Righteous Fear Read online

  Hassan headed to the beverage coolers and pulled out a couple of coffee-flavored energy drinks. She was tempted to pop one open and chug half of it, but set aside that thought.

  She waited behind a man who was buying a case of beer. Her mind drifted to how the situation at the health center might just be the beginning, that there could be more incidents. She had to do something, but where did she start? She thought about Anderson Williams, an animal who’d wounded multiple people, who’d killed innocent clinic staff and blown out the brains of a Mobile, Alabama, police officer. She didn’t give a damn about Williams, except for whether he had friends waiting in the floorboards, ready to scurry into the open like cockroaches and spread their filthy hate across the city.

  It was enough for a detective to slip the killer’s name and social media address to her on a card.

  “Four sixty,” a man said in front of her. Hassan blinked and looked him in the eyes. She fished in her pocket, pulled out a five and then placed it in a dish beside the register.

  “Sorry, long day,” she muttered. He pushed a black bag through the slot under the Plexiglas stop-and-rob window. She dumped one of the energy drinks into the sack, then one-handed the pop top on the other. Fizz bubbled over her fingers, and she slurped off the top. She ignored the thought of “all those rats crawling over these cans.”

  “Sure,” the clerk said. He didn’t look like he gave a damn, just as long as she laid down the money and got the hell out of the store.

  * * *

  Hadib Asada couldn’t believe that she had walked into his market after all this time. She didn’t recognize him, but he remembered her.

  Dr. Annis Hassan had shot down his brother nearly a decade ago in Helmand Province, killing him to save a stranger, one who might have been an American. The man who’d stopped their cleansing of the unbelievers could have been from the United States, simply because of a nearby US base, but his visible skin had been almost as dark as any desert-dwelling Afghan.

  Whoever he was, he’d disappeared. Asada and his surviving brothers in arms had escaped into the desert. Originally, Asada had left Saudi Arabia to help Afghanistan fight against the evil Americans who’d violated the divine Islamist state established by the Taliban. After the assault by the stranger had torn the heart out of Asada’s unit, he’d made his way back to Saudi Arabia. The defeat and humiliation were a weight around his neck.

  He’d failed his faith. He’d failed his comrades. Only after a few years of his brooding over the fiasco was he asked to once again take up the cause.

  Thus, he was here in the heart of the Bible Belt, serving caffeine to and ringing in groceries for the very people he had wished to drive from a Muslim country. The Christians paid him no attention; he was invisible. The filthy dollars they spent were funneled to operations within the United States, the slow, inexorable encroachment of the New Islamic Revolution striking at the black heart of America.

  And now, the doctor he’d been sent to kill seven years ago in Afghanistan had just walked out of his store. Like the Christians, she’d ignored him, disregarded his presence, but Asada remembered her.

  His hand hovered near the pistol he kept under the counter, but she was gone. He’d blow his cover for a message that no one would understand. All the resources spent on creating this money funnel, to have him disappear behind enemy lines and stay hidden from the bigoted Christians, would be wasted with a single gunshot.

  Asada reached for his phone instead.

  Time to get the killing crew back together.

  Chapter Two

  Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  It was late. Barbara Price had settled in at a work station in the Annex’s Computer Room. The daytime cyberwizards were off duty, taking time to decompress and relax. Even with no action teams in the field, someone had to pull night shift during the week, and this time around it was Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman’s turn. While the wheelchair-bound cyberboss took a late dinner up at the farmhouse, Price was keeping an eye on various hotspots in case Stony Man received an emergency alert.

  Computer towers hummed as they ran search algorithms and monitored activity in other agencies’ surveillance systems. It was quiet. Calm. Giving Price time to read after-action reports or undertake some political analyses of current events from the most fact-based, opinion-neutral sources available. Such reads would allow her, as the Farm’s mission controller, more insight into the danger zones she would send the Stony Man action teams.

