Toxic Terrain

The level of security was nothing short of bizarre. Most cattle operations in the area needed only the security of a big dog or perhaps some alpacas to keep coyotes and other predators away from the calves. Even though the Little Missouri National Grasslands—a chunk of land that covered more than a million acres in western North Dakota—was all open-grazing, meaning the cattle roamed on more or less free range, most ranchers kept their herds together and they knew one another’s brands and tags. The closest anyone ever got to rustling was when a stray animal accidentally ended up in someone else’s herd, and those situations were usually solved with no hard feelings. Though most people out here carried at least one firearm at all times, and often two, that had more to do with the chance of running into a rattlesnake or buffalo that had strayed from Theodore Roosevelt National Park, or a rogue Angus or Hereford, than with fear of humans.

A Bell 210 helicopter flew over the river and landed in the complex just as the sun sank below the western horizon. Except for the yellow-and-red “Ag Con” decal on its side, the 210 was painted flat black. The first helicopter had barely landed when a second came in from the north. Again, while unusual, Ag Con’s flying a couple of helicopters out here wasn’t unreasonable. The company ran twenty thousand head of cattle in a range that covered over more than sixteen hundred square miles. It would be a challenge to cover it all on ATVs and horses.

But the men wearing full battle gear inside the helicopters were a little harder to explain. Bolan had a hard time imagining a legitimate use for the grenade launchers mounted beneath their QBZ Type 97 assault rifles. Grenades weren’t the most useful tools for rounding up cattle or mending fences. The rifles themselves, modern bullpup-style weapons, with their grenade launchers poking out from under their barrels, looked as out of place in the Western landscape. Not to mention that the Type 97 had never been legally imported into the United States.

Several other men came out of the guarded barn dragging something that eliminated any doubts Bolan might have still harbored regarding the nature of the Ag Con operation—two figures, a male and a female, both with their hands and feet zip-tied together and black hoods draped over their heads. They had to be Pam Bowman and Roger Grevoy. Seeing the two captives was all the evidence Bolan needed to turn this into a shooting war.

Though he was well-armed, the Executioner could see no way to turn this soft probe hard without endangering the captives. Bolan had taken on more people than were guarding the compound and lived to tell about it, but if he started shooting now, there was no way he could take out all the enemy before they executed Bowman and Grevoy.

He watched as the prisoners were loaded onto one of the helicopters and flown from the compound. The Bell had a maximum range of 225 nautical miles, but since it hadn’t refueled, its destination was likely much less than that. The helicopter headed northeast and was soon followed by the second helicopter. There was no cell phone service this far into the Badlands, but Bolan had brought a satellite phone in case he needed some help from Stony Man. Bolan punched in Kurtzman’s secure number, but before he heard the big man’s gruff voice answer, he felt a gun barrel touch the back of his head.

“Put down the phone,” a voice behind him said.

Bolan, still in a prone position, started to put the phone down in an exaggerated slow-motion movement. Hoping that the man’s attention was on his arm, the soldier swept his leg around behind him where he estimated the man would be standing. His calf hooking around the other man’s leg told the soldier that he had guessed correctly, and the man fell to the ground. Bolan felt the barrel of the gun slide away from the back of his head at the same time he felt the man fall. The man squeezed the trigger an instant after the tip of the barrel left the back of Bolan’s scalp and he felt a hot line sear across the back of his head. The bullet didn’t hit him with enough force to cause any concussive damage, but the report from the rifle deafened the soldier—all he could hear was loud ringing.

But he didn’t have time to worry about any permanent hearing loss. He flipped upright and drew his Desert Eagle before the man hit the ground. There was no point bothering with the silenced Beretta, since the soft probe had already gone hard. Bolan aimed and fired. The big 240-grain bullet put a crater the size of a walnut in the man’s forehead and took half his skull with it on the way out.

Bolan still couldn’t hear anything but ringing, but he knew the bad guys would be coming at him in force. He rolled back over and scanned the compound. By this time the sun had gone below the horizon, so he turned on the FLIR thermal imaging sight he’d mounted on the DPMS rifle. Sure enough, all four ATV riders were headed his way, as were a number of foot patrols from inside the compound. Bolan fired a shot at the ATV rider nearest the butte, hitting him in the gap between his full-coverage helmet and the chest protector of his motocross body armor. The .260 round would easily punch through the ABS plastic of the man’s riding gear, but Bolan, who was used to fighting foes wearing antiballistic body armor rather than protective riding gear, instinctively aimed for open flesh. His shot was dead-on and a gaping wound opened in the man’s trachea. The bullet sheared the man’s spine just below the base of the skull, and he tumbled from his vehicle.

