back of her hand to wipe some splatter off her face as more blood continued to drip through the gun port.

  Careening the Grizzly past a marble fountain, Bolan sent the machine crashing through a flower garden, then braked hard. The end of the Grizzly fishtailed wide and slammed into the guard kiosk at the front gate. The bricks exploded in every direction, and the men inside never even had a chance to scream as they died, brutally reduced to crimson pulp.

  Slamming the pedal to the floor, Bolan shifted into high gear. The diesel engine roared with power and the wheels squealed as the Grizzly shot forward.

  “Brace yourself!” Bolan shouted, aiming for the front door.

  They only got halfway there before incoming rounds peppered the hull of the Grizzly from several directions. The vehicle hit the revolving door like the fist of God.

  Noise and chaos ruled for a moment and everything loose inside the Grizzly went flying from the recoil of the jarring impact. Then they were through and speeding across the smooth terrazzo floor of the spacious lobby.

  As guards appeared, Weinberg and Gonzales opened up with their AK-101 assault rifles and the men danced like mad puppets from the hammering barrage of 5.56 mm hardball rounds. Only one of them got off a shot, and the bullet smacked into the Lexan window alongside Bolan, the .45 slug going flat and just sticking there like a bug on a windshield.

  Some sort of twinkling kinetic statue filled the center of the lobby, so Bolan smashed through the reception desk to the sound of splintering wood.

  “Welcome to hell, boys!” Glenn shouted, triggering short bursts from his weapon.

  Unexpectedly, a grenade dropped into the lobby from an upper level, but the Grizzly was already moving down the side hallway when the charge detonated. The blast sounded louder than doomsday inside the building, and shrapnel rattled the rear doors of the Grizzly. Cosentini flinched and touched his cheek, the fingers coming away streaked with red.

  “Damn gun ports,” he snarled, wiping the hand clean on his pants.

  Unstoppable, the Grizzly barreled down the long hallway, killing two more guards in the process, the terrazzo floor smeared with red tire prints. The sides of the transport were loudly scraping out chunks of plaster from both walls, and behind them
was a billowing cloud of drywall dust and diesel exhaust.

  Banking hard, Bolan sent the Grizzly down a side corridor, killing two guards before he even registered their presence. In a cold dose of reality, the soldier slowed the armored transport. If those had been some of the civilian workers, Bolan would have betrayed his own code. That was unacceptable.

  “Something wrong with the engine?” Gonzales asked, yanking a spent magazine from his weapon.

  “Don’t want to miss the turn!” Bolan lied, redoubling his efforts to watch everything. Unfortunately, there was blood and dust on the front windows. Combined, they had formed a sticky paste that he knew from experience the wipers would only smear and not remove.

  By now, alarms were howling and linked steel gates began rattling across the hallway.

  Maintaining speed, Bolan hit the first gate halfway down, and the Grizzly punched through with the tortured sound of twisting metal. The second gate barely managed to lock into position before the Grizzly hit. The prow rose high and a Lexan headlight shattered as the engine controls slung into the red. For a long second Bolan thought they weren’t going to make it through, but then the entire gate ripped free from the walls to violently crash onto the floor.

  Jouncing forward, Bolan lost control of the rampaging machine and clipped a photocopy machine set into a small alcove. A blizzard of loose papers filled the hallway as he regained control and took another sharp turn. Directly ahead of him was a set of ordinary-looking swing doors.

  Bolan had not told the others, but this was the weak point of his plan. He had not been able to get a good look at them when he was here last. If they were reinforced strong enough to stop the Grizzly, the mission ended here. But there was no other option. As he had so many times before, Bolan put his life in the hands of fate and let the dice roll.

  The Grizzly crashed through the flimsy doors, ripping them off the hinges and sending them hurtling away. One of them hit a stack of crates, causing a minor avalanche, and the other landed squarely on a guard struggling to eject a jam from his rifle. Blood splattered for yards.

  Banking hard, Bolan barely avoided plowing into a huge stack of fertilizer bags. Everywhere men and women wearing uniforms were madly running around, cursing and shouting.

  Just then, something slammed hard into the Grizzly. A tire blew and the shuddering transport started curving to the right.

  Fighting to regain control, Bolan frowned at the sight of a forklift alongside the APC, the blades jammed underneath the armored chassis.

  Glenn cut loose with his AK-101, the hail of rounds throwing off bright sparks as they ricocheted off the protective cage around the driver.

  As Weinberg and Gonzales also tried to kill the driver, Cosentini yanked open the roof hatch. Climbing halfway out, he jerked as a bullet slammed into his chest, the slug glancing off his body armor and merely ripping away a large swatch of cloth. However, the man lost his grip on the hatch and it slammed on the assault rifle, bending the hot barrel.

  Throwing the useless weapon away, Cosentini drew his sawed-off shotgun and fired both barrels. The driver of the forklift was blown out of his seat by the hell storm of fléchettes. The motor died instantly.

  Now only dragging a half ton of steel, Bolan angled for a concrete pillar. Cosentini barely had time to close to hatch before there was a deafening crash. The Grizzly jerked around in a semicircle, but the forklift came free and Bolan headed back toward his original goal.

  There was a prolonged explosion; it sounded like the transport was driving through the worst hailstorm of all time. Another tire blew and Weinberg cut loose with her assault rifle.

  “Atchisson!” she announced, reloading her AK-101.

  “Where?” Glenn demanded, angling his weapon for a target.

  “Dead!”

  Passing the badly scorched entrance to the stairwell, Bolan finally saw a plain brick wall off to the side. There was nothing stacked in front of it and he almost smiled.