  Price glanced toward the screen and saw two programs spark into activity. She set aside the report she held and opened up one of the alerts. It was a “lookout” program that registered the names of people Mack Bolan had added to the database. News and law-enforcement alerts were consistently scanned for specific names from an ever-growing list of contacts. The Executioner was no longer a full-time member of Stony Man Farm, but he was the founder of the Sensitive Operations Group. As such, he was allowed leeway for suggesting monitors of different folks. This way he could keep a watch on those who had helped him in the past, as well as seek out their aid in the future.

  Mack Bolan was a man who had altered his identity many times over his career. He’d been Sergeant Mack Samuel Bolan in the US Army before going AWOL to avenge his family. He’d been the Executioner, rampaging against organized crime to prevent others from suffering the losses he’d had. He’d been Colonel John Phoenix when he was the founding member of Stony Man Farm in the wake of his incredible successes in his personal vigilante war. He’d returned as the Executioner, standing at arm’s length from the Sensitive Operations Group, after an assault on Stony Man had resulted in the death of April Rose, the love of his life, and Andrzej Konzaki, the Farm’s weaponsmith.

  The Farm did its best to make sure that the world, the internet, would never see or remember the warrior, sweeping the truth of his life under the carpet. Bolan was a myth, a rumor, and his ability to strike anywhere in the world was simply his invisibility. Even so, the world was the world and people were people; few folks could forget his six-foot-three frame, those graveyard blue eyes and the unmistakable confidence of the Executioner. They wouldn’t know who he was, but they would know what he was about.

  The contact list worked both ways: picking up information about a particular person from a news or law-enforcement event and providing a card that would lead to a randomized, untraceable dead-drop message line.

  The screen laid down output.

  Dr. Annis Hassan. Contacted in Afghanistan. Health professional. Possible assistance when injured in region. Charitable works may put her in the line of fire of terrorists or criminals.

  A follow-up output told what had happened.

  Subject mentioned in law-enforcement reports. Terrorist incident involving forced birth extremists at women’s health center. Two dead. Several wounded. Dr. Hassan witness.

  “Why did you pick the term ‘forced birth extremist’?” her boss, Hal Brognola, had asked Price on one occasion.

  “Because you’re not very life affirming by placing bombs to kill doctors, nurses and patients,” she’d answered. “And they sure as hell aren’t lining up at orphanages to adopt the babies they force these women to carry to term. So, why call them by the name they want to be called when they’re just extremist killers? We don’t give polite names to Hamas terrorists when they blow up children in a school bus or to Neo-Nazis when they put poison in a water supply. So why should we call a yet-unnamed extremist movement anything but what their hostility stems from?”

  “Has the Pro-Life Movement pissed you off?” Brognola had asked.

  “We’re all pro-life, Hal. We all wish abortions weren’t a necessity. But when you shoot doctors, you are an extremist and a terrorist. When you bomb a health center, you are an extremist and a terrorist. And our organization was founded on the necessity of killing terrorists before they harm innocent people. Be pro-life. But when you become a murdere
r for your political beliefs, you are a terrorist, and these terrorists have been active for too long without being tracked and shut down.”

  “When you explain it that way, it isn’t political correctness,” Brognola responded.

  Price recalled frowning at her friend and supervisor. “Hal, we track down mass murderers and deal out justice—usually with a bullet—for their crimes against humanity. When have we ever been close to being politically correct? Call an extremist an extremist. Communists, fascists, religious fanatics—we fight them all and take them down without a sliver of guilt because they don’t care who they kill on their way to their ‘solutions.’”

  In Price’s eyes, violence was violence, and terrorism was her enemy. Seeing an acquaintance of Mack Bolan’s pop up on the lookout search engine was interesting, especially in regard to a forced birth extremism event.

  Suspect attempted suicide. Deceased after taking lawman’s weapon and stopped by officer in police station.

  Price grimaced as she took in the additional details. Blue suicide was not unusual, but the suspect had already shot himself through the jaw.

