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  Bolan went to the other side of the building and stuck his head just far enough around the edge to get a glimpse of what was on that side of the building and encountered another man walking straight for him. The man saw the soldier and stopped, sensing something was wrong. Before he had time to process the situation and draw a gun, Bolan lined him up in his sights and pumped two rounds directly into the man's forehead.

  The soldier went back behind the warehouse and checked the rear walk-in door. It was unlocked, which made sense, since the two corpses with the smoldering joint were supposed to be guarding it. Bolan cracked the door open and peered inside. A large forklift was backing away from an oversized delivery van and two men were pulling down the overhead rear door of the van's cargo box. At least six other men watched the process, each of them armed with an SAR-21. There were likely more men in the building, but Bolan couldn't see them.

  Bolan grabbed one of the flashbangs from his utility belt, pulled the pin, and tossed the bomb toward the van. The movement caught the attention of some of the armed men, but Bolan had the element of surprise on his side. The men simply weren't expecting to be attacked by a black-clad soldier in a Santa Cruz warehouse. Before they could get their minds around what they'd witnessed the M-84 flashbang went off. Bolan shouldered the P90 and rushed into the building while the people inside were still incapacitated from the grenade. Four of the gunmen stood to the left of the van and Bolan sprayed them with a burst of full autofire from the little FN submachine gun. One man fell to the floor, where he remained, motionless. The van took off out the door while the other three dived behind the forklift for cover.

  Bolan blasted a short burst into each of the two gunmen on the right of the van, sending multiple rounds directly into the centers of each man's mass. If the rounds didn't hit their hearts, they punched through their spines or other major organs because both men fell, dead or dying.

  By this time, the men from the first group had regained their senses and started firing at Bolan. He leaped behind a large crate and crawled around the edge until he reached a point from which he could see where the shots were coming from. The men behind the forklift fired blindly, holding their rifles above the forklift and pulling the triggers without aiming. Their shots went wild, posing a greater threat to the soldier when they ricocheted off something than they did as fired. But the forklift driver had a clear shot at Bolan. He raised a Glock pistol and took direct aim at the Executioner. The man fired and a bullet hit the pavement inches from Bolan's head, sending sharp fragments of concrete into his face.

  Bolan snap aimed the P90 and sent a burst into the forklift driver's face. The 5.7 mm bullets were something of a compromise; they were designed to penetrate most soft body armor but in return they lacked the expansion needed to create a large wound channel. But that didn't matter when they penetrated the forklift driver's head. The bullets entered his face, leaving marks that looked like an angry case of chicken pox, and exited through holes that weren't much larger than the entrance holes. But they did their intended job, scrambling the man's reptilian brain stem on their way through.

  The whole firefight had lasted less than two minutes, and in that time the driver of the van had started his engine and dropped the transmission into gear. He gunned the engine and the van roared toward the door. Bolan tried to get a shot off after him but return fire from behind the forklift kept him pinned down behind the crate.

  It appeared that only three people behind the forklift were firing. Bolan's initial blast must have wounded one of the men more severely than he'd originally thought. He needed to take out all three of them so he could pursue the van, which almost certainly contained the plutonium. Bolan pulled the pin on one of the M-67 fragmentation grenades, counted off three seconds, and hurled the grenade to the far side of the forklift. It exploded before it even hit the ground, shredding all three gunmen in a blast of razor wire.

  More gunfire came from the front of the building. The two guards he'd left there had positioned themselves behind a couple of cement-filled steel pipes protruding from the concrete floor, where they were supposed to prevent truck drivers from hitting the tracks for the large overhead doors. Judging from the multicolored paint streaks on the metal pipes, they'd served that purpose more than once. Both men opened fire on the soldier's position. Neither could get a good shot off at Bolan, but in return Bolan was unable to get a clean shot off at either of them.

  Not that he needed to kill either of them; what he really needed to do was stop the van carrying the plutonium. He looked at the back door, trying to judge if he could make it there in a dead run before the guards in front of the building shot him. When he looked at the door he saw a head covered with a black nylon do-rag peeking around the door frame. The Executioner put the illuminated yellow dot of his optical sight on the black nylon and squeezed off a single round. The head exploded and another of the BNG gang members fell dead in the doorway. From the commotion outside the door, Bolan could tell that there were others waiting outside.

  Bolan weighed his options. He had men coming after him from the front and from behind. He'd reached a detente-like situation with the gunmen in front of him, but the gunmen to his rear would soon realize that they had an advantage over him — if they were careful, they could get aimed shots off at the soldier a lot more easily than he could return fire. He'd have to move to a position that provided a better firing lane to the back door.

  To his right stood a small office area that had been built from steel-framed Sheetrock. The area Bolan would have to cross between his current hide and the office offered a clear lane of fire for both guards at the front door. The area to his left didn't offer much more cover — the warehouse was relatively empty — but there were two SUVs parked there. The forklift somewhat shielded the area he'd have to cross from the sight of the gunmen by the front door. If he ran fast enough, Bolan might be able to reach the Cadillac Escalade before the men in front were able to draw a bead on him. He kicked off and sprinted toward the big Cadillac as fast as he could run, a stream of 5.56 mm autofire nipping at his heels the entire way.

