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  * * *

  Bolan knew he was in trouble when he examined the explosive device. It differed radically from the schematic drawings he'd pulled from Gunthar Maurstad's corpse and the instructions he'd received from Kurtzman didn't match up with what he saw before him. Kurtzman had a team of experts on standby to help talk him through disabling the device, but he had no cell phone signal in the underground storage area covered by thirty stories of steel and concrete.

  A digital timer on the device indicated that it would explode in a little over six hours. Bolan sketched out a schematic of the wiring he saw on the device and went outside to call Kurtzman.

  Kurtzman patched him into a conference call with the group of explosive experts that Hal Brognola had assembled to assist the Executioner in dismantling the device.

  "It sounds like Maurstad had to deviate from his original plan at the last minute," Tom Gardiner, one of the team members, said, and the others concurred. "My guess is that he had to rig some sort of off-the-shelf clock to the detonator and was forced to improvise."

  The men had copies of Maurstad's original drawings, and Bolan described the changes he'd seen on the actual device.

  "This isn't good," Gregory Lefrooth, one of the other team members, said. "I think I know what he did." Lefrooth explained his theory to the others and they agreed that his hypothesis was almost certainly correct.

  "This could be disabled by clipping a single wire. The trouble is that there's no way for us to tell which wire it is. The only way would be to dismantle the device, but that would risk detonation."

  "It doesn't sound like a very stable setup," Gardiner interjected. "I think upsetting the detonator would almost certainly set off the bomb."

  The others agreed.

  "It sounds like clipping a wire is the clear way to go," Bolan said. "So how do I decide which wire it is?"

  "From what you describe," Gardiner said, "I don't think Maurstad set the bomb up to detonate if you clip the wrong wire."

  "So I can just start cutting wires until the clock quits counting down?" Bolan asked.

  "I don't think it will be that easy. I believe that cutting the wires might affect the rate of the countdown. Cut the wrong wire, and six hours could become six minutes. Or six seconds."

  "Couldn't I just disable the timer?" Bolan asked.

  "You could, but that won't stop the detonator. The timer is just there to provide information; it doesn't control anything. The only thing you'll accomplish by disabling the timer would be to prevent you from knowing when the bomb was going to explode."

  "So I'm going to have to start cutting wires and hope for the best."

  "That looks like it's your only option," Gardiner said.

  * * *

  Bolan crouched over the device with wire cutters in hand. He estimated how long it would take him to cut all the wires should he clip the wrong one first and speed up the detonation process. The fact that the device was fairly large — the tubular object stood almost four feet high and was about thirty inches in diameter at its widest point — and that the wires were not located in one spot but ran in and out of the complex device in what appeared to be a haphazard fashion, conspired to slow down his reaction time. In his mind he plotted out an order for cutting the wires that seemed most possible to do in less than six seconds.

  With one eye on the timer, he cut the first wire, ready to start cutting the rest as fast as he could should the timer speed up. It didn't speed up, but neither did it stop counting down. He moved to the next wire, again mentally preparing himself for the mad dash of cutting all the wires in under six seconds should he clip the wrong wire.

  When Bolan clipped the next wire, the countdown on the timer switched from five hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-six seconds to five minutes and seventeen seconds. Bolan still had seven wires to cut, but even though this last cut hadn't worked out as planned, he continued in the same sequence he'd mapped out in his head. It was the only way he would be able to cut the remaining six wires in the allotted time should the minutes switch to seconds.

  Bolan cut the next wire in his sequence and nothing happened, but the wire after that tripped the sequence from minutes to seconds. The soldier switched into his alternative plan without hesitation. His life had depended on his timing ever since he'd begun his war and he'd developed a mental clock that was as reliable as a metronome. He clipped the first, the second, and the third wires in less than three seconds, but the fourth was around the far side of the device. With his mental clock keeping pace with the timer, he reached around and clipped the final wire.

  The timer stopped.

  His mental clock told him that he had less than fractions of a second to spare before the device detonated. Mack Bolan had perhaps the strongest nerves of any man who had ever walked the Earth, but coming this close to being on top of an exploding nuclear bomb had shaken him. It wasn't his own mortality that had rattled his nerves; it was the fact that he'd come so close to letting down his country and bringing about the deaths of hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of people. The soldier took a deep breath and looked at the timer. He'd stopped the countdown with just twenty-three one hundredths of a second left before detonation.

  Bolan realized he was drenched with sweat. It was hot in the storage area behind the loading docks, but the soldier knew that wasn't the reason for the sweat. He looked around at the other men in the room. Osborne and the four surviving members of the BNG were as drenched with sweat as he was. The five men stared at him, their eyes wide, their jaws hanging slack, as if trying to speak, but no one said a word.

