Prison Code Read online

  Bolan pulled down his goggles to shield his eyes, and fired.

  The security door flew backward off its hinges in a pulse of smoke and blast. The soldier pulled a flash-stun from one of his pouches as men within the barn shouted and screamed. He pulled the pin and tossed in the grenade. Light flashed and sound cracked and Bolan stepped into the firefly swarm of pyrotechnic aftereffect. Kurt lay beneath the blackened door moaning. He gasped as Bolan walked across the door. The rows of stone cow stalls lay empty. Sawdust sifted down from the wooden boards above as men shouted and ran about upstairs. Stone stairs led up to a closed wooden hatch in the floor; an open door to the left led downward into the cellar. The element of surprise was lost and Bolan was severely outnumbered. He had to make a decision. It was a grand old barn, and it pained him, but he jacked a white phosphorus round into his M-203 and nuked the stairs heading up. Men above roared and screamed in alarm as burning white smoke and particulate funneled upward into the wooden barn above.

  Bullets cracked and spalled against the stone at Bolan’s feet as gunners above began firing down through the floorboards. The soldier hugged the wall and jacked a fresh grenade into the breech of his M-203 and didn’t deploy the standoff probe. He aimed where the main floor support beams met overhead, and fired. With a direct hit the High Explosive Dual Purpose—HEDP—round was designed to penetrate two inches of steel vehicle armor. The ancient and brittle oak of the beams stood no chance. The upper floor of the barn dropped like a falling bridge. Men screamed as the floor fell out from beneath them, and they tumbled to the stone floor or their bodies broke on the stall divides. Bolan ran for the cellar door as the floor continued its collapse and a black Lincoln Town Car, a Jeep and two pickups joined the landslide. Orange light expanded and fire whooshed as the collapse of the floor sucked heat and flame from the stairwell into the upper story and the barn began to burn in earnest.

  Bolan spoke into his phone. “Police and Fire, Bear. Report multiple shots fired. Multiple suspects. I’ll be in the basement.”

  “Copy that, Striker.”

  The Executioner turned to the stairs leading down as hell erupted behind him.

  A big man with slicked-back hair, wearing a suit, erupted out of the cellar stairs at the run. He carried a Glock in each hand and goggled at the sight of Bolan and raised his pistols. “Motherfucker!”

  Bolan’s silenced Colt whispered five rounds into the gunner’s chest and sent him tumbling back down the steps. The soldier loaded a fresh grenade into the smoking breech of M-203. He tossed a flash-stun grenade down the stairs and turned his head as it detonated. Bolan locked the steel door behind him and descended to the cellar as the blast echoes reverberated around him. He stepped over the thug’s corpse on the landing and entered the cellar. Two hanging bulbs lit the bare, stone enclosure, and the shock of the stun grenade had shattered a third. Another suited thug reeled from the sensory overload of the flash-stun grenade, drunkenly waving an Uzi pistol. Bolan cracked the man across the jaw with the butt of the Colt and dropped him. The cellar was a double space and Bolan went through the door between them, his weapon leveled.

  The soldier caught sight of a snarling, bald, middle-aged man in an expensive suit just as the steel door of the safe room started to slide shut. The soldier made another decision. The door breaker wouldn’t crack this door, and the full HEDP might kill the person behind it.

  Either way, he wasn’t going to let it close.

  Bolan fired. The armor-piercing round breached the door inches before it locked, and expended its jet of molten metal and superheated gas into whatever lay behind. The soldier strode to the entry. The twisted and blackened door had stopped on its track. Bolan shoved and it slid back. Black smoke filled the enclosure as the phosphorus burned. The most fascinating aspect of the safe room was the second door opening onto a darkened tunnel. The soldier stepped over the blackened, blistered and moaning man on the floor and moved toward the computer at the burning workstation. He snatched the flash drive from the USB port as it started to melt. The desktop had taken a jet of molten metal. The screen was shattered glass and crumpled plastics, with sparks coming out of it. Bolan hit Eject on the keyboard and the tray miraculously opened, delivering a pitted and smoke-damaged disk. Bolan pocketed the data and turned on his suspect.

