Sabotage

“I got a phone call, man.” Schrader shrugged. “Last minute. Don’t know the guy. He said just that he was a fellow American, and that he knew the service today was going on, and that there was supposed to be a big peace protest here. Said he figured that would be of interest to me, and yeah, it was. It’s what we do. We stand up for people who can’t do it themselves, you know? People who’ve already given everything there is to give. You can dig that, right?”

“I can.” Bolan nodded. Indeed, he could.

“We network,” Schrader said, indicating his fellow Riders. “There are other chapters of Riders in this part of the country, and a few other groups that go by different names, folks who do the same thing we do. We stay in touch and we tip each other off when a ride comes up, especially if we think one of those protest groups, especially the crazier ones you see on the news, is aware of the service and looking to march on it. We were, all of us, on CNN just last month. But I’m telling you, Cooper, this is the first time I’ve ever gotten an anonymous phone call like that. I’m thinking now it was some kind of setup.”

“You could be right,” Bolan acknowledged. He took a small notebook from inside one of the pockets of his blacksuit. Using the metal pen clipped to it, he wrote down a phone number. The number would route a call through several satellite cutouts and eventually to Bolan’s secure satellite phone, while flagging the call as an unsecured transmission from a potentially unknown third party. No amount of tech-tracing would produce any intelligence on Bolan’s phone or the soldier’s whereabouts, but to the caller it would still appear to be a direct line. Bolan tore out the slip of paper and handed it to Schrader.

“If you hear anything more,” Bolan said, “anything through your contacts or those in your organization, call me. I’m interested in anything you hear about protests, or if you anyone calls you.”

“Here,” Schrader said, pulling out his cell phone and flipping it open. “I have the number on my phone from this morning, the number this Deep Throat or whatever called me from.” He recited it, and Bolan copied it down.

“That may help.”

“You’re wondering who’s got it in for our boys, aren’t you?” Schrader asked quietly, looking shrewd.

“Justice,” Bolan said simply. “I’m just looking for justice.”

“I heard that.”

Bolan excused himself and moved to the corpses of the shooters. He had already taken photos of each of them and sent them via secure upload to the Farm for analysis. The locals hadn’t liked that much, from their body language, but they hadn’t tried to stop him and they hadn’t asked any questions. Bolan had left the scene undisturbed while they were tagging and cataloging, but they were finished now. He knelt and carefully started searching the closest corpse.

“You won’t find much, sir,” one of the uniformed officers said. He nodded at Bolan and help up a plastic evidence bag. “I personally checked their pockets and the lining of their clothes. No IDs.”

“Thank you,” Bolan said. “Officer…?”

“Copeland, sir,” the cop said.

“Anything of consequence there?” Bolan nodded at the evidence bag.

“No.” The officer shook his head. “A few personal effects. Combs, pocketknives. A pair of wristwatches, domestic and unremarkable. Nothing, really. No car keys, no money, no matchbooks or scraps of paper. They more or less emptied their pockets beforehand, I guess.”

“What about him?” Bolan pointed to the driver, dead behind the wheel of the van. “And the vehicle.”

“We’re checking the vehicle identification number now.” Officer Copeland shook his head. “The plates came back already. They were stolen off a Toyota pickup twenty-five miles from here. I can tell you that van will come back as stolen. See that shattered side window up front, the little access window? That’s how they get in to hot-wire it. Sure sign the thing is hot. They must have grabbed it and then switched plates. It would have been enough cover in transit from wherever they got it, to here.”

Bolan nodded. He liked this Copeland. He was young but knew his business, and wasn’t afraid to share information with another department—in this case, one he had to know was decidedly above his pay grade.

“Nothing on the driver, either.”

Bolan looked over the dead men and women once more. That was strange. Amateurs were rarely so thorough, and these sign-waving shooters had hardly been professionals. They’d been sloppy, careless and, in the case of the one man who’d taken down two of his partners, dangerous to one another as much as to their targets. That didn’t make a lot of sense…unless these were the types of politically motivated pawns some greater interest, such as Trofimov, was controlling from higher up. That scenario made more sense. But if that was the case, then there definitely was likely to be someone—

“Agent Cooper?” Officer Copeland broke into Bolan’s reverie. “Uh, sir, is he one of yours?”

Bolan saw the man just as the uniformed cop pointed him out. The figure, dressed in a dark hooded sweatshirt and slacks, had taken off at a dead run from the very edge of the cemetery, headed away from the graves.

Bolan broke away and sprinted.

