Righteous Fear Read online

  One of the SALT hardmen took Bolan’s most recent route through the ruined side of the shipping container, but the Stony Man warrior held his fire. In the semidarkness of the big metal box, he was an invisible shadow on the floor, and when he fired, his Beretta would not produce much of a muzzle-flash, but it would mark his position. He held his fire, biding his time.

  “No movement,” the lead gunman whispered, sweeping the area. He tapped the light mounted on the barrel of his rifle, the cone of illumination sweeping around Bolan. The Executioner narrowed his eyes to slits to prevent his eye shine from betraying him. He was an amorphous shadow that was easily missed in the gloomy interior of the container.

  He heard the crackle of a radio from a muffled earbud on the point man.

  Bolan knew the report. The others looking for movement out of the second exit of the container would find nothing in the gap between the big metal boxes. The point man tensed, as if anticipating the Executioner’s presence in the darkness. Another rifleman entered, his gun light sprayed toward the other end of the container.

  “Nothing,” the newcomer whispered.

  “Where the fuck did this bastard go?” the point man asked. “Keep your head on a swivel. He’s toying with us.”

  The lead gunman stepped closer, each crunch of his boot soles on the detritus bringing him closer to his quarry. The flashlight no longer blazed into Bolan’s eyes. He had kept one shut, to protect his night vision, and once the blaze of the light was gone, he opened both eyes. It was an old trick, and was the real reason why pirates wore eye patches, enabling them to see in the bright sunlight abovedecks and down in the hold.

  The Executioner aimed upward, the length of his forearms, pistol and its sound suppressor enabling him to tap the point man on the belt buckle. The gunner looked down and Bolan drilled him with a ripping 3-round burst that tore through leather, cloth, muscle and intestines. The SALT gunman jerked violently backward, his rifle tumbling from lifeless hands. The weapon glanced off the top of Bolan’s skull and thumped onto his back, but he fought through the surprising impacts. He shifted his aim to the man behind the lead man. Bolan ripped off another 3-round burst, but only one bullet hit the gunman’s thigh. The other two slipped between his legs and drove into the SALT soldier behind him.

  Both rounds struck the man in the pelvis. As Bolan used a heavier round with a powerful charge, but not supersonic, both bullets hit with the force of a jackhammer, shattering the heavy bone and robbing him of a leg to stand on. Three down, two only badly wounded.

  A sound suppressor didn’t make a weapon silent; it only decreased the roar of a gunshot. Therefore, the SALT gunmen had heard him open fire. They rushed forward and ducked through the entrance behind him.

  Bolan rolled, aimed, then rolled some more to avoid a storm of high-velocity slugs that ripped the floor where the shadow form lay only a moment ago. He pulled the trigger and his rounds clanged hard against rolled, rusty steel. He didn’t hit an enemy, but their gunfire halted as they scrambled for safety.

  That bought the Executioner a few seconds to get himself to a place of better concealment. There weren’t many objects that could stop a bullet inside the abandoned container, but the shadows could hide him, especially the deep ones.

  One of the gunners poked his weapon high and blindly fired through an entire magazine. Bolan rolled into a ball to shield his face and head from broken fragments of bullets. The man didn’t aim, praying to hit through volume and sheer luck by pointing the gun in a general direction. Nothing directly hit the Executioner, but shattered bullet splinters and chips of steel peppered him. Bare skin bled from slivers slicing his flesh, red seeping over the blackened paint on his face, neck and hands.

  Bolan locked in on the source of the muzzle-flashes and aimed low and to the right of the fireballs. He tore off two 3-round bursts from the machine pistol. He hit and killed the rifleman, in the middle of reloading his assault weapon, slamming him to the wall with a metal-thumping boom. His two allies opened up, making the air above the prone Executioner uninhabitable. The lead content was fatal, especially with the limited armor that Bolan wore. He focused on the twin fireballs from below and emptied the Beretta’s magazine.

  Shots ripped through the air, and one gunman cried out as bullets shattered his arms and pierced his lungs. The last shooter through that entrance dived outside.