  From his new position Bolan lobbed an M-67 grenade just outside the rear door, again waiting three seconds before throwing the grenade. The grenade exploded, lacerating everything within its two-meter kill zone. The M-67 didn't kill everyone outside the building, judging by the shrieks of pain that emanated through the door, but it seemed to take the fire out of whoever remained. No one made a further attempt to enter the warehouse from that direction.

  Bolan crawled on his belly to the front of the Chevrolet Tahoe. Hiding behind the front driver's side wheel, he leaned over to his right so he could see under the car. From that vantage point he could see one of the guards, or at least he could see the guard's lower body. He couldn't see the man's torso or head.

  The Executioner triggered a burst into the man's kneecaps, knocking him to the floor. Bolan held the trigger down, stitching the man's torso as he fell. As soon as the man's head came into Bolan's field of vision, he unleashed another burst from the gun. This time, the bullets exiting the head took a good chunk of the man's skull and gray matter with them.

  After taking another glance at the door behind him to make sure that men weren't attacking his six o'clock position, Bolan rushed the final man in the front. Taken by surprise, the man took a moment to respond to the charging wraith in black, and that moment cost him his life. Bolan emptied the P90 into the man's face and replaced the stick magazine as he ran past the man's lifeless corpse and out the front door.

  Bolan knew that there still might be men outside, so he went to the front edge of the building and glanced around the corner. Sure enough, he could see an armed man creeping along the wall, moving toward the front of the warehouse. Both men raised their rifles, but Bolan was quicker on the draw and fired off a short burst of rounds, hitting the man in the throat and stitching bullets up across his face.

  Bolan didn't see any more men coming so he ran back toward the street, roun
ded the corner, and didn't stop until he reached his motorcycle. When he approached the bike he looked back and saw two men coming around the corner, heading his way. Bolan raised his gun and looked through the Leupold scope, which he'd turned up to three-power magnification, and saw two of the BNG members running down the street toward his position. He lined up the yellow dot of the reticle on the outline of the closest man's head and triggered a short burst from the P90. The man fell and his buddy dived behind a garbage bin.

  Bolan could hear the sirens of approaching emergency vehicles and he knew he had to get out of there. He threw on his riding gear as fast as he could, taking suppressive potshots at the man behind the Dumpster to keep him pinned down. The man took a few wild shots at the soldier, but he wasn't leaving his position to take aimed fire. Bolan let off a long burst, emptying the magazine, and at the same time got on the bike and thumbed the starter.

  The engine caught and Bolan gunned the throttle, breaking the rear wheel loose. With his left foot on the ground, Bolan spun the bike around facing away from the gang banger hiding behind the Dumpster and took off after the van. Bolan wheelied the big MW toward Mission Street, leaning forward to keep the oversized dirt bike from flipping over completely. He got the front end down just before he arrived at the intersection. He kept on the throttle but dabbed the rear brake and shifted his weight to the right, putting his right foot down. This made the rear end of the bike step out to the left and he goosed the throttle, sliding around the corner, leaving a big black stripe all the way. He performed the opposite maneuver when he reached Highway One, then got on the throttle as hard as he could. In his mirror he could see multiple vehicles with flashing red lights turning onto Fair Avenue.

  The van had a several-minute head start on him and Bolan rode flat out down Highway One, trying to catch the UPO. He reached 130 miles per hour and hoped a deer didn't step out on the road.

  After riding down the nearly deserted highway for almost twenty minutes, he spotted the van up ahead. When he approached the vehicle, the overhead door in the cargo box flew open and two men inside opened up on the soldier with SAR-21 rifles. Bolan tried to avoid the flying bullets but one grazed his helmet, snapping his head to the right. Just then several more rounds hit him square in the chest. His head was still reeling from the near miss on his helmet, and the shots in his chest caught him off guard.

  The soft armor stopped the 5.56 mm bullets, but the impact knocked the wind out of Bolan and aggravated the broken rib he'd suffered earlier, causing him to lose his grip on the bike's handlebar. Bolan flew off the back of the bike and landed on his back, skidding down the highway. The material in his riding suit was supposed to provide better abrasion resistance than leather at speeds up to one hundred miles per hour. At speeds higher than that the material could melt, leaving the Executioner's back a bloody, burnt pulp. Bolan had slowed when he came up behind the van, but he hadn't looked at his speedometer.

  Apparently he had slowed to under one hundred, because when he came to a stop just before he hit the guardrail on the opposite side of the road, the riding suit saved his skin from being shredded on the pavement. When he stood, the riding suit was damaged beyond repair, but it had protected him from a severe case of road rash. He checked his arms and legs. Everything worked; the only bones that appeared to be broken were the ribs he'd broken earlier.

