Season of Slaughter Read online

  His lip came out in a mocking pout. “And secondly, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants don’t have a logo.”

  “Sit down and behave,” Thunder ordered.

  “You don’t pay me enough to behave, love,” Dark returned.

  Thunder sighed. “Dark, it’s been a long day, and rumors have it that we have a big scary on our tail.”

  “A big scary?” Dark asked. He leaned both hands into the table, eyes wide at the prospect. “Tell me more.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much intel on this agent, but I want to make sure that he’s off our case. We don’t need anyone messing with us, not this close to the O’Hare operation,” Thunder stated.

  Dark nodded. “He’s as good as cold and on a slab, DeeDee.”

  Thunder smirked, blowing smoke rings into the air.

  “THE PICTURE ISN’T PRETTY, folks,” Hal Brognola explained as Bolan, Able Team, Barbara Price, Jack Grimaldi and David Kowalski sat around the War Room table back at Stony Man Farm.

  “What could be uglier than hundreds of people murdered?” Kowalski asked, discomfort sitting on top of him like an elephant, crushing the breath from him. He was an alien to this part of the Farm. Usually, he either worked the fence line as a guard, or trained with other lawmen and soldiers skilled and lucky enough to be noticed by the staff. The blacksuits heard rumors, felt vibes that the Farm was something much more. Buck Greene had told them to put those thoughts at rest, but more than once the contingent of elite cops and special operations soldiers were drawn into the field, rallied against a crisis, and usually lead in that action by the black-haired man at the end of the table. Not until a desperate day in Egypt did Kowalski learn the true nature of the tall man who came and went from Stony Man Farm.

  Barbara Price glared at the young man, but Bolan shook his head, cutting off any reproach for the newbie at the table. Kowalski settled back in. It was a desperate situation, and Bolan had conceded to having Kowalski present as Phoenix Force was otherwise occupied on their own search-and-destroy mission halfway around the globe. Price made a show of “vetting” him with Buck Greene and Bolan himself.

  “It’s part of my job to be paranoid,” she explained to Kowalski.

  Something told him that there was a deeper issue at stake, and he remembered a bit of craziness with a blacksuit named Jim Gordon.

  “They have the technology to do this all over again,” Brognola explained.

  “What technology?” Schwarz asked.

  “The missile they fired, it was experimental technology. Five disappeared from a shipment to the Developmental Naval Warfare Group,” Brognola explained.

  Bolan frowned. “And the missiles are designed to be man-portable radar seekers.”

  Brognola nodded. “Right. The idea is to send in a Special Forces team ahead of an air strike, and fire antiradiation missiles to knock out the enemy’s ability to see us coming. This way the team only has to get within the maximum range of the rocket motors and not have to deal with tight patrols. Indirect ground fire makes our teams able to stick to canyons and fire upward at an angle, and the radar detectors in the nosecone home in on anything hot.”

  “Push-button warfare,” Schwarz said. “A nifty piece of kit.”

  “Considering what it did to an airport,” Blancanales noted.

  “It wasn’t the missile that crashed those planes,” Grimaldi corrected. “Ski mentioned that there was a SATCOM-style portable unit on the ground. It was transmitting deliberately falsified altitude and radar readings, resulting in a collision and a crash.”

  Kowalski could see the pilot’s tortured features, and remembered the horror of the fireball slamming into the asphalt. He remembered it was called survivor’s guilt. The only one who didn’t seem softened by the spiritual drain of that guilt was Mack Bolan.

  “Pullman took out the computer when he saw what was going on. I couldn’t even think,” the U.S. Marshall admitted.

  “These people came prepared,” Price started. She passed out several folders. “We got only blurry, grainy pictures off the main video security cameras, but Aaron and the team managed to work some of their magic with a video enhancement program.”

  Kowalski opened his folder, seeing the face of the blond giant as he stood over two murdered National Guardsmen. He knew him instantly. “Good cleanup job.”

  “We verified the other with Ironman,” Price explained. “They’re known as Adonis and Dark, a couple of supermen who have been bouncing around the covert operations world for the past couple decades. Their reputation is that they’re the world’s finest.”