  Bolan rushed to the side entrance. The gunman who’d been shot in the leg crawled toward where his fellow SALT comrade had exited, and the man with the shattered pelvis rocked, agonized and immobile.

  Before Bolan dealt him a mercy round to end his suffering, the crippled gunman put the barrel of his rifle to his lips and fired. His brains exploded out the top of his skull, a fountain of gore and stringy pulp fanning out in a massive spray.

  The Executioner dumped the magazine in his Beretta as he broke into the open, running parallel to where the last standing SALT rifleman was headed. He fed it a fresh box, dropped the slide, the top round of the mag fed right into the barrel. The running gunman raced toward the pickup trucks the armed force had arrived in.

  Bolan lowered his pistol, running with it down at his side, finger far from the trigger. He wanted answers, and maybe catching this last man alive would bring him closer to the leadership of the extremists who’d tried to kill Annis Hassan.

  The last gunman dived into the driver’s seat of one of the pickups. Bolan brought the Beretta up in the hope of doing damage to the vehicle to slow it down. Something hard slammed between the Executioner’s shoulder blades and he stumbled forward. The armored vest that carried his spare ammo and kit had saved him once again, but he cartwheeled to the ground.

  Bolan was about to open fire on his latest attacker when he saw Annis Hassan blaze away with her Glock 19. The gunman with the thigh injury caught bullets in his back, but he didn’t have Kevlar and a protective ceramic plate to protect his vital organs from shredding projectiles.

  “Go!” she shouted. “Get him!”

  She pointed to the starting pickup.

  Its back tires spun as the escaping SALT member put down too much throttle in first gear. Gravel launched at Bolan almost as brutal as a salvo of submachine gun fire. Then the pickup caught traction and launched like a missile toward the exit gates.

  Bolan jumped into a nearby pickup.

  He didn’t need a chase through downtown Mobile, Alabama, endangering noncombatants. This had to wrap up fast.

  Chapter Six

  The key was in the Ram 1500’s ignition, and Bolan turned it over. There was a 345 HEMI stamp on the fender, and the roar of almost 400 horsepower was music to the Executioner’s ears. He needed speed and power if he was going to catch up and bring down the escaped SALT gunman.

  The enemy got a few seconds’ head start, but Bolan knew how to operate a vehicle, and he didn’t waste energy or time applying too much throttle. The tires got their traction instantaneously, they didn’t spit gravel and make the big Dodge snarl and roar impressively yet impotently in one place. He rolled out immediately, shifted up through the gears and stuck to the road in a straight line as the truck ahead of him swerved as power switched from one axle to another in a wild frenzy of balance. Whatever lead that the SALT escapee had gained through his mad rush disappeared in moments as Bolan accelerated toward him.

  The Ford up ahead wasn’t lacking power, but with his adrenaline pulsing out of control, the SALT gunman lost control of his finer motor functions. Panic made his hands twitchy and he over-revved the engine before kicking in the clutch and shifting up. And as he shifted, his control on the steering wheel wavered. As the Ford had traction control, the driver confused the computerized system with his veering movements.

  Bolan aimed the front bumper of the Ram at the other truck. One good solid hit with the vehicle’s heavy-duty bull bar and the chase could be over. His aim was true, and he swung the reinforced-steel push bumper, the “ho
rns” of his literal Ram truck, into the right rear tire of the escaping SALT gunman. The trucks were moving at different velocities, but Bolan applied all the force and momentum of his truck to the rear axle of the other pickup.

  The old saying was “Horsepower is how fast you hit the wall, but torque is how much you move the wall when you hit it.” The semantics were in constant debate, but in this instance, more than 400 pound-feet of torque provided the power to move the rear tire and wheel of the Ford closer to its counterpart on the other side. Unfortunately for the escaping gunman, the rear axle of his pickup didn’t operate like that. All the power of the connected back wheels was severed like a broken spine. The axle shattered, the truck’s bed punctured by its splintered shaft.

