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  "Right."

  There was a worried look on Turrin's face as he departed, and Brognola saw no profit in a futile bid to lift his spirits. It was just a hunch, but he had learned to trust his instincts in a quarter century of service to the government. Brognola's intuition was responsible for solving countless cases where "police technology" had failed. The human factor, after all, was still what made the world go 'round, for good or ill.

  And that included Bolan.

  The guy had taken on Brognola's New York operation as a favor, using time he doubtless could have spent on other projects, tracking other enemies. It was supposed to be a simple touch-and-go, two killers neutralized by force, a message telegraphed to their employers in the Middle East. Instead, with the involvement of a New York mafioso who was known to deal exclusively in drugs, the game was complicated, turning in upon itself to form a riddle… and perhaps a snare.

  Brognola had a hunch, all right, and he wasn't about to leak the details in advance. With any luck, a call or two would prove his fears unfounded, and he could dismiss the notion as a bit of job-related paranoia.

  He reached across the desk and lifted the receiver for his private line. No point in going through his secretary this time. A mistake would cost him nothing more than time. A solid hunch, by contrast, just might cost the life of Hal Brognola's closest friend.

  If he was right and everything proved out, the secret would be his. And he would keep it to himself until tomorrow when he shared it with the Executioner.

  * * *

  Grimaldi swung the chopper east, along the nonexistent line that was the border, with Nogales at his back. The desert was invisible below him, lost in darkness, with a smudge of light that would be Bisbee, Arizona, showing up around eleven o'clock, some forty miles ahead. Without his running lights, he was compelled to trust the instruments explicitly and pray the mufflers on the whirlybird's jet engines were performing as designed. Inside the cockpit there was no way he could tell.

  It hadn't been Grimaldi's first time flying dark, but he'd never cared for the experience. Bush pilots running drugs from Mexico would do the same, and every moment he was braced to meet a blacked out Piper Cub, propeller growling like a buzzsaw as it churned his windscreen into dust. So sorry, Jack… but, anyway, you stopped the shipment.

  Great. Except he wasn't after drugs tonight. His target was a so-called human being, or a group of same, who had been working nights along the Arizona border for the past six months, surprising wetbacks in the darkness and relieving them of any cash or personal belongings they were dumb enough to bring along when they went looking for a new life in El Norte. Having pocketed the goodies, Mr. X and company wiped out the risk of witnesses by mowing down their victims, execution-style.

  As targets go, the wets were relatively "safe." They weren't citizens, most spoke no English, and the new arrivals had no special status under terms of federal amnesty. The border rats who preyed upon them knew that local cops — most cops — in Texas and in Arizona had more pressing problems than the fate of half a dozen wetbacks every now and then. It was a shame they had to die on U.S. soil, of course, but what the hell, it wasn't like the border rats were murdering Americans.

  The Border Patrol expressed greater concern, unsettled by the prospect of armed predators operating at will in the wasteland, realizing perhaps that the raiders must inevitably run afoul of a patrol. The explosion had come two weeks earlier near Lukeville, when a pair of officers had stumbled onto something and gone down before a hail of automatic fire. The Feds were angry now, and with the possibility of international connections in the case, a subtle word had been relayed to Stony Man Farm. Grimaldi and the chopper had been detailed to assist in scouring the border for a man, or men, who made the rules up as they went along.

  It would have been a hopeless task with searchlights, swooping in like something from an alien invasion, warning their potential prey before he came within five miles of making contact. In the place of running lights and floods, Grimaldi used an infrared device designed for stalking human prey in Vietnam's impenetrable jungles. Recently it had been used on the domestic front to turn up missing children, stranded hikers and remains of victims buried by a psycho killer in a Sacramento suburb. An adjustment to the unit kept Grimaldi from receiving false alarms on every rabbit, stray dog or coyote that he passed, but if a human being or an engine-driven vehicle turned up along his flight path, he would know about it. Once a contact had been made, he'd communicate with units on the ground and close the net.