  “So how come they’re not working for us?” Blancanales asked, sarcasm cutting his voice.

  “We have our standards,” the Executioner answered. The grim timbre of his voice told Kowalski that this was far from their first atrocity. It also soothed some of the young man’s fears of what he was getting into, learning even a tiny fraction of the inner secrets of this black bag operation.

  Bolan locked glances with the young man. “You can relax. You’ve earned enough clearance with us.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Kowalski said, feeling much younger and smaller for a moment.

  Bolan’s smile was welcoming and genuine. “You don’t have to be so proper. I work for a living.”

  “Back to these two. They disappeared a couple years back. We thought that maybe someone caught up with them. There were some kills we could attribute to those two here and there, but nothing concrete,” Price continued. She glanced over to Bolan. “And given the state of the world, it could have been anyone taking out these particular targets.”

  “What kind of targets?” Blancanales asked.

  “What do you have in mind?” Price asked.

  “Maybe rivals of certain Christian Identity militia groups?”

  Price looked at her folder. “I’ll have Aaron look into the affiliations. You could be right.”

  “He usually is,” Schwarz chided. “And he doesn’t use a computer, either.”

  “Still makes your job easier,” Price quipped.

  “Lady, gentleman, not in front of the rookie. We’re supposed to be mature,” Blancanales said.

  “So much for that theory,” Bolan said dryly. “Where did the missiles get ripped off?”

  “It was a snatch-and-grab in California,” Price said. “Not only were the MARS stolen—”

  “MARS?” Bolan interrupted.

  “Man-portable Anti-Radar System,” Price told him. She didn’t continue as she turned to watch something else.

  Schwarz was looking over a list from one of the pages of Price’s information packets. He scratched his temple with his middle finger for a moment.

  “What’s going on up there?” Price asked.

  “There’s some very specific technology listed here that was in the shipment. We’re talking stuff that most of the firms in the Silicon Valley couldn’t handle,” Schwarz explained. “I think we can possibly narrow down who could do something with this hardware if we called in an old mark.”

  Blancanales grinned. “You mean, Jackie Sorenson?”

  Schwarz nodded. “No offense, Ski.”

  “Mr. Stone asked me to keep you from being understrength. Frankly, I’m not sure how he meant for me to do that, but any more bodies, especially someone you know would be appreciated.”

  “All right,” Schwarz answered. “But don’t call me Frankly.”

  The old joke got a small grin out of Kowalski, and Schwarz was pleased with the result.

  “All right. Gadgets, you hook up with Dr. Sorenson,” Price said. “Rosario, you and Ski dig into the possibility of a Christian Identity militia being involved in the snatch. We don’t have time to handle this nightmare one lead at a time.”

  “I’m going to be elsewhere,” Bolan surmised. He was looking at some paperwork he’d pulled from his own folder. “Terintec, in suburban Chicago. Those are the people who developed the MARS?”

  Price nodded. “I know you’re not in the same league
as Gadgets, but you do know your way around military applications of technology.”

  “Colonel Brandon Stone, U.S. Army Special Forces, retired this time. I’ve been sent by the Pentagon as an adviser to Terintec to evaluate progress on the MARS system in the absence of the stolen missiles.”

  “That’s right,” Price told Bolan. “We’ve arranged an appointment with a Dr. Sable Burton for you.”

  Bolan plucked the photograph from the file, studying it for a moment. His lips set firmly, then he returned the photo to the file.

  “We’re not going to have forever on this,” Brognola said. “Get moving, otherwise the President will pull the plug on us, and do something reckless, like suspend Constitutional rights.”

  SABLE BURTON PUSHED her glasses up on her nose once more.

  “Why don’t you get contacts?” Gina Larkin asked, brushing her tangle of long, rusty curls from under the strap of her ID badge.

  “Because they make my eyes hurt too much,” Sable lied. In truth, she had a phobia about putting things into her eyes.

  Larkin snorted derisively. “Well, you’d think after all the work you put into this project, you could try something like laser surgery.”