  That was in the initial impact. The sudden movement of the wheel transferred to the rest of the enemy vehicle, and the SALT driver’s shocked features rotated into view as the Executioner’s vehicular tackle spun him until they were face-to-face. The Ram bounced against the front bumper of the Ford, jamming it backward. The bed crumpled as it met the wall of a neighboring warehouse to the abandoned factory. The cab of the truck was suddenly stuffed with billowed airbags.

  A moment later Bolan himself was struck by the erupting safety measure on the Ram’s steering wheel. He’d braced for the explosive cushion and was glad that he didn’t wear glasses. The force of sodium azide reacting with potassium nitrate was instantaneous, violent, and slammed the nylon shell into the Executioner’s face with stunning force. He’d turned his head so that he didn’t catch the bag on the nose. Airbags were notorious for breaking noses and shattering glasses. Preparation kept him from being knocked out. Hot nitrogen gas seeped from the splits in the nylon, and the cushion deflated quickly, but nowhere near as fast as the violent chemical expansion of hot nitrogen that filled it.

  Bolan pried open the Ram’s side door and dropped to the ground. His knees wobbled; the nylon shell had hit him at 200 miles per hour, an impact proportionally as dangerous as the actual crash between the two pickup trucks. He went around his truck to the driver’s side of the Ford. He didn’t want to cross between the two vehicles in case a ruptured engine, battery or radiator sprayed scalding or corrosive fluids at him. Bolan wasn’t moving as quickly as he wanted to, but through the spider-webbed windshield of the Ford, he saw that his opponent was still.

  The Executioner’s quarry slumped over the steering wheel. Livid red rings of puffy bruising surrounded his closed eyes. Blood trickled from a bent, swelling nose. His lips also began to inflate. Bolan checked his pulse. He was still alive. He yanked the stunned man out of the driver’s seat. The guy had avoided a fracture, but the g-forces of going from near sixty miles an hour to zero had still given his brains a good scramble.

  The Stony Man warrior braced himself and dragged his unconscious prisoner to the passenger-side door of the Ram. The man fell to the road as Bolan gripped the door handle. He got it open, then realized that hauling him in the shotgun seat would mean the captive would be sprawled across the center console, and interfere with Bolan’s driving. He opened the back door and threw the slumped SALT captive across the bench seat in the back of the quad cab.

  It took a moment or two to position the man on the seat so that Bolan didn’t break the guy’s legs with a slammed door, then he climbed into the Ram’s driver’s seat. A few moments with his combat knife to slash the deflated airbag from the steering wheel and the truck could be driven easily once more. He pulled a J-turn and drove back to where he’d parked the Ford Transit. The RAM pickup was a good vehicle, but the damage it had taken would draw too much attention to him. He checked the pickup’s VIN plate, but it was scarred with acid, much like the rifles carried by the gunmen sent to eliminate his other prisoner, Colton Howard.

  Though he felt the fog of his crash-induced weakness pass, when Hassan joined him, she insisted on helping him load the latest prisoner on board. “I’m going to have to check you for a concussion before you drive.”

  “Why? I’m fine.”

  “Because that cage on the front of your Ram is as mangled as Howard’s arm,” the doctor said, referring to the limb that Bolan had destroyed to take the would-be assassin alive and captive.

  “I appreciate your powers of observation, but I know when I have a concussion,” Bolan said.

  Hassan grabbed him by the chin, and the Executioner didn’t resist. Her grasp was firm, but not so much that he couldn’t pull away if he wanted to. She fished a small pocket light from her jeans and flashed it in his eyes. “Pupils responding normally. But you’ve got a lot of little lacerations under that black gunk. We need to clean that off and put some disinfectant on it.”

  “Just because it’s inky paint doesn’t mean it’s going to make splinters infected,” he told her. “This isn’t my first time using greasepaint, and I make sure to utilize a sterile, breathable product. Take it easy.”

  Hassan nodded but still looked uptight.

  Bolan rested a hand on her shoulder. “Thank you for saving my life.”

  “At the cost of another’s,” she answered.