Before the man hit the ground, Bolan had already fired on the ATV rider who was next in line. He didn’t have a clear shot at the man’s neck, so he punched a round through the man’s goggles.

The two ATV riders who were behind their fallen comrades both reacted in different ways. The rider who was farther back stopped and tried to get behind his vehicle for cover, while the closer rider opened up his throttle and came bouncing toward Bolan at top speed. The soldier put a round right into the armpit of the man who was clambering off his ATV, and the guy fell from sight. Then Bolan targeted the rider coming at him on the ATV. It took two shots to stop him. Since he was so close to the butte, Bolan had to shoot almost straight down at him, taking him out with a shot through the top of his helmet.

All of this took place in a matter of seconds, but it was long enough for the shooter in the cupola atop the barn to start firing at Bolan’s position. Bullets started knocking up chunks of dirt all around the Executioner, and at least a dozen armed men had left the compound and were running toward him. Bolan scooped up the sat phone, scrambled back to the far edge of the butte and leaped over the edge, half falling, half running down the steep embankment. When he reached the bottom he ran toward his horse. He knew the terrain would be too rough for anything but foot travel or horseback, so he ran at top speed through the bottoms of the maze of washes and gullies that made up the Badlands, knowing that he could keep ahead of the Ag Con goons.

The ringing in Bolan’s ears had finally subsided. He regained his hearing just in time; voices in the brush ahead told Bolan that he also had to worry about what was in front of him as well as what was coming up behind. He could make out two distinct voices speaking with each other in the far end of the wash. He was still a good mile from his horse.

As quietly as he could, the soldier climbed to the top of the wash and took cover in a shrubby growth of juniper trees. From his vantage point he could see four armed men through his FLIR sight. A quick scan in the other direction showed Bolan that the armed men from the compound who were spread out and combing the area looking for him were closing in.

He pulled a pin from an M-67 fragmentation grenade and lobbed the bomb toward the men in the wash, then ducked behind a pile of rocks and clay. Though he was out of the kill radius of the grenade, he was still close enough to be wounded by flying shrapnel.

One of the men in the wash had time to utter, “What the…” just before the grenade detonated. Bolan also heard the sound of other guards coming down the path he’d just made through the shrubs, but before he could identify his trackers, the bomb went off. When the Executioner scanned for survivors after the blast, all he saw was the brightly colored thermal signatures of a leg and a couple of arms amid the less brightly colored signature of the bloody mist that was all that remained of the four men.

He did make out another five-man patrol heading toward the sound of the explosion. Bolan once again broke into a full-speed run through the rough terrain and made it to his horse. He didn’t take time to scan for his pursuers with the FLIR, but he hoped they were still combing the area and not making nearly as good time as he was. Bolan untied the horse and led it out of the draw as quietly as possible. After about a quarter mile he reached the trail he rode in on. He could hear his pursuers closing in by the time he mounted the horse and gave it his heels. The horse broke into a run just as a man emerged from a stand of junipers at the rim of a ridge that ran parallel to the trail. The gunner fired a full-auto burst at the fleeing soldier, but Bolan had already put enough distance between them for the shots to fall short. The horse was given its lead and it ran until Bolan was certain he’d gotten far enough away from his pursuers.

2

Chen Zhen erupted from the barn door before the report from the first shot had quit echoing off the distant buttes. He watched as the ATV-mounted patrols were mowed down as they descended on the shooter’s position on the butte to the east of the ranch. They were supposed to be good—they’d chosen Build & Berg Associates because of their reputation as the best private military contractor available—but so far they hadn’t impressed Chen as especially competent.

At least he had his own men upon which he could depend, troops handpicked from among the very best the People’s Liberation Army had to offer, and Yao Rui, the sharpshooter manning the cupola, had been one of the PLA’s finest snipers. Before Chen could make out the exact location of the shots coming from the butte, he heard Yao’s Barrett M-98 unleash several rounds. The booming of the powerful .338 Lapua Magnum rounds rang through the Badlands like the sonic boom from a jet fighter, but Chen couldn’t see any sign that they’d hit their target.

Chen grabbed the radio clipped to his belt, pressed the talk button and heard the voice of Colonel Liang Wu, his associate who oversaw the PLA contingent and acted as his liaison with B&B Associates. Chen’s English was rudimentary at best, while Liang was fluent in not only English, but also Russian and French, as well as several of the other languages spoken by the eclectic collection of mercenaries that comprised the B&B contingent.

“Find out what’s happening,” Chen ordered, “and report back to me the instant you have information.”