  She took her hand, extended her index finger to form a gun and pressed it under her chin. There was no way that someone who wasn’t in a struggle could miss a major portion of their brain with a gunshot.

  The second lookout alert was swiftly followed by a third.

  She opened the second, an FBI surveillance tap on a suspected terrorist cell operating in the American south. Mobile, Alabama. Where Dr. Hassan’s incident occurred. A suspected terrorist was calling someone within the cell.

  The readout said the two in communication were Hadib Asada and Krahiat Majnuna. Audio played from the clip.

  Asada: “Remember the doctor bitch from Helmand? The one who ran the hospital for the refugee camp?”

  Majnuna: “Dr. Annis Hassan. Yes, I do.”

  Asada: “She is here. In Mobile. She walked into my store.”

  Majnuna: “Here? Doing what?”

  Asada: “Doctor shit, I suppose. She was bloody, and in scrubs.”

  Majnuna: “Accursed witch... She should be dead already. We suffered grievous defeat.”

  Asada: “We did. And we now have the opportunity to strike her down. It is our duty.”

  Majnuna: “I want her dead more than anything. But can we accomplish this without ruining our cover?”

  Price suppressed a snort of derision. They had no cover.

  Asada: “We can do it without getting our faces on television.”

  A moment of silence.

  Majnuna: “We will gather the others.”

  The phone line went dead.

  Price blinked.

  After an attack on a woman’s health clinic by a forced birth extremist, and mostly likely while on the way home from the police station, given the timing, Annis Hassan had incurred the wrath of Islamic fighters who’d been working alongside the Taliban.

  It wasn’t much of a surprise to Price that foreign Arabs were the spine of a pro-Taliban movement.

  Afghanistan, after its battle with the Soviet Union, had needed fighters and disenfranchised young men from Saudi Arabia had headed east to seek their combat glory. When the United States targeted the Taliban for their support of al Qaeda, even more Arabs had found a new crusade to battle against.

  The average American thought that it was the Afghan people who’d founded the terrorist movement known as the Taliban, but in truth, the clerics who ran Afghanistan were a foreign occupational government. More commonly, it was the Afghan people who’d been robbed, executed, their children kidnapped for political indoctrination as child soldiers.

  “Doc, you have to be one of the unluckiest women in the world,” Price said softly.

  The third alert was from the FBI. They were in the midst of a search of Dr. Hassan’s background. The mission controller was tempted to help them look into the doctor to dismiss their concerns about her involvement with terrorism.

  The Bureau’s background check for Hassan received an update. It had been terminated.

  Price looked at the tag for the termination. She knew the codes, and it turned out to be shut down because it would interfere with an “ongoing undercover operation.”

  Asada or Majnuna were either undercover operatives, confidential informants or something bigger. She’d need the Stony Man cybercrew to figure out which. This could even have been peripheral to a larger operation. Either way, someone at the FBI had decided to throw Dr. Hassan to the wolves.

  She opened up an encrypted message window to the one man who could save Dr. Hassan from the pack of killers.

  Striker. Sending surveillance logs regarding Dr. Annis Hassan. Under threat from FBE and radical Islamists.

  Around the world, the communication app would find Mack Bolan and clue him in to threats that only he could respond to—or would respond to. If the American antiterrorism community decided that intel was more important than the life of a doctor helping American citizens, then the warrior would take up the challenge.

  Minutes later, a response popped up.

  Mobile, Alabama. Four hours out, as the Huracan flies.

  Price blinked. There were no weather alerts for the Gulf of Mexico. When she realized Bolan hadn’t written “hurricane,” she knew he must be referring to a Lamborghini Huracan LP-610. It also told her that the Executioner had hit a very rich criminal somewhere along the lower East Coast or Gulf Coast. Considering the exotic nature of the sports car, and the fact that it could break 200 miles an hour easily, Price placed the man and the vehicle in Miami or its environs.

  White supremacists and Islamist radicals. Seems like Dr. Hassan not only can’t escape the one but proved a lightning rod to the other.