  “Hi.”

  The burned man glared up at Bolan with pure, unadulterated hatred. “Fuck you.”

  “You have significant burns. You want medical help?”

  The burned man opened his hand. He was holding a smartphone. An application on the screen was counting down from five. Bolan lunged for the second door and slammed the big red Close button with his palm as he dived through. The steel door slid shut with a hiss, and the soldier’s world plunged to pitch-black.

  The tunnel smelled of fresh earth, and it rained down on him as the ground shook with a significant detonation. The door didn’t fly open, and heat and a shockwave didn’t tear out Bolan’s lungs. Dirt sprinkled down, but the tunnel didn’t collapse. The soldier clicked on his tactical light. The fresh tunnel was about thirty yards long and ended in what looked like the belly of a brick barbecue. The soldier did a little mental math and smiled.

  The tunnel ended directly beneath the well he had passed.

  Bolan came to the brick and looked at the hatch above. He swung the latch lever and stepped back as the hatch door fell open with a clang and the foot of dirt that had covered it rained down.

  Bolan grabbed rungs and started climbing.

  The rungs disappeared and turned into what seemed like random holes and stone protrusions that would take more than a cursory glance to detect as a ladder. Bolan grabbed the lip of the well and pulled himself back onto the surface. The barn was hurling flames into the sky. Bolan watched the structure burn. He couldn’t tell how many Lincoln County Regulators or guests had escaped while he had gone spelunking, and he wasn’t going to step into the inferno to try to find out. Heat washed against him as he moved close to the fire.

  Tucker was gone. The tracks in the dirt indicated he had headed toward the road rather than going back for Dale. Police and Fire would find Dale and the dogs. Sirens began wailing in the distance on cue. The mission wasn’t FUBAR, but it could have gone one whole hell of a lot better. Bolan had never known rural, northeast white supremacists that were willing to blow themselves up for their cause. The soldier began his extraction.

  Something very odd and very ugly was going on in Lancaster.

  Chapter 2

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  “THIS IS SOME sophisticated code,” Aaron Kurtzman admitted.

  Bolan sat at the conference table with Kurtzman and Akira Tokaido. Each man had a laptop before him, and they were connected. The confiscated flash drive was connected to Kurtzman’s computer and code scrolled down each man’s screen. Bolan didn’t know much about writing or breaking code, but if Kurtzman was impressed then so was he. “How sophisticated?”

  Kurtzman made a noise. “Unless the Lincoln County Regulators happen to have an idiot savant cousin who sits in his overalls all day picking a banjo and dreaming in code?”

  Tokaido laughed.

  Bolan considered his brief relationship with Tucker and Dale. “It is difficult to imagine.”

  “Then this is outsider work. I’m talking top of the line.”

  “How top of the line?”

  The computer wizard sighed in grudging admiration at the code scrolling down his laptop’s screen. “This is so good there are only a handful of humans who have this kind of talent.”

  Bolan waggled his eyebrows. “And two of them work for Stony Man.”

  Kurtzman stopped short of blushing. Mack Bolan didn’t hand out praise often, and when he did he meant every word of it. Tokaido did blush.

  “Yeah, well, that’s t
he problem, Mack. You guys yanked me out of nowhere before I became famous, and gave me a dream job. People like me are writing the new generation of computer code. A younger mind can do, accept and conceptualize things that an older one can no longer intuit, much less—”

  “Watch it....” Kurtzman intoned.

  “So like I’m saying. We can’t just assume this is Russian, PRC or Iranian. In fact given who’s using it, I think that makes it unlikely as hell.”

  Kurtzman frowned.

  Bolan sipped coffee as the old school and new school of cybernetic warfare butted heads. “What is it, Bear?”

