Code Of Honor

Not that that was likely to be an issue for Bethke. He’d really hoped to climb Mount Kilimanjaro some day.

1

Mack Bolan peered through the Pentax Lightseeker XL scope on his ArmaLite AR-50 .50 BMG rifle. The scope was equipped with a Twilight Plex reticle that was designed for fast target acquisition and low light. It was currently in night-vision mode, not to adjust for darkness—since it was midafternoon—but to detect heat signatures on the other side of the steel plating of the warehouse.

To the general public, the warehouse in this suburb of Detroit, Michigan, was used for meat storage by the Hash & Cox Meat Packing Company. The inside was kept at thirty-eight degrees, so the presence of a ninety-eight-degree human being would stand out like a beacon in the scope.

At the moment, the warehouse was empty of everything other than the meat and assorted tools and storage units.

The Executioner knew that would change soon.

The warehouse wasn’t exactly a front—Hash & Cox was a legitimate business that served as a middleman between suppliers and retailers—but it was used to mask a much less legitimate business. The warehouse was used for drug merchants who supplied cocaine and heroin for many of the dealers working in Detroit. All attempts by the Detroit Police Department to bring the business down had been stymied by Hash & Cox’s CEO, Karl Hash—the brother-in-law of the DPD police chief. Attempts to bring in the DEA or the FBI were equally stymied by the influence of a state senator, who had received numerous campaign contributions from Hash & Cox and its satellite companies. Hash & Cox’s COO, Charles McPherson, was also the nephew of a Michigan congressman who was on the committee that controlled the DEA’s funding.

All this made Hash & Cox off-limits to legitimate law enforcement.

That was where the Executioner came in.

Bolan would bring the company down because nobody else could. He’d learned that McPherson and Hash were meeting at the warehouse to make sure that the place was cleaned out of all narcotics in preparation for an FDA inspection the following day. When Bolan had talked to a friend of a friend in the FDA to get the inspection to happen, he’d been hoping for this result. Hash and McPherson had too much riding on this warehouse to risk trusting underlings. They’d want to check the place themselves, make sure it would pass inspection.

He planned to take out the pair of them as soon as they showed up by taking up position on the roof of another warehouse on the same backstreet. With the pair of them dead, the path would be cleared to legitimately bring down the drug operation.

A limousine pulled up to the warehouse gate. The driver hopped out and fumbled with a set of keys before inserting one into the padlock that secured the chain holding the gate shut. The padlock snapped open, and the driver pulled the chain out and tossed it aside. The gate slowly creaked open on its own, leaving the way clear for the limo to continue inside, once the driver got back inside.

Once the limo pulled up to the side entrance, the driver again hopped out, opening the door to let the other occupants out: two white men in pinstriped suits who matched the pictures of Hash and McPherson in Bolan’s dossier. At first, the Executioner was concerned that the driver might go inside as well, but he got back into the car once he closed the back door behind the two men. The scope couldn’t differentiate people inside the warehouse, just heat signatures, and the warehouse had no windows.

He could have taken them down outside, but it was better to wait for them to be inside, so that the driver would remain in the dark for as long as possible. The driver himself aided in this by turning on the limousine’s sound system at a very loud volume.

The Executioner had been waiting on the roof for these two to show up for four hours. He could hold off another minute.

After they went inside, Bolan waited until he saw two heat signatures. First one entered his sights, and he squeezed off a round. The rifle had been in his hands so long, it was like an extension of his arms, and firing it barely required a conscious effort on Bolan’s part.

The .50-caliber bullet easily penetrated the thick metal of the wall and blew off the head of either Hash or McPherson. The formerly upright heat signature fell into a crumpled mess on the floor.

It took only a second for Bolan to adjust his aim slightly and take out the heat signature of the second person, who hadn’t yet registered what had happened to his colleague. The bullet whistled through the air and pulped the head of the target.

When the second body went down, Bolan continued his vigil, making sure the heat signatures didn’t move and the driver didn’t respond to the loud report of two rifle shots being fired. After a while, the signatures got cooler as their body temperatures went down, accelerated by the low temperatures inside the warehouse.

But Bolan still didn’t move.

The limo sound system had been going for four songs before the driver turned it off. Seconds later, he bounded out of the car, a cell phone at his ear and a concerned look on his face, and ran to the entrance. Bolan assumed that Hash and McPherson had only expected to be a minute or two inside, and that the delay had the driver worried.