  After an uncomfortably long time, Osborne broke the silence.

  "You did it?" he asked.

  "We did it," Bolan replied.

  "What about those four?" Osborne asked.

  "I told them they're free to go, so they're free to go."

  The Executioner looked at the four men. "This doesn't mean my friend here won't come after you the next time you break the law," he told them. "You've seen what he's like when he's mad. Now get out of here before I change my mind."

  When they'd left, Bolan walked out to the loading bay and called Kurtzman to have him send in a team to dispose of the device.

  Epilogue

  Eddie Anderson got a good start off the pole position and rode one of the best races of his life. The only person who could run with him was his teammate, Daniel Asnorossa, but he never got within three seconds of Anderson.

  He was riding the race of his life, but he couldn't shake the thought of his brother Darrick from his head, so he decided to go with it and imagined he was following Darrick. Eddie had watched Darrick race this track dozens of times, and he'd memorized every line his older brother had ever taken through every corner, but he'd never been able to put together the perfect lap here quite like Darrick could. Now, in his imagination, he was watching Darrick take the absolute perfect line. Eddie poured on the gas and was running well ahead of the pace of everyone but Asnorossa, but he wasn't going fast enough to catch the image of his brother that he imagined in his head.

  Darrick's team had pulled out of the race entirely. The discovery of the bodies in the Team Free Flow garage had created incredible turmoil in the paddock, and there had even been talk of canceling the race. Ultimately the promoters decided to go on with the event, figuring that the body count might rise significantly if they tried to turn back tens of thousands of rabid fans on race day. They figured the crowd would be especially incensed once they learned the reason for the cancellation had been because of a tragedy that had befallen a third-rate back marker team that absolutely no one cared about after the death of its star rider, Darrick Anderson.

  No one really cared about Team Free Flow, but Darrick's name still meant something to the crowd, and Eddie had noted hundreds of people wearing T-shirts with images of Darrick from Darrick's winning years. Many even carried banners with Darrick's name on them.

  But even more carried banners with Eddie's name on them, and
for every T-shirt with Darrick's image, there were three with Eddie's. But the Darrick banners were all that mattered to Eddie. He was riding for his brother as much as he was riding for himself and his team. And he was riding extremely well. He passed his pit board, which told him that Asnorossa had fallen to four seconds behind him.

  In his mind he was chasing his brother, who seemed to disappear into the heat waves shimmering up off the hot asphalt. Eddie was riding right on the edge of his tire-performance envelope, and even though he knew better than to risk losing the front end and crashing, costing him valuable points and perhaps ultimately the championship, he pushed his bike even harder trying to catch up with his imagined sibling.

  In his mind, Eddie noticed his brother was taking slightly different lines through the corners than he'd remembered him taking. Eddie followed these imagined lines, which were unorthodox, but they worked. He apexed a bit earlier in some corners and a bit later in others, deviating from the accepted fast line through Laguna Seca, but there was a method to his madness. Eddie began to adopt the lines he imagined his brother taking and he started to shave time off his laps. After putting together several laps with the new lines, he passed his pit board to see that he'd just set a new lap record, and not just the lap record for race times — he'd set an all-time lap record, beating his qualifying record set the previous day by nearly half a second.

  Eddie knew he had more in him and his bike. He continued to follow the strange lines he imagined his brother taking and his lap times continued to drop. Four laps before the race was over, he set his fastest lap, beating his record of the previous day by over a second.

  Asnorossa still hung with him until his fastest lap, falling back only five seconds by the time Eddie set the record. But on that incredible lap, Asnorossa pushed it too hard and he went off the track in Rainey Curve, exactly where Eddie had gone off in practice. Asnorossa almost made it back on track but dropped the bike in the kitty litter just off the edge of the asphalt. He got the bike back up before it stalled and got back on track. The pair of Ducatis had built up such an amazing lead over the third-place rider that Asnorossa was eventually able to bring his bike in at second place, despite his off-track adventure.

  Meanwhile Eddie kept up his blistering pace, but he still couldn't catch his imagined riding companion. He was still going faster than anyone ever had before, and on the final lap Eddie wheelied past the finish line, taking the checkered flag.

  The crowd lost its collective mind. In his imagination, Eddie saw Darrick turn around and flash him a V-for-victory sign.

  Table of Contents

  Don Pendίeton's The Executioner Death Run

  The Mack Bolan Legend

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Epilogue