Face Of Terror

Charlie dropped a checkbook on the counter and began endorsing several checks. “Morning, Susie,” he greeted. He passed the checks and deposit slips through the hole at the bottom of the glass that separated them, and was about to speak when the front door suddenly burst into flying shards of glass.

Everyone inside the bank froze.

Susan watched in horror as, one by one, five men dressed in multicolored Army camou outfits with black ski masks covering their faces crunched over the glass inside the bank.

Susan and the others were still glued into position as Charlie produced a silver-colored gun from beneath his T-shirt and turned to face the robbers. He got off three quick shots—all of which looked like they’d hit their targets in the chest by the robbers’ reactions—before another of the men turned some kind of machine gun on Charlie and shot him three times. One of the bullets made the elderly customer drop his pistol, but he suddenly pulled a thin sword out of his cane and staggered toward the men in the Army shirts and pants.

It took only one more round to drop Charlie to the floor.

Susan screamed, which made the other tellers scream. Then the loan officers and customers began screaming, too.

The five robbers were trying to shout over the shrieks in some kind of foreign language. It was probably Arabic, Susan thought. She was about to drop down to her knees behind the counter when one of the men switched to heavily accented English. “Do not move! If you do as I say, no one else will be harmed!”

Susan’s eyes darted back to the three men Charlie had shot, and she saw that they were still on their feet. Bulletproof vests, she thought. She remembered that some robbers in California had worn them a few years ago, and the police had had a terrible time trying to stop them.

The man who had spoken in heavily accented English now fired a burst into the ceiling. “Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut up now, all of you, or I will kill each and every one!”

Suddenly, the main lobby of the bank went silent. Susan had planned to drop to her knees a moment earlier, but now those same knees made the decision for her. She sank to the tile floor as if she’d been given a local anesthetic in both legs, and had to force herself to slide in beneath the counter.

From where she now hid, Susan heard the same voice ordering the tellers to come around to the front lobby. Each one who passed her looked down to where she hid. Some were crying. Others were in shock.

Susan realized that if any of the bank robbers came back behind the counter they would easily find her. But the time to surrender had come and gone. Something in her heart told Susan that if she slid out and got to her feet now, she’d be immediately killed.

And so would her baby.

Behind her, through the thin wall, Susan heard the man speaking English order everyone to the carpet. A few seconds later, she heard him speaking in that strange tongue again. A moment after he stopped, she heard the sounds of doors opening and closing from the part of the bank that held the loan officers’ offices and supply rooms.

The robbers were looking for anyone who had hidden, Susan knew, and that realization made her heart pound so hard she feared she might have a miscarriage.

The half door that separated the lobby from the tellers’ area swung open, and two of the men in Army clothes appeared in front of Susan. She pulled her knees tighter against her chest, but the baby inside her kept her from getting her legs out of sight. The two men walked past her and, unless the stress was causing her to hallucinate, neither of them noticed her feet sticking out from under the counter.

The men headed for the vault in the back of the bank. They disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared at the doorway leading back to the tellers’ area. One of them was looking at his wristwatch. A little later, an explosion sounded from the vault room.

Another man wearing a ski mask now hurried through the swing door and followed the first two back into the vault room. They spoke excitedly in their foreign tongue, then came back carrying large cotton money bags.

It took them three trips to get it all.

Behind her again now, Susan could hear the crunch of the broken glass beneath their boots as they began carrying the money out to whatever vehicle awaited them. Then, evidently finished and ready to leave, Susan heard the same man who had done all of the talking speak again. “Allahu Akhbar!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Death to all infidels!”

Then the room erupted with the explosions of all of the men’s machine guns, and Susan closed her eyes again and prayed. Dear God, she mouthed silently. Please spare the life of my child if not mine. Then she began to cry.

She was still crying five minutes later when the police arrived. It took a good minute after that for her to pry her eyes open and face what had happened.

Inside her belly, her baby boy was kicking like a well-trained rooster at a cockfight.

1

They had received the exact location from DEA Special Agent Rick Jessup’s informant only minutes earlier. Which meant they had mere minutes to reach the site of the cocaine transaction before the deal would be over and the drug pushers gone.

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, continued to floor the accelerator of the civilian-market Hummer. It was not the kind of vehicle he’d expected to find waiting for him when he’d arrived in Guyman, Oklahoma, earlier that morning.

With its bright yellow paint job, the only advantage it might have was that it stood out so much that no one in his right mind would believe any police agency would have the audacity to use it as an undercover vehicle.