As well it should have.

Only then did the Executioner remove the scope and head for the roof entrance.

After making his way down the stairs of the warehouse to the street, he placed the rifle and scope in the trunk of the Chevrolet Aveo he’d rented, got behind the wheel and drove toward Interstate 94. Using his secure sat phone, he dialed the number for Stony Man Farm, the base for America’s ultracovert counterterrorist organization.

Within seconds, he was put through to Hal Brognola.

“Both men have been taken care of,” Bolan said without preamble, and without specifics.

“Good work, Striker. Your ride’s waiting at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base to bring you back here. We’ve got a big one.”

Bolan’s original plan had been to drive south on I–94 to Detroit, where he’d hole up in a motel room for the night, but instead he headed to Selfridge.

A FALCON 10 PRIVATE JET belonging to Stony Man had been waiting for Bolan at Selfridge, and it took off shortly after his arrival. One of the airmen stationed at the base said he would take care of Bolan’s rental car. The Executioner knew that Brognola had contacts all over the military and in law enforcement, and it was no surprise that he’d gotten Selfridge to do him this favor without their knowing precisely what it was about—or who it was they were doing it for.

The Falcon 10 had only one occupant when Bolan arrived: Charlie Mott, a civilian pilot who sometimes flew for Stony Man. “Welcome aboard, Striker,” Mott said with a sloppy salute at Bolan’s approach.

“Since when does Brognola give you chauffeur duty?” Bolan asked, as he climbed the small set of steps leading to the aircraft’s interior.

As he pulled the steps up into the closed-door position behind Bolan, Mott said, “He wanted to make sure you got to the Farm in one piece. He said this one’s a biggie.”

“So he told me over the phone.”

Mott then went into the cockpit and started preparing the plane for takeoff.

The Executioner slept for most of the two-hour flight to Stony Man Farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The Falcon 10 could accommodate up to eight people in extremely comfortable seats, and Bolan had long ago learned to take his rest where he could get it.

Mott taking the Falcon 10 into its final descent was enough to awaken Bolan, and as soon as the plane touched down, he gathered his rifle case and satchel and waited for the aircraft to come to a stop.

Brognola was waiting for him on the runway of the Farm’s airfield. “Welcome back, Striker. Let’s head up to the farmhouse so you can get a shower and a change of clothes. I’ve got a full briefing ready to go as soon as you’re ready.”

“No need to wait. You obviously want to get going quickly on this.”

“Fine.” Brognola hadn’t expected Bolan to actually accept any delay in getting the briefing to his next mission, but he had made the offer in any case out of respect for the man.

He and Bolan walked the short distance to the farmhouse, rather than accepting a ride in the Jeep that was standing by. After walking up the front steps and keying in the proper access code, the two men made their way to the War Room. A solid wooden conference table, surrounded by ergonomic chairs, dominated the room. At one end was a state-of-the-art laptop with a twenty-inch monitor. A USB cable was plugged into the laptop at one end and into a huge plasma TV mounted on the far wall, showing what was on the computer’s monitor in high definition.

At the moment, that was the desktop, which had assorted icons of programs and folders with file names made of seemingly random alphanumeric characters. Bolan knew that these were codes. Brognola moved the cursor to one of those folders and double-tapped the laptop’s track pad.

The folder contained several Portable Network Graphics files, also given coded alphanumeric file names.

First, Brognola called up four of the images, which were all crime-scene photos of dead bodies, and arranged them on the screen so Bolan could see all four.

There was a man with thinning brown hair lying against a rock in a grassy area, a woman with short steel-gray hair lying dead in a city street with a bullet wound in her back, an overweight man with his head literally blown off in a parking lot and a bald man with multiple stab wounds in his chest.

“You’re looking at Albert Bethke, Michaela Grosso, Terrence Redmond and Richard Lang.”

Bolan started at the third name. “Redmond’s been retired from the NSA for, what, ten years?”

“Twelve. And that’s something he has in common with the other three. They’re all people with a history of covert ops, and they’re all retired. Bethke was one of the people who set up DHS after 9/11, and before that he was NSA and FBI. Grosso and Lang were both CIA. They were all killed over the course of the past week or so—assassinated by the Black Cross.”

“You’re sure?”

Brognola hesitated. “No. But the evidence points to it.”

“The lack of evidence, you mean.”