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  At the signal from Grimaldi, Bolan was out of the plane. The plan had called for a low-level jump of one thousand feet above Lake Moomaw. The coordinates indicated that Shurish’s retreat was about a quarter mile off the lake, and hidden well from air observation by the natural greenery and mountainous woodlands of the Monongahela. The lake wasn’t frozen solid, but the ice was thick and coarse enough to provide a semidecent parachute landing. As the chute collapsed, the wind carried Bolan, his boots sliding across the ice while the chute acted as a makeshift sail. When the Executioner was about fifty feet from the shoreline, he slapped the quick releases and the parachute disengaged from the harness. Bolan’s momentum slowed and by the time he hit shore he was walking under his own power.

  The warrior dumped the chute pack and harness, and proceeded toward the location of the cabin. He was armed only with the Beretta and the Desert Eagle, but he was confident that would be enough. It was unlikely that Shurish would have any of the NIF terrorists actually accompanying him—it sounded as if the majority of them had gone down in Able Team’s raid at the wharf.

  Bolan moved through the woods, glancing occasionally at the gloomy, darkening sky overhead. He was running out of light, and that meant a full-court press to get to the location where they hoped Shurish was holed up. Almost half an hour elapsed before Bolan came upon a clearing and spotted the cabin. Actually, it was a bit more than a cabin. The home—probably paid for by whatever blood money Shurish had accepted from the NIF—was a single story log-cabin style, with a packed gravel drive that appeared to lead to an access road. There was a shiny limousine parked in the drive, positioned immediately behind a luxury sedan.

  The Executioner checked the perimeter for security and took quick notice of a small box that looked as if it housed an electric eye. Bolan moved to the box and placed one hand on it. There was no heat and no exterior exposures indicating it was wired to blow if molested. He located an access panel on the side and flipped it open to find the wires inside had been cut cleanly in two. Somebody had already neutralized the security system. That concerned Bolan, since it meant that Shurish had other enemies, enemies that were possibly inside.

  Bolan loosed the Beretta, thumbed the selector to single shot and kept low as he advanced on the house. He reached the porch steps unchallenged, ascended them and catfooted his way to the front door. The screen door was unlocked, and a careful twist of the doorknob produced a soft click. The door moved inward and Bolan slipped inside. He went low, bracing his shoulder against one wall of the foyer, and tracked the room with the muzzle of his pistol. All was quiet, and then he heard voices.

  Bolan took a deep breath and steeled his nerves, willing himself to an almost meditative state. He closed his eyes for a moment, turned his ear in the direction of the voices, then got to his feet and moved with stealth to a closed door five feet away. With the exception of a hallway light, the rest of the house was dark and gloomy. Shadows in the outside twilight played across the floors, and Bolan could feel a sense of foreboding creep over his skin and settle at the base of his neck.

  A small glow spilled from under the closed door. Bolan turned the handle and opened it just enough to gain a view of a descending stairwell: a basement. He opened the door a little more and pushed the Beretta ahead of him. His sights came to rest on a big, hulking figure with his back toward the Executioner. He was dressed in a tailored suit and in his hand Bolan saw a large pistol. Bolan could only see part of the man’s face, and a quick search of his mental files told him the face was familiar. He couldn’t immediately place the mug, and then it dawned on him. He’d seen this guy inside the home of Nicolas Lenzini.

  That explained the limo, and it also explained a hell of a lot more. Lenzini had forged some type of alliance with Malcolm Shurish, and whatever they had planned certainly wasn’t good. Kurtzman had reported some unusual electronic signatures coming from the area, and there was definite activity inside Lenzini’s network, even after the destruction of the satellite dish. Still, Bolan couldn’t understand it—he’d neutralized that system. They had shut down every major component and closed every hole. That could only mean that Shurish had masterminded a backup if all else failed, and proved MacEwan’s theory that only an exit code entered at the source would shut it down now and forever.

  Bolan opened the door and leveled his sights on the Mafia gunman’s head as he descended the stairs. The Executioner triggered the weapon on the run. The 135-grain semijacketed hollowpoint round punched through the hard guy’s skull and pitched his body onto a flimsy table. The table collapsed under the man’s weight and rained books, glasses and a pile of other debris onto the corpse as it hit the ground.

  Bolan reached the bottom of the steps and pegged two more hostiles. One of the mobsters was clawing for gun leather when the Executioner’s first shot caught him through the hand. The man pulled his arm free, his pistol clattering to the floor from beneath his jacket, the bones in the hand shattered and exposed. The man screamed as blood began to spurt uncontrollably in various directions. Bolan’s second round went straight through his gaping mouth and blew out the back of his head.

  The Executioner shoulder rolled past a couch where Lenzini was seated. The old man was screaming and coughing, obviously choking on his own saliva as he ordered the remaining bull to end the carnage. The Mafia soldier started firing, but he hadn’t been selective of his targets, and while his rounds found their mark it was not the correct one. Two of the .45-caliber bullets from the shooter’s pistol crashed through Lenzini’s chest, and the crime boss’s screams died in his throat, replaced by blood and lung tissue.

  Bolan came to one knee, braced his forearms across the back of the couch and steadied the pistol in a Weaver’s grip. The warrior unleashed a 3-round volley. The first round connected with the enemy gunman’s pistol hand, smashing bones and vital tissue and sending the pistol skittering across the floor. The remaining pair of 9 mm slugs punched through his skull, the first splitting his head open while the second did more of the same. The man’s nearly headless corpse staggered backward and connected with a support beam before collapsing to the concrete.

  The Executioner stood and tracked the room before he settled on Shurish’s quivering form—the guy was cowering in a corner. Fearful sobs emanated from him, and Bolan’s finger eased off the trigger. The warrior kept his pistol pointed at Shurish, but his eyes flicked to MacEwan and studied her with a practiced stare of concern. She didn’t look any worse for the wear.

  “It’s about time, Cooper,” she said.

  “I got a little sidetracked,” he growled. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, but the rest of the country won’t be if you don’t cut me loose.”

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he moved over to her and untied her bonds.

  She didn’t answer him until he had her untied. She rubbed her hands and rushed to a nearby computer terminal. “He’s activated the code to assemble the programs.”

  Bolan whirled and pointed the pistol at Shurish’s forehead. “Stop it, or I’ll kill you here and now.”

  “I didn’t want to do it,” Shurish cried. “I really didn’t want to do it! Lenzini made me start the sequence. I wasn’t going—”

  “Quit stalling and tell us how to stop it!”

  Shurish locked glances with MacEwan, who sat at the keyboard and waited expectantly for him to say something. “You have to wait until the precise moment. If you start the abort sequence before recompilations are complete, the program will lock you out of the system, and—”

  “Is there an exit code?” MacEwan screamed at him.

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Give it to her,” Bolan commanded him.

  Shurish began to give the instructions to her, and while Bolan barely understood a word of it, MacEwan was nodding in unison with his instructions. She began to type furiously, moving between keyboards and entering characters and digits at a furious pace. Numbers and letters echoed back to her on the screens, and Bolan wa
tched with fascination as her eyes scanned multiple lines of code that seemed to be moving across the terminal windows faster than any normal human being could have possibly hoped to read them. Still, it seemed like it made perfect sense to MacEwan.

  Finally, she said, “All right, we’re inside the system but we’re going to have to hook into Bear’s network in order to distribute the information across the SuperNet.”

  Bolan went to the phone, dialed the direct emergency number and handed the receiver to MacEwan. She quickly explained the situation and then nodded as Kurtzman obviously began to act on the information. She spit numbers and letters at him, going on continuously about IP addresses and subnet masks and gateway identifiers. A few minutes later, the mask of concentration was broken.

  MacEwan looked at Bolan, and with a wink and a cocksure grin she said, “There you go, Cooper. Nothing but Net.”

  And the Executioner laughed.

  Epilogue

  Now this is more like it, Jack Grimaldi thought.

  The Stony Man pilot looked out from the porch and studied the breathtaking views of the ranch. Tyra MacEwan’s home was nice, to say the least, but nothing could beat these kinds of views. The flier had decided to take some time off and he couldn’t think of anything better than spending that R&R with a beautiful and intelligent woman. Something had ignited a spark between Grimaldi and the gutsy, old-fashioned woman from Amarillo, and while he knew it wouldn’t last, he was comfortable with it in the here and now.

  MacEwan knew it as well; she knew there were reasons such a relationship couldn’t be permanent. Nonetheless, it didn’t stop them from enjoying a bit of time together, and he wondered what she was thinking even as they sat on the porch swing and rocked while she rested her head on his shoulder. Both had wounds that needed mending, internal and external, but that was okay. Grimaldi would go back to his job, eventually, and she would go back to hers, and that was probably the last they would ever see of each other.

  Still, it didn’t mean they couldn’t be together for right now.

  “How are you feeling?” MacEwan asked.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I think I’m feeling much better now that I’m here with you.”

  “I hate to bring it up,” she said, raising her head from his shoulder and looking at him.

  He saw the sparkling mischief in her eyes. “What?” he asked.

  “I was wondering how Cooper was doing?” She shook her head, laughed lightly and added. “No, wait. What is it you call him? ‘The Sarge’?”

  Grimaldi couldn’t resist a sheepish grin. “Yeah, the Sarge.”

  “Have you spoken with him?”

  “No, not since he left for parts unknown.”

  “You two have a strange relationship,” she stated. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “It’s crossed my mind once or twice,” Grimaldi replied easily. “But I owe that guy. You have no idea how much I owe that guy.”

  “What happened?”

  “I can’t talk about it, Tyra,” Grimaldi said. “You know that.”

  “Yes,” she whispered, settling her head back on his shoulder and snuggling against him. “I guess I do.”

  “Just suffice it to say that I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for him.” Grimaldi smiled, although he knew MacEwan couldn’t see it, and he thought of another time. A time long, long ago in a city called Las Vegas.

  “Where do you think he’s gone to?”

  Grimaldi sighed. “Not a clue. But you can bet wherever it is that it’s where he’s most needed.”

  “Doesn’t that guy ever slow down?”

  “This would be a much harsher and dangerous world if he slowed down. But that’s his way. He knows what he’s doing, and he does it extremely well. He’s a far better man than any I’ve known, Tyra. And he’s done far greater things than most men could ever hope to do. That’s just who he is. It’s what makes him who he is. Do you understand?”

  “Not entirely, I suppose,” she replied with a deep sigh. “But then it doesn’t really matter. I guess the important thing is that he’s out there risking his life so that all of us can have better ones.”

  “You do understand,” Grimaldi replied. “And wherever you go or whatever you do, the best thing in the world you can do for him is to remember that.”

  And as they sat together and watched the sun set, Jack Grimaldi did just that.

  He remembered.

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-7406-1

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Jon Guenther for his contribution to this work.

  EXIT CODE

  Copyright © 2005 by Worldwide Library.

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