  “I work with lasers for a living, Gina. Lasers and radar and electronics. I don’t want those things poking around in my eyes.”

  She ran her ID card through the scanner and the steel door in front of her gave an asthmatic hiss and shrugged out of the way. Larkin followed right on her heels, prompting a figure in a gray jumpsuit and a gun belt to stomp into their path.

  “Ms. Larkin, you know the rules,” the security guard said. As if to add weight to his words, he tapped his nightstick on the rail in front of Burton.

  “And what about me? I’m going to be late,” Burton said, screwing up enough courage to sound defiant.

  The big, smug guard gave her a smirk. “You shouldn’t have let her through on your keycard swipe.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “What’s the problem?” a deep, resonant voice rumbled behind them. Burton turned and saw a man in a ribbed black commando sweater and matching cargo pants. It took a moment for her to take in the whole effect of the man, like the blast wave off a bomb finally reaching her after she saw the first spark of explosion. Except for his face and hands, he seemed carved by a classic Greek sculptor out of pure obsidian, his long, powerful body an example of a warrior’s ideal.

  Burton felt her heart skip at the sight of him, then turned away, back to the security guard, hoping no one noticed her. She felt as though everyone could see the tingle that ran through her at the sight of the man in black.

  “And you are, sir?”

  “Colonel Brandon Stone, U.S. Army, retired.”

  The guard looked at his clipboard. “Sorry for the delay.”

  “I swiped my access card. The woman ahead of me swiped her access card. And you obviously know this woman. What’s the purpose of holding up this line with your weapon out?” Mack Bolan asked.

  The security guard seemed to stiffen for a moment, as if he wanted to go head-to-head with the tall stranger. However, the air went out of the guard’s sails. He slid his nightstick back in place.

  “Ms. Larkin, just swipe your card and don’t be so lazy,” the guard said, his voice dropping to a murmur.

  Burton caught Stone’s cold stare and realized why a testosterone fit had been averted.

  Those were the eyes of a man who was not to be trifled with. She tossed Larkin a quick glance and saw that her friend had already had sized him up and was grinning from ear to ear at the sight of him. Larkin moved back to the entrance, slowly, brushing against Bolan’s body in the narrow hallway. She gave an unfelt apology for getting so intimate, but the man in black was unimpressed by her nearness.

  Burton blushed with embarrassment. If Larkin, tall, willowy, with great breasts and barely concealing her sexuality underneath a thin, filmy spring dress, couldn’t get a rise out of that stoic, broad-shouldered man, what chance did she have? She was shorter and still wearing a lumpy sweater and jeans under her lab coat, fending off the recently faded Chicago winter. She quickly dismissed the thought.

  She had work to do today. If she wanted to meet someone, there was always online relationships, or even heading out with Larkin and picking up the guys who didn’t score with her. Burton continued on to her office, too lost in her self-image issues to notice that she was being followed. She stopped at her door, then looked up, seeing the electric-blue eyes of the stranger looking down at her.

  “I’m here to be briefed by a Dr. Burton,” he said.

  She looked at him, a long look for her as she was only a shade over five feet tall, with long brown tresses that hung a few inches past her shoulders. She pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her button nose again, and smiled.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Colonel Stone,” she said after giving her throat a quick clear. She offered up a hand and Bolan took it in his, surprised at how small it was in comparison.

  “Same here, Doctor.”

  Professor Sable Burton was a woman who could help him understand, perhaps, just how the terrorists who’d hospitalized Carl Lyons and killed hundreds of innocents at Dulles International Airport could get their hands on top-secret weaponry.

  “How much do you have to be briefed on, Colonel?” Burton asked, walking behind her desk.

  Bolan scanned her office. It was little larger than an office cubicle, and bookshelves were stuffed with paperwork and reference materials. She barely had room for personal touches, the most prominent of them being a battered old, stuffed black dragon with a purple belly, its eyes droopy and crossed, head tilted.

  “I just need a refresher,” Bolan replied. “How much proprietary technology is needed to complete the radar-seeking warhead?”