Chen had no idea who was trespassing on Ag Con property, but at least he knew who it wasn’t. Chen knew Ag Con had nothing to fear from the authorities. Gordon Gould had assured him that he would take care of officials from the local law-enforcement agency, which consisted of that fat buffoon Jim Buck and his simpleminded deputies. Likewise Governor Chauvin had given his assurance that Ag Con could count on nothing but the utmost support from the state highway-patrol department. Ag Con was the state’s largest employer and had single-handedly kept North Dakota’s economy growing throughout the United States’ most recent economic turmoil.

Chauvin, who had his sights set on a seat in the U.S. Senate, was not about to let anything like a criminal investigation get in the way of commerce or his political future. Ag Con supplied the butter that Chauvin put upon his bread. Chen knew that wasn’t the exact translation for the American idiomatic expression, but he knew it was close. Chauvin aspired to a higher office, and for that to happen, he needed the campaign funding that Ag Con provided. That’s how things worked in a so-called democracy, Chen thought. In his opinion the word seemed to be code for a system of political prostitution, in which an oligarchy of corporate pimps like Ag Con ran a stable of political whores like Chauvin. To keep this illusion of democracy alive, the political whores spouted rhetoric designed to appease one political faction or another. They seemed to focus on emotionally charged but ultimately meaningless issues to keep their constituency distracted from the real matter at hand, which appeared to be financially raping the population.

Chen had spent much time with Governor Chauvin, and he wasn’t convinced the governor would have spurned Ag Con’s financial resources even if he had known the corporation’s real motive, which was nothing less than the complete destabilization of the U.S. economy. Chauvin most likely would win his seat in the U.S. Senate, but by the time that occurred, the Senate would not have a stable civilization to govern. Chen wasn’t sure that Chauvin possessed the intellectual tools to comprehend Ag Con’s plans even if he knew of them. If their plans were successful—when, not if, Chen reminded himself—the United States would devolve into societal chaos that would make countries like Somalia and Haiti seem stable.

Regardless of whether or not he had the intelligence to comprehend such possibilities, Chauvin had effectively removed the state police from the equation. That left the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which answered not to Chauvin but to North Dakota’s attorney general, Jack Pullman. They were even less a threat than the highway patrol because Gould had video footage of Pullman having sex with a prostitute. When confronted with evidence of his illicit activity, Pullman had been willing to make any compromise in order to keep his secret safe.

When it came to doing business in North Dakota, Ag Con was above the law, meaning that the intruder killing his men from atop the butte was something other than official. Most likely it had something to do with the abduction of the extension agent and the veterinarian.

Chen watched Liang and a small patrol of his men race away from the compound on foot. This new development worried him. He hadn’t expected to encounter any resistance this early in the process, but he had complete faith in Liang and his ability to neutralize the resistance.

LIANG AND HIS MEN raced around the butte and caught a glimpse of a dark figure disappearing into the sagebrush. He signaled for his men to stop and listen to the fleeing figure. Liang could hear the sound of the man cutting through the sagebrush, but he was remarkably quiet. He had no idea who he and his men were up against, but he was certain of one thing—the man was a professional.

But so were Liang and his troops, and once he’d identified the direction in which his prey was headed, they broke into a full run and pursued him. They moved through the brush almost as stealthily as the big man they tracked. Almost, but not quite.

Liang sensed they were getting close, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt they were on the right track when he heard the grenade go off. The terrain made progress difficult, but when they heard the explosion, Liang and his men moved even faster, until they came into a clearing awash in blood and dismembered body parts. Equine carnage mixed with the human gore; the Build & Berg mercenaries had ridden to the site on horseback, and two of the four horses had been killed in the explosion. A third had been severely wounded by shrapnel and would soon expire, but the fourth appeared relatively unharmed, perhaps because it had been shielded from the blast by the other horses.

Liang heard movement on the ridge above the massacre site. “After him!” he ordered his men. The men took off after the intruder in an instant, exhibiting the discipline that Liang had spent years instilling in them. Meanwhile, he untied and mounted the surviving horse.

Liang felt at home atop the horse. Mongol blood coursed through his veins, a shameful family secret that he’d managed to keep from his superiors, but at the same time a source of inner pride. Liang always felt that his secret Mongol heritage made him the fierce warrior he was. He’d definitely inherited his ability to ride a horse from his Mongolian ancestors.

Liang crouched low on the horse to avoid being swept from the saddle by the juniper branches and rode through the bottom of the gully toward the sound of the reports issuing from his troops’ rifles. He couldn’t hear any return fire and hoped that meant that their bullets had found their intended target. He burst out of the gully just as the horseback-mounted figure disappeared into the fading twilight. It appeared as though the man had not been wounded in the exchange of fire.

Liang estimated the distance between himself and the fleeing figure. Setting his selector to single-round fire, he sighted in on the man, then raised his sights to account for what he’d heard the American Southerners refer to as “Kentucky windage.” He carefully squeezed off a shot. By the time he brought his rifle down and peered at the fleeing figure through the light-amplifying scope he’d mounted atop it, the target was slumped over in his saddle.

There was no time to congratulate himself on his lucky shot. Liang gave the horse his heels and charged toward the fleeing figure. All things being equal, he thought he should be able to catch the man. Both the intruder and he were mounted on quarter horses with similar musculature, but the big man he chased had to weigh at least 200 pounds, while Liang weighed a mere 125 pounds. Simple physics dictated that his horse should be faster given its lighter load, and indeed, Liang swiftly closed in on his prey, though not as quickly as he’d estimated.

Liang decided that the problem was his horse, which, like almost every human he’d encountered in the United States, seemed to be fat and lazy. Liang wished he’d had his own horse, a beautiful athletic Arabian that he’d purchased from a local horse rancher, instead of this oversize nag. The Arabian was too slight to comfortably carry most of the men working for B&B, but for a man of Liang’s diminutive stature the horse was spot-on perfect.

Liang rode the chubby quarter horse at full gallop for nearly three miles before he started to get close enough to try another shot. He could tell that his horse was fading. Quarter horses were sprinters, not bred for stamina, and Liang knew if he kept up the pace for too long he’d kill his ride home. But if that was the case, he knew the quarter horse his opponent rode had to be at least as tired, and probably more so, given his additional burden.

Liang’s quarry didn’t appear to be doing much better than the horses they both rode. The lucky shot appeared to have done enough damage to inhibit the man’s riding ability, but it didn’t appear to be a kill shot. He had hoped to get closer for a better shot, but judging from his horse’s condition he probably couldn’t continue much longer. Liang stopped his horse to take a final shot, but before he had his rifle to his shoulder the big man had whirled his horse and fired off a shot of his own. The shot missed Liang, but it struck his horse in the neck. The animal fell to the ground, throwing Liang into some thorny sagebrush. By the time he’d extricated himself and gathered his weapon and the other gear he’d lost when he fell from the horse, the animal was dead and his opponent had disappeared.

HAD BOLAN BEEN prone to self-pity, he would have cursed the bad luck that had allowed his pursuer’s wild shot to find its mark, which happened to be his left shoulder, but Bolan was a professional and he knew that this was all part of the game. He also knew that he could be thankful for his good luck, because the bullet had passed through muscle tissue without finding an artery or bone. But the soldier didn’t expend a lot of energy thinking about luck, good or bad. Instead, he put his energy into making his own luck.

This time he’d need some help to make his luck good. Even though the bullet hadn’t done any permanent damage, he was still bleeding profusely. He could feel himself getting weaker by the mile, but he continued at as fast a pace as he dared without killing his horse, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Ag Con ranch. Once he was certain he’d shaken his pursuers, he dialed the number on the business card he’d been given the previous afternoon. He’d burned the card, but not before he’d memorized the number.

Kristen Kemp sounded glad to hear from him. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’ve been better,” he said. He hated to bring a civilian into this mess, but Kemp was already involved, and judging from what he’d seen of Ag Con, she would probably be safer with him than by herself. Besides, he needed to have a bullet removed from his shoulder and have the wound sewn up, and Kemp had the skills to do the job. He didn’t dare go to the local hospital for medical attention because Ag Con would most likely be watching for him there. And even if they weren’t, the hospital would have to report his wound to the sheriff, which was as good as reporting his presence to Ag Con.

Bolan already knew that Ag Con somehow had its hooks into the sheriff, which was the only possible explanation for the bogus incident report the sheriff filed after the Ag Con sniper had tried to kill him and Kemp the previous afternoon. The Executioner hadn’t seen the report himself, but Kurtzman had obtained a copy of it the moment Buck entered it into the North Dakota State Bureau of Criminal Investigation computer system. The sheriff was dirty. How dirty, Bolan didn’t know, but he did know the man couldn’t be trusted.

“I’ve been shot,” Bolan told Kemp.

“My God!” Kemp exclaimed. “Is it serious?”

“It’s not good,” he told her. “It could get serious in a hurry if I don’t do something about it soon.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m about a half-hour ride from where we parked the horse trailer yesterday. How soon can you be there?”