  It was a piece of cake. Except they'd been running sectors for the past eight days without results. In all that time, they'd surprised perhaps two hundred wetbacks, plus a naked teenage couple, sweating up the seats of daddy's station wagon. In the process. Jack was conscious of the fact they might have been observed by their intended prey.

  The border rats had no apparent schedule, and their territory ranged from Yuma, Arizona to Del Rio, Texas. The odds of spotting them on any given night were minuscule, ridiculous to contemplate. Forget about your basic needle in a haystack. This was more like searching for a drop of water in the ocean. Hopeless unless…

  The scanner came to life, directing Jack's attention to a group of bodies and at least one vehicle ahead. Most likely it would be another gang of wetbacks coming over from the south, perhaps a party warming up. In either case, he had to play the game.

  Grimaldi keyed the floods and saw two off-road vehicles, one black, one camouflage, with five or six armed men around them. Ten or fifteen feet away, about half a dozen Mexicans were standing with their hands raised, staring into leveled guns.

  The floodlights startled all concerned, and Jack was barking orders as he brought the air speed down and swung the chopper back around to face the gunmen. Hovering, he lighted the scene from thirty yards away and fifty feet above the desert floor. His earphones told him troops were closing on the ground, and all he had to do was keep the gunmen more or less in sight. No sweat.

  The punks had other notions, though. They scrambled for the vehicles, ignoring a demand for surrender that Grimaldi broadcast over the helicopter's loudspeaker. Two of them opened fire on the chopper, and Jack took her out of range, as engines roared to life beneath him. He was satisfied, at least, to see the wets had disappeared, their shadows melting into darkness on the fringes of the lighted stage.

  The vehicles were moving now in opposite directions. Choosing one at random, Jack advised the ground pursuit team of the runaway's direction and received an anxious «roger» in return. If someone let the runners slip away, it wouldn't be Grimaldi's fault.

  He stuck behind his chosen target, noting that the off-road number was an open Jeep. Three men were hanging on as ruts and potholes shook the vehicle, and they were conscious of pursuit. First one and then the other passenger glanced back in the direction of Grimaldi's chopper, shouting something to the driver, and with every bulletin the wheelman urged his vehicle to greater speed.

  There was a limit, even so, and they could no more lose a helicopter in the open than they could produce a set of wings and fly. The chopper had greater speed, and it wasn't delayed by the necessity of bucking surface obstacles. Grimaldi ran no risk of blowouts, broken axles or fractured oil pans.

  The raiders recognized their problem and decided that the quickest way to shake the tail would be to shoot him down. Both passengers were packing automatic rifles, and they started pegging rounds at thirty yards. Amused, he took the chopper up and out of range, continuing pursuit from higher altitudes.

  The driver of the Jeep was running dark, as if extinguishing his headlights would defeat surveillance from the sky. In his position, anything was worth a try, but there were risks involved. He never saw the gully just ahead, carved out of sand and stone by flash flood waters, and the Jeep was airborne by the time the driver realized he had a problem.

  Impact, halfway down the far wall of the gully, solved his problem, permanently. Skewered on the steering column, dead before his vehicle
made contact with the desert floor, the driver probably had time for one last scream before it all went black. In any case, he never felt the rush of crackling flames that instantly consumed the vehicle and his companions, burning bright enough to bring the search teams home without Grimaldi's help.

  He thought about returning to the contact point and looking for the other punks, but he decided not to bother. They were in the box by now, and if they chose to shoot it out, he didn't care to watch. Enough, for one night, was enough.

  Grimaldi had the microphone in hand and was preparing to report, when static whispered in his earphones, followed instantly by the dispatcher's voice.

  "Command to Airborne One."

  "I copy."

  "Airborne One, we need you back at base, ASAP. You're wanted on the land line. That's a Blue Ridge Top Priority."

  Grimaldi felt his pulse rate quicken as he recognized the code from Stony Man. He didn't hear the Blue Ridge Top Priority that often — maybe once or twice a year — and it would mean that Brognola was in a flap.