  “You mean, stuff only we could produce? That was the point. We were trying to make it fast and easy for the Army to keep in production. You’d still need our technicians to put it all together, but it’s supposed to be a cheap and easy weapon,” Burton answered. “It’s basically just fire and forget. Set it off and the soldiers can move to a safer place even before the rocket exhaust clears.”

  “With a proper sample, someone could reproduce this,” Bolan said thoughtfully.

  The woman nodded, looking a little pale. “Was it our missile used in the Dulles incident, Colonel Stone? It’s too much of a coincidence for someone like you to start poking around just after—”

  “You’re right,” Bolan admitted. “Do you know any details about the stolen shipment?”

  “I’m a physicist, not a salesclerk,” Burton replied.

  Bolan frowned. “Who would be in charge of getting the missiles out for field testing?”

  “You’d have to talk to Hector Terin. He’s the president and lead developer.”

  “Could you take me to meet him?”

  “He went on an extended weekend. He’ll be back tomorrow. Until then, would you want to look around the facility? To kill time?”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” Bolan admitted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Wearing the darkness like an old friend, the Executioner paid a visit to Hector Terin’s estate in Oak Park. He wasn’t convinced that Terin was guilty of wrongdoing because he took a trip the same weekend that missiles developed by his company were used to commit mass slaughter. It wasn’t guilt that the soldier smelled, though. Something was drawing his attention, instinct, based on past experience with countless similar situations.

  Bolan stopped off at his hotel and changed to his blacksuit. He put on a pair of loose jeans and a jacket over the combination, making it look as though he was just walking around casually, the high-tech skintight garment just another tight black T-shirt under a leather jacket. The blacksuit had evolved over the years from a simple cat-burglar-style jumpsuit to an environmentally adapting suit that would keep him either cool or warm under the appropriate conditions, and was resistant to cuts and tears. The black coloration helped with b
lending into the shadows, but it was also a psychological weapon, too. Bolan’s height and 200-odd-pound frame, with rippling muscle under black fabric and a weapons harness, added to his ability to intimidate and shock his enemies. Sometimes it granted him only a half second, a heartbeat, but it had been a deciding factor in enough shoot-or-die situations.

  He remembered the videotape of Dark in action at the airport. He was another person who had taken the idea of clothing as a psychological weapon and run with it. The addition of the long flowing coat also had the bonus of altering Dark’s center of mass, making people shooting at him hit the flapping tails of his trench coat when they were looking for a chest hit. The trench-coat-wearing murderer wasn’t just relying on a killer wardrobe to carry his way through battle. Plain style wouldn’t let someone beat Carl Lyons so badly he was left in a hospital bed with a collapsed lung and a score of broken bones.

  If anything, Bolan recognized that Dark had no style at all with his hand-to-hand combat. Men like that were the most dangerous, because someone with a definitive fighting form could be anticipated. The mass murderer, however, combined maneuvers and improvised. That was Bolan’s approach to martial arts, despite the efforts of others to try to pigeonhole him into whatever the latest “dance craze” was in the chop-socky circuit. Not that Bolan didn’t “taste” martial arts on his own time, learning new katas and moves to add to his arsenal of hand-to-hand combat.

  Mack Bolan didn’t fear entering any kind of personal combat, either swords or knives, fists and kicks, or guns and grenades. He’d done it all.

  This night, however, he was hoping not to get into a shooting match with Hector Terin’s guard force. Judging by the kind of security in place at Terintec’s headquarters, it would be a step above the usual collection of rental cops, but without a determination of guilt, Bolan couldn’t bring himself to kill a man doing his job for a simple paycheck. He had his Beretta 93-R in its shoulder holster, sound suppressor attached, but that would have been a weapon of absolute last resort. Stealth would have to get him past the guards if he was to get information.

  He could have asked Stony Man Farm for a lowdown on Terin’s personal holdings or any of his private dealings, but something told Bolan that someone with the pull to issue top-secret weaponry to the most highly specialized combat units in the U.S. military would have resources that could spot Stony Man’s cybercrew a mile away. Besides, there was something about being on-site. Breathing the air.