  Tokaido interjected. “Bear says his gut says it smells military. And it does have an old-school, military vibe to it, I’ll give it that. And it’s kinda funny what Bear said about idiot savant. It’s like someone with talent stepped out of a time machine from the past and started playing with the new toys. It’s like he’s brilliant but he’s still learning.”

  “That’s an interesting hunch.”

  Kurtzman nodded. “I agree.”

  Bolan turned to Kurtzman. “Anything off the disk?”

  “Well, fire and blast damage don’t exactly play well with CDs.”

  “Anything?”

  “It was written by someone different, and with less talent. That was easy to determine. As a matter of fact, we can tell that the disk was written over with the new code.”

  “Any chance it’s a Trojan horse?”

  “I can’t be a hundred percent yet, but I’d say no. The problem is the writer of the original code seems to know his stuff could be broken, so he relied a lot on simple word replacement, and it’s smelling like the word replacement is personal recognition.”

  Bolan had run into it before. “So it’s gobbledygook unless you get the reference.”

  “Exactly. The simplest example was the Japanese High Command’s order to the Imperial Fleet to bomb Pearl Harbor. We had broken their code, but the order was simply ‘climb Mount Fuji.’ That could mean anything, except to the person who knew what it meant, and the only person who did happened to be Admiral Yamamoto. It certainly didn’t mean anything to us until afterward.”

  “What words have we gotten?”

  “Not enough. Due to the damage on the disk we have less than fifty percent decoded, and our certainty of accuracy is varying from forty-five to eighty-five percent.”

  “What are your strongest words?”

  “I swear, Mack. It’s like we’re playing newspaper word puzzle codes, but we don’t even have half the vowels yet. And that’s on the crappy damaged code, much less the shiny new one.”

  “Anything.”

  “We have Pennsylvania,” Kurtzman snorted. “That was a no-brainer. We threw down Regulators and think we have multiple hits. But the problem with word replacement is you can take it into infinite incarnations.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, we’re looking for a national security threat. We squeezed president out of it.”

  “The Lincoln County Regulators are going to assassinate the President of the United States?”

  “Could be president of anything,” Kurtzman admitted. “It could be the president of the Pennsylvania Hell’s Angels chapter. They don’t get along. If we assume our current replacements are correct, we also have the words devil and town, but I’m assuming those are code words for something else.”

  Bolan slowly straightened. “Why would you do that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re strong on the word Pennsylvania?”

  “It’s our best, it’s our first keystone to both codes and it keeps building words from the damaged disk.”

  “And that gave you devil and town?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bolan took a long breath and let it out. He’d been raised in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In his youth his mother had told him that hell lay across the Pennsylvania border if he didn’t keep his nose out of trouble. “Duivelstad.”

  Tokaido blinked. “What?”

  Kurtzman’s eyes flared. “Well, now, that is an interesting leap of logic, Striker.”

  Tokaido looked back and forth between his boss and Bolan. “What?”

  “Duivelstad,” Kurtzman confirmed. “Devil Town, from the Dutch.”

  Tokaido blinked. “Yeah? And?”

  Bolan sighed as he saw a personal worst-case scenario rolling out before him. “Duivelstad Penitentiary is the worst prison in the United States, and it’s in Pennsylvania.”

  Duivelstad Maximum Security Prison

  “HERE WE GO....”

  “Oh boy, this one is going to be trouble.” Correctional Officer Frederic “Fatty” Barnes watched the new prisoner being processed, then approach the gate to general population.

  “Oh, shit!” Officer Pablo Zavala straightened in alarm. “That’s the special transfer!”

  Barnes sighed. “What’s special about his transfer?”

  Zavala looked and acted like a matador who happened to be wearing a correctional officer’s uniform. He gave Barnes a sad sigh in return.