  “Okay, here it gets tricky,” Bolan announced, braking to halt. “Glenn, open that!”

  “Open what?” the man demanded, looking around the warehouse.

  “I don’t know!” Bolan snapped, pointing at a thermal scanner on the control board. “But there are people on the other side, so find the sliding door, trapdoor, secret elevator, whatever, and make it fast.”

  Nodding, Glenn slung the assault rifle, grabbed the laptop and opened the rear doors. Almost instantly a prolonged burst of incoming rounds flattened on his body armor and the laptop. The big man staggered but kept moving and made it to the lee side of the Grizzly.

  “Okay, let’s buy him some time,” Bolan ordered, unbuckling his seat belt and grabbing a Kalashnikov.

  Jerking open the roof hatch again, Cosentini started heaving out stun grenades. He was hit twice before the first one detonated, the dazzling flash illuminating the warehouse with hellish intensity. As the glare faded away, a dozen guards could be seen blindly stumbling around, and the people in the transport mercilessly gunned them.

  “Six o’clock,” Gonzales said calmly, firing his assault rifle.

  Lumbering in from the loading dock, another forklift was headed their way, the blades in front extending through a steel waste container. Weinberg peppered the crude armor with her assault rifle as a diversion while Bolan drew the Desert Eagle, carefully aimed and squeezed off a single booming round.

  The canister of compressed propane gas on the back of the machine erupted into a fireball, engulfing the driver. A human torch, he shrieked insanely and fell off as the forklift veered randomly away to crash into a tall stack of empty pallets.

  “How’s it coming over there?” Cosentini shouted, slapping in a fresh magazine.

  “One minute!” Glenn replied. “Almost there!”

  “Freaking hope so,” Weinberg muttered, working the arming bolt to eject a jammed round. The bent cartridge went spinning away to land amid the mounds of spent brass covering the floor.

  Replacing Cosentini in the roof hatch, Bolan kept watch with the AK-101 cradled loosely in his grip. Every movement in the distant shadows was rewarded with a short burst of rounds, often accompanied by a cry of pain.

  However, it was getting more difficult to see. The air in the warehouse was murky with smoke from the countless small fires. Glancing backward, Bolan saw Glenn kneeling on the floor, typing madly on the laptop. A maze of wires ran from the military computer to an electronic lock inside an open hatch in the fake wall.

  “They’ll kill the power next,” Weinberg stated, just as the overhead lights died.

  Quickly, Bolan and the others pulled on night-vision goggles, then dialed for infrared.

  Sure enough, several barefoot people were silently running their way holding Claymore mines. Bolan let them get halfway, then carefully took them out with head shots, ending their brief span in this dimension.

  Suddenly, there was a loud grinding noise and a bright white light flooded the warehouse.

  “We’re in!” Glenn announced.

  Scrambling back behind the wheel, Bolan shifted the APC into Reverse and started backing into the opening. Gonzales held the back door while Glenn clambered inside.

  “Good job,” Weinberg said, nudging the man with a hip.

  He flashed a smile. “Ain’t nothing but a chicken wing, babe!”

  “Babe?”

  “You’re not quite done yet, lover boy,” Cosentini stated, pointing a finger.

  Ahead of the reversing Grizzly was a solid sheet of clear material. There were no doors, hatches, vents or openings of any kind. The meth lab was visible on the other side of the barrier. A dozen men and women in full-body environmental suits were huddled protectively under a long table in the far corner. The rest of the room was filled with bubbling retorts, reduction vats, cooking trays, boiling flasks and a crazy web of glass
tubing.

  Deep inside, Bolan was disgusted, and ached to destroy the crystalline poison. Just one tray could destroy a hundred lives, turning weak men and women into slaves, willing to do anything to obtain the money necessary for another hit, to smoke just one more bowl of sweet death.

  “Excellent,” Bolan said, trying to force some enthusiasm as he braked to a halt. “Glenn, find us a way in, but don’t open that wall! Everything on the other side is both flammable and poisonous.”

  “And worth millions,” Cosentini added, grinning widely. Grabbing the battered laptop, Glenn nodded curtly and exited the transport. As he began probing the wall, the people on the other side watched him with eyes filled with fear.

  Turning on the remaining headlight to hinder anybody coming his way, Bolan took the handheld microphone from the dashboard and thumbed the button on the side.

  “We have control of the lab,” he said, the amplified words booming across the war-torn warehouse.

  “Screw you, cop!” somebody shouted from the shadows.

  “Oh, we’re not the police.” Bolan chuckled. “Even more important than the lab, my hackers have crashed your mainframe and seized all of the overseas bank accounts.”

  He gave them a moment to absorb that information. “I am now in charge. This factory, and everything in it, now belongs to Anthony Giancova. Remember that name. I’m your new boss.”

  “Bullshit!” a man replied from somewhere. “When Ziggy returns he’ll—”

  “Dead,” Bolan interrupted. “Ziggy is dead. He was weak, and got burned.”

  For a few moments there was only silence. Then a group of heavily armed men walked out of the darkness.

  “When he was kidnapped off the roof, we kind of guessed that Ziggy was history,” the leader of the group said slowly, an Atchisson autoshotgun expertly balanced in his hands. “You do it?”

  “Yes.” Turning off the engine, Bolan exited the Grizzly and walked into the beam of headlight.

  There were hushed whispers at that. Bolan needed these people on his side to continue to run the business. A lot of them had just died in the battle, but that was just part of the job, part of their world.