Orange Alert

“Taylor, Buckley and Johnston will also be hit this week.”

Oxford heard Cypher say their names as a strong arm suddenly clasped him from behind, and in one swift move snatched the Glock from his belt holster. Too late, he realized, he had failed to notice Cypher’s bodyguard slipping behind him. He pushed with all his might, attempting to expand his shoulders to open enough space for an elbow jab, but the arm around him was like an iron vise.

The huge man squeezed, and Oxford’s breath was driven from his lungs. He saw stars and thought for a moment he was blacking out, but the moment passed, and he drew a shallow breath that kept him conscious.

“There’s a traitor in our group,” Cypher said in a dry voice.

There were two poisonous darts in Oxford’s wristwatch, each loaded with a derivative of venom produced by central eastern Australia’s inland taipan, the most lethal viper in the world. Scientists at the CIA had refined the toxin, creating a poison hundreds of times more deadly. The result was a substance powerful enough to bestow upon a tiny dart the capability to deliver almost immediate death.

Held as he was, Oxford was unable to reach the watch’s trigger button with his right hand. His mind racing, he realized that, if he could knock his shoes together, the blade inside his right heel would snap into place, and he’d be able to stab his captor’s shin.

Like a movie viewed in fast forward, the scenario flashed through the agent’s mind. Reacting to the unexpected stab to his leg, the bodyguard would release him and, in less than two seconds, both he and Cypher would feel the prick of death stored inside the wristwatch. Oxford could quickly dispatch the other three, barehanded if necessary.

As if the huge man could read his thoughts, Oxford was suddenly thrown forward into the darkness. He landed on his knees, spinning immediately upon hitting the ground while reaching for his left wrist.

Excruciating pain, the likes of which he had never exprienced, shot through Oxford’s arm and into his brain as a 9 mm round from his own weapon smashed into the watch and continued through his wrist, leaving his hand dangling by a few bloody tendons. Ever the professional, the first impression to register in his mind above the searing agony was that the bodyguard must have slipped on night goggles to make such a shot.

His second thought, coming nanoseconds after the first, was to get the hell out of there.

Oxford lunged and took two quick steps before a round caught him in the back of the knee, blowing his patella onto the ground before him in a shower of bone chips and blood. He pitched forward, writhing in pain so intense that he lost awareness of all other sensations. The cold ground rushed up as he slammed onto his face, breathing raggedly, inhaling small bits of dirt laced with a peaty residue that tasted of decay.

A heavy boot smashed into his side, taking his breath away and flipping him onto his back. Oxford fought hard to keep from passing out. He knew he was about to die, and he wanted to be fully aware when it happened, facing death head-on, the way a warrior would.

Cypher’s bodyguard loomed over him. High above the Irish countryside, the sliver of the moon shimmered, illuminating the short barrel of Oxford’s Glock as the cold steel was pressed against his forehead.

In the distance, an animal wailed. Cypher said, “We’ll see who comes for him,” and there was a brilliant flash of white light that ended the CIA agent’s life.

1

Mack Bolan listened to the rhythmic signal coming through his earpiece. The cadence was strong and steady. As he got closer the beat would get faster and, during his final one hundred yards, the pitch would change if he veered off course. Judging from the spacing between notes, Bolan knew his objective was a ways off, maybe as far as three miles.

When the GPS finally led him to within one yard of the tiny transmitter implanted inside agent Oxford’s molar, Bolan’s earpiece would begin to hum a steady tone.

As he listened to the steady electronic pulse, the soldier was confident that the system would lead him directly to his goal.

In keeping with his practice for night missions, Bolan’s six-foot-three-inch frame was dressed entirely in black, from his jump boots that trod silently across the hard ground of the moors, to the knitted wool hat that covered his closely cut hair. The green-black-and-brown jungle camouflage he had smeared on the high points of his hawkish features absorbed the silvery sheen of moonlight, rendering him invisible against the dark countryside.

On his hip he wore a .44-caliber Desert Eagle and, in the pouches attached to the web belt, he carried, among other items, several clips of ammunition.

A holster on his left shoulder held a 9 mm Beretta 93-R, and a foot-long Fairbairn-Sykes combat knife rested in a weathered black leather sheath strapped to the outside of his right calf.

The man some called the Executioner didn’t know if he would actually need the weapons he carried, but he had been walking the hellfire trail too long to approach any mission unrepared. Despite the tranquil appearance the Irish countryside offered, a CIA agent had lost his life three nights earlier, and, to Bolan, that made the area a combat zone. More than once, Bolan had seen supposedly cold spots turn unexpectedly hot in seconds. He hadn’t survived all these years by being careless. Parking his rental car more than two miles away and coming in on foot was only the first precaution.

The Irish coast near the Ulster border was rugged country, with narrow, winding roads twisting through bowl-shaped contours of land extending from Lake Erne to Donegal Bay. In the daylight, views, at times, were nothing short of spectacular as the trails meandering through barren moors suddenly emerged upon sheep-studded pastures, so intensely green they were almost blinding. Immediately south of the moors, where Bolan had parked his car under the cover of a thin stand of hickory trees, the way became treacherous, perilously clinging to the sides of cliffs rising straight up from the sea where, hundreds of feet below, angry surf pounded the craggy coastline. Small religious shrines were carved at irregular intervals into the side of the rock walls to commemorate locations where fugitive priests had celebrated Mass during the British repression.

The trouble here had started, as so many conflicts in the history of man have, over religion. Protestant against Catholic, both sides killing for Christ, with the escalating violence over a period of more than two generations spawning the Orange Order, the IRA and twenty or thirty splinter groups, each with its own vision of tomorrow’s Ireland. For the most part, the rest of the world had ignored the conflict. A bunch of Irishmen killing each other on their tiny island way up in the North Atlantic didn’t threaten world stability the way an outbreak of war in the oil rich Middle East would.