  "Affirmative, Command. Good timing. We're just finished here. I'll disengage and see you on the ground in fifteen, tops."

  "We copy fifteen minutes. Airborne One. Command out."

  Talking to the ground, he gave the hunters clear directions to the weenie roast and told them he was breaking off. They asked no questions, and Grimaldi offered nothing in the way of explanations. Hell, he had no answers, even if he felt inclined to flap his jaw.

  The summons was a mystery, like always. Everything would be explained on his arrival, and until that time, he would be left to play a game of solitaire with his imagination.

  Grimaldi didn't notice that he was smiling as he turned the chopper back toward the command post, opening the throttle on her jets. Perhaps, he thought, enough was not enough.

  Not yet.

  * * *

  In his hotel room, Bolan spent the night packing. He had traveled light, one suitcase and a carryall that never would have passed security in any airport, but the weapons were expendable. He could have ditched them in the case of an emergency, but he had opted for the longer, slower drive from selfish motives.

  Bolan wanted time to think.

  He could have traveled on a military or commercial flight to Richmond, but the riddle of Silvestri and the two Iranians was preying on his mind, and forty minutes in the air wouldn't allow him time to scrutinize the different angles, looking for a way inside the puzzle box. He might not solve it on his own, but he could try. And anyway, the act of driving tended to relax him. After the recent hit, it would help him wind down and clear his mental decks for action.

  Television news was covering the Greenwich Village shootout as a case of underworld diplomacy gone sour. No one in the media or law enforcement was surprised to find Silvestri dead. It happened all the time to dealers, and if every human death diminished mankind as a whole, some cases generated less alarm than others. Frowning TV anchorpersons might not say so, but for New York's finest and their federal counterparts, "good riddance" was the password of the day.

  Silvestri's bodyguard had been a four-time loser, with convictions on the books for rape, grand theft, extortion and impersonating a policeman. In his younger days, Vincenzo ("Shelly") Manganiello earned his keep by posing as a vice detective, shaking down male prostitutes and their embarrassed johns for payoffs to avoid "arrest." The scam was strictly business, Manganiello leaning strongly toward the ladies after hours. Sadly, for his victims, he preferred to pick his «girlfriends» out of parking lots and shopping malls, persuading them to serve him at gunpoint. Like Silvestri, he wouldn't be missed.

  The two Iranians hadn't yet been identified as such. The media suspected that their passports might be bogus, but the Teheran connection hadn't been deduced so far. "Smart money" pegged the pair as Pakistanis, interrupted while negotiating a narcotics deal with Brooklyn's king of smack. As for the gunman who had dropped Silvestri and the two Iranians, homicide investigators had no clues. No useful fingerprints had been recovered, and eyewitnesses were hopelessly confused.

  A shower helped the Executioner unwind, and he had turned the television off by nine o'clock. His bags were packed, the car secured downstairs, his clothing laid out for the morning's journey. Naked, Bolan killed the lights and slipped between cool sheets, settling in as he waited for his body heat to warm the bed. Beneath his pillow, one hand curled around the grip of his Beretta. He closed his eyes.

  Tomorrow would bring the answers to his riddle, one way or another. He'd either scope the problem out himself or pick up a solution from Brognola at the Farm. If neither of them had a solid answer of his own, they would discover one together. In the meantime, there was nothing to be gained by stalling sleep.

  He shifted once or twice, adjusting to the mattress, blanking out the images of violence that had marked his afternoon. Accustomed by experience to sleeping when and where he could, the soldier focused on a spinning void and let it swallow him alive. Within the space of ninety seconds, he was breathing deeply, face and form relaxed in sleep.

  But, for the Executioner, escape would bring no respite from his everlasting war. The images of death and violence would return to him, as always, in his dreams.

  Chapter Four

  The Bear was tired of waiting. Action was his strong suit, even from the confines of his chair, and killing time before arrivals always set his nerves on edge. Distractedly he punched up a display of Hal's itinerary and confirmed the ETA from Wonderland.