  The bike wasn't so lucky. The big BMW had cartwheeled off the road just before the guardrail next to where the Executioner now stood. He looked down over the cliff. There, more than a hundred feet below him, lay the wrecked motorcycle, smashed to pieces on the railroad track that ran below the road. The headlight was still on, but in the moonlight he could see that there wasn't much left of the mangled remains that resembled a motorcycle. Bolan climbed up to a rocky outcropping above the road on the opposite side where he was out of the sight of any curious passersby and got out his cell phone.

  8

  The sun had once again risen over the hills to the east of Monterey by the time Delbert Osborne drove the Executioner to his hotel room. Osborne had learned his lessons well when he'd gone through his blacksuit training at Stony Man Farm and he knew better than to ask Bolan too many questions. Still, the expression on Osborne's face as he drove his Audi S4 back to the hotel let the Executioner know he was curious.

  Osborne looked like a good man, and the fact that he'd been through blacksuit training meant that he was a highly trained soldier, but Bolan didn't want to bring him into this unless he absolutely needed help. The problem was that there were still too many unanswered questions and things were happening too fast. Bolan had to be able to react quickly if he learned anything. Though there were times when an extra gun would come in handy, there were even more times when dragging around an extra body would only slow him down.

  Bolan hadn't been able to learn anything about the destination of the van. He'd had Kurtzman check the satellite images and the truck had simply disappeared. Kurtzman was able to pull up an image of Bolan closing in on the van just before the occupants had fired on him, very close to where the wrecked BMW lay on the tracks just above the surf of the Pacific Ocean. When the next satellite had passed over the area twenty-three minutes later, the van had completely disappeared.

  Still, this lack of information told the soldier something. The van had to be parked somewhere between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, no farther north than the halfway point between the two cities, and most likely closer to Santa Cruz. There weren't a lot of places to hide a van that size along that route. It was going be difficult, if not impossible, to find the van, but at least it wasn't yet in San Francisco.

  He wasn't sure how he was going to proceed from this point. He was kicking around the seeds of an idea that involved kidnapping one of the Team Free Flow staffers, but the problem with that was that he didn't know which staffers were or weren't involved with building the bomb. He wasn't going to take the chance of terrifying some innocent schmuck who didn't have any information to offer. The only people still living that the Executioner knew were involved with the plot were Botros and bin Osman, both of whom were too well guarded to be easily snatched. Even if he could get one of the men, they were hardcase terrorists. Most likely they wouldn't give up the plot even if Bolan resorted to torture, a tool the soldier didn't include in his normal repertoire.

  Bolan had arranged for another BMW motorcycle to be delivered to his hotel in Monterey, along with a nearly complete set of riding gear; the only things that survived the crash were his boots. Even his riding gloves had been shredded when the bike hit the rough surface of the highway. But the gear had done its job, and the Executioner's skin was still intact. There wasn't much that he could do until his bike and gear arrived in the morning, so Bolan went up to his room to get some well-deserved sleep.

  * * *

  Musabin Osman paced back and forth in the old abandoned turkey shed, his feet wearing the filthy, cracked concrete floor clean. He'd been on edge ever since the stray motorcycle rider had passed through the compound just before dusk. Laguna Road was marked as a dead end, but the trail back down to the highway showed up on GPS programs. As more people equipped their motorcycles with GPS units, the compound had begun to see more and more stray riders passing through.

  Randy, the strung-out methamphetamine addict who owned the place, tried to reassure bin Osman. "They're just passing through every now and then. Ain't never caused us no trouble." Bin Osman could barely understand the man; between his thick Okie accent, his habit of mispronouncing every word he spoke and his missing teeth, the words that came out of the man did not sound much like the English language to the Malaysian's ears. But bin Osman wanted to believe the burned-out Okie knew what he was talking about when he said there was nothing to worry about so he let Randy's words calm him.

  Randy had let the Filipino gangsters set up a methamphetamine lab in one of his ramshackle outbuildings in return for a steady supply of the highly addictive drug. Now bin Osman had commandeered one of the larger buil
dings for his own purposes, purposes that might have turned even the BNG against him, had they known what he was building in his makeshift laboratory. He was preparing a nuclear bomb capable of destroying most of San Francisco and taking a good chunk of Oakland with it.

  But they didn't know, and they had no need to know. All they knew was that their parent organization in the Philippines had ordered them to assist bin Osman in his assignment and being good soldiers, they were doing just that. So far they'd proved adept at everything except one task — getting rid of the big man posing as a racing fuel salesman.

  When bin Osman thought about the tall, dark man who had singlehandedly taken out a crack team of Arab terrorists as well as decimated a truckload of urban gangbangers, he felt cold fear. He'd constructed a plan that no law enforcement agency would ever discover, yet this lone renegade seemed to anticipate his every step. Clearly this man was not associated with any law enforcement agency; the trail of death he left behind was too bloody even for the American CIA to tolerate.

  This Cooper had to be either a lone vigilante crusader, which was highly unlikely given his deep resources, or else the member of some supersecret covert operations team. Either that or he was a ghost, some sort of spirit sent to punish bin Osman for his past sins.