  “They were the same people who would have murdered you without a second thought,” Bolan noted. “His job was literally to punish Howard for failing to kill you, and there’s no doubt he wouldn’t have cut you in half.”

  “I bought my pistol to protect myself. I knew that, with my history, I’d have to use it. I just... I’m worried that I didn’t feel a thing.”

  She looked at him, met his gaze, her brown eyes bewildered. “Does that make me...?”

  “It makes you someone who was protecting another person from violence,” Bolan said. “When we get to the safehouse, I’ll show you the bruise between my shoulder blades. In the meantime, I have to secure my assault rifle.”

  Several minutes later Bolan slid behind the wheel of the Ford and started it up.

  “Why aren’t we going to my home?” Hassan asked.

  “It’s not only a place of interest to SALT, but to another group of people, which inspired a nonstop night drive to get to you,” Bolan said.

  “What group?” Hassan asked.

  “Sorry. Just another group interested in you. They might have been official when they were still fighting for the Taliban.”

  “Oh,” Hassan murmured. She turned away from him. “Trouble from home.”

  Bolan knew that across the world there were people who risked everything for others, and people who engaged in intolerant rampages against those who practiced such compassion. The Executioner had waged his war against intolerant fanatics of “Western values” and “Islamic justice.” Neither group—nor any of the others who had come under his cleansing flame—was run by men with actual beliefs in anything other than self-promotion. Cults of personality rose around con men with big, beautiful promises of inclusion and higher calling. In the end, it was just political muscle through violence or profit at the barrel of a gun. Cold-blooded killers rose to the summons of these false prophets and purveyors of profits far too often, far too readily.

  Religious differences could be worked out with calm discussions that focused on the similarities of disparate faiths, and yet there was power in creating conflict where none was necessary. If the Executioner was to prevent unnecessary conflict, he would. Men like Howard and Bolan’s current prisoner were not much different from Hadib Asada and Krahiat Majnuna. The messages might not be from gods of the same name, but the end goals were the same. Someone up the food chain profited from violence and madness, either feeding their sociopathic urges or giving them a promotion in power or money.

  “It seems like I can’t go anywhere without being hunted as an enemy,” Hassan said.

  “One thing I’ve learned is that if I’m going in the right direction, more enemies are thrown at me.”

  “Twenty something gunmen? Plus the five from my apartment?” she asked.

  “For me, that’s just Monday morn
ing,” Bolan answered with a brief smile.

  The doctor seemed to recall their first meeting in Helmand Province. “You’re not joking.”

  “No,” Bolan said.

  He drove to the motel and parked. It was the afternoon, and Jessica was returning to the lot on foot. She saw Bolan at the wheel of the Transit and stopped by the vehicle. She merely glanced toward Annis Hassan, and smiled.

  “A guest?” she asked.

  Bolan nodded. “I’ll put some extra...”

  “No worries,” Jessica said. “You’ve provided enough in tips to be allowed some leeway. I don’t think this is a conjugal guest, so no charge.”

  “You charge for conjugal guests?” Bolan asked.

  “A security deposit,” Jessica admitted. “I’ll let Baxter know.”

  Bolan nodded. He didn’t want to mention his prisoners, mainly because the less the staff knew, the less they could be prosecuted for if the Executioner’s mission went south. So far, he’d been lucky, but that couldn’t last forever, and this little off-the-grid motel had been a kind host to him. He backed the Transit into the parking spot, so the loading doors would be near his room, minimizing exposure of the prisoners as much as possible.

  Lifting Howard was easier than when he’d dragged the other man from the wrecked Ford pickup, so his weakness was not from a concussion, just the shock of the impact. Bolan sat Howard up and leaned him against the door, then pulled the other man forward. Howard’s eyes were slit openings and he breathed evenly. Bolan checked his pulse again. It was strong.

  It took a few minutes to maneuver the new prisoner into the motel room. He zip-tied the man’s wrists and ankles to a steel folding chair, then gagged him.

  Bolan’s phone beeped as the fingerprint check came back from Stony Man Farm. He looked at the rap sheet for the Alabaman hired gun. Nolan Malone.