But Bolan knew that would be a short-lived advantage. The bright Hummer might work fine for inner-city surveillance, but as soon as any action started, that advantage would disappear in a cloud of smoke.

Gun smoke.

Then again, Bolan had learned to work within the limitations of the equipment he had on hand, and he did not intend to quit doing so now.

The stakes in this game were simply too high to fold now.

Ever since Jessup’s informant indicated that a large cocaine deal was about to go down in the Oklahoma panhandle, Bolan had dressed and played the part of a wealthy Southwestern businessman. Both he and Agent Jessup wore exotic-skinned boots—Jessup’s were ostrich, Bolan’s anteater—carefully pressed blue jeans and colorful Western shirts with bolo ties of silver and turquoise.

Bolan continued to press the Hummer to its maximum speed while Jessup studied the hand-drawn map he had made while talking to his informant over the phone. “I think it’s the next turn,” he told the Executioner. “Yeah, there’s the motel my guy mentioned.” He pointed at a small set of brick buildings on the right side of the road. “Out in the middle of nowhere just like he said. Almost exactly halfway between Guyman and Boise City. That means we turn right the next time we see dirt.”

The Hummer flashed past the motel and sped on.

Oklahoma’s panhandle was known for its flatness, and the eye could indeed see for miles. The terrain was mostly prairie, with a few occasional wheat fields.

Not the usual sort of place radical Islamic terrorists or mafiosi would pick to do a drug deal. Then again, they might be working off the same sort of psychology the Executioner was using with the Hummer—picking a place so bereft of privacy that no lawmen were likely to even consider it.

In other words, hiding in plain sight.

Bolan saw the quarter-section road ahead and felt his eyebrows lower in concentration as he slowed. Middle-Eastern terrorists doing business with old-school Phoenix mafiosi didn’t constitute an average run-of-the-mill dope deal, either. But Bolan had seen stranger alliances form when there was a buck to be made.

Twelve-thirty p.m., which was what the Executioner’s watch read at the moment, was also a strange time of day for a drug transaction. Both the terrorists and the mafiosi had to have figured that all of the local lawmen had met someplace for lunch.

Bolan twisted the steering wheel and kicked up reddish-brown dust clouds beneath the Hummer’s tires. He leaned onto the accelerator again, driving along the packed-dirt county road only slightly slower than he had on the pavement. His eyes searched the horizon ahead, and he saw Jessup lift a pair of binoculars.

“This ground isn’t as flat as it looks,” the DEA man said. “It looks like you ought to be able to see all the way to Canada. But you can’t.”

“We’re only a few miles south of the Kansas state line and we can’t even see that,” the Executioner replied. “The terrain rises and falls so slowly and gently that it just looks flat. It can still block the view.”

Jessup nodded and dropped the binoculars to his lap. Bolan drove on.

Two and a half miles later, the Hummer topped one of the gentle rises the Executioner had mentioned and suddenly they could see a group of vehicles parked in the middle of a cow pasture. One Jeep and five pickups were parked in a circle roughly a half mile in front of them and a quarter mile or so off the road. Bolan hit the brakes and slowed to a speed that wouldn’t draw so much attention.

After all, the bright yellow Hummer was enough.

“Don’t you think we ought to hurry on in?” Jessup asked, turning toward the Executioner.

Bolan slowed even further and shook his head. “They’ve seen us,” he said. “Right about now, they’re all looking this way and speculating on who we are. Wealthy farmers with more money than good sense who bought a big yellow play toy? Or the law? The law would swoop in fast. But it wouldn’t be fast enough to keep most of them from getting away across the prairie.”

“Not to mention the fact that they’re going to start shooting as soon as it’s obvious the law is after them.” Jessup paused for a low chuckle, deep in his chest. “At least I’m the law,” he said. “I still haven’t figured out exactly who or what you are.”

The Executioner chuckled himself. All Jessup knew was that he had been assigned to work with Bolan—whom he knew as Matt Cooper—for a series of drug deals to which his snitch was privy. He had already seen Cooper bend conventional law so far as to break it. But it was always for a final good, and the end really did always justify the means.

“You’re right about the shooting,” Bolan finally said. “As soon as I turn this baby their way, it’s going to start. So the longer I can stay on the county road, the more it’ll appear that we’re just headed for someplace past them.” He paused and took in a breath. “That means I’m going to wait until we’re right across from them and then cut a hard right their way.”