He raced through the maze of tombstones, dodging this way and that. The runner looked back, saw him and produced a handgun of some kind. He loosed a round, but it went wide, ricocheting off one of the marble memorials. Then they were both free of the cemetery proper, the running man cutting across a two-lane road that backed the rear of the graveyard. A Honda narrowly missed the man, the driver honking in outrage.

Bolan yanked the Beretta 93-R from his shoulder holster, risking a glance left and right before rocketing over the road. His combat boots chewed up asphalt and the muddy grass of the field beyond in long, rapid strides. The distance closed; there was a small copse of trees some yards beyond, but no real cover for the fleeing man to seek. He snapped another shot in Bolan’s direction. The bullet never came anywhere near the sprinting soldier.

Mack Bolan was a crack shot, a trained sniper and marksman of decades’ experience. Even he, however, wouldn’t risk a shot on a running man he wished to keep alive for questioning. Instead, he poured on the speed, judged the distance and then launched himself in a flying tackle. He took the smaller man around the knees and rolled through the muddy earth. He came up standing above the runner, who looked up from his back. The Beretta 93-R was trained on the smaller man’s face. His hood had come off to reveal that he was Asian, maybe midtwenties.

“Don’t move,” Bolan ordered.

The Asian was lightning fast. His body torqued and his foot came up like a rattlesnake, snapping a vicious blow into Bolan’s wrist. The Executioner lost the Beretta and took a step backward. The Asian leaped up and was at him, raining a flurry of brutal, acrobatic kicks. Bolan felt the wind being pressed from his rib cage. He reeled, clawing for the Desert Eagle still in its sheath, protecting his head with his left forearm as kick after vicious kick hammered away at him.

He ended up on his back, pulling the Desert Eagle free as the Asian man dropped a knee onto his chest. Firing from retention with the massive weapon pressed against his body, Bolan put a single .44 Magnum round through the little man’s midsection. He yelped in surprise, rolling over and off Bolan, scrambling to his feet once more and taking a few shaky steps away from the soldier.

“Stop!” Bolan ordered, surging to his feet and leveling the hand cannon. The Asian man seemed not to hear him. He took another drunken step, lost his footing and collapsed on suddenly rubbery knees. His legs were folded beneath him as he stared at the sky and took a last, ragged breath, his eyes wide.

The death rattle was unmistakable.

Bolan checked the body carefully. There was little chance a man could fake that sound; the Executioner had heard it often enough for real. Satisfied that the man wouldn’t be going anywhere ever again, Bolan searched the grass for his Beretta and surveyed his surroundings.

Silence.

The empty field bordered several properties, a couple of them residential. The nearest buildings were quite some distance away. No one had heard the gunfire, or no one thought to check it. Either way, Bolan was alone with the dead man.

He’d hoped to question the Asian, but as viciously as he’d fought, it was unlikely he’d have been very talkative. Bolan knew the type. This man was a fighter. He’d have gone down struggling.

Bolan holstered the Desert Eagle and retrieved the Beretta. He ejected its magazine, catching it in his free hand, then racked the slide and caught the ejected round in his cupped hand. He inspected the barrel of the machine pistol, peering through the open slide up the spout, making sure there was no mud or other foreign matter obstructing the weapon. Then he loaded the loose round back in the 20-round magazine.

“Agent Cooper!” Bolan turned at the sound of his cover name.

“Are you all right?” Officer Copeland asked, breathing hard as he ran to catch up.

“Fine,” Bolan said. He gestured to the dead man. “I can’t say the same for him.”

“You got him,” Copeland said. Bolan made no response as none was required.

Bolan checked the body. The man’s gun, a Glock 19, was on the ground nearby. Copeland retrieved the weapon, checked it, then unloaded it. Bolan nodded his approval. The dead man had nothing on him except a spare magazine for the Glock, a compact pair of binoculars and a short-range two-way radio, the sort of device hunters and other sportsmen used to coordinate groups of people in the field.

“Did you find one of these?” Bolan held up the bright yellow, rubberized radio. “In the van, or on any of the bodies?”

“Yes, actually,” Copeland confirmed. “It was in the van, in the back with a bunch of junk.”

“Junk?”

“An old dog blanket, a few cardboard boxes full of mostly trash.” Copeland shrugged. “The sort of thing that collects in the back of a van. It was rolling around loose back there. We thought it was just part of the debris, along for the ride after the vehicle was stolen.”

“Not an unreasonable conclusion,” Bolan said, nodding. “But this—” he wagged the radio at Copeland “—changes everything.”

“Who was he?”

“My guess,” Bolan said, “is that this man was a spotter. He was watching the service and called in the gunners in the van for maximum effect.”

“Copeland,” a distorted voice said from Copeland’s belt. “Copeland, come in.” The officer unclipped the walkie-talkie from his duty belt.