Under normal circumstances, a man like Mack Bolan wouldn’t have been the one called into Ireland for a CIA find-and-retrieve mission, but the communiqué had been sent straight up the chain of command to the director of Homeland Security, who’d immediately alerted the President of its contents. The chief executive had decided he wanted someone with no traceable ties to a government agency, The call had gone out on a secured line to Hal Brognola at the Justice Department.

“They have to take it seriously,” Brognola had said later that day when he’d met Bolan on the National Mall in the shadow of the Museum of Natural History. They’d been walking west along Madison Drive, the domed Capitol building at their backs gleaming a brilliant white in the light from the afternoon sun.

The big Fed had continued. “This is much more than just an agent getting murdered, Striker. A terrorist group threatening to assassinate cabinet members? Jesus. The President wants someone to help assess how credible these people are.”

Brognola was fully aware of the Bolan’s arm’s-length relationship with the government, but he also knew that the soldier had never refused a request from his old friend. Brognola’s agenda usually was in tune with the Executioner’s. But Bolan would decide on his own whether or not to accept the mission.

Bolan had remained silent, studying the transcript he’d been reading as they’d walked.

“What’s this about another 9/11?” he asked.

“That’s the part that has the President most concerned,” Brognola answered. “The CIA doesn’t need any help dealing with these guys if they’re just a bunch of crackpots trying to make a statement. But, if what we’re up against is an organized terrorist cell with the capability to carry out those threats, we have to know who they are, and we have to know it now. All the President wants you to do is to get the CIA pointed in the right direction.”

It had been the part about another September 11 that had convinced Bolan to take the assignment.

He had met with Edmund Fontes, the director of CIA activities in Ireland, who’d reluctantly given him Steven Oxford’s final field report. In it, the late agent had described Cypher and the terrorist cell the mysterious man was forming, but there was no mention of any targets other than Catholic organizations in Ireland.

“He was one of my best,” Fontes had said tersely while handing Bolan the report, “and, if it was up to me, we’d go in and get him, ourselves. This is our job, and we don’t like someone else doing it.”

Bolan took no umbrage at the CIA man’s resentment. The way he received missions all but guaranteed that he’d be treading on someone else’s turf from the minute he showed up. He’d go in, get the microchip for Brognola, the one Oxford had in a back molar, and see what developed from there.

Now, twenty-four hours after saying he’d take the assignment, he was on-site, closing in on his objective.

An animal howled in the distance, and Bolan paused to take his bearings. Close by, a freight train rumbled over tracks on its way to the industrialized areas to the north.

The homing signal’s beat suddenly picked up, and Bolan’s senses went on full alert. With the terrain’s undulating dips and swells dotted with sparse patches of tall bushes and wind-blown hickory trees, the area was perfect for an ambush.

Bolan walked quickly, his eyes scanning the darkness, his free ear processing a steady flow of sounds. Noise carried well over the moors. Not as well as over water, where the crack of a gunshot could carry for miles.

He heard them before they were aware of his presence. A metallic click lasting no more than a millisecond rode to his ears on the night’s currents. It might have been the sound of a buckle that hadn’t been taped, or a snap fastening someone’s top collar against the breeze, but to a soldier with Bolan’s honed senses, it just as well could have been a bullhorn announcing their location.

Dropping to one knee, he reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles. As he adjusted the goggles on his face, Bolan turned off his earpiece. He’d deal with the ambush first, then locate Oxford. From the signal he had been getting and the direction he thought the errant sound came from, his greeting party appeared to be positioned close to his objective.

Bolan focused the goggles, bringing the moors into sharp relief. There was a flurry of movement off to his left as a pair of jackrabbits dodged and sprinted their way through the underbrush. He scanned from left to right, pausing at every patch of bushes and trees, watching for unnatural movement. A halo of light flared briefly, the flame of a cigarette lighter magnified tens of thousands of times as its photons passed through the photocathode tube of his goggles.

Amateurs, Bolan thought. Undisciplined, untrained amateurs.

He switched the goggles to infrared mode, and the scene before him shimmered slightly as he painted the landscape with IR. Three men were positioned in a clump of trees about a hundred yards off to his right, their figures clear and distinct against the cooler foliage. A slight spiral extended upward from the man who was smoking, his cigarette heating the air directly above him.

Bolan removed the goggles and returned them to their pouch. The men waiting for him obviously knew that Oxford was wearing a transmitter that would lead someone to his remains. Did they also know that he had been a CIA plant? And, if they did, what were their intentions now for the man who came to retrieve him?

Regardless of what they had been planning, the Executioner thought they were about to get more than they’d bargained for.

He rose into a crouch and set off, as silent as an owl swooping from above to snatch unsuspecting prey. When he finally got to a point about twenty yards behind them and they became visible in the dim light, he lowered himself again to one knee and took note of how the three were set up. He figured they would be facing his objective. He switched the earpiece back on.

The beat was coming in as an almost steady tone, and the note had changed, indicating Bolan was slightly off center. Before turning the signal off, he mentally extrapolated the sound with his position and that of the ambush, arriving at a spot about fifty yards from where he thought Oxford’s body would be buried.

He withdrew a powerful penlight from his front shirt pocket and rotated the lens to produce a beam. Sliding the Desert Eagle from its holster, he stood and took a step forward.

“Everyone freeze!” he shouted in a voice full of authority as he held it out at a full arm’s length to the left of his body.