Face Of Terror

Jessup drove on. When the helicopter was perhaps a hundred feet in the air, the pilot turned its nose directly at the oncoming Hummer. Jessup watched as a man in green camouflage, secured to the helicopter by a ballistic nylon strap, leaned out of the same sliding side door through which the men had boarded.

Resting on his shoulder was an OD-green bazooka.

“Twist the wheel!” Bolan yelled. And even as he spoke, he dropped the AR-15 and reached across the Hummer with both hands.

The bazooka’s charge exploded out of the mammoth barrel even as the back blast flew past the rear of the helicopter. Together, Bolan and Jessup turned the wheel as if their very lives depended on it.

The explosion ten feet to one side of their vehicle created a crater in the prairie ground roughly the same size that a hand grenade buried beneath the surface would have made. Bolan looked back up at the sky and saw the man with the bazooka disappear back into the helicopter. Then the chopper rose higher into the air, turned and flew away.

Jessup turned the Hummer back toward the helicopter as it grew smaller in the distance. Both he and Bolan stepped out of the yellow vehicle and watched.

“Any idea where they might be going?” Jessup asked.

Bolan shook his head. “Even on ground this flat, they’ll be completely out of sight in another minute or so. Especially if they stay as close to the ground as they were. They could keep going, turn right or left, or even fly a few miles one way or another and then double back past us.”

“They might figure we’ll wait here and see,” Jessup suggested.

“They might,” Bolan said. “But it’s not likely. They can spot this yellow Hummer a long time before we see them in the air. Come on.” He got back behind the wheel of the big vehicle as Jessup jumped into the passenger’s side. They drove only slightly slower as they returned to where the three Toyota pickups lay in ruins.

“It’s gonna take a while to get all that coke rounded up, inventoried and loaded,” Jessup said as they neared the overturned truck. “Want me to radio in for some assistance?” He started to reach for the microphone mounted on the dashboard.

Bolan shook his head and Jessup’s arm froze in midair.

“I’ve got a faster and much more efficient way of handling things,” the big man said as he pulled up next to the overturned truck. Quickly dropping down from the Hummer, the Executioner walked to the back of the Hummer and grabbed a five-gallon can of gasoline. Then, walking from truck to truck, he dribbled a trail of gas in his wake, removing the cap to each pickup’s gas tank when he reached it.

Finally, Bolan dripped gas in his tracks as he walked backward to the Hummer once more. Punching the cigarette lighter into the dash, he turned to Jessup as the DEA man got in on the other side. “You don’t smoke, do you?” he asked.

“No,” Jessup said.

Bolan nodded. Pulling the cigarette lighter out of the Hummer’s dash, he glanced for a second at the glowing orange disk inside it, then dropped it out of the window.

The gasoline-soaked prairie grass next to the Hummer immediately started to burn, and the flame worked its way down the individual trails that led to the Toyotas, cocaine and dead men.

Throwing the Hummer into gear, Bolan tore up more grass and dirt as he floored the accelerator and raced back to the county road. He had driven through broken barbed-wire fence and traversed the bar ditch to the road when the explosions began.

2

Bolan watched the flames leaping in the rearview mirror as he drove the Hummer back toward the highway. Next to him, Jessup had turned sideways in his seat and watched as the three exploded pickups, the dead mafiosi and a half-million dollars of cocaine burned. “Well, Cooper,” he said finally, turning back to face the front. “That’s certainly a lot easier than bagging it all for evidence and transporting it for safekeeping until the trial—which won’t be necessary now anyway.” He paused and took a deep breath. “You sure we aren’t going to have to answer for this? I mean, calling this unorthodox behavior for a law-enforcement officer would be the understatement of the century.”

“Don’t sweat it, Jessup,” Bolan said. “Yes, I’m in charge of this operation. But I’m not a law-enforcement officer.”

The DEA man threw his head back against the neck rest atop his seat. “Oh, that’s great,” he said. “So you’re a spook. CIA? Department of Defense? Homeland Security?”

“Uh-uh,” the Executioner said. Ahead, he could see where the dirt rose up to the two-lane highway leading from Guyman to Boise City. “None of those.”

“Okay,” Jessup said. “I’ll quit wondering exactly who you are or who you work for. It doesn’t matter. You’re one hell of a…” He stopped talking for a second, looking for the right words. When he didn’t find them, he continued, “You’re one damn fine fighter. You immediately adapt to whatever situation presents itself.” Across the front seat, the Executioner saw him frown. “But do you not have to answer to anyone? Anyone at all?”

“Just the President,” Bolan said. “And we get along just fine.” He withdrew his scrambled satellite phone and tapped in a number. A few seconds later, Jack Grimaldi answered the summons.

“Yeah, Striker,” the ace pilot acknowledged. “What’s up?”

“We got the dope but missed the money,” Bolan told him. “We’re headed back to Guyman now to meet you.”

“You can do that if you want,” Grimaldi said, “but there’s no need to. I took a little recon flight an hour or so ago. Spotted your bright yellow vehicle on the road. But the important thing here is the terrain I saw. It’s so flat, I’d have to try hard to find a place where I couldn’t land.” He stopped speaking for a second so Bolan could take it all in, then said, “Want me to come to you? It’ll be a lot faster.”

“Sounds fine,” the Executioner said. He pulled off the highway onto the shoulder and threw the Hummer into Park. The entire roadway was asphalt, pocked with holes the size of volcanoes and, in general, rougher riding than the cow pastures had been. Pulling a small handheld Global Positioning Unit—GPU—out of his shirt pocket, he read the Hummer’s coordinates to Grimaldi. “When you start smelling smoke and seeing flames below, you’ll know you’re close.”

“That’s affirmative, big guy,” Grimaldi said. “I’m revving her up now. See you in a few.”

Bolan heard a click in his ear and folded his phone back before dropping it and the GPU into his pockets again. Then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “You never know when we’ll get another chance to rest once this mission gets off the ground,” he told Jessup. “So I’d suggest you take advantage of it now.”

IT SEEMED THAT BOLAN had just closed his eyes when he was awakened by the distinctive sound of twin Pratt & Whitney PW305 turbofan engines. He turned to Jessup, grabbed the DEA agent’s arm and gently shook him to consciousness.

Bolan smiled when the pilot landed and brought the Learjet 60 to a halt less than twenty yards away. His friend controlled whatever craft he was flying as if it were an extension of his body. Aircraft were to Grimaldi what firearms and other weapons were to the Executioner.

When Jessup was awake, both men got out of the Hummer, walked down and then up across the bar ditch, then climbed over the fence. The Executioner found the door to the Learjet already open when he reached it, and Jack Grimaldi grinning at him below his sunglasses.

A second later, Bolan had strapped himself into his seat next to the pilot and Jessup took the seat behind Grimaldi. The ace pilot revved the engines, and the plane began to pick up speed again in preparation for takeoff.

The Executioner withdrew his sat phone and tapped in the number to Stony Man Farm, America’s top-secret counterterrorist headquarters. Bolan maintained an arm’s-length working relationship with Stony Man, and his and the Farm’s missions often coincided.

Barbara Price, Stony Man Farm’s mission controller, didn’t answer until the fourth ring. “Sorry, Striker,” she said. “I was busy transferring some data to Bear.”

Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman was in charge of the banks of computers and personnel who gathered the Farm’s electronic intel. Kurtzman spent most of his life in front of a computer. Once a strong bear of a man, he had been paralyzed from the waist down during a gun battle years ago and was now confined to a wheelchair.

And he was the best. There were simply no programs into which he couldn’t hack if given enough time, and there was no computer that came close to the power of his own brain. He had proved invaluable to Bolan and the other teams that worked out of the Farm.

“So what’s new on the western front?” Price said.

“We got the Mafia scum and the coke,” Bolan told the honey-blond mission controller. “Just missed the sellers.”

“Did you hear any of them speak?” Price asked.

Under normal conditions, the question would have sounded straight out of left field. But Bolan knew why Price had asked him. “Uh-uh,” he said. “We never got close enough to hear voices. They spoke to us with bullets and a bazooka.”

“A bazooka?” Price said.

“That’s right,” the Executioner said. “They missed.”

“Obviously,” Price said. “You need to talk to Hal?”

“Yeah,” the Executioner said. “Put him on.”

Bolan heard a click in his ear as Price put him on hold and went about her search for Hal Brognola, the Farm’s director. But he was also a high-ranking official within the U.S. Department of Justice. High enough, at least, that no one questioned his frequent and unexplained absences from Washington, D.C., during which time he manned the reins of Stony Man. He was also Bolan’s link to conventional law enforcement, and could get most things done with a simple phone call.

The Learjet continued to gain altitude, then leveled off as Bolan waited. A few minutes later, he heard the voice of another old friend.

“What’s happening, big guy?” Hal Brognola said into the phone.