  Another fifteen minutes.

  He'd been working through the night to nail down answers for the questions Hal had asked him yesterday by phone, and while another man might have displayed the symptoms of fatigue, it didn't show on Aaron Kurtzman. Rather, he was brimming with excitement, anxious to report his findings and observe Brognola's personal reaction to the news. He could expect an «attaboy» on this job, if the man from Justice wasn't too disgruntled by the information Kurtzman had amassed.

  In fact, he had been lucky with his queries, striking a responsive chord in places where he had expected only silence — or at best a grudging nod of confirmation. Hal had been on target with his supposition, but he hadn't grasped the full dimensions of the problem they were facing. If the truth were told, Brognola's guess had barely scratched the surface.

  That was bad, and Kurtzman was relieved that these days no one killed the messenger who brought bad news. Brognola would be angry, perhaps depressed, but he'd hardly be surprised. If Aaron knew the guy at all, his first reaction would be digging in to find a viable solution.

  And the viable solution, Kurtzman knew, was driving south that morning from New York. If anyone could take the ball and run for daylight on a play like this, Mack Bolan was the man.

  Brognola had to know that, too, and it wouldn't improve his humor. He didn't enjoy dispatching friends — or strangers, when it came to that — on missions that could easily result in sudden death. For this one, scratch out «easily» and write in "probably," providing an assessment of the grim reality that Aaron's monitors and printers had disgorged since 4:00 a.m.

  Eight minutes now, and Kurtzman hoped the plane would be on time. He wheeled his chair back from the double keyboard, flexing forearms roped with muscle. Somewhere in the house there was a motorized contraption he could use, but Aaron let it gather dust. He had already lost his legs, the price of failure to detect a traitor in the ranks, and he wasn't about to let his arms go by default. If nothing else, maneuvering his chair around the house and grounds provided him with daily exercise.

  These days he seldom thought about the night when he was shot. The human body has a talent for dismissing pain once it is safely past, and while the mind recalls an incident as painful in the abstract, it can seldom specify the suffering involved. Was there an ache? Or stabbing pain? How had it really felt?

  In fact, the spinal wound that left him chairbound hardly hurt at all. The shock of impact had immediately rendered him unconscious, and there had been nu
mbness afterward, supplied in equal parts by local anesthetics and the severance of all the major nerves below his waist. He wouldn't walk again, the doctors were unanimous on that score, but he could adjust and lead a fairly normal life within the limits of his handicap.

  And so he had.

  But in the old, preambush days, he'd been prone to pacing under stress. If he was sweating out a rendezvous or waiting on a bulletin from distant sources, he would stalk the floor with long, determined strides. More recently, in lieu of wheeling back and forth like something from an animated shooting gallery, he fumed inside and worried the computers, firing queries off around the country and around the world, on any topic he could think of. On occasion he received surprising answers.

  When it was almost time, he caught the elevator from the war room and wheeled himself across the first-floor computer room, through its coded access door and the spacious entryway beyond, onto the long covered porch of the farmhouse. Facing north across a field of fallow ground, he had a clear view of the landing strip, three hundred yards away.

  He wouldn't go to meet the plane, as it would mean a transfer to a vehicle and back again when he returned. The effort would be wasted on a ten-minute round trip, and there would be no time to brief Hal in the car, regardless.

  He could hear the sound of engines approaching from the east. It circled once, the military pilot getting clearance from the house before he lined his aircraft up and brought her in. A car rolled out to meet Brognola and his lone companion, doubling back in the direction of the farmhouse as the pilot shut his engines down and waited for the fueling truck.

  Emerging from the car, Brognola looked the same as ever, with the possible addition of some brand-new worry lines around his eyes. Behind him, Leo Turrin flashed the Bear a grin composed in equal parts of friendship and determination. Neither man was overjoyed about the purpose of their visit, and the station chief of Stony Man Farm regretted that their day could only go from bad to worse.