  Officer Fatty Barnes lived up to his name. He bore a disturbing resemblance to Porky Pig in a guard’s uniform. Everything about him was round, pink and hairless. He lived with his mother and had failed the physical the last three times, but felt certain that his union wouldn’t let him be fired. He mostly opened and closed doors, and despite being a poor student in high school he found he excelled at paperwork. His fellow employees at the prison were mostly fond of him. The cons called him Fatty to his face, but most were grudgingly aware that he went out of his way to treat everyone fairly. Despite his appearance, Barnes was very handy with the old-fashioned side-handled PR-24 baton he clung to rather than the collapsible clubs everyone else carried. And he was somewhat famous in the yard for talking people out of altercations rather than settling them.

  Barnes also refused to accept favors, bribes, or take a taste of anything going on, which often left him out of the loop when it came to what took place beyond the yard.

  Zavala glanced both ways and lowered his voice. “Listen, Gordo.”

  Barnes had always like that Zavala called him Gordo. It still meant fatso in Spanish, but Barnes liked the sound of it much better. “What?”

  “Word is they transferred him in from Gitmo.”

  “Guantanamo Bay? To here?” Barnes goggled. “Really?”

  “Really, like from the secret wing, for political reasons. Check out this motherfucker.”

  Barnes checked out the motherfucker.

  There was something about the prisoner that made Barnes nervous. The newb was big, but not that big. Duivelstad had plenty of those, men built like bodybuilders, circus strongmen and sumo wrestlers. In Barnes’s experience the big prisoners were usually the least problem. His greatest unexplored passion was dog breeding, and like the giant breeds, Barnes found the big cons were usually the least active. They mostly lifted weights and stood around like nightclub bouncers for their respective gangs, intimidating people. It was the little, hatchet-faced guys built like whippets who started trouble and tried to shank everyone around them.

  This newb was a new breed entirely.

  Barnes took in the dishevelled black hair and the unshaved, strong jaw. His jacket read no tattoos, neither jail, gang nor military. He was an ongoing concern at six feet plus, but on top of that he projected like he was seven feet tall. Barnes had seen every type of prisoner walk through the gate: some shaking and crying and pri
me meat for the rape train; some mad-dogging everyone they laid eyes on; others acting like they didn’t care at all. Some came in acting as if they owned the place, others came in believing they actually did. Barnes frowned as he tried to put his finger on what disturbed him now. It was something in the eyes. They were arctic-blue in the sun-darkened face, and they seemed to take in everything. The man moved in a state of absolute awareness. It wasn’t like the con was acting as if he owned the place, it was more like he was going from point A to point B, point B might well be conquering Scotland, and woe unto anyone who stepped in his path.

  The prisoner stopped before Barnes and Zavala. Duivelstad was a privately owned prison, and old-fashioned. It issued dungarees and denim shirts rather than brightly colored “jungle” jumpsuits favored by state and federal penitentiaries. The prisoner held his two issue standard-blankets, a pillow, his spare change of clothing and a paper bag containing whatever few permissible personal items he had been allowed to bring in.

  Barnes sighed as Zavala immediately went in hard with his new-prisoner spiel. “No fighting, no fucking, no drugs or alcohol. You have been stripped and photographed. If you are found with any new tattoos at your next health inspection, you will face a loss of privileges. Needle marks or signs of drug use will be punished with the loss of privileges. As a newb you have no privileges, so fuck up early and you’ll never see them. The rules have already been explained to you in processing. I do not expect to have to explain them to you again.” Zavala’s voice dropped low. “And I don’t care how many special friends you make in the showers, gray-meat. You’ll never know what a real ass-reaming is until the day you cross me.”

  The prisoner turned eyes like tombstones on Zavala. The guard stopped just short of taking a step backward and putting his hand on his pepper spray, but it was clear that had been his first instinct. Barnes sighed again. He launched into his own spiel, which he knew from long experience, his appearance and his somewhat high-pitched, slightly lisping voice was about as useful as talking into a wind tunnel.