  Bolan was quick to respond.

  You’ve seen these ideologies work together before. The only real difference is what they name their gods.

  Gods twisted by their own personal prejudices.

  Want any help?

  I’ll recon scene first. Will send aid request if needed.

  Will do.

  Somewhere, out in the night, a dragon slayer rode a mighty Italian steed flat-out to save a maiden in distress.

  Price wished him luck.

  * * *

  Mack Bolan worked the gears, flowing with the tach as it rose to the red line. He sat just in front of 317 cubic inches of V10 might. In the heyday of American muscle cars, the V8—four cylinders on each side of an engine—was the epitome of power and speed. The V10 increased that count by 125 percent, and in the Lamborghini Huracan, it produced double the horsepower of the biggest 7-liter Hemi or Cobra Jet.

  Given his druthers, Bolan would have preferred a Dodge Hellcat, or the newer Demon, mainly because either wouldn’t have stood out as much as the Lamborghini. The Challenger would have had a back seat as well as a roomy trunk for more battle gear. The drug dealer he had just taken down hadn’t had that kind of aesthetic, however.

  Bolan didn’t mind. The Italian supercar went fine with his Italian custom machine pistol, the Beretta 93-R. He wore it in a shoulder holster, balanced out by a pair of 20-round magazines. The gun belt with a tie-down holster for his Desert Eagle sat on the other bucket seat. Three extra magazines of .44 Magnum rounds in hip pouches—plus one round up the pipe—gave him thirty-three shots that could reach out to two hundred yards to tag an enemy. The gun belt and its contents were hidden beneath a light windbreaker, so as not to arouse any suspicion if he were pulled over by a state trooper.

  Bolan wore his Beretta and shoulder rig under a loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt. Lead washers had been sewn into the placket of the shirt, so a breeze would not inadvertently disclose his armed status.

  He had more clothing in the trunk of the Huracan, including his blacksuit, a piece of high-tech fabric that made him harder to see in the shadows and provided protection from both heat
and cold. The heat protection extended to fire; flame-proof Nomex. The midnight-dark suit had seen material upgrades across his career, but it had maintained the same attributes all around—no snag, low-profile pockets with plenty of storage, and elasticity for plenty range of motion. It was like his second skin, and it made him look leaner, meaner, far more intimidating.

  Along with the blacksuit, the trunk held a load-bearing vest festooned with munitions and tools for infiltration, sabotage and destruction. Under that, in a Pelican gun case, were two long guns. One was a Brügger & Thomet MP-9, 20.6 inches long unfolded, lightweight, with a sturdy folding stock. It could spit out 9 mm Parabellum rounds at 900 rounds per minute. Once folded, the weapon was a mere 11.9 inches long, able to be secreted in a shoulder holster like his Beretta 93-R. It even shared the forward pistol grip, though it didn’t fold like the Beretta’s.

  The other was a Fabrique Nationale SCAR-L. It was a rifle designed to replace the M-4 carbine for the US Army. Unlike the M-4, the SCAR-L could fold its stock, making it easier to store while still providing firm shoulder support for accurate fire. Folded, it was slightly more than two feet long, which fit inside the Huracan’s trunk readily. Even with the stock extended, it was under three feet, handy and quick in combat.

  Bolan looked at the phone resting in its cradle on the supercar’s dashboard. Not only did it have a GPS, thanks to the technology and algorithm programming of Stony Man Farm, it had a map of all the speed traps between his current position and Mobile, Alabama. As it was late at night, there was very little traffic to contend with, and the highway stretched long and clear ahead of him.

  A fraction over seven hundred miles was about ten hours doing the speed limit. Even 110 miles an hour wasn’t a stress on the Lamborghini’s engine. Bolan revved it up to 150 miles an hour on the straightaways. He’d only had to stop for gas three times, but by the time the sun cracked the horizon behind him, Bolan was just a few